Going well on our sustainable meats New Years resolution

At the beginning of the year we made a resolution to eat mostly local, organic or free range meat.  To date we have been able achieve our goal by:

1. Buying local and free range meet from local shops - Totally Local and the Farmgate Butchery.
2. Going to the local take-away shop that uses free range chickens when we need a hot roast chook rather than getting a non-free range hot chook from the local supermarket.
3. Even the big supermarket chains in town now offer a range of meat products to support our resolution - we can get free-range chickens (whole, pieces or sausages), free range pork and organic beef.
4. Finally, we decided to try some kangaroo meat - considered a more environmentally friendly option than the hoofed animals we normally eat (sheep and cattle) and to have lower greenhouse gases produced.  So we tried Roo stroganoff after seeing Linda and Tricia's recipes in the past. Everyone loved it - so I am sure it will be on the menu agin sometime. 

Testing the powers of vinegar outdoors

It's been a while since I started using vinegar as a cleaner indoors in the kitchen and bathroom - and I am totally converted.  Vinegar is a great glass cleaner, helps remove those stubborn stains around the stove and on the kitchen bench.  Vinegar cleans our stainless steel appliances (fridge and dishwasher) - getting rid of those little kids fingerprints and leaving a clean streak free surface.

A few weeks ago I read a snippet somewhere that vinegar can be used as a weed spray outdoors. Having found uses for vinegar indoors I could not wait to trial vinegar in the outdoors.  Further research on the Internet brought up numerous articles on vinegar (or acetic acid) as a herbicide - read some here and here and here. 

So here is our home trial of vinegar as a herbicide and the results we have observed so far.

I filled a pressure spray pack with 2 litres of vinegar (just the cheap white vinegar) and added a small squirt of dishwashing liquid (to help get better leaf coverage) and went out to the front yard to trial my new herbicide on cat's ear,  paspalum, couch and dandelions (photos in this order).

The photos on the left show photos of the weeds at the time of spraying and the photos on the right are the same plants just 2 days after.

The results look promising.

Vinegar (or acetic acid the main chemical in vinegar) acts as a drying agent on the leaves of the plants.  You need to apply the vinegar on a warm sunny day to get the best effect (or the best drying out) - and the leafy plants like the dandelions showed signs of drying out almost immediately.  Even the grasses (paspalum and couch) are showing signs of being weakened.  Vinegar is a broad spectrum herbicide so you need to be careful with your spraying - spray only the plants you want to kill and do not spray on a windy day.  Vinegar is not as powerful as commercial broad spectrum herbicides- and you should expect to have to reapply your treatment several times.

I am inspired by my initial results and will keep repeating the vinegar applications on our next sunny day to keep weakening the weeds and hopefully eventually eliminate them from this section of our garden. 

A week of solar cooking

Tricia and Heather have asked me to contribute to their soon to be published sun oven cook book. This has inspired me to cook a whole range of things in our solar oven this week - luckily it has been a mostly sunny week.

We started with baked squashes and golden nugget pumkins - picked from our garden.

Then had an Indian feast of dahl and a palek paneer (spinach and cheese) with rice.

We stewed some rhubarb from the back yard with some new season apples from a local orchard and topped half of it with a cobbler and the other half a baked custard mix.

In the oven now is a weekend batch of chocolate muffins for the kids.

If you have some recipes you would like to contribute to the upcoming solar oven cook book contact Tricia and Heather at solarcookbook@gmail.com .