Vegard Elseson

One of the houses on our land has been gathering lots of gunk in the gutters as well as having some pieces needing a good mend.
Guttering time!
Most was done by moving ladder, ascending, de-gunking, descending, moving ladder. Rinse, repeat. Brushing where I couldn`t quite reach, spraying with the hose to blow the rest into the downpipes. Most of the gunk went into a tub to join a compost somwhere. Much fun was had, as standing in ladders doing work makes me tingle a bit. In a good, but still decent way, of course.

This is an old trick of mine to not waste water or soap, and it`s just my luck it`s also BB-material!

Mother dearest has a beautiful garden with all kinds of flowers, including a patch of lavender I was quite lucky to be able to harvest from.
Did also grab a few live plants as well as some seeds, both to be planted near the beehives to give my little girls some nice smelling treats.

Hung my bunches in the hallway where I do most of my drying, where I have a fan making a soft breeze to speed the process _slightly_.

Steve Mendez wrote:We are in the process of making 6 gallons (23 liters) of wine. This is our first attempt at winemaking and so far everything is proceeding according to plan. It will be ready to bottle in December
 

Plum wine! That sound amazing. I hope you will bless us with pictures of the colour and a description of the taste when it's ready to be sampled.

We don't usually get wine amounts of plums, but we _do_ get enough blackcurrants. Made 20liters last year as a first attempt at wine making. We read the sweetness meter up side dowm and thought a mid-range sweet wine was dry, so we added extra sugar. Now we have lots of bottles of what turned out an amazing dessert wine :p

I just wanted to share one of my favourite recipes for gluten free bread in hopes of trading for other recipes.

A lot of the gf bread to be found in stores or bakeries often end up way too dry, or with that "gluten free" taste and texture that large amounts of white rice flours give.
This is my edit of a recipe that originally comes from the Norwegian language gf baking book "Ekte Brød" (real bread) by Kristin Granli and is a treat to work with, wait for, and eat!
I have found that as long as I  keep the ratio of lighter to heavier flours and grains balanced with the wets a lot of experimentation can be done with which flours to use. Also trying different wets will do good stuff. Substituting whey for the sour milk was a great success. Using both made for an awfully sour bread

For two loaves:

Dries:
Buckwheat flakes 1 cup
Buckwheat flour 1cup
Oats 2 cup (originally 1 cup as well as 1 cup of white rice flour, but adding extra oats and removing the white rice works wonders for the taste!)
Tapioca starch 2 cup
Brown rice flour 2 cup
Teff flour 1/2 cup (I am always out of teff, so quite often corn flour is my go to here)
salt 3sp
pofibers/potato starch 4tbsp (have tried corn starch to great success too!)
xanthan gum 4 tsp
psyllium 2 tbsp
powdered yeast 2tsp
dried nettle 2tbsp
Pumkin seeds 3 tbsp

Wets:
Cold water 3 cups
Sour milk 1 1/4 cups
Sour dough 6 tbsp
vinegar 2 tbsp
Oil 6 tbsp
Eggs 2 (If you want to go vegan it works very well with whatever egg replacement you`re used to.)
Honey 2 tsp

Your preferred pan greaser
Oats, buckwheat or the seed of your choice for decoration

Mix the dries and wets separately before mixing it all together.
Let rest for a few minutes to let the psyllium swell for a bit before mixing a bit more.
Divide into two greased bread pans and smooth it all over with a spatula.
Grab your topping and spread it all over like a crazy person.
Cover the pans and put in a cool place over night.
Pre heat your oven to 400f and bake for about 45 minutes.
Get them out of the oven and remove the pans, putting the loaves back in for 10 minutes.

Cool on a grate, and wait until completely cooled until slicing.


So permie bakers, what`s your go to gf bread?

Thank you all several lots for your replies!

Angela: that butter looks amazing. I am loving the addition of cinnamon and cardamom to the plums. Both warm flavours that I`d expect would work well with the sour sweetness of my plums! Sadly, no lemon or lemony things about, so this one is noted for later!

Abraham, Phil: Inspired by you both I ventured into the unexplored land of making prunes with the thought of heading over the top into Saladito valley. I definitely left the plums in the oven for WAY to long, so they went far past soft prunes into something akin to sun dried tomato-territory. Still tasty, but I think I left the chance for Saladitos behind a few hours before rescuing from the oven the driest prunes I have had the joy of encountering.
Dried plums ain`t all bad, and a lesson about diy prunes is made. Still a win!

John: the Dakota Kuchen looks absolutely amazing. Am without pie pans, but I am definitely keeping this for later as it is a very good excuse to get some There was an attempt at plum jam that turned into two kinds of plum sauce.
One "asian" style with chili, ginger, garlic and onion that turned out pretty alright. I might have been sampling it through the evening yesterday to get that slight burn that is working remarkably well with the plum taste!
The other I added some of the rum pickle juice from my initial post, and some licorice root and kept at a low boil for some minutes more. To my licorice-addicted taste buds, that was an absolute success. Just a tea spoon of powdered licorice root into about 0.5l of the sauce went a long way!

Barbara: Kolaches. Never heard of them, and they look really simple, so I had to try! As my nest mate has celiac disease I had to find a gf version. Did, and while I fudged mixing the flours to get a substitute (gf living is a lot of experimentation for a lad who`s been living the wheat life) and ended up with a dough that didn`t get as airy as it looks on the pictures, the taste is marvellous. Did a splotch of the sweet licorice-infused plum sauce and despite a slightly hard crust: WOW. This is definitely a part of my recipe book from now on. Yum.

Tereza: How do I plum vinegar? I am a vinegar making virgin, so I know nothing about this. Do you just add plums to vinegar?

Jay: That looks delicious! Plums work remarkably well for making savoury sauces, and this looks just perfect for my cheese habit :O How do you reckon adding some hot peppers as well to make a plummy hot sauce?

Last winter got a bit too snowy for our single plum tree, and the poor thing broke several branches from the weight. This year it`s been healing good, but no fruit. *sadface*
But a friend in need is a friend indeed, and our friend Linn took her wonderful little dog, Tarek, to visit. They brought 10 liters of plums for us!
Plums are tasty. Yum. But eating ten plums a day for several days will make me need more friends who want their natural medicine straw badges (I see a D word on the Quinn list)....

So far I have rum-pickled 28 of them. That doesn`t seem to actually make much of a difference with the actual amount of plums we have. I will probably make another batch.
But we can`t rum pickle all of them! I crave variation!

Therefore I turn to y`all. Some of you beautiful permies and horticulturalists and doomsday preppers and pickling connoisseurs and what have you will probably have THE BEST way of storing plums!
What`s your special go-to super high quality awesome tasting recipe for keeping your plums delicious over the winter?

Come share your recipes with me! Please?

As a trade, my rum-pickle recipe:

28 plums.
3.cups / 0.75l of water
1 1/5 cups / 3 dl sugar (I used the whitest of sugars, but am quite sure other sweeteners will do.
0.5 Cup / 1 dl brown rum.

(I have tried translating my silly metrics to your supreme post metric system. Please forgive any inconsistencies.)

Welcome witches, hello herbalists, greetings ginger enthusiasts.
Gather round and witness the creation of a wonderous salve, a magnificent cure for all ailments, a permacultural panacea!
GINGER ROOT SALVE!

I travelled far and wide to find the ginger for my salve *
And the rapeseed it has granted it`s magic even from further and wider aways.**
The wax I am gifted from the familiars of our coven, the beautiful busy bees spear-headed by their queens the fair Euphemia and the belligerent Maude! ¤
A recipe I was granted by my teacher P.Ahnert from her alchemical grimoire.¤¤
Too powerful was her salve, and my force is not as strong, so this is a mere shadow of hers. £
Two score seven of fiery oil!
Halfscore two of wax!
Heated on the fires of hell! ££
Fear its power! @

*(45 minutes to the store. at least 10 minutes in the store and 45 minutes back again. A proper voyage!)
** (The ecological rapeseed oil is from a store about a minutes walk away from where I got the ginger. Which adds at least two minutes of journeying...)
¤(We had three hives last year [now four!], and wax here was scrapings from two of them)
¤¤(Beehive Alchemy. A great addition to your bookshelf if you want to do things with wax!)
£(I halved it due to not having enough oil for a full batch)
££(Our wood fired oven)
@(I haven`t really tried it yet, but ginger is great for a lot of things, so I have faith in this`n)

Now that I actually discovered we had calendula in our garden, I picked what was available and am ready to make all the calendula things!
I have made some lip balm before, but no salves, so this was an interesting experiment.
The recipe for salve is from Petra Ahnert`s "Beehive Alchemy". The book is filled with a lot of great things to make out of gifts from honey bees. Honey, propolis and wax, oh my!
Recipe is 79% herb-infused oil, 20% beeswax, 1% vitamin E oil.  That latter to increase the salve`s shelf life, but I want to see how long it`s going to keep without extra stuff, so I just cut that out.
Book says 95g oil, 24g wax, but that`d use all my oil! :O Wanting to keep oil for other things, I did something akin to halving. PLan WAS halving, but the pouring went a bit overboard, so I tried scaling up a bit. Hopefully it works!

Anyways, here`s my salve!