Too many tomatoes for eating fresh but not enough for passata making yet, so it’s sun drying time. We have a dehydrator but often low tech is easiest. A dark coloured enamel plate with a dark tinted pyrex pie plate in the sun. Halved cherry tomatoes and some sprigs of basil, oregano, thyme. Easy peasy.
We just split the first of our native bee hives. Late spring is the time, when they are warmed up and living their best life, and when there is still plenty of time for them to regroup before winter. There are over 1700 species of bees in Australia but only 11 of them build hives and only a few are stingless. We have two species, both stingless hive building, honey…
Much of the retrosuburbia writing about energy use and energy conservation that I see is about heating, but heating isn’t the issue here. Here, it is cooling, not heating that is the main challenge, even now let alone in the future.
It was a very nice outcome from this bit of research that aloe vera actually does work to repair sun damage “stimulating hyaluronic acid and collagen production” – which is what the labels on expensive little bottles of cosmetic serums say too. I think I need to plant more.
Someone asked me in a comment about my seed raising mix, so it’s a good opportunity to do a whole post about it. My recipe has changed with the availability of ingredients. But the concepts remain the same. Permaculture is like that – not a recipe but a system to be applied differently to every site.
I put turmeric in my tea every morning. Just a half a thumb sized piece of fresh turmeric, sliced fine, tea poured over it. Add a little grating of black pepper because the piperine in the pepper makes the curcumin in the turmeric useable, and I have my tea with milk. It sounds odd but it tastes really good – a little chai slant on ordinary black tea. And I…
Remember fridge pickles? This is just another variation on that theme, and a really good way to use up cabbage if you are finding that the cabbage moths have ramped up to a level where the last of them have to be harvested now. If you want quick and easy, ready tomorrow, very delicious, failsafe, and will last for at least two or three weeks in the fridge (but you…