Uncategorized – Page 2 – Gallifrey Forest Farm

Honey processing by hand

2014/10/09 deej 0

Honey doesn’t need a lot of processing, but there is the small matter of separating the honey from the wax of the comb. Normally, you’d just take the entire frame out of the hive, run a hot knife over it to take the caps off the cells, and then use a honey extractor to spin the honey out of the comb. We haven’t yet managed to acquire one of these, so any honey extraction we do is done the hard way: by hand. We’ve been meaning to harvest some honey form our hive for a few months now, but it’s […]

update 2013-10-11

2013/10/11 deej 0

Sorry for the long hiatus, everyone. Life got super busy (not that it isn’t now, but still). Draft #3 of the houseplans are finished, and I think it’s all good this time. We’ll go over them with a fine-toothed comb and make sure, but I think we’re good. Of course, that still means we have two weeks or slightly less to find a builder and get the bank on board, or we’ll be trying to start building in December when all the builders in WA seem to take 2 months off. At any rate, it’ll be soon. I’ve started university […]

basically, all the animals

2012/10/17 deej 0

I’ve been looking at different breeds and varieties of livestock, planning which ones we’ll get eventually. It started small, looking at cat breeds (I know, not really livestock, but I’ve wanted a kitten since I was six years old, and it’s pretty exciting that I can finally get one when we move into the new house. Once it’s built). Then, after a lengthy sidetrack into cat genetics, which is absolutely fascinating, I started looking at chickens. And ducks. And geese. Perhaps an alpaca, or even a llama. And fish, of course, in an aquaponics system. And goats. And turkeys. And […]

Tick season and the bee enclosure

2012/10/05 deej 0

The bee people at Bees Neez Apiary near Chidlow have said that the breeding program for the year is underway, and we should be able to get our baby hive by the end of October. We’ve laid a small concrete slab for the hive to sit on (it will also have cinderblocks or similar under it to keep the wooden hive boxes well away from the termite infested ground). The hive will be surrounded by a hedgerow, which will form a bee enclosure. I’m thinking roses, bottlebrush, lavender, rosemary, apple and possibly hazelnut trees. You see, Gallifrey has ticks. It’s […]

Roses and Ghost Berries

2012/08/09 deej 0

I know this isn’t really exciting unless you’re a massive plant nerd, but I grew roses from seed! I have baby rose seedlings, sprouted from some seeds I collected at my very first permablitz from the prunings of some heritage roses. I have no idea what varieties they were, so my babies are of unknown parentage, and I’ll probably have a long while to wait until I see the first flowers, but even so – how cool is that? Roses. From seeds. From rosehips. There are people out there who don’t know that roses even produce seeds; one of my […]