Food
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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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New Raised Beds
We have had an issue with wild rabbits for the last couple of years in part this is a success for us, when we arrived here in 2004 we would never see wild rabbits on or near our property. Travel five kilometres or so to near by villages and they would be all over the verges and sometimes in the road. On some of our land we have excluded domestic stock and let it naturally regenerate, and now we are seeing wild rabbits here for the first time, the natural regeneration is providing habitat. We have also planted hedges round our vegetable garden and this is now a wildlife corridor the…
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Mining Nutrients
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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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Sausage Making
Well here goes for starters I have to be honest I am no expert at this but that’s true of much that Fiona (My favourite person in all the world, Oh and wife) have done in the last 10 years. However we have both made some wonderful sausages, first you will need some meat tradition says it should be pork and possibly mix it with some other meat of your choice or availability. Remember sausages used to be peasant food and are used to hide some of the less palatable parts of animals still today. Most butchers and commercial producers use Rusk or breadcrumbs in their sausage mix, but this…
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Sausage Recipes
These are just a few of the sausage recipes we have used here at Permaculture Eden Honey & Mustard Sausage 5Kg sausage meat 60% lean meat 25g Salt 50g of English mustard powder 250g of local honey Mix all of the above together well and stuff your casings. Orange & Chilly Sausage 5Kg sausage meat 60% lean meat 25g salt 2 to 3 whole oranges Chilly to taste 6 tablespoons of our own sauce about 8 fresh chillies or 5 tea spoons of powdered chilli. 125grams of breadcrumbs to absorb the orange juice Mix all of the above together well and stuff your casings. Sage & Onion Sausage 5Kg…
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Black Gold
Soil is the foundation of our civilisation its the single most important element of natural systems, it’s also the most complex element and the one we know the least about. It’s also the element we treat with the least respect we take it for granted and abuse it like a disposable commodity. Unless we are Permaculturist’s then it becomes central to our thinking and behaviour we seek to build soil and try to come to a greater understanding of the complexities of soil and the life within it. Soil is the mixture of minerals, organic matter, gases, liquids and a myriad of organisms that can support plant life. It is…
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Mining Nutrients
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New Rocket Stove
We have been using rocket stoves on site now for a few years especially during our Permaculture Design Certificate courses how do you get enough hot water for as many as twenty people at one time? well using waste wood or small amounts of wood on a highly efficient stove work well for many reasons. Firstly it introduces students to efficient technology which both low tec and highly resource efficient, secondly it gets people used to the idea of putting the work in for themselves again not just expecting everything at the flick of a switch. One draw back has been that everything used on an open fire gets black…
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Greenhouse Update
The overnight temperatures are stabilizing now and the new seedling are responding well today sees our first squash appear from below the compost and the poly-tunnel is showing good progress too. Fiona has been busy pricking out dozens of brassica seedlings of multiple types including cauliflower, cabbage and broccoli. Below you can see Fiona is getting great results in the Poly-tunnel with the first planting of peas beans and potatoes, the beans have already got flower buds on them so should be blossoming in the next week or so. The peas are do very well too and the first early potatoes are through the soil and although we don’t eat…
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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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