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Hedgerow (and general) Update

2023/02/10 Danielle 0

Summer is hard. This is not news, really, but knowing that doesn’t make it less depressing when the latest round of seedlings and saplings die in the heat in spite of being babied and watered daily, and mulched to within an inch of their lives. We live in a desert, and getting over that initial hurdle of getting things growing is hard. It makes the things that do work that much more important. Like the hedgerows. Not that they’re growing as fast as I’d like – our “hedgerows” are actually still imaginary lines in the dirt with a series of […]

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Sourdough Almond Pancakes

2023/01/12 Danielle 0

The first thing I ever learned to make without a recipe in front of me was flapjacks – a sort of traditional South Afican (and Dutch) miniature pancake. Basically because they’re easy, the recipe is super forgiving of ingredient substitution and changes to proportions (they can be made with 1 egg or 4 eggs, or with 1/2 cup of orange juice in place of eggs, with regular self-raising flour, wholemeal flour, or even almond flour, with oil or butter, with or without milk), and at the time I was working with limited ingredients and unfamiliar kitchens. As a teenager, when […]

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Lost Skills: Butchering

2022/12/19 Danielle 0

This is going to be a controversial post for some people, so please consider yourselves warned: I will be talking about killing animals, including the mention of blood and guts and slaughter. There are no images. It is my strongly held opinion that there is nothing wrong, per se, with humans eating meat – provided it is done ethically. Which is to say, the animals involved live good lives, and were killed in as stress-free and painless a manner as is possible. What this means, practically speaking, is that you need to either raise and kill, and butcher your own […]

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Citrus Variety Planning

2022/11/28 Danielle 0

Disappointingly, it turns out that I cannot in fact get access to the new red-fleshed Mandared mandarin cultivar being managed by ANFIC. Early discussions indicated that they would send me budwood for an evaluation planting, but.. well, the person who said that no longer works for them, and apparently failed to mention that (a) there are fruit royalties on the variety as well as tree royalties (it’s a PBR variety), and (b) it’s being managed through a massive marketing group for nationwide sales and export, and (c) therefore they’re really not interested in smaller plantings. Like I said: disappointing. It […]

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Lost Skills: Soapmaking

2022/10/26 Danielle 0

Soapmaking, as a hobby, tends to get either the enthusiastic interest of people who are into homesteading and do-it-yourself make-your-own hobbies, or half-amused references to the 1994 Fight Club scenes about stealing medical waste from liposuction operations and turning the fat into soap to then sell back to the wealthy customers of those same cosmetic surgery clinics. That is possible, by the way. The making of soap from human (or, more usually) other animal fat. Lard (beef fat) and tallow (sheep or lamb fat) are traditional ingredients for soapmaking, and make a nice, hard soap with a good lather. One […]