Lyndal and I made a jaunt down to the city the other day and I spent some time in the botanical gardens again, drawing and reading, and then we went for a walk and a drive around the city itself. 6 years ago the major earthquake dismantled the city, and I thought it would be almost unnoticeable looking at the city now, but while we were walking in the town square it seemed like the disaster had happened almost yesterday. The main mall downtown is now made up of shipping containers stacked alongside one another and the main cathedral still has rubble hanging on tedious-looking scaffolding. The last time Lyndal made it to the city (which was not very recently..) the entire town square and a pretty large radius from the cathedral was completely blocked off.

the cathedral

What surprised me the most wasn’t how damaged everything still looked, but how few people were actually working on rebuilding the old buildings compared to how many people were working at the “temporary” mall containers and other seemingly less important buildings. Lyndal said that the city is lacking in contractors and workers to fix the old buildings and it seems like the people’s priority is not focused on saving the old structures like the cathedral and is more focused on building new, more modern buildings.

While we were walking around the square we stopped in a nice cheese shop and then went into a meat shop next door. The cheese shop had probably 25 different cheeses available ranging in price from $25/kg to $100/kg so naturally I asked to try the most expensive one. It was a Tomme de Chévre and one of the creamiest goat cheeses I’ve ever tried (but still not better than Lyndal’s cheese.) We also tried a camembert de Normandt which is a real french cow’s cheese originally made in Normandy and it couldn’t have been more different. It was more buttery and smooth rather than chalky like the goat’s cheese and the flavor was more subtle. We weren’t planning on spending $50 on cheese while we were out so we ducked out after savoring the flavors and standing in awe of the cheeses for long enough. I had no idea before I came here that there was more than one type of chévre and that you could even make cheese out of sheep’s milk. Tasting all of the different cheeses that I have so far has been so eye-opening and I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to go back to the regular ‘ol shredded “sharp cheddar” you buy at the supermarket in the states. The american view of what different types of cheese are is so skewed and we have no concept of the skill and talent involved in cheese making.

Lyttelton harbor

After we left the city, we went for a drive over to see the the volcanic crater that we can see from the back porch. The drive was absolutely gorgeous and we could see the southern alps and the ocean pretty much the entire time. We saw three historical buildings on the way, build by Harry Ell, an environmentalist and conservationist who wanted to preserve the bush and the natural flora on Banks peninsula, the hills we can see from the house. The three houses we saw are called the Sign of the Kiwi, the Sign of the Bellbird, and the Sign of the Takahe. The sign of the kiwi was build for Ell to live in as a tollhouse and the other two were tearooms between 1915 and 1930. All three have spectacular views onto the Canterbury plains, Christchurch, and Lyttelton Harbour (the crater valley.) The three houses are still standing and serve as amazing views and reasons to hike up to the top of the hills and experience the beautiful flora and fauna of the bush. The idea of preserving the land while also making it accessible is an idea that humans have struggled with for a long while. How do you determine whether or not a footpath or road will “damage” the environment when you also want to make it suitable for any type of person to walk on it? Harry Ell decided to make the Sign of the Kiwi into a tollgate to charge people for the upkeep and regular maintenance of the roads and paths, which was not taken lightly. People fought back saying their taxes should be enough to cover what it would cost, so the question is, does charging defeat the point of accessibility or make sense to maintain the status of the reserve? That one I’ll have to think about.

the Sign of the Bellbird

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about plants and humans and how different we are. I went to the Christchurch botanical gardens again on tuesday and saw how diverse all of the different foliage is and became a little upset about how humans are so visually “boring” compared to all of the different varieties there are in the plant genus and especially the orchid family. We are practically the same looking across the world, just a little bit different in tones and structure but when you look at orchids, which are all in the same family, there are hundreds if not thousands of different varieties that all have different structures that have different purposes. Why haven’t we evolved to form to fit suited to our exact environment like plants have? Humans move around a lot more than plants do obviously which affects the time needed to evolve but what about generations of people who’ve lived in the same place? It just blows my mind that in all of the years that humans have been alive we have only figured out how to build cars and computers and artificially change ourselves, but we haven’t figured out how to grow petals or gills or create anything different within ourselves.

I’ve made a ton of jam with all of the fresh fruit we’ve been harvesting. So far my favorite flavors have been:

plum, lemon & honey

plum & merlot

yellow plum, lemon verbena and plum liqueur

apricot, ginger, and lemon

I think I’ve pitted about 500 plums and apricots in the last few days. We’re also using a solar dehydrator to dry some apricots to preserve for later.

It feels so good to be making use of so much that would’ve just fallen on the ground and gone to waste. Although it would be so much easier to go to the shops and buy a jar of jam rather than driving to the river, foraging, pitting, and cooking the jam, I learned so much about patience and it feels (and tastes) so much better to eat something that you’ve processed yourself rather than buying something that for all you know could have negative effects on the environment and the consumers.

two of the eight jars of jam I’ve made so far

According to Lyndal’s lunar planting schedule it’s time to sow brassicas so I sowed about 15 different seeds today to add to the potting shed. I’ve planted everything from chamomile to red cabbage. The rocket (what arugula is called here) I planted a couple weeks ago is growing so quickly and I’m so excited!

I LOVE sowing seeds and watching the little babies grow. I swear food tastes better if you grow it yourself and you have the satisfaction of not having to go to the store to buy things, instead just having a quick trot to the greenhouse. We don’t use chemicals here to fertilize our plants which makes them less bountiful than store-bought vegetables, but it is so much better for the earth and for your hearts and stomachs to do it the slower, more natural way.

all of the seed trays I’ve planted so far

my baby arugula (rocket)

I’ve also made three different kinds of cheeses pretty much by myself now. I made halloumi and ricotta yesterday, and feta a couple of days ago. Halloumi takes a few hours to make and is a pressed squeaky cheese which is super good fried in replacement of chicken or any protein in pretty much any dish (I love it so much.)

Halloumi:

when the halloumi curd reaches clean break (when you can cut it without it falling apart) you cut it into cubes in the pail

once it’s into cubes you keep it at temperature and stir it gently for 30 minutes

once the curd is cooked it goes into a press with cheesecloth and gets pressed for 30 minutes and then cut into cubes and boiled in the whey for 20 minutes and then it’s done!

When the halloumi is being pressed, the rest of the calcium needs to come out of the whey so it can boil in it again without developing a weird film. This means you have to heat it up to 85C and then add salt and vinegar to make ricotta and get the rest of the protein out so the whey is clear for the halloumi.

Feta:

Close to the same process as halloumi with different temperatures and when the curd is done cooking it’s put into a cheesecloth to drain and form into a big ball.

the feta is cut into cubes and rolled in salt and put in the fridge

Making cheese takes so much patience and I have gained a ton of respect for cheesemakers now. If the temperature, humidity, or pH isn’t right, the cheese has the potential to turn into something mildly dangerous or just not turn out.

Lyndal doesn’t sell any of her cheese because of dumb regulations regarding the sale or practice of raw milk cheesemaking. The whole system is corrupt and requires the small-scale maker to pay the same amount as a large-scale company would for audits and such even though its such a different market. If Lyndal wanted to sell her cheese she would have to pay $3000/year for audits, pay a certain amount per batch of cheese, and pay other fees involved. The amount per cheese block would make it so that she would make hardly anything off of the actual cheese, making it not worth it at all. She would also have to pasteurize the milk, killing all of the good bacteria and calcium in the milk which ruins the integrity of it and destroys the point of making raw milk cheese entirely. It is also illegal to barter for her cheese or sell even just the milk except if she sells it for “pet milk” or “bathing milk” which is just sad. Small farmers and businesses are always being taken advantage of and it makes me feel so awful for supporting large businesses when people like her aren’t allowed to make money off of all of the hard work they put into doing what they love. Karma is real, and hopefully acts soon.

A few days ago i noticed a few of the lambs had dirtier bums than usual so Lyndal came out during feeding to check on them to realize two of them had flystrike. This happens when sheep have wet butts which attracts flies which then lay eggs in the poo. When the eggs hatch, maggots are born which eat into the skin and if unchecked can eat the sheep alive, inside out. We ended up shearing the dirty bits of wool off, picking all of the maggots off, and then spraying iodine all over the affected areas to kill any lasting maggots or bacteria. Luckily we caught them before the maggots buried into the skin so now the lammies are feeling a lot better. The process of dealing with flystrike as Lyndal put it is “the worst thing I’ll ever have to do here” so I guess it can only get better from here.

The past couple days I noticed Picodon, one of the milking goats, had lost a significant amount of weight so today I collected some of her feces and did a fecal egg count and found a bunch of worm eggs. This unfortunately means we have to drench her with a wormer and that we can’t use her milk for 35 days until the chemicals are out of her system. She was one of the last two who we were still collecting milk from and now we’re down to one which is a huge bummer.

This morning, we decided to process some chickens who we caught previously eating eggs. This was my first time ever participating in butchering any animal, but I think it’s definitely important to see what the process is like if you decide to eat meat. (GRAPHIC INFO AND PHOTOS AHEAD) We started by hanging them upside down by their feet and then took the heads off in one fast slice with a very sharp knife. Since the spinal cord has been severed, they thrash around which is why it’s so important to tie them tight so the blood doesn’t spatter everywhere. Then, you dunk the body in 65 degree C water to loosen the follicles so it’s easy to pluck the feathers. After the feathers are gone, the actual butchering process starts. Lyndal gave me a brief anatomy lesson as we gutted them and we actually found two whole fully formed eggs inside the girls. We saved the hearts, livers, and gizzards to cook and fed the rest of the intestines and guts to the pigs and dog and cat. Lyndal decided to boil one of the chickens, and I cleaned and froze the other two. The hearts are best eaten fresh, and it is an ancient tradition to consume the heart of an animal you’ve killed to let the spirit carry on into yourself. Lyndal made a heart salad with leek and port wine and cooked up the eggs we found inside. Overall it was a very intense experience but I definitely learned a ton by participating.

I’m not going to post gory photos online but this is the knife we used to slice the heads off

egg yolks inside that hadn’t fully formed into eggs

the heart

Before killing the chicken, I thanked it for its life and took a brief moment to acknowledge what was about to happen. It is definitely not easy to take a life, but when thinking about how farmed chickens are managed and treated in death it makes me feel a lot better to kill and process the meat that I eat this way, rather than in a dirty, disrespectful fashion. It is a really powerful thing to watch but in using every usable part of its body and respectfully disposing of what we didn’t use means that the chicken will live on and will have not died in vain or for no reason.

One of the hens has been broody, trying to sit on eggs to hatch them instead of unconcerned like they usually are, so we’ve decided to name her and put her on eggs. We put her in a little box with 12 eggs and a little run and we’re going to keep her there for 3 weeks until the chicks (hopefully) hatch!

I was so lucky to have gotten the chance to participate in the coming together of so many different people during the north Canterbury forage. It was such a diverse community, and the idea that people from all over the world came to work together for a day and put aside differences to just focus on the food and the concept of living off the land was so moving. Although I wasn’t the most educated or largest participant, everyone greeted me with a grin and was happy to teach me about what was being done or what crazy food was sitting on the table. I was able to talk to another girl who was from the states during the wine tasting.  She talked about her life as a now kiwi resident and how she believed that even though there is so much chaos in the states right now, there are still faint glimpses of things to be proud of being from the U.S. This was so fulfilling because I had been a little too focused on the current events instead of the wine that was in front of me and it blew my mind that a simple conversation could turn my mood around so quickly.

Every year, wineries and farmers of the north Canterbury region host sommeliers, wine writers, food critics, chefs, and media writers to participate in a food forage and dinner in the region. All of the different people get sorted into groups and go to different areas in the region to collect wild food and then they come together at Pegasus Bay winery to celebrate and cook/eat it all. The different groups go hunting, fishing, diving, foraging, and collecting.

Pegasus Bay winery grounds

swan pond

giant eel that lives in the pond

view of the winery from the pond

One group came to AislingQuoy to “forage” milk and cheese to cook in the dinner. We brought them into the dairy and made coffee and tea and squirted milk straight from the sheep (which they thoroughly enjoyed.) I also did a demonstration on how to make ricotta cheese and Lyndal gave a little cheese tasting before they had to go to their next location.

Once everyone reconvened, the chefs looked over what everyone collected and decided what to make with it all. The wineries that participate also did a tasting of all of their current release wines that I also got to participate in which was super cool. Unfortunately, they only gave two tickets to the actual dinner to AislingQuoy so I didn’t get to go, but I got to stay the entire afternoon and filet fish, walk around the grounds and talk to people, drink lots of wine, and learn a lot about the local food and drink scene.  I tried around 20 different kinds of wine, ranging in price from $25-$95 and overall, it was the less expensive ones that I liked more. (Maybe I have poor taste, or maybe the wine industry is ripping everyone off? Who knows.)

the table with everyone’s foraged food

seafood the fishing team collected

legs of the buck

wild hares

The hunting group shot a wild buck and left the head on the ground out front

Filleting fish with Lyndal, Mel, and Kate.

Wine barrels up to the ceiling.

the wine tasting consisted of around 90 bottles of wine in a room that were open and available to be poured yourself.

Since I couldn’t go to the dinner, Lyndal and Steve brought me back a few of the little courses so I could have a taste of what the dinner was like.

Mazz and I hopped over to Christchurch a little while ago and visited the botanic gardens and the Cantebury museum in the middle of the city. While the gardens were just breathtakingly beautiful, we did notice that the gardens spray pesticides. I understand that the city wants the gardens to look as beautiful as possible, but to me it is pretty ironic and sort of ruins the  integrity of the gardens when they destroy the water system or lives of birds or the aquatic animals in the process.

huge pitcher plant

orchids

another cool orchid

royal rose gardens

My most recent exploration at evergreen involved the fibonacci sequence in nature, and this plant is a great example of the spiral. It formed at an angle made up of two successive fibonacci numbers to spiral in and direct water flow to the base of the plant. There were so many other great examples of the sequence in the gardens and it was fascinating to be able to see so many different forms of the same plant (like the orchid) all in such a small space.

can you tell i like orchids?

On the farm, there are lots of cardoon plants which are in the family of clovers or artichokes and Lyndal mentioned that the stamens can be used as a coagulant in cheese making. Since we drenched most of the milking goats, we have around 2L of milk a day that we can’t use and so we decided to do an experiment on some of the milk to see whether or not the cardoon could actually coagulate milk.

I collected 8 grams of cardoon stamens and put them into different plastic tubs at intervals of .5 grams and recorded the time until floculation. It turns out, you have to have more than 4 grams of stamens per 500 mL of milk or else absolutely nothing happens. Because the first 4 with amounts less than 4 grams didn’t work at all I decided instead of throwing it out entirely I could just add another 5 grams to the highest amount to see if we could make anything happen. With 7.5 grams of stamens in 400 mL of milk, it started to coagulate at 6 minutes. It wouldn’t get to clean break which is needed for cheesemaking, so we’re going to ditch the experiment for now until the cardoons produce more stamens and then try again with higher amounts per mL of milk.

Even though it didn’t turn out as expected, it still definitely coagulated the milk a little bit and we wrote it down so it’s still science!

In this region, there is less than a 5% occupation of the “native” Māori people, but we went to Christchurch to the botanical gardens and to the Cantebury museum, and learned about the first settlers of the Chatham islands and the New Zealand archipelago. The Moriori people were polynesian and the first to live on the islands, and lived by a code of non-violence and passive resistance. When the Māori people who were linguistically and genetically different invaded, they hijacked a European ship, carried 500 Māori people armed with guns to the land and enslaved, murdered, and cannibalized the Moriori people. A council of Moriori elders convened and discussed the invasion that was occurring and decided that “the law of Nunuku (their nonviolent and passive ideals) was not a strategy for survival to be varied as conditions changed; it was a moral imperative.” The Māori people forbade the speaking of the Moriori language and desecrated and ruined their sacred sites.

On the New Zealand currency, the country is referred to as Aeotearoa, the Māori name for the country which means “land of the long white cloud.” The long white cloud is of course the cloud that is always hanging over the southern Alps because of the weather patterns and pressure differences that are always present. Today, there is a wide debate on whether or not to refer to the country as “Aeotearoa” because of the brutal genocide that the Māori people did to the actual indigenous people of the islands. There are such few Moriori people left in existence that there aren’t a whole lot of people to stand up for the oldest culture on the islands but in my opinion, that shouldn’t be the deciding factor on whether or not to continue the use of a word with such dark history.

There has been a lot of speculation about animal behavior and trying to predict earthquakes in this area. The other day, the wind stopped and the animals went silent and one of the neighbors said it was “earthquake weather” because of what was going on. No earthquake happened, but we were curious as to how animals react to changes in the atmosphere almost “predicting” when an earthquake might happen. Someone sent Lyndal an article (attached) on some of the tested theories and already known facts about animal behavior.

When earthquakes are stewing, the chemical composition of minerals in the earth’s crust changes and electronic charge carriers are activated in the ionosphere. Silicate minerals known as positive holes flow out of the stressed rock and into the surrounding unstressed rocks and when they get to the surface of the earth they ionize and oxidize water into hydrogen peroxide.

The goats here don’t seem to be drinking enough water and we’ve been trying to think of why and how we could get them to drink more. Here, the sheep’s water troughs are all connected to the rainwater collection sources on the house, however the goats drink from collected groundwater which would be part of the affected areas during an earthquake. We’ve been thinking that if the earthquakes made the groundwater more acidic, the goats would drink more of it if we made it more basic. We put out baking soda in troughs and added it to the water and sure enough they ate and drank it up.

There is some faultiness to the whole animal behavioral reactions to earthquakes, and our experiment didn’t prove a ton for a couple reasons:

-most data about animal behavior during quakes is retrospective, and therefore slightly to mostly inaccurate

-we gave the goats apple cider vinegar which is very acidic and they drank it up
Good news is, they’re drinking more water.

http://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/9/7/2339