Kate Downham

For cooking, any of the animal fats work well. You'd usually need to get the fat from a farmer or butcher and then render it yourself, which is easy to do. Beef fat (tallow) is what I mostly use, lard from outdoor-raised pigs is really good but harder to find where I live.

Ra Kenworth wrote:Oil items that may rust or wrap in cloth soaked in oil
I actually use clarified coconut oil myself because I can work the oil in with my bare hands

That's really good to know that clarified coconut oil will work - I've never seen clarified coconut oil - would ordinary coconut oil work?

Will any kind of oil or fat help to preserve tools?

Leigh Tate wrote:Experiment #1.

I took a look at Kate Downham's hummus recipe and compared it to the one Kevin posted, as well as one I found with Brave browser's AI. All three had similar ingredients, but ChatGPT's added water to thin to a salad dressing consistency. I used the ingredients I had and sort of melded all three recipes.

2 cups canned garbanzo beans
2 tbsp apple cider vinegar
2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
1 clove garlic
1 tsp dijon mustrd
1/2 tsp Himalayan salt
6 tbsp water

Whirred it up in my blender, adding 1 tablespoon of water at a time until I got a creamy, salad dressing like consistency.



Just taste testing right out of the blender, I wasn't sure I'd like it. It seemed to have too much dijon. But then I tried it on my salad and it was great! I didn't have tahini, which I like and would like to try in another batch. And I have ideas for flavor variety and some other ingredients to switch it up. I think it would make a good dip for veggie sticks too.

I've never added mustard, but I sometimes add cumin or smoked paprika (or sometimes both) and they are really nice in it. Lemon juice is good in it too if you have any on hand.

I have now pressure canned using a wood stove several times.

Here are a few observations and tips:

I am doing this on a proper wood cooking stove. I’m not sure how it would work on a stove designed for heating.

To pressure can on a wood cookstove, I just use the same techniques that I use to adjust the temperature for cooking on it - adding more wood, adjusting the air intake, moving the pot around. I wouldn’t recommend canning on a wood stove unless you know how to cook well on one - if you can sear a steak in a pan or bring a pot to a rolling boil and then keep it at that temperature, then you can probably pressure can on it.

Because you can’t just set the heat and expect it to stay the same as you would on an electric or gas stove, it’s important to be nearby when it’s canning to make sure the pressure doesn’t drop because of the temperature getting lower - it’s not the end of the world if it does, it just means you’re supposed to start the timing again from when it gets back up to pressure again, so it will take more time and maybe get a bit overcooked. Right now I’m in the next room and I can hear the weighted gauge moving around, but I wouldn’t want to go outside for long.

I add some extra water just to make sure it doesn’t boil dry - instead of 3 quarts I add 4. So far there’s still been plenty of water left at the end of canning for 90 minutes so this probably isn’t necessary.

To avoid wasting wood, choose your canning time wisely - it’s best to can during a time when you are happy to keep wood burning in the firebox, not when it’s dying down for the night.

The process of bringing it up to pressure involves getting a decent fire going - any fire that would sear a steak or get a pot to a rolling boil is fine. I’ve used all the 3 main types of firewood that we have and they all work well, as long as I use them in the same way that I would for high heat cooking. During this time, the oven will probably heat up quite a bit, so it’s good to time it with bread baking.

I err on the side of putting too much heat into the canner rather than too little for time when it’s under pressure - the weighted gauge seems to be making a constant noise. Usually when I try to move it off the hottest spot on the stove it seems to quieten down a bit too much for my liking. If there is a healthy fire in the firebox I can usually slow the air intake down, keep the pot on the hottest part of the stove, and it stays under pressure nicely without using much wood.

Adding the extra weight to the regulator and relying on the dial instead might give a better idea about what is happening (I have the Australian version of the Presto canner, which has a dial and weights), I might try this sometime while my canner is still fairly new, but as we can’t get them calibrated here I prefer to rely on the weights in general.

Luna Silva wrote:getting a job is so hard and also iI measured my backyard on google maps, and it is 0.039  acres which sounds  small

Welcome to Permies : )

I have a son who is nearly 15 and grows a lot of food - last year was his first year with his own garden and he grew way better broccoli and cabbage than I've ever grown - beginners can definitely go well with gardening. He has 4 beds for veggies, each around 4 feet wide by 16 feet long, and also a 5th bed for berries which is around 30 feet long. He figured out what he likes to eat and then we designed a 4 bed crop rotation for this foods so that he's not growing the same thing in the same bed every year.

Have you heard of biointensive? That is one approach to getting huge yields and growing your own fertility on a small amount of land. We have a forum all about it: https://permies.com/f/231/biointensive

I am packing away the tiniest of woolly baby clothes and not sure when I'll next be unpacking them. Some kind of wool eating creatures have damaged our wool clothes in the past when they haven't been stored properly, and I want to keep these in the best condition possible without toxic stuff so I am wondering what would be the best way of doing this?

I read somewhere that using extra borax in the wash might help - would packing them in with dry borax sprinkled in damage them at all? Or is the borax washing the best strategy? How much borax would I put into a laundry sink full of washing?

I usually put a little bit of cedarwood oil in when I'm washing woolly clothes to store in the hope that it will deter the pests - is this something that actually works?

In the past I had blocks of cedar wood that I put in clothes drawers, but I have still seen damage with these. It might be that they need to be sanded to let the smell get out again.

Getting clothes really clean I think helps a lot- the worst damage I've seen is in the parts of baby clothes that get food spilled on them - it's hard to get all of this out and it seems to attract the wool eating insects. I've been careful since then to soak the baby clothes and carefully wash them myself.

I think keeping clothes packed away in tight-lidded boxes or drawers that the wool eaters can't get into probably helps a lot - the worst damage I've seen is in clothes that I had in an open cardboard box.

Is there anything else I can do to protect these clothes naturally?

I like to cook them in spiced syrup - the cooked spiced quinces can then either be eaten warm or cold, or put into jars and then water bath canned. They make a nice jam as well.

Here are my recipes: https://thenourishinghearthfire.com/2022/11/05/quinces-how-to-prepare-cook-and-preserve-them/

r ranson wrote:I remember reading that a very mild feaver, under 100F, is best treated by staying warm and drinking far too many drinks warm or room temp.  Monitor every half hour and if it goes over 101F, follow modern advise.  But usually it dicipates after 4 hours or so and we can avoid the flu or whatever by helping our body do its thing.

Anything to this?  Or is it just wives talk?

That's pretty much what I do. Hot baths are really good if there's no danger of falling asleep, or hot bentonite clay foot baths.

What we are producing now, for a family of 9: all of our milk, cheese, and yoghurt (from 5 goats), plus some surplus to trade. Every year except last year we produced all our potatoes. We find it easy to grow all our leafy greens and garlic. Other vegetables we've been growing some of, and basically just eat seasonally from the garden as much as possible, although we have been bringing in some bulk organic cabbage and carrots for fermenting and root cellaring, we are working to grow all of our own this year.

We currently eat a lot of non-homegrown organic grain, because it’s easy, cheap, and efficient currently for me to just make lots of bread and dish it out when we need to eat, and everyone eats it. I was thinking about how we could rely more on homegrown foods, and growing more potatoes and having these to replace bread is something that would be good to do - so far I have been serving up soups with a side of roast potatoes rather than a side of bread and we’ve enjoyed this. Having a tray of roast potatoes with some homemade cheese melted on top I think would also be a good way to replace a bread meal too. There are two people in my family who don't eat potatoes though, so that makes it trickier.

Small grains grow well here, but I need to figure out a better system for threshing and winnowing it.

Next year we’re planning to have 2 or 3 more does in milk, so will have a bigger surplus of cheese to replace other foods, or to trade. We also recently bought a pregnant sow and some more chickens, but how “homegrown” pork and chicken is depends on whether you are counting where their food comes from - we are working to eventually grow all our own animal feed, but this is going to take time so for now we use a mix of homegrown and bought animal foods.

It's really inspiring to read about what you are all growing and see photos of your beautiful homegrown food!

I’ve lived in Tasmania most of my life, I will try my best to answer your questions.

Land price varies a lot depending on the type of land, how big it is, and the location. How many acres do you need? And what kind of homestead are you thinking of having there? Pasture? Forest? Many acres? or 1/4 acre?

Land at the moment is really overpriced, in a bubble that is going to burst at some point, it’s hard to say when this will happen though.

I like the climate here, some people find it too wet though. Different parts of the island have different climates, east coast is more similar to the mainland and is a bit warmer and drier, west coast is very wet and doesn’t have much farming, other parts of the island, some are similar to Northern California, some to Southern England, generally there is more rain in winter and spring and less in summer.

Rainfall varies a lot - some parts of the midlands might have around 300mm rain a year, many other places have around 1000mm- 1200mm.

There is the La Nina/El Niño cycles here where some years are wetter (or drier) than others - dry years we might have summers with 6 week without any rain at all, so that is something to keep in mind.

Downsides… wildlife can be difficult - they will eat everything unless it’s fenced appropriately, or have dogs, or can cull them at night (or have neighbours culling). Bushfires happen, so property needs to be selected and designed carefully.

There are venomous animals here - all Tasmanian snakes are venomous (but usually not aggressive, just a matter of being careful where you tread), we are home to the world’s most venomous ant, and a bunch of other biting insects, but snakes are the only real danger.

Tasmania has a lot of retirees and the sick care system is pretty strained - there are long wait times in the hospitals.

maps.thelist.tas.gov.au is a really good site to look at if you’ve found a block of land (or an area) you might like, you can put in a bunch of map overlays such as nearby transmission lines, 10m contours, farming suitability for various crops (which will tell you the pH, soil depth and other information about the land), I used this tool a lot when we were looking for land.