Time for an update!

It's Winter here at CTF, and we've had a few frosts, but some lovely fine days too. Fortunately not too cold being at the Northern end of NZ. We don't get snow here, it's usually just wet, with a cold southerly wind or else fine and sunny during the day but frosty at night.

I've been out pruning our many fruit trees, some of the bigger ones have needed quite a bit of work and that's very time consuming. I've been fairly brutal to them poor things but they did really need to be 'minimised' - we don't want huge fruit trees with inaccessible fruit for one thing! While we may not get such a great crop this next season, I'm hoping the following one will be good.

The pigs are growing fast. They've already eaten all of the root fodder we grew for them in their paddock (mainly mangels and sugar beet). And they've eaten just about all of our pumpkin harvest too - although I was loathed to feed them one of the only Musque du Provence pumpkins that grew in the drought - have kept this for a few winter soups for us!

They're now guzzling their way through lots of milk, crab apples and the odd handful of pig pellets.

In the vege garden, while things have slowed down over Winter, we're still managing to harvest a few greens for the dinner table.

The broccoli has been performing well, we've eaten quite a lot already with more yet to harvest. Apart from the standard green heading, I've put in some purple sprouting as well.

The cauliflowers are doing quite well. I planted purple ones this year for a splash of colour -

Also in the garden lots of spinach, silverbeet and herbs - coriander and parsley. I have found the odd chilli out there too which is amazing! Hope your garden is producing well over the Winter months.

New pigs

This year we have 4 pigs, so we will now have our work cut out feeding them!

Right now, they are feeding on their paddock lot of mangels and sugar beet. As you can see, they have wasted no time digging these up and munching them! I have also been supplementing their feed with household scraps (I collect them from my work too), and cooked up pumpkins and potatoes. Hopefully we can get hold of some crates of kumara (a kind of sweet potato here in NZ). Last year we did this, and boiled up large batches in a copper boiler outside - it's too hard to cook up enough indoors in small pots! Previously we've also managed to get hold of excess milk from local farms, don't know if this will be possible but we will try. The pigs love the milk and it's easier than cooking up food.

So, here they are, 2 girls and 2 boys (no names - they are destined for the table!):

My first batch of coloured soap - fail

Hey folks sorry for the long break between posts. A combination of being sick and a lack of anything much to post about. But now here's an update on soap making. This time using one of my herbal infused oil colourants.

I made up a batch of plain olive oil soap (castile), see here for recipe details. I used about 3 tablespoons of the infused oil (alkanet for the colour purple), plus some lavender essential oil. The soap turned a pale shade of greenish-gray. Not quite what I was expecting but after further research on the net I discovered it does do this because of the pH of the soap, and will change as the soap cures. So I didn't get to worried about it. After all, this is only my 7th batch of soap, so I'm all fine with experimenting and seeing what the results are. However, as the days progressed and my soap started drying, the colour seemed to just fade right away! Since I forgot totally to take any photos of the newly made soap, you can only take my word for it.

Another thing that happened with this soap was that it was very sticky. I'm pretty sure I must have mucked up my oil measurement (interestingly I notice one of my earlier posts mentioned this too - see here if you're interested).

Anyhow, after the soap sitting, supposedly curing, although it didn't look very good, I decided I would remelt (rebatch) the soap and add in more colour (and a little more fragrance too). I chose the boil in the bag method which is supposed to be a bit quicker than using a crockpot or a double-boiler.

Sliced up soap soon to be chopped smaller - look at the lack of colour!

Unfortunately the soap was really soft and sticky so grating it (into small fragment to melt more easily) was not going to be an option. I decided upon chopping it up as small as possible with a sharp kitchen knife.

Then I put all the chopped up soap into an heat-proof oven bag:

I added the bag of soap (closed with a twistie tie) to a pot of boiling water.

 It took about 3/4 hour - 1 hour all up to melt the soap, taking it out every so often and (wearing oven gloves) giving the soap inside a bit of a squeeze.

Once it looked melted I added in another 3 tablespoons of colour and another tablespoon of lavender oil. Gave it a good mix and then plopped it out into my mold. Unlike the original batch it was not pourable so I had to press it into the mold using a spatula and then when it was cooler, I put plastic wrap on top and pressed the soap loaf flat with my hands. Then I left overnight before slicing up today (as it seemed hard enough to me):

Well as you can see it has some colour now, but is still a little too pale for my liking. Also because I couldn't grate the soap as it was too sticky, you can see little lumps of white soap throughout. I guess this is OK for an effect if had I wanted it! Also, whether I cut up the soap too early or it was just the consistency of it, but it crumbled very easily - as you can see in the 2nd photo above, the pile to the right.

I'm really tempted to try remelting it again and add more colour. Hopefully I should be able to grate it up now or at least chop it finer so there are no blobs of uncoloured soap in the finished product. Also I think I should have added a little water to the bag when melting the soap. May as well have a play around with it to see what results from the next experiment. Will keep you posted!