First of all, thank you for all the encouraging and wonderful messages we have gotten from our past students and volunteers! To be honest, we were quite disillusioned when we decided to pull back a bit earlier this year. People’s support for us has re-instated our faith, and we feel encouraged to run another PDC course. For now, we will no longer have volunteers or long term and practical students on the property, but we feel (and have received the feedback) that we run a great PDC, and after receiving a number of requests, we will run a PDC in September this year. This will include a cooking class as well on the middle Sunday. Until that time though, we will continue growing food and living as frugally as possible.
This morning I made some butter again. The raw cream from our cows had been sitting out for around 48 hours, and I shook the 2 litre jar (with around 1 litre of cream) for around 10 minutes. The cream began to turn to butter and buttermilk. I poured off the buttermilk for use in this week’s cheese cake (!) and washed the butter in cold water to remove the remainder of the buttermilk. Hopefully over the next few weeks I can build up a bit of a butter store, but it is so good, that it usually gets eaten pretty quick!
Another hot day today, thunder is rumbling in the distance! The cat didn’t mind, she was happily asleep during the day after a big night of hunting (and catching!) rats.
Our working pussycat, in after work mode
©2016 Zaia; permeco.org, incorporating Permaculture Research Institute Sunshine Coast, simplicity, permaculture, self reliance, food, health and homesteading, Butter making and running a Permaculture Design Certificate course at Maungaraeeda
Author: Zaia Kendall
Zaia grew up in a family of musicians in Holland, and has a background in top sport (snow skiing) and web development and design. She co-founded the PRI Luganville and PRI Sunshine Coast Inc (now PermEco Inc.) with Tom, and runs the “invisible structures”, like finances, business administration, website design and maintenance, writes articles and records and edits videos. She assists Tom in running the Kendall Permaculture Farm and supervising other volunteers. She is an active member of several musical projects and bands, involved in community music and runs percussion and marimba workshops, is the percussion leader for the Woodford Folk Festival People’s Orchestra and composes as well as plays music. She is passionate about community music and loves seeing people discover that they can play!