Having enjoyed the most delicious fresh baked bread from Lizzie the master baker at the Nabiac Farmers Market for the past 4 years, it was a no brainer to ask the queen of bread to be the “expert” for our new breadbaking course. Our aim at Honeycomb Valley Farm through our training company “Cape Able” is to eventually bring to people a huge selection of courses on the “Lost Arts & Crafts”. We started with Beekeeping, now we’re able to offer breadbaking and soon…blacksmithing, preserves, pickling and more.
Today a group of us trialled the new breadbaking course. Most of us were complete novices, others already knew how to make bagels and nurture a sourdough starter…but all of us came away with lots more knowledge, loads of tips and tricks, and a take home stash of loaves that were mouthwatering! The best thing about the course (besides hanging out with a great group of people, enjoying a delicious morning tea and lunch, homemade passionfruit cordial and the amazing smell of bread baking) was that not only did we get to practise everything, we were also given all the recipes to take home.
Here’s the day in pictures…and if you’re interested in doing one of the breadmaking courses, get in touch. You can learn anything from sourdough breadmaking to sweet breads and flat breads, foccacias, bread sticks, garlic and cheese loaves, Turkish bread and more.
The breadbaking course begins
We learned the different ways of kneading
and how to use a dough scraper
How to help dough whether the weather is hot or cold
and what a goood dough looks like
Many hands makes lots of bread!
The bread guru speaks
We had loaves of laughs
Lunch time
Fabalicious!
How good is this!?
Breaking bread…mmmm
Wholemeal
Mmmm…did we really make this?
Time to learn how to make sweet doughs
Learning how to make sweet bread sultana & brown sugar scrolls
What a top day!
Back at the farmstay they were queing up for the sweet loaf
The kids’ agreed…learning how to make bread is a real crowd pleaser!
Fab two weeks with Sophie & Basile from France and Adele from Hong Kong who have been helping on the farmstay through Helpx. Lots of good food (mmm… French bread, quiches, sushi, Chinese dumplings, fresh churned butter, buttermilk pancakes, mayonnaise…), good company and hard yakka! Here’s some of the times we shared in pictures.
Caught a bit of TV last night and saw the new ad for Kmart Australia. Whoa! A father and son go into a Kmart and come across a shelf loaded with a zillion different types of toaster. The son likes the look of one at his end. The dad likes the look of the one at his end…but then they meet in the middle and the Dad is all chuffed with his $9 toaster. $9! The toaster was packaged in a fancy printed cardboard box and it got me wondering (again!) about how as a society we’ve been so easily tricked into thinking that cheap is cheap…that there are no hidden costs. That life is all about getting a bargain and getting lots of them.
Seriously…a $9 toaster? So its components would be metals, precious metals for the electronics, certainly plastics made from non-renewable 0il. Then we have the box made from cardboard, the colour inks, and the internal packaging. Then there is all the costs and pollution that went into its production, from the initial mine extraction or tree felling and the shipping to the factory where it was produced, then its shipping from a far off land (back to) to Australian shores, then it would have been trucked around our our vast nation to various Kmart stores. Oh yeh…and how much were the people paid to actually make this toaster? What is the cost to people and the planet? So how can it only cost $9?
It’s interesting that the cost of living we can’t afford to avoid keep rising (rents, mortgages, rates, medical costs, healthy food, transport), while the cost of diversions (plasmas, computer games) , electronics and junk food seem to keep falling.
Kmart Australia is owned by Wesfarmers who have seriously morphed from where they began in 1918 as a Western Australian farmers cooperative. Maybe they should rename themselves PlanetFarmers because they tend to dig a lot of it up and sell it back to us. Now they own: Coles, Target, KMart, Bunnings, Office Works, Harris Technology, Begalla Open Cut Coal Mine in the Hunter Valley, Premier Coal Open Cut mine in WA, Curragh Mine in QLD, as well as in the insurance field Lumley Insurance, OAMPS, WFI and Crombie Lockwood. Then there’s CSBP Chemicals, Queensland Nitrates, the sodium cyanide producer Australian Gold Reagents, Australian Vinyls, Modwood, Kleen Heat Gas, Air Liquide WA, enGen and CSBP Fertilisers. And then there’s the Industrial & Safety Division with even more companies in it!
Is a company like this interested in bringing us a toaster that has longevity, or will this $9 toaster need replacing just after its 12 month warranty runs out? What kind of quality do we get for $9? What kind of conditions and pay do the factory workers receive? What does a $9 toaster mean for our planet as a whole? And what does it say about our society that an ad agency knew the way to get Australians to come in and buy was to spend a huge amount of money advertising a $9 toaster.
“But people are doing it tough, we need a $9 toaster” you might say. Sure – but we actually need to investigate, solve and minimise the factors behind why the middle class is feeling the squeeze and others are falling into multi-generational poverty, and we need to think about the real poverty outside our borders where people need to work for a month to even be able to afford a $9 toaster! We can’t just bandaid all these problem with a cheap way to cook bread.
There’s a lot riding on our morning toast and it ain’t just vegemite!
More Info:
If you haven’t already seen the Story of Stuff, check it out here. It’s a short movie that helps explain the true cost of all the stuff we buy.
“Are we poor Mum?” asked our 7 year old son earnestly today.
“We’re rich gorgeous…in love, in ideas…”
“But are we poor mum?”
“Why are you asking?”
“The kids at school ask me because of my tin.”
“What tin?”
“My lunch tin”.
Toooo cute. Couldn’t help but giggle. The tin he was talking about is his (not so cheap) stainless steel lunch box that we bought because we didn’t want his lunch being in close quarters with lead, BPA’s (bisphenol) and PVC that many cheap plastic lunch boxes contain. So his stainless steel lunch box isn’t your garden variety Big W made in China type with loads of plastic and colour dyes and off-gassing/leaching problems, it’s a sleek, simple design that is easy to throw in the dishwasher (top shelf) and most importantly – is a healthy, non toxic option!
We first bought the stainless steel lunch boxes about a year ago for the kids and stock them in our shop too along with stainless steel Klean Kanteens our favourite eco drink bottle. Our lunch boxes are the “Lunch Bots” brand. They come in two different sizes, and two different models (one with a centre divider which is good to separate carrots/biscuits etc).
It’s funny how kids’ ideas are shaped by the mass produced (or maybe not so funny!). But at least our son now knows that his simple little ”tin” is actually worth its weight in gold when it comes to his health. That might sound like a strong statement, but the more you read and learn about chemicals in the environment, everything you can do to minimise contact with them is important…and a lunch box and drink bottle are an easy place to start.
Yesterday we were so happy to welcome the Wallis Lake Tourist Travel Club to the farm…our first large bus tour group. And what a fun day! Just loved it.
Mal Pruitt from Tuncurry Coaches has been so generous advising us on what we needed to do to bring tour groups to the farm, it was so cool that he brought the first lot out! The
Fun Factory and Mickey come up to say hi
Watching lunch being cooked by the sun!
Sophie (our angel Helpx’er from France) getting ready to solar bake some cookies for the bus group
Getting up close with the alpacas…and dorpers…and goats…and cows…and…
48 guests were on a “mystery tour” and they probably got more mystery than they bargained for! First we introduced them to the delights of solar cooking (we had our big Villager Sun Oven and three of the small Global Sun Ovens facing northward and cranking up the heat). Then they got to meet our menagerie of animals, chicken tractors, plants and farmerceuticals (Farm Balm, goat’s milk soap, lip balms and natural insect repellent etc). A two course lunch went down a treat and all too soon it was time to say farewell.
They were such a delightful group to have and it was so fun to show everyone around, they also left some lovely comments in our guest book like: “10/10 absolutely a wonderful place” and “Fabulous place, well done” and “absolutely wonderful”. Yay! Our baby Saanen goat Toggles won a few hearts methinks!
Can’t wait to welcome more bus group tours to the farm, and we won’t have to wait long as next week a mini bus from Bellevue Gardens Retirement Village at Port Macquarie is coming down for lunch and a tour as well. If you’re from a Probus Group, Travel Club or Garden Club, get in touch if you’d like to book your group in to visit the farm for a fun day out. We’d love to have you.
“Hens on Holidays”, that’s what we call our chicken coop these days having converted one old caravan into a mobile chicken tractor. We completed the first one a few months ago and the chickens have loved it (as has the paddock!), so thanks to our current Helpx’s (Basile, Sophie & Adele) we started another caravan reno today so we can house more chooks this way.
Why did we embark on the chicken caravan, mobile coop tractor project? Lots of reasons! Including:
Our old coops were crumbling and increasingly hard to maintain against foxes
A caravan is easily moveable which means we can move our chicken yard each week, thus increasing the fertility of our paddocks (thanks to the concentrated chook manure and the straw bedding material we sweep out).
It means our chickens get a good, free range life enjoying fresh air/grasses/weeds/bugs to eat.
By having the chooks move through our paddocks, they help reduce the parasite burden on our farm that would otherwise affect our cows/goats/alpacas/sheep/horses etc.
We’re able to re-use a cheap resource (aka old caravans) rather than using new materials
At night, the chickens are safely housed in a locked up, fox proof hen house
The caravan provides lots of shade and shelter when our hens need it (the underneath part of the caravan is a great area providing sun protection and where they can run to if hawk’s threaten…not that we tend to have that problem on this farm)
They caravans are a really good size so we can increase our flock size
Caravans normally come fitted with water tanks so it’s easy to refill the chooks’ water
We have a number of different breeds of chickens on the farm (araucanas, light sussex, isa browns/Rhode Island reds and silky bantams), and various flocks at different ages, so we need a large number of pens for them… and though we have a McCallum chicken tractor we like and some smaller chicken tractors that fit across our vegie garden beds, we were looking for a cheaper, yet much more spacious and more fox proof solution to look after our hens and roosters
By moving the chickens weekly, their own parasite/worm burden is reduced as they are moving to fresh ground regularly rather than staying in the same old spot of ground
And in addition to being a good all round permaculture solution…it’s just a bit of fun really! And our chooks… well they get to sightsee all around the farm!
It all started when we put an ad on the noticeboard at Nabiac’s Old Bank Centre for an old caravan. Someone told someone and before we knew it we were picking up two old, not fit for human habitation caravans. They sat in the backyard for a while as our list of farm projects grew longer and longer, but finally the first one was ready for chooks! They moved in, we popped a solar-powered electric fence around the caravan and since then we and our farmstay guests have been enjoying great free range eggs and watching our chickens enjoy their days, and head back home into the safety of the van at dusk…all we have to do is lock the door behind them (this could probably be automated too if you are a real boffin!).
Here are some pics of the completed chicken tractor, and of the new one we started work on today. Normally the windows on old caravans are shot, so we put mesh grills in and make up little wooden shutters over them that we close at night so it’s nice and cosy inside. We knock up simple timber perches for use inside and put straw bedding down on the ground which is easy to sweep out and a great addition to our paddocks.
Renovations on the chicken caravan begin
HelpX Adele from Hong Kong painter extraordinaire
A fun job for young and younger!
Basile from France…up to mischief again!
Can you make us one too?
Rocky rooster stands proudly in front of his new abode
Just back from the 2010 Countrylink North Coast Tourism Awards (which covers the tourism industry from Port Stephens in the South to Tweed Heads in the North of NSW). It was held up at Coffs Harbour with Tim Bailey Ch 10′s weatherman doing the MC honours (he was great by the way!).
It was a bit of a crazy day Saturday because we had the Gloucester Farmer’s Market on that morning so had to head out at 5.30am to set up there…bringing along our baby Saanen goat “Toggles” for the ride because he needed his bottle during the day. Sooooo love the Gloucester Market – lots of great stalls, lovely customers and a good vibe with the ridges of the Barrington Tops in the background….just beautiful.
Luckily our gorgeous HelpX’s (Wwoofers) Basile & Sophie from France and Adele from Hong Kong came along in their campervan and helped us do a quick pack up at 12. Then it was home to Nabiac, another goat milking training session for the Helpx’s and back in the car with the kids for the 3 hour trip north to Coffs Harbour (with a stop along the way at Freddo’s pies for their yummy vege pie). And before we knew it we were at Opal Cove Resort and out of our farmboots and into the “black tie” get up for the awards. It was our first time entering so we didn’t really know what to expect and received a lovely surprise to hear our name called as winner of the hosted accommodation category for Honeycomb Valley Farmstay – yay! It was fab hearing about all the other category winners, and the next day we popped into visit the Butterfly House at Coffs Harbour who had also won a gong on the night…then home again to find our magnificent Helpx’s had milked the goats, painted the shed and cooked dinner…reckon they’re the ones who deserve the award today!
I often wonder what the Greyhound Bus driver thinks when he drops off all manner of foreign travellers at Nabiac…seemingly in the middle of nowhere. Nabiac isn’t the Byron Bay of backpacker routes, but in the last few days we’ve hosted the United Nations at the farm in the form of Helpx travellers who swap a good day’s work for food, accommodation and experiences as they travel around Australia. Some Helpx’s stay for 3 days, some for 3 weeks, some for 3 months!
Helpx isn’t as well known in Australia as WWOOF (willing workers on organic farms), but according to the travellers who stay with us, they prefer Helpx because it’s internet based and allows hosts and helpers to leave feedback for eachother as well, thus helping them avoid nightmare placements and guiding them to where others have had a good time. Likewise for hosts, it’s good to have an idea of who’s coming and the skills and interests they bring so you can plan some jobs they’ll really enjoy. We’ll be in the wwoof book from next year, so it will be interesting to see what wwoof converts like best about that program. I think the concept of both is just fantastic.
In the last few days we’ve had a convergence of wonderful Helpx travellers, with Jade from the UK, Adele from Hong Kong, Ai & Liu from Szechuan province in China and Basile and Sophie from France…add them to our paying farmstay guests from Singapore – and it’s been a wonderful few days, great conversation and lots of work (and play) getting done around the farm….oh yeh…and lots of eating!
Toggles the goat and Helpxers Jade & Adele in the garden
With Rod the Beeman we’ve spent weeks in the field and the editing suite putting together a DVD so anyone interested in beekeeping can learn the basics…from how to light a smoker, to how to find the queen, to how to open a hive and extract honey. There is a section on building your own hive and frames, catching a swarm of bees, and how to deal with the small hive beetle which is a nasty little critter that can decimate your hive. The DVD is for sale in Australia for $30 + postage and handling, or, you can attend an in-the-field beekeeping course with Rod the Beeman, right here at Honeycomb Valley – the combination of the two is a great way to become a confident beekeeper!
Here’s a little one minute video as an introduction…or if the embedded video doesn’t work, go to Utube to watch it
Our registered purebred Saanen Goat Ivy has just had a gorgeous baby boy to our registered billy goat Harley. Mum is a fantastic milker and Harley our Saanen buck is top quality too - we get amazing milk and progeny from our herd. Kid “Toggles” is gorgeous too. If you’d like to reserve “Toggles” so you can have your own Saanen Dairy buck to improve the quality of your herd later in the year, please get in contact. You’ll be making your own goat’s milk soap, ice cream and paneer in no time!
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