Raw Milk

I think I must live in my own universe. I am always the last to know anything. There is this massive food revolution going on and I knew nothing about it. People are turning back to natural foods grown as nature intended. They are eating meat from grass fed cattle and free range everything. And I was oblivious to it all.

But I had a rapid emersion course in organic foods when I first came to New Zealand. Dan and Yael were both very keen that their children (at that time child #1 was on the way) get the most they could out of their food.

Dan, a researcher at heart, had spent literally months familiarizing himself with food. When he got to NZ he began talking to anyone who had something to offer on the subject. This included owners of health food stores, farmers, butchers, etc.

Finally, he bought a farm and stocked it with sheep and steers for our eating pleasure. Then came the chickens and fresh eggs from the most spoiled chickens on the planet. Now, of course, we have branched out to include organically grown veggies. With little success so far!

So I thought I was pretty darned up to speed in the healthy eating department. And then Dan dropped the latest bomb. There is a product called 'raw milk'. I suppose I knew that at some stage milk was raw but I had never thought about it. I had not even connected the word pasteurization to Louis Pasteur. I am lactose intolerant and spent very little of my gray cells on the subject of milk.

But it seems that Dan has researched the raw milk thing up one side and down the other and come to the conclusion that we, as a family, should try it. This would include me. I tried to opt out citing my allergy to milk but he was persuasive. It seems that I might not be allergic to milk itself but to the pasteurization process that kills so much of the good bacteria. Since, as he pointed out, I have a severely inhibited immune system, I should try it.

I was very reluctant but cravenly hoped he would forget about it or not be able to find a raw milk supplier. How little I know my son. He showed up here with raw milk, gave me half a glass and watched me drink it down.

Believe me, I didn't want to. My stomach churned at the thought but it churned more when I looked at my son standing there proudly assured that he was improving my health. I couldn't let him down. Once at mother, always a mother. Anyway, I drank it. It didn't taste like any milk I had ever had. Normally I could have about half a glass of skim milk every other day. This tasted nothing like skim. In the picture you can see the cloudy stuff around the inside of the container. That, folks, is butter fat. And is it good! I mean really, really good.

The half glass didn't upset my digestive system. Neither did the full glass I had the next day. Or the glass I had the day after that. I am thinking of increasing to half a glass in the morning with cereal (my muesli suddenly doesn't taste like sawdust any more). Then I might have a whole glass with a cookie for afternoon tea. My food world has just expanded. I think I like this food revolution thing but I am standing firm with Dan on this one. I will NOT get a milk cow and start milking day and night. NO WAY!

Water

 

I decided to give you a visual idea of my garden with pictures of my corn at the top and tomatoes at the end. With the rest of the sandwich,  I’ll catch you up on activities on the farm. Of which there are many!

First, the chickens. For someone who doesn’t eat many eggs, I spend a whole lot of time catering to these fowl. Now that Dan is up here and busily re-piping the entire farm’s water system (more later), I have been busier than ever. Why? Because Dan cannot keep opening and shutting the paddock gates as he tools around toting pipes, etc. They stay open. The result of this is that the chickens are free to resume their old behaviors and wander at will.

This means that I have to chase them down, round them up and return them to home base. I wouldn’t bother normally but the girls are terrified of the chickens (for absolutely no reason) and scream the place down if one of our feathered friends wanders within eyesight.

Last night we got a terrible scare.  I had forgotten about the nomadic birds since over time I had trained them to stay in their own 2 paddocks (until our new open gate policy). So here I am up in my room and hear these piercing shrieks. I race out of there, stumble on my stairs, catch myself with a now wrenched arm and race around the house searching for whichever grandchild was dying horribly.

What I found was 2 girls sitting on tricycles screaming their heads off. I also found two bemused chickens standing some distance away, heads cocked, trying to figure out what was going on. I still haven’t recovered.

All this for chickens who have slacked off on the egg production front. I tried everything. More feed; less feed; different feed. More water, changed twice a day, etc. We finally got smart and called the breeder who said they slacked off when it got hot! Who knew? I burned up the internet trying to discover what was wrong but nowhere did I hear about hot weather slowing production. Cold weather, yes. Hot weather, no. Learn something every day. Or in this case, every few months.

So that’s the chickens. The water system here has left a great deal to be desired. This used to be one large farm which someone quartered into lifestyle blocks (Kiwi for farmettes). So the tanks, piping, etc. has been haphazard to say the least. Dan has been working diligently for 3 years to replace garden hoses with proper piping. He has also been trying to find one stubborn leak but no luck yet. Along the way, he has found numerous other leaks and repaired them.

Now that it is the long vacation and Dan’s first time off since he moved here, he decided that he would rather play with water than go to the beach and be in water. This was triggered by discovering that the pipe to the paddock across our driveway was just a garden hose buried under the gravel. He is now digging it up, retrenching it, and laying proper pipe. He is also putting in new water troughs, new valves, etc.

He found time to refine the market garden watering system for which I am very grateful. And just in time since the drought should be along any time now. But for the time being, I am relishing watering a garden with actual plants. I have a pumpkin, numerous corn, and tomatoes. We will glide lightly over the many vegetables that were sacrificed to the well-being of some rat clan. Yes, Dan found a rat tunnel from outside the garden in and I have played Sherlock and assumed that that is where all my seedlings went. I am only a tad bitter. Make that pretty darn bitter. I hate rats!

Roma Tomatoes

 

To Do List

Since I am going to be showing you some market garden pictures, Alessia wanted you to also see some of our beautiful flowers. So she took my camera and here is the result.

The Friday after Christmas found me being driven to the other side of Auckland to have a tooth extracted. The word 'extracted' means major pain but I had been numbed up the whazoo and Dan and I headed back to the farm in fairly good spirits. And then we hit what turned out to be a 12  1/2 mile backup on the two lane road we HAD to travel. It took us almost a half hour to travel one mile. I was trapped!

In order to keep  my mind off my increasing pain as the numbness receded and the armies of pain marched into my mouth, I made a to-do list. Not for myself, you understand, but for Dan. After all what else did he have to do on his yearly vacation?

I will skip all the little things like being with the kids, tackling the ant infestation, removing vast numbers of spider webs, spiders, and cocooned insects, mowing the lawns, clipping the lawns, etc.

And, of course, there were the unexpected treats like the geyser (hot water tank) in my apartment leaking down through the garage and having to be drained. It is the holiday season and there is literally no one available to come fix the darned thing for 6 days.

But the list grew despite extraneous events. The market garden needed to be weeded. Those are not edible plants you see, those are various weeds that have thrived under our protective netting. The fruit trees needed to be weeded and mulched.  All the soon-to-be produce in the garden needed to be weeded, the dirt loosened, and mulched.

Anyway, you get the idea. I am showing you some of my success stories; cherry tomatoes, corn, and squash. Everything else is dead. I think we are going to be eating a ton of succotash. And I hope to can at least 48 jars of tomato sauce. Haven't got a clue what to do with all that corn (besides eat it fresh). I just can't see myself hulling the kernels and canning them. We are talking major work there.

The Bug

The Lord family has been laid low with a malevolent stomach bug that ran right through all of us (pun intended). Naavah got it first but being the last of the 2-year-old Stoics, simply reported that her stomach hurt. Since she continued playing, etc. we didn’t pay too much attention. That is until we saw that she had been vomiting into her quilt. Not a word, no complaints, just soldiering on.

Her sister, on the other hand, made sure the entire family knew when the bug bit her. This was at 1 in the a.m. and from then on, she stayed in my bed with me. We quickly got into a routine. She would vomit, I would take the basin and clean up. I would return to the bed, continue the story I was telling her until the next episode. Once she realized that we were very sorry she was sick but that there was little we could do, she settled down and was as stoic as her sister.

She was over it within 12 hours. Dan and Yael took 2-3 days and I was flat out for 6 and have been staggering around ever since. This getting old stuff is sooo much fun!

What with the bug, etc. it was 5 days before I could drive around the farm to see how things were doing. The answer is: not too well.

First, the steers took advantage of my relaxed vigilance to kick over their water trough and so were without water for several days at least.

 

Next up were the bugs. No, not the bacteria type; the eat everything that grows type of bug. As an example, most of the corn is gone. Not a trace. There are a few scattered stalks and you can see from the picture how well they're doing.

The possums have totally destroyed my roses. I am livid but there is nothing to do but wrap the plants in netting and pray.

However, there is some good news. This hot, humid weather has been great for my tomatoes. I should make a ton of tomato sauce from these glorious specimens. Most of the plants are heritage tomatoes so I am looking forward to finding out what the taste differences are. Probably the difference is that the heritage tomatoes actually have a taste. 

Shearing Season

It is shearing season once again and I thought you might like a quick view of our miracle lamb. She's the one in the center facing us. Remember, she was born during the last shearing and everyone thought she would die. Obviously she didn't. I feel a special affinity for her and love to see her hopping and leaping in the paddock (running away from me as fast as she can just like all the others).

The rest of the family was back in Auckland so it was up to me to "supervise". This always elicits a few chuckles from family and friends. John is more than capable of doing the whole operation on his own. In fact, this time he almost had to. He didn't call me went he got to the shearing shed so I had no idea he had started.

On a vague whim, I drove down to check on how the sheep were doing since they were cooped up waiting. John was there and so were 4 sheep already shorn. I told you he was more than capable. Anyway, my heart stopped as I saw one ewe with blood trickling down the side of her face (see picture). I stuttered as I asked John if that was something I should be concerned about. "Nope," he answered, "Sheep heal quicker than about any other animal."

Maybe so, but she bled the whole 3 hours. Not only that, by the time John finished, the place looked like an abbatoir. You can see how closely they are confined. As she moved around, she wiped her blood all over the pretty shorn coats of the rest of them. Not a pretty sight. I was just glad the girls weren't here. I have no idea how I would have put a happy spin on that one.

I checked on the flock this morning and the overnight rains have washed the fleeces and I can't even figure out which ewe got nicked on the ear. I guess they are quick healers. Lucky for them!

Market Garden Update

It has been a few weeks now since my last blog on the market garden (MG) so here is an update. A few weeks can be a lifetime in the Spring garden and I wish I could say that was the case for the MG. But it’s not.

The bugs continue to win what I now consider to be a very unequal contest. As you can see, the tomato plants in the foreground are struggling to survive. Only one bean plant (in the back of the tomatoes) is growing and that is a replacement for its 9 dead relatives.

 

I have scattered tomato plants throughout the garden and most of them are still alive which I guess means the battle is still being waged. But they are obviously in some distress. I water every day which is a worry since it is very early in the season to be using so much water. I read somewhere that beneficial bugs live under soggy logs so I have started importing some. We’ll see.

The only area in which I can claim success is as a possum burial site. Dan and I inter our possum kills right in the soil. Dan thoughtfully makes sure that the tails are left exposed (that is what you can see directly below the corner of the white board). This is so that when I plant seeds or seedlings, I don’t inadvertently dig into a carcass.

 

There are so many things I never dreamt I’d be doing. Burying possums; catching snails and using them for chicken protein; cleaning out barns and chicken coops; hauling water, etc. etc. I look back on the Suburban Terry with some astonishment. Did I really expect to go through life never being in touch with the reality of food production? I guess so. I honestly never thought about it. This adventure has truly changed my life. I hope I am more humble. Losing the ongoing battles to a bunch of insects surely is humbling enough to do it for me.

How Did They Do It?

 

Now that I am struggling with the organic garden concept, I look back on our evolutionary progress (?) with great puzzlement. How did they do it? I can’t get a lousy 9 bean plants to survive in the natural environment. How on earth (pun intended) did our ancestors move from hunter/gatherers to farmers and survive?

I am not saying that I share my beans and peas with the earth and all its critters and insects. I am saying that I am ceding my beans and peas to them. Look at the picture. Where do you see 4 and ½ plants surviving to feed me and my family? Nowhere! The critters and insects have demolished the whole crop and have moved in on the peas. How did those ancestors manage to grow enough for them to survive?

I am still faithfully (and it takes a whole lot of faith let me tell you) planting my cherished seedlings in the market garden. They are protected by wood plank walls and bird netting and still they are nothing more than a portable feast for whatever.

I am also planting seeds directly in the soil. The soil, by the way, which is overrun with weeds.  Remember all the paper we smoothed out and then laid out?  How about the top soil, compost, and mulch? Remember them? My aching muscles do. Dan and Yael’s aching muscles also vividly remember. But the weeds were born without shame and continue to thrive in our organically correct market garden. I just pray that enough of our plants thrive to feed us this Autumn and Winter. But I’m not too optimistic.