farmlet.co.nz Life on our small farm in New Zealand

One of our aims here on the Farmlet is to produce as much of our own food as possible, reducing our expenses and our dependence on outside food sources. We still have a long way to go, but it feels very good to have started working towards this goal.

What have we done so far?

1. So far, our biggest step has been starting the vegetable garden. We now grow most of our own vegetables.

2. Buying cows and goats has been another major step. We are now waiting to get milk from our dear cows (due to calve in a couple of months).

3. We are making an effort to buy from local, organic and/or bulk sources as much as we can.

4. As far as possible, we make our own food from unprocessed whole ingredients. We make our own bread, crackers and snacks, beer* and sodas, yoghurt and kefir, stocks and sauces, and sauerkraut, and avoid pre-processed, packaged foods almost entirely. [* I brew with Coopers— Kevin]

5. We have started to plant fruit and berries, and to plan out orchard and “food forest” areas on our farmlet.

Purple “Maori” Potatoes

So. . . how much do we actually spend on food? Over the last couple of months, we have been itemising and tracking our expenses in order to find out.

I have come up with a total of NZ$265.75 per month, or NZ$66.44 per week. That comes out to about US$49 per week. I don’t have enough information at the moment to see whether there is a big seasonal difference in our spending. It will be interesting to keep an eye on the totals through winter and early spring when our supply of home-grown vegetables will be running low. Of course, by then we will (hopefully!) not be buying milk any more, so our overall spending might not change much.

Market wonder and Dalmatian climbing (purple speckled) beans

Recently, I read a Path to Freedom post on this same topic that quotes some statistics from the US Department of Labor on the average American food budget in 2005. I don’t have comparable statistics for New Zealand, but we think these US figures provide an interesting point of comparison.

1 person in the family, one wage earner: $68 a week
2+ persons in the family, one wage earner: $121 a week
2+ persons in the family, 2 wage earners: $144 a week
2+ persons in the family, 3+ wage earners: $184 a week

Path to Freedom (who grow a lot of their own food, and are committed to buying from local sources as much as possible) add that their own expenses are as follows:

4 persons in the PTF family (+ 1 volunteer), 4+(?) wage earners: $100-$125 a week (winter) & $60-$80 (summer)

Of course, while reducing expenses on food is a worthwhile goal, it is also a simplistic one. We try to reduce costs by buying in bulk, and buying seasonally, but it also makes sense to spend more money on goods that are local, organic, and higher quality. Our food costs are higher due to certain choices we make regarding source and quality.

Fresh beet salad

What steps are we planning to take in the future, in order to increase our food independence?

1. As it is, we are growing most of our own potatoes. We have saved more seed potatoes for next season, and hope to expand our potato beds to grow all the potatoes we need. Potatoes are an important and easy-to-grow staple for us.

2. Work on growing more garlic and some large beds of onions. Now that our soil is more workable, we also hope to begin growing more root vegetables, such as sweet potato, carrots, and Jerusalem artichoke. Next year, we plan to grow a larger quantity of long-keeping winter squash.

3. Start growing some maize to grind into corn meal. Try growing some grain amaranth — with adequate protection from birds! (Corn and amaranth seem to be the grains most likely to yield successfully in this bio-region — and can be processed relatively easily at home on a small scale for human consumption.) We long to make polenta and tamales from home-grown corn!

4. Continue to plant fruit, berries and nuts, so that in time we will be producing all the fruit we need. Most high-calorie tree crops such as nuts and avocados take a while to start producing, so we are trying to get some started as soon as we can. We are dreaming of food forests!

5. Milk our own cows (nearly there!) and goats. We already make some of our own dairy products from scratch. Once we are milking the cows, we hope to make all our butter, and hopefully cheese, as well as yoghurt and kefir.

6. Get some chickens to raise for eggs and meat.

7. Once our animals produce offspring, we will be able to start fattening some for meat. We look forward to the good taste and savings of home-grown beef steak and goat curry.

8. Plant more olives, in hopes of producing enough to press for oil at the local olive oil press.

The garden is a bit of a mess at the moment. The tomatoes look straggly and horrible, but are still yielding a few last fruit. The peppers are coming to an end, and the tomatillo plants are sprawled every which way, with some of the fruit splitting. We harvested a big basket of tomatillos, so it was time to make a large batch of green salsa. Here’s the recipe:

Green Salsa

8 cups chopped tomatillos
3 large, pungent onions
olive oil
4 green bell peppers, chopped
4 jalapeno chiles, chopped (adjust according to taste)
4 cloves of garlic, crushed
1 teaspoon of salt (adjust according to taste)
1 generous bunch of cilantro, chopped

Tomatillo Salsa

Saute the onions in the olive oil until soft. Add the peppers and chiles, and saute a little longer. Add tomatillos, garlic, and 3 cups of water. Simmer for about 15 minutes to cook the ingredients and reduce the mixture a little. Turn off the heat and add the cilantro. Blend the mixture until smooth, and add salt to taste. You can also add lime or lemon juice, according to taste, especially if your tomatillos are a bit over-ripe and not very tart. I added about 3 teaspoons of citric acid because the tomatillos were pretty ripe and our lemons and limes are not ready yet.

Having a sufficiently acid mixture is especially important if you want to can the salsa — which I did — so I used the citric acid quite liberally! I canned the salsa in small jars, using the overflow method. I’m sure that we will appreciate the summery taste of the green salsa in months to come.

Now that we have some kefir grains, we decided it was time to follow the recommendations of some of our readers and try making kefir cheese.

Iowerth wrote:

Make your kefir cheese much as you would make yogurt cheese:

First make your kefir. Then, strain out the grains, and place the kefir in a porous container such as a cloth bag or a large paper coffee filter (as we did, supporting it with an old coffee filter holder) so that the whey can be collected as it drips out.

Cover and place your kefir in the fridge and in about day, after which the whey should have all dripped out, you have kefir cheese. Add some salt and herbs (to taste) to your cheese and enjoy.

This sounded simple enough to us. . . and so it was. The kefir cheese was delicious mixed with a bit of sea salt and some herbs from the garden. We enjoyed it on top of pieces of sourdough toast.

Kefir cheese on sourdough toast

I’ve also been making another tasty treat using kefir cheese. I found a recipe for “Cheese Pucks” in the Summer 2006 edition of “Wise Traditions” — a publication put out by the Weston A. Price Foundation. The ingredient list looks a bit unlikely, and the name “cheese pucks” made me wonder if the results would be tooth-breakingly hard. I nearly didn’t try this recipe, but I’m very glad I did! The resulting “cheese pucks” are rich, cheesy and somewhat chewy in consistency. If you want to try the recipe, please note that I find I need to add extra arrowroot powder to get the dough into a suitable consistency to roll. Of course, that might be because I substitute kefir cheese for the cream cheese called for in the recipe! I also think that the recipe tastes extra good with a few chives or sprigs of fresh dill snipped into the mixture. The recipe is gluten free, but if you don’t do well on cooked dairy, or don’t want to destroy the live properties of the kefir by cooking it, then it’s probably not for you.

A couple of days ago, we also had our first attempt at making quark. Our neighbours along the road, and some Farmlet readers, have been telling us how easy it is to make. . . and how delicious!

Anita wrote:

I usually let two liters of raw milk stand in a stainless steel pot, lid slightly ajar, for two to three days at room temperature. When the natural souring process is complete, I skim the fresh soured cream off the top, which keeps well in the fridge, but usually gets used quickly in salad dressings, soups and sauces. The skimmed cheese gets poured in a cheesecloth lined bowl and hung for two hours or longer, depending on how wet or dry I want the cheese. Some of the whey gets used for fermenting veggies (our favorites are ginger carrots), some for pre-soaking beans and grains, but the bulk goes to the chickens who love it. The fresh cheese (we call it Quark in German) can be used in a variety of ways, but our absolute favorite is as a dessert. I use a puree stick to blend the cheese smooth and add raw honey, linseed oil and raw milk to get a creamy dessert that is just delicious with fresh or frozen berries.

Kevin and I have been wanting to try making quark for a while! A few days ago we had a couple of extra litres of raw milk, so we decided to give it a go. Mysteriously, we have ended up not with quark and whey, but with several litres of yoghurt. Somehow that milk must have become innoculated with yoghurt culture, though we have no idea how! The milk was handled carefully and soured in a clean stainless steel pot. Our neighbour laughed in disbelief when I confessed that our first quark effort had produced yoghurt. She says she’s never met with such an outcome in all her years of making quark. We will have to try making quark again soon. In the mean time, we have a large additional batch of yoghurt to enjoy. Not a bad consolation prize, though we were really looking forward to trying the quark! I’m about to start a big batch of yoghurt dough, in anticipation of making empanadas in the next day or so.