When Cheese Goes Wrong

I could wax lyrical about all the cheese that I have made that went according to plan, but I don't think I have ever mentioned one that has gone terribly wrong!  This is one of those times.

If you have been reading my adventures over at Little Green Cheese, you would have been following a series of posts about a Blue cheese that I have been chronicalling.  This is the final post in the Blue cheese adventure.

It started out looking kind of nice and something like this.  There was enough curds for two small and one rather large cheeses.

Over the course of the last few weeks, I totally neglected these cheeses.  They required turning every 4 days and humid conditions.  At the 30 day mark I was to scrape off the mould and it would have looked nice.

Anyway, because of the neglect, this is what they looked like on Monday night!

The large one had mostly had a melt down, but was salvageable of sorts, but the two small ones had totally lost their form and were runny inside.  A bit like blue cheese Camembert I suppose.  As for the taste, well they were fantastic.  A great creamy blue cheese flavour.

This is what I managed to do with them.

I scraped all of the mould off of the large cheese, then wrapped it in cheese wrap and put it into the normal refrigerator to see what happens.  I could use it now, but it would be just good for spreading on crackers like a blue cream cheese.

As for the two small ones, we stored them for a day in the fridge and turned them into a wonderful blue cheese sauce.  Kim cooked up some Penne pasta and lots of cauliflower, broccoli, carrot and corn, mixed it all together with the some rue which she added the cheese to make a blue cheese sauce and baked it in the oven.  The flavour was amazing and the meal was delicious.  Ben went back for seconds as did I!

If this is what is known as a disaster in the cheese world, then I am happy with it!  I love it when we learn from mistakes that can be turned around to something edible and yummy.  It just goes to show that cheese making is not all about recipes and following rules, it can be about serendipitous mistakes as well!

I will leave you with this cheesy quote of the day:

"People who know nothing about cheeses reel away from Camembert, Roquefort, and Stilton because the plebeian proboscis is not equipped to differentiate between the sordid and the sublime." - Harvey Day

Downshifting

This is a personal tale, so please bare with me.  I need to share.

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine from work passed away.  One evening he collapsed at the office, and six days later he was no longer with us.  Rob was the same age as I am.

To say the least, his passing hit me pretty bad.  So bad in fact that I had to seek counselling, because when I thought about him and the good times we had, I began to cry uncontrollably and was very ineffective at work.  I was grieving for the loss of my mate.  However, I did not feel that it was appropriate to go to his funeral, as I did not know his family.

The counselling helped a lot, and the Psychologist that I saw strongly recommended that I go and visit my GP urgently and talk to him about taking a week off of work to gather my thoughts and to grieve.  Well, I did as she suggested, and that was why I was at home last week.  Thinking, thinking and more thinking.  I even had a little ceremony in my head for my friend so that I could get some closure.  I also spent time grounding myself in the soil of my garden.  A great therapy.

During my thinking time, I figured out why I was so upset.  It had to do with Kim, and her MS.  Apparently, this is called transference, and even though I was grieving for my friend, I was also upset about my wife and that I should spend more time with her than I currently do to help her out.  Because of her fatigue, she has to rest daily, and sometimes when I get home she is totally burnt out, and I have to quickly take over to help her recover.  As with most MS sufferers, her condition does not improve with time.  I needed this wake up call.

Anyway, Kim and I talked, worked out our finances and we came up with a plan of action.  I decided to approach my employer and asked to work a 9 day fortnight.  Downshifting so to speak.  The great news is that they have agreed, and it should start in a months time.  New contracts have to be drawn up and signed before I take the pay decrease due to working 26 days a year less than I do now.  Every second week on a Wednesday, I will be able to take the pressure off of my lovely wife and help her around the home.  Call it preventative medicine for Kim if you will.

Now I figure that I would not be able to downshift if we were addicted to the consumer culture that surrounds us.  The less you buy, the less you have to work.  Pretty simple really.  Sustainable living is simply living within your means.  More about those thoughts in a separate post, because I do not want to taint my friends memory with my own personal biases.  

Fair-well my friend.  You have helped me come to the realisation that I need to live in the now, and be true to my main value of family first.  I will miss you.

Spring Clean

I was recently reading the current edition of ReNew magazine, which is all about sustainable living and renewable energy.  Within there was an article about Solar PV system maintenance, which I learnt a lot of information about the benefits of cleaning your panels regularly.

Over the period of a year, dirt and bird droppings can build up which cannot be squirted off with just water from the hose.  This layer of dirt can degrade performance of each panel by at least 5%.  So today, I did something about it.  I found an old car windscreen squeegee and connected it to a long pole, climbed up on the garage roof, and cleaned each of the 16 panels.  The cleaning agent was simple and green, just 8 litres of water to 1 litre of white vinegar.

Here is a picture of me.  I had completed 9 panels by this time.  Before I went up on the roof I took all electrical safety precautions.  I isolated the inverter at the dual pole switch, and once up on the roof, I isolated the DC current at the junction box.  With all the panels isolated from each other, it was a slim chance that I would get a shock.  The water after I finished was filthy and so was the water that was streaming off of each panel as I cleaned them.  It just goes to show how much dirt was stuck to them.

So after I finished I turned it all back on again, and guess what (no pun intended)?  The output had increased by just over 150 watts (a 6% improvement for a 2.8 kW system), and this was even after the solar noon where the output of the panels should have been going down.  The proof will be that we should generate an extra kilowatt hour tomorrow if it is a similar sunny day. 

Then it was on to the chookhouse, and I gave the girls home a muck out.  I separated their droppings and kept them in a bucket to make a liquid fertiliser, and kept the straw for another layer of cob for the oven we are applying next weekend.

After a quick sweep of the veranda around the oven, it was the pools turn for a clean.  As I mentioned the other day, I clean it manually to save on electricity for the pump, and I do a far better job than the Creepy Crawly does anyway. 

 

Kim was trying to take artistic shot of the pool whilst I was cleaning it.  Anyway, it took me an hour to vacuum it and afterwards I checked the chlorine levels, which were fine.  The pool was only 16C, so I was not going in for a swim just yet.  I think I need to leave the solar blanket on for a week so that it heats up a little!

It looked very clean afterwards.  Just like a resort.  Then it was time to relax with a glass of wine in our new gazebo.  What a great way to spend a Sunday.  I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Spuds Ahoy

The humble potato.  It is one of the most versatile vegetables on the planet and the 3rd largest crop grown around the world.

This is my second year of growing potatoes, with the first year being successful enough, so I thought that I would expand my spud growing operation this year.  This is my patch from about the same time last year.

Anyway, this year I thought a bit bigger.  After watching Gardening Australia last Saturday, and getting a better understanding on how to plant potatoes, I made my bed much bigger and higher.

It is 2.4 x 1.2 metres and should be large enough to get a good crop.  I used a garden fork and dug down about 25 cm into the soil, and then built it up with the compost that I had laying all over the area in two smaller beds.  I sprinkled liberally with pelletised chicken manure, added a few handfuls of blood and bone and some sheep manure, turned it over again and gave it a good soaking with the hose.  Then I dug three trenches and mounded up the sides.

Then I collected the potatoes that I have been chitting for the last week.

Dutch Cream

Toolangi Delight

I kept them out of direct sunlight and the eyes grew so that I could tell which way was up when I planted them out.

The trenches in the spud bed were about 75 cm apart and about the same in depth.  Then I placed the potatoes in each trench with the eyes facing upwards.

Then I covered each row (5cm) with compost from the Aerobin, which was more like worm castings, then some more compost from the other bin that had been sitting for 6 months.  The next layer was about 5cm of soil which I then watered in well.

As the growing tips poke their heads through the soil, I will cover them up again until the trench becomes a mound.  The soil is very friable, which is just how potatoes love their environment.  All things being well, we will have a bumper harvest this year.  More on this beds progress as the season moves along.

We just love our roast, mash, salad, and jacket potatoes!  A.A. Milne said it best with, "What I say is that, if a fellow really likes potatoes, he must be a pretty decent sort of fellow."

So in closing I would just like to share this tribute to the potato.  May everyones spud harvest meet their expectations!

Environmentally Friendly Swimming Pool

Let me get one thing clear up front.  A normal backyard swimming pool is not very environmentally friendly.  Full stop.

Ah, now I have that off my chest, the rest of this post is about how we try and minimise our environmental impact when maintaining our pool.  Our pool contains about 60,000 litres of water.  That is a lot of H2O.  As any body of water is subject to evaporation, how do we either prevent this from happening or when required, top it up?

To prevent evaporation, we have a pool blanket, which is made from a thick plastic material that has little bubbles all throughout it so that it floats.  Think of it as very thick bubble wrap.

We roll this out as the weather warms up and it serves two purposes.  Firstly, evaporation loss as mentioned, and secondly, it helps heat up the pool quicker as it acts like a greenhouse and insulation.  When we use the blanket the first 50cm to a metre is about 38C (100F), and the water below is still about 17C (60F).  So we jump right in and stir it all up bringing the temperature down to about 21-25C.

As we do still get a little evaporation loss, this is what I use to top it up.

Our main rainwater tank gets dumped into the pool when we know there is a storm coming and that it will be filled back up again.  Also, if the tank does get full over a period of days, I connect the garden hose to the first flush diverter (the pipe to the right of the tank with the black hose on the end) and run it into the pool.  These two methods keep it topped up over the summer.  I have bought a second tank that will be installed when my Dad comes to visit in November, so I will have more water do divert into the pool, and to keep my veggie patch alive during those very hot days (45C) we get here sometimes.

Pools are notorious energy guzzlers, and when I bought the house in the year 2000, mine was no exception.  It had a thumping big 3kW pump motor, which fortunately died after about 2 years, and I replaced it with a more efficient 1.1kW pump.  This pump is still not as efficient as I would like, so when this one pops its clogs, I will be looking for an alternative.  Either a DC brush-less pump powered by solar panel, or a more energy efficient AC pump motor.  It shouldn't be too long as I can hear the bearings going in this pump already.

When the pump is running, the device called a "Creepy Crawly" makes its way around the pool and cleans/sucks all of the silt off of the bottom.  This water then gets filtered by a media filter then returned back into the pool all nice and clean.  However, we had another device in the middle of all this.  We have a salt water chlorinator that has a cell that splits the two molecules within the salt (Sodium & Choride).  The sodium sticks to the cell plates, and the chloride, now chlorine is returned to the pool to keep the bacteria levels down, without the addition of copious amounts of dry or liquid chlorine.   This is a great environmental feature, as all we have to add to the pool is salt in big 20kg bags each year.

So we have covered water and chemicals.  What about the media filter?  Well the sand filter we had up until about a month ago needed to be backwashed, (which is just a fancy term for cleaning and dumping about a thousand litres of water in 5 minutes down the drain) about twice a week.  This used to piss me off to no end at the thought of having to dump that water down the drain just to clean the silt out of the filter.

Like I mentioned before, we replaced the old sand filter with a much more efficient device.  Enter the new media filter the EcoPure F25.  I am not sure which part of it is 'eco' but I do know that it does not need hardly any backwashing every month.

It does not contain sand, but is filled with a medium called Zelbrite, which is basically crushed zeolitic volcanic rock in a granular form.  It collects more silt because is attracted to the Zelbrite and therefore requires less backwashes and less water wastage.  In the one and a half months I have had this new filter, I have backwashed it once, and it took 30 seconds to clear instead of the normal weekly clean and 5 minute flush!  I am so pleased, and it all cost only $100 more than a normal filter and filter medium.

As for running the system, one pool guy told me that I needed to run it for at least 8 hours in summer and 4 hours in winter to make the chlorine and filter the water.  If I took his advice then I would use at least 9 kWh of electricity in the summer just on the pool.  Well, not one to follow the pack, we filter for 2 hours a day in summer, and I clean the pool manually on a Saturday morning during warm weather which only takes another hour.  So from a recommended 63 kWh a week to just 15 kWh using my method.  The chlorinator makes less chlorine due to less pumping time, so I combated this by using a simple floating chlorinator that I put a few large chlorine tablets in once a week, to keep the levels up in summer.  In winter, I don't add it all.

All in all, I believe that the methods that I use save water, electricity and chemical additives, which can only be a good thing for the planet, and all those who swim in the cement pond!

All Hands On Deck!

I have been keeping this project close to my chest as I wanted to wait until it was completed before sharing it with everyone.

Long time readers will know that I have a swimming pool in the backyard.  I don't write about it much, because it takes up so much room where I could be growing food and up until now it has frustrated me.  Yes folks I have even thought about converting it into a fish farm, however there is another problem with that idea.  You see, Kim has Multiple Sclerosis and one of her main symptoms in summer is fatigue.  The disease stops her body from regulating its temperature, so we find that by having a quick dip in the pool (more like all afternoon, mermaid style) when the outside temperature rises about about 30C, it recharges her batteries, and she can function again.  So we are leaving the pool how it is.

We do have a four citrus trees, a bay tree, and green tea bush all in pots, however I wanted more.  I wanted some grapes!  So once we checked how much money we had put aside for the project over the last year, Kim and I compromised, I decided upon a grape arbour, and Kim a gazebo on the proviso that it was all made from sustainably harvested wood and finished off with low VOC paint and natural oils.  We hired our builder friend to do the main work, and Kim and I did the painting, oiling and landscaping.

We figured that as wood was a renewable resource it was fine as long as we made wise choices.  We chose the following timbers using the Good Wood site as our guide; Treated Radiata Pine, Cypress, Cedar, and eco-Merbau.  The first three types of wood are normally harvested from plantation forests in Australia, and not from old growth forests, however Merbau is usually illegally harvested throughout Indonesia and Malaysia and sold in Australia as decking timber.  Our builder Ray managed to track down some FSC certified Merbau which cost a little extra, but I was happy to pay the price.   It certainly beats using Steel and Aluminium which have a much higher carbon footprint.

So on to the pictures.  Here is a before shot of what the area looked like 11 years ago.  It was run down, loaded with concrete which we chose to leave in place, and needed a boost.

Taken when we bought the house in 2000

We painted the concrete and put in a shed in 2006

July 2011, construction had begun.  We removed the shed late last year (ebay).

View from the opposite corner.

The deck is taking shape

The gazebo begins.

The roof goes on

The cedar shingles are on and the seating is nearly finished.

We painted the treated pine that was exposed at the top with a low VOC external paint (woodland grey)

Started landscaping.  I moved the two orange trees which look nice.

So far so good.  You will note that the cypress supports are covered in plastic.  This is to stop the wood from drying out and splitting which it has a tenancy to do.  You have to oil or paint this wood to prevent it from splitting in the rain.

Then it was on to the final touch, oiling the deck.  I used a natural oil which was Tung oil mixed with wood turpentine.  No petrochemical toxins for me!

Strike the pose.  Nice gum boots Gav!
Note the little solar spotlight in the pot on the right hand side.

Diligently oiling the gazebo

All finished.  Then it rained and made the deck dirty!

Starting to landscape.

Sitting on the build in benches.

The benches are really big boxes with lids.  Great for storage.

 Once the two coats of oil had been applied and I was happy with the result, my eye turned to lighting.  Not wanting to deviate from our solar ethos, we purchased some solar powered LED white fairy lights.  You may have already noticed that I have solar led spot lights in most of the pot around the deck.  These work really well.  Solar lighting certainly has come leaps and bounds since the technology was first released.

Small, but effective solar panel.
This unit contains two AA size Ni-MH batteries, that can be replaced.

Meet the Mum and Dad, little fellow.  Welcome to your new digs.

Lights all strung up.

You will notice that the lights are strung up on lengths of wire across the top.  This wire is going to be used to trail the grape vines once they grow up the main support posts.  Give it a few years, and it will be cool in summer and let the sunlight through in winter.  All I will have to contend with are grape leaves in the pool, and a few birds nibbling on the grapes.  I should be able to get netting to put over it when they eventually grow.

I have purchased three varieties of grape vines, Sultana which is a white seedless variety, Crimson Seedless, and two Merlot vines.  Merlot loves clay based soil, so it should thrive in our soil conditions.  We will eventually have enough for wine, I hope.  When the time comes, I will have to look for a wine making course.

Me thinks that it is time for a pool party!

Tomorrow, I will write about how we maintain the pool as sustainably as possible, with minimal chemical inputs and no mains water.

Farmhouse Cheddar Video Tutorial

This is a cross post from www.littlegreencheese.com.  I believe that my video production is getting quite good, so I had to share it here as well!

Friday night was cheesemaking night, and as the Farmhouse Cheddar tasted so good, that I thought I had better make a replacement toot sweet!  So as I made this cheese, I filmed it as well, and over the last few days I have been editing and producing another of my tutorial cheesemaking videos from the footage.

So here it is!







This cheese is just so simple to make and has a great taste, especially when you add peppercorns!

A Very Disturbing Smell

Strangely enough, this is not a post about politicians or climate change or anything else sustainable.  It is about a mysterious smell in our house.  Here is the story.

Kim's nose is very sensitive.  On Sunday night, after we had closed up house and all the volunteers had gone home she smelt a faint odd odour in our bedroom.  All fart jokes aside, we couldn't really determine its origin, and I couldn't really smell it at all.  I just thought that it smelt like the bathroom floor mat which was damp.

Monday, Kim could still smell this odour, and now I could just smell it.  It smelt a little like natural gas, however I knew that there were no pipes in this part of the house.  The odour was only in the main bedroom, and we could only narrow it down to around the east wall, but I could not pinpoint the source.

Tuesday, it got worse.  Kim decided to pull everything out of the bedroom except for the bed, so I had to stop everything and help.  This included a Uni assignment that was due today.  We pulled out the wall unit, the chest of draws, and everything in them.  We still could not find the source.

Wednesday, craziness set in.  Kim started to loose it a little, so I told her to call the plumber so see if we had any damp problems.  Our friendly neighbourhood plumber Adam made a house call, and gave us a few suggestions like put a wax seal around the rubber seal that connects the toilet to the drain, take a water meter reading and check it in an hour to see if we had a leek in the concrete slab that the house sits on.  Well the water was not leaking, and I couldn't smell anything around the toilet.  Adam kindly did not charge us anything.

Thursday, Kim called our builder mate Ray, who was due to fix a leak around the cob oven flue (didn't quite seal it properly and rain damaged a bit of the oven).  Ray could smell the offensive odour, and thought that it may be something in the roof.  He got up there, lifted a few tiles, but could not find anything.  If it was a rodent, he said it would go crusty in a few weeks and the odour would go away by itself.  BTW, he fixed the seal around the flue as well.  All for free again.  Very nice of him to look for the smell.

Today, I was at wits end.  Kim said she was going to demolish the house to find the smell, so as I was home for the day (that is another story), I decided to go up on the roof and have a look for my self.  I started to remove roof tiles, which was quite easy, shoved my head into the hole that I made and used my nose to try and pinpoint the odour.  After about 2 hours and pulling half the roof off on top of our bedroom, I got it down to a few square metres.  I started to rummage through the insulation, which today I found out was rock-wool, that was laid about 50 cm thick.  After about 20 minutes of meticulously searching, I found the smell.

It was a dead mouse, and OMG did it reek.  My nose hairs are permanently singed!  Gav to the rescue, pong finder extraordinaire.  I tossed the creature from the roof to the ground, and you could almost see the trail of stench.  Who would have thought that such a small dead creature could cause such a calamity.

Anyway, the saga is now over, the smell has abated, and life is back to normal around here again.  Nothing to see here except us neo-hippies fruit loops!

Lies and Rubbish

Who is sick of the TV ad campaign by the Australian Trade and Industry Alliance?  Well I certainly am, and I don't even watch TV!  However my lovely wife Kim does, and she is disgusted with the lies and deceit contained in these ads.

So to combat the rubbish offered by Australia's biggest polluters who masquerade behind the title of the so called Australian Trade & Industry Alliance (i.e. Australian Coal Association, Mineral Council of Australia, Australian Steel Institute to name a few), GetUp! have released a parody of the ATI Alliance ads.





I am well over the campaign of lies being touted by these, the worst offenders of greenhouse gas polluters. It makes me sick to the core that they only have their own short term interests and profits at heart and not those of their very own children and grandchildren.

By the way, if you fancy a bit of the truth and some gratuitous swearing about carbon politics you could do no worse than popping over to Nevyn's Place and reading her post titled "A Carbon Tax Grumble".

Sustainable House Day 2011 - Wrap Up

Always a great event and fun was had by all!  At 10am when we opened the gates it was 10.5 degrees Celsius, and bucketing down with rain.  I just could not believe how cold it was for Spring, so cold that it hailed the day before.  It stopped raining at 11am and the sun came out of hiding.

Hail, yesterday afternoon

However the cold and wet weather that did not deter people from visiting though.  We had so many people through in the morning it was keeping all the volunteers busy as bees.  It died down in the afternoon, with only dribs and drabs coming through.  The Football finals must have been on?  The grand total for the day was;

54 Guests and 11 Volunteers = 65 Visitors for the day.

The inside of the house was off limits, as our privacy is important to us, but the gardens were open slather with many people going around twice just in case they missed something.  We had so many people that interested in all the low tech stuff we had done, in fact quite a few had visited other sustainable homes and mentioned that they were all too high tech, and just looking for something that they could do to their own homes.  The overwhelming majority of comments based on feedback from the volunteer guides during the day, was that people felt inspired that they could do some of the things around their own homes and reuse things that they also had laying around.

Anyway, here are some photos of the event.
 

Here is Amy, my daughter and expert with sponsor pencils by the looks of it.  She was the greeter for the day.

Here is one of the displays, with pickles, jams, fruit, and soap.  We printed up an information sheet for each guest to explain a little about each area around the garden and some of the inside features.

Our display board was fully stacked with pictures.  These belong to the Melton Sustainable Living Group, which we use for displaying sustainable living information at events around town.

You may have seen this likely looking character before.  I was waiting to take the next group of guests around, when Kim caught me un-awares!

The main vegetable, herb and citrus garden.  People loved the greenhouse and the recycled poles I used to run the peas up.

Past the Solar PV, the compost bins, and the car into the pool area.  We cordoned this area off, and had a safety number posted.  I will be planting the grape vines soon (in the next few weeks) to grow up the arbor!  Two Merlot, one white table and one red table grape vines.  Looking forward to tracking their progress over summer.

We repotted lots of Yuccas yesterday, and trimmed off any side shoots and repotted them as well.

Kim painted this sign late yesterday, totally exhausted!  Mind your step now.

A quick right turn to Cluckingham palace, which everyone loved,

Then down past the cob oven to the wicking bed,

Still alive and well watered salad greens.  So many loved the simplicity of the wicking bed.

Past the garlic bed to the front yard.

A stroll around the 13 fruit trees, and then a hearty hand shake and thanks for the visit.

 This is the view as the guest walked back to their vehicles.  We are totally whacked, and are now having a well deserved rest.  A big thanks goes out to the 9 helpers from the Melton Sustainable Living group, without who the day would not have gone so smoothly.  Hazaar!

And a special big kiss goes out to Kim, my darling wife, who puts up with all my crazy green projects and ideas but loves showing people around.  xox

Until next year, signing off from Sustainable House Day 2011 in Melton West, Victoria!