Diet
posts for our Homevour page only
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Milking Cows
We have been milking cows here for most of the time during the last thirteen years, making use of the milk here on the farm. We use the milk directly with no embellishments just good old fashioned raw milk, then for cream, butter, yogurt, fromage frais, ice cream and of course cheese. Milk is an amazing food anyway you use it, but it gets bad press for many reasons and most of the reasons are simply ill informed nonsense. But due to being asked a question by a reader of this site I want to concentrate on one of those issues and that’s the issue of cruelty to animals, the…
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Permaculture Pigs
Firstly I should state there is no such thing as a permaculture pig, but rather pigs woven in to a permaculture design. Firstly we have to look carefully at every element we are planning on putting in to our design. Then comes the usual question what is an element? each thing be it animate or inanimate we intend to add to our overall system is an element these could be a tree, an animal or a shed. Each element has it’s needs (inputs) it’s benefits (outputs) and it’s intrinsic behaviors, if we look carefully at each element including some serious research, we will gain some idea of how to integrate…
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Saturday Morning Off
While taking time out at the weekends is incredibly important to Fiona and I we are here trying to hold ourselves to a higher moral standard both for our lives and the lives of the animals we eat, sometimes this means we don’t get that time out. Saturdays and Sundays we normally do the least work we have to do to care for the animals and process the milk from our expanding herd, and then take time out to do things we enjoy. Taking a coffee in the corner of a market square, going to a Brocante (flea market) or taking a walk somewhere beautiful which have no shortage of.…
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A day in our life
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Eleven Years of Hand Milking
We have had dairy cows since 2005 one of which came to us pregnant so we were early to milking once the calf had taken the colostrum. Last year we increase our stock levels of cows buy one to three milking cows, this is in anticipation of milk conversion becoming a commercial operation not just one of self reliance. We have enjoyed an abundance of meat, milk, cream, yogurt and at times even cheese. Now that Fiona my wife no longer works off site in a cheese making factory she is going to restart on farm cheese making both for ourselves, our students and the public. Once the cows have…
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A day in our life
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Our Potato Harvest
We have always grown potato’s as part of our annual planting regime, but for the last few years we have collaborated with our neighbours too. Now early and late plantings of potato’s are grown on our site and main crop potato’s are grown on our neighbours site. Our neighbours site changes every couple of years as they farm 100 hectares of land, a mixture of arable crops and beef cattle are the produce. So once they have had their main crop garden in one place for two to three years they move it to another field, which has been grazed for the previous few years, exploiting the natural fertility of…
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A day in our life
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A day in our life
Firstly I should say there is no such thing as a typical day in our lives. Some things have to happen every day as you will see but other are only done once or twice a year. Some things are done every day for weeks then not done again for a year and other are done once a week every week. This is the joy of living a life in tune with the natural forces around us our life is cyclical. I’m writing this in part to give potential apprentices/interns some idea of what to expect when they come to live and work with us, but it’s also a…
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Peaches for Breakfast.
This time of year is always an outstanding point in the growing calendar here at Eden. Not just because this morning during the daily round of feeding the chickens letting them out of their house and then checking on all the other animals, I plucked and ate fresh ripe peaches from one of our many peach trees. Also because this is the peak of the growing season for all the other produce too, we have harvested the main crop of potatoes Fiona and one of our interns are picking and preserving in one way or another every day of the week at the moment. Peaches are halved and bottled, made…
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A day in our life
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Wild Boar
We often receive gifts of excess produce from a local hunt, Fiona sometimes works at a local cheese factory and the two brothers who own the business both hunt. Now while I would like to preserve wildlife as much as possible control of the hunt in France is done very well to preserve enough wild life populations from one season to the next and on in to the future this makes it sustainable. The quality of the meat is also excellent so we never refuse gifts of hunted meat so long as it comes from an official source. So yesterday Fiona came home with a whole wild boar in the…
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New Greenhouse
Last year was our worst growing season in nine years on this site, the spring never really arrived, instead we had cold wet weather well in to June. Our first sowing of sweet corn, hemp and wheat all rotted in the ground and had to be re-sown for what turned out to be a poor crop anyway. This made us take a long considered review of our system and in particular how we could mitigate this situation if it repeated again in the future. Given our changing weather patterns it seam only logical we will experience such problems with increasing regularity well in to the future. Then on a visit…
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Meat
Preparing for this summers building and design courses and the rest of our homevour year we have recently slaughtered a calf Casta (castania sativa) was ten months old and still feeding from his mother the day he went to the abattoir. He had never eaten anything but milk, grass and hay and had access to the outdoors for his entire life, he had never been given drugs or vaccines of any description. This regime makes his meat the best domesticated food available on the planet today. There are many reasons Fiona and I still eat meat and here are just a few. Meat is a valuable part of the natural…
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