Gingerbread things!

So, last night I made little gingerbread things. I started out with a plan to make a gingerbread log cabin, cutting a large tray of gingerbread into strips and then overlapping them to make a log cabin. In the end there wasn’t enough gingerbread so I made these things instead:

So, the recipe:
175g of Butter
175g of Sugar
4 tablespoons of golden syrup (Pretty much just emptied the pot in…)
700g of plain white flour
2 teaspoons of bicarbonate of soda
3 teaspoons of ginger
2 teaspoons of cinnamon
2 eggs
If you want to make a gingerbread house, double or even triple the ingredients, this is nowhere near enough for 1 house…
Stick the sugar, flour, bicarbonate of soda, ginger and cinnamon together.
Melt the butter in a pan, then pour it, and the eggs, and the golden syrup together with the rest…
So everything is together. Mix it like crazy so it makes a paste, sometimes it’s thick, sometimes it’s runny… Doesn't massively matter as it’s going in the oven anyway.
Leave the ball of dough in a bag in the fridge for half an hour, it’ll get cooler and expand a fair bit.
While it is doing this, grease a tray, the one I used was too big, but just choose one you think will fit, if not, make 2. Then put the dough in the trays. Roll it out with a rolling pin till it’s about 1cm thick, can be as thick as you want really. The thicker the longer you’ll have to cook it for, the thinner the shorter…. Still with me?
Great! Pop it in the oven. 180C or gas mark 6. If it is about 1cm, leave it for 15 minutes and then check it. If you prod it with a knife and some comes out still on the knife, you need to leave it for another 5 minutes or so. It’ll look nice and brown, but not dark brown… then you’ve messed up and burned it, but light brown… Sort of… coffee coloured.
Then, bring it out of the oven, and while it is still warm, cut it with a knife into what ever shape or size you want it, can turn it into a gingerbread house or just make little biscuit things like I did, they taste nice as hell if you like gingerbread….
Happy… Last week of advent?
-Skipper

Birdhouse with someone….

Okay, apparently I’m not even allowed to refer to people by their initials anymore… So… I now work with a Mr X, a Mr Y and a Mr Z in the afternoons, as well as Gilberto and Tom… because they’re not vulnerable adults and I can call them by their names…
So, Mr X and I were building a birdhouse. It is meant for a present for his brother, and instead of buying one for £10, we decided to make one instead.
So I spent a good morning designing a birdhouse in Google Sketchup. Making all the dimensions nice, and working out how many pieces we needed to cut etc.

These I then drew out on paper, cut out and used to mark off onto pieces of wood. These were then cut out:

Somehow my precision engineering from my plans, translated into plywood resulted in non symmetrical parts… and pieces that no longer fit… But no matter! We shall prevail!


I didn't realise how freaking big this is...

I have the best job in the world.

I have come to this conclusion a few times in the past week. First was during the evening when Tom and I were moving a trailer. It was a cool, clear evening, just about 4 o clock. The sun was just setting below the horizon, and from the other side, the top of the moon was just peaking over the wall. It’s times like these where you wish you were carrying a camera at all times. It was beautiful.
The second time was on Monday (12th). Tom and Gilberto were out at training courses, so I had the farm. We had all finished work at 12, and the villagers went in for lunch. My work wasn’t entirely finished as we have two heifers at the back of the dale, about a km away. These heifers needed some hay, so I loaded up the tractor and drove up. It was also a beautiful clear, crisp day, just before lunch.

It’s times like these I love to be a farmer in Botton Village. We have the best job in the world don’t we?

First Snow!

So, a few days ago we had our first snow fall. I can’t really call it a real snow fall as it looked little more than frost, but it was actual real snow!

Didn’t last for very long, but it is certainly getting colder. Was around –1 this morning, with the bull’s drinking trough being completely iced over. When I took the ice out it begun to refreeze almost immediately. Warmed up to +4 during the day though… Well, I saw warmed…..

Yesterday the sky at about 7 in the morning was really amazing, such cool colours:

The light on the ground was really golden, was very odd. Cool, but odd…

What else… Oh, Honey Bee Nest have woolly pigs:

And no, they’re not a cross between a sheep and a pig, that’s not biologically possible.. Or at least I doubt it is…

Muck Heaps

No I have not posted in a long time, I am sorry.

So, what have we been up to? Well, a while ago I mentioned that I had taken the muck pile from the barn into the field. In order for the muck to break down properly it needs to be kept warm and moist. Too much water and it’ll wash the nutrients away, which kind of defeats the point of muck spreading.  The muck heap is finally complete, and the other day we added the biodynamic compost preparations. These are 502-507.

• 502: Yarrow
• 503: Chamomile
• 504: Nettle
• 505: Oak Bark
• 506: Dandelion
• 507: Valerian, which is the only one that is sprayed around the edges of the muck

502-506 are incorporated into a small ball of mud or muck and put into the centre of the muck heap, each one separated by around a metre from the last in the order above. My job was to make the little balls and pass them to people to put inside the heap. I think we made around 50 balls in total.

The muck heap, before the fleece

We added the fleece during really high winds, which made moving a 25m long, 4m wide fleece into position under 40mph gales was rather challenging. Finally we got it on and weighed it down with tyres:

Completed muck heap. Oooh look at all those tractor marks though… Luckily we’re ploughing it soon!

Looks rather good too!

Free shower….Clearing out the liquid manure system

Okay, here is a little map of High Farm, where  I work. The point on it is a field, which according to Google Earth is 30m below the level of the farm in altitude. The point is at the approximate position of a liquid manure hydrant.

 

So, attached to these hydrants are sprayers, like these two:

and attached to the other end is a pump dipped in the liquid manure tank. For the past couple of months it has been draining out about 120000 litres of liquid manure… Or about that… onto the fields. The tank is now empty, and with winter here, and frost on the way, we need to drain the system and bring everything in, which was my job (I stupidly rejected the offer of Tom doing that and I doing the pigs….). So, to begin with the pump went into the moors water storage tank, and was switched on, this pressurised the top with fresh water, which we let out through two sprayers in the top fields. To drain the system the lower hydrant needed to be opened. Figuring that the two sprayers and the distance down hill to the hydrant, I thought there would be at least a second between opening the hydrant tap and the liquid coming out.

The hydrant is designed like this. There is a hole dug in the ground, about half a metre deep, with a pipe coming up through it. At the bottom of the hole is the tap as well to open the flow. To get to the tap you need to reach down, and in doing so your face passes in front of the hydrant.

My calculations of how long it would take the liquid manure to travel down to the hydrant, and the pressure drop from the 2nd hydrant open were not exactly spot on….. I got the full force of the pump, 30 metres of gravitational potential energy and about 10L of liquid manure squarely in the face. Oh the life of a farmer.

Still, could be worse… At least there was running water in the hosepipe to wash everything in Oh 4 degrees of temperature outside too.. Chilly when you’re wet…

Paper Stars and Advent time

I love this time of the year. The traditions and festivals in Botton and in all other Anthroposiohical communities, like Michael Hall when I was there, have been a part of my life since… Forever. So it is now this time of year again, and we’re all busy making things for it. Amongst these is my favourite, mainly because I can make them… Paper stars:

In other news… I’ve killed both my dive camera, which I was using for everyday snaps, and my phone camera as it fell off the back of the tractor… Oh dear…. The last photograph my phone ever took:

 

What else.. Oh, it’s quite pretty at the moment, but then again, it always has been:

And I think that is about it for now! Have a good day y’all!