Births, Marriages & Deaths
March 31st, 2009 - Posted in chickens, self-sufficiency, sheep - by Sarah|
Hen and chicks
We recently decided to see if our new rooster was doing his stuff and put half a dozen eggs underneath one of our perpetually broody hens. Lo and behold, 3 weeks later we have 3 chicks. All of the eggs had developed to some degree but we think that the fact that the hen had been broody for quite a while before we gave her the eggs, coupled with our first really cold nights since last winter, may be to blame for only 3 hatching.
They are now at the stage of getting massively bigger every day and our main concern is keeping them away from the local Wekas who seem to be very hungry at the moment.
The hatching took place while we were away in Martinborough attending the wedding of Nathan and Lisa which was a nice opportunity to catch up with the extended family and for me to meet some of Brendhan’s relatives that I’d never encountered before. All the best to you guys!
Anyone who has grown emotionally attached to our sheep through reading this blog should probably stop here as we finally took Cardigan and Mittens to the butcher last week.
Off to the butcher
We debated killing and butchering them ourselves but decided in the end to go for the easier option of taking them to Hokitika Homekill. I feel a bit guilty about not being there when they were killed but not enough to stop me eating them when we get them back again 
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Hanging sheep (Mittens on left) and Keri from Hokitika Homekill
We dropped them off on the Thursday and I went along the next day to collect their skins as I am having a go at tanning them. Their carcases had been hung to cool down and I persuaded Keri to pose beside Mittens for a photo to give it a sense of scale.
They are being hung in their cool store for a week before being chopped into joints, chops etc and bagged up for us to collect.
Meanwhile, I salted the skins and then spent today stripping all the last bits of fat off them and trimming unwanted extremities off (eg ears). Then I washed them and put them into a tanning solution. I’m using a Leder pack that I got from a local outdoor/sports shop. I’ve been told that it tends to give white wool a slightly blue cast but hopefully it won’t be too noticeable on darker wool.
They will sit in the solution for about 10 days and then will need washing, stretching and greasing until the leather is soft and supple.
Salted Mittens skin complete with ears
Speedy shuffling
March 18th, 2009 - Posted in sustainable living, wellbeing - by Sarah|
When we got back home after our fab Christmas break in Cromwell I decided that it was time to get healthy. This lifestyle has tanned my face and bleached my hair (honestly, it’s not grey) and massively developed my upper body strength but my fitness and weight levelled off early on and were not going to magically improve without my conscious intervention.
I started off with The Food Bible by Judith Wills
This book has loads of good nutritional information about different vitamins and minerals in food and why you need a balanced diet. It has chapters covering weight control, food as medicine and for different stages in life. It also has a small selection of recipes and a really useful section of basic ingredients with their calorie, vitamin, mineral and fat content. I decided that to lose some weight I should be eating about 5,140 kilojoules per day (about 1200 calories) so I started weighing and calculating everything I ate and jotting it down in a diary. We still had the same meals we usually did as my investigations into healthy diet confirmed that we tend to eat all the right things (low meat, lots of veg and fruit, pasta, rice etc.) but our portion sizes went down drastically.
The first week of this I had still got lots of birthday chocolate left and so I incentivised myself to stick to the regime by allowing myself to make up any spare kj in my daily allowance with cubes of chocolate. While I haven’t seen this recommended anywhere I found it a very effective way to ensure that I continued to work out that I’d eaten 33kj of carrot and note it down. The transition when the chocolate had gone was a bit difficult but I switched to rice cakes as my ‘treat’ as I happen to be lucky enough to really like them. I also decided from day one not to include fresh fruit in the calculations as its lack of fat and multitude of good constituents outweighed any calorific value.
After 2 weeks I felt confident that I had formed a good understanding of what 5,000 kj looked like in meal portions so I stopped adding everything up but still stick a plate on the scales occasionally to check I’m not going too mad with things like pasta and muesli.
After another couple of weeks I was ready to start upping the exercise and this led me to another highly recommended book: The Complete Book of Running for Women by Claire Kowalchik
This a great book written in a very accessible style and covers all aspects of running from starting out to training for races. I started at the end of Feb with a fast walk for 30 minutes 4 times per week. This is recommended as a check that you’re ready to start running. Then I began the 10 week programme to go from 0 to 30 minutes running. The weeks so far have been:
Week 1 – 2 minutes running and 4 minutes walking x 5
Week 2 – 3 minutes running and 3 minutes walking x 5
Week 3 – 5 minutes running and 2.5 minutes walking x 4
The book has a good set of stretches to do after each outing including a couple particularly important for women – the shins and the iliotibial band (outer thigh). The one thing that has been a revelation to me is the recommended breathing pattern. This is to breathe in for three steps and out for two. This helps to prevent stitches (I haven’t had any) and also contributes to injury prevention as you hit the ground hardest when you start to breath out and this pattern means that the impact is shared equally between both feet. I found that it gave me something to concentrate on when I first started out instead of being left counting the seconds to go before I could walk again. This last increase to 5 minutes of running (20 minutes per outing) felt like a huge increase psychologically but again, the breathing pattern and the practise from the previous two weeks made it fairly easy. This book has also encouraged me to go as slowly as I need to in order to feel comfortable so while it may look like I am shuffling speedily in my head I am running.
I started having a look at the next book this week, the one that takes over once I can happily run for half an hour: The Non-Runner’s Marathon Trainer
