How to make your own Yoghurt | by Mariella

As I have said, I love making yoghurt (see Bees, honey and Yoghurt). You put two things in a pot and a completely different thing comes out, a thing that is so much more than the sum of its parts! The other reason I like yoghurt is that it is so easy to make. With all the toxic ingredients and additives like thickeners being added to yoghurt, I had no choice but to start making my own and now, there’s no looking back.

First, you want to make sure that the milk you are buying is free from hormones and antibiotics. I only make yoghurt with full cream milk.

-      Pour the milk into a steal pot and bring to the boil, I make yoghurt when I know I’m going to be in the kitchen for a little while! Take the milk off the heat once it’s starts to rise. Allow to cool, testing the temperature with your finger every so often. You need to be able to comfortably keep your finger in the milk for a count of ten.

-      Once the milk has sufficiently cooled, stir in four tablespoons of yoghurt. I keep yoghurt from the previous batch and use that to make the next batch. If I run out for any reason, I purchase a little tub of healthy yoghurt to start up again.

-      Put the lid on the pot and wrap the pot in a thick blanket or place in a hot box, if you have one. Give it about ten hours to colonize, just to be safe.

And voila! Delicious home-made yoghurt in just three steps. Super easy! If you let the milk cool too much, heat it up again as the yoghurt wont take if you allow the milk to get too cold.

Now….my favourite thing to make with my own yoghurt is lassi! Lassi is a traditional Indian drink made with yoghurt and, generally, loads of sugar. I make it with Stevia. Vanilla essence, little water to thin it out to a drinkable consistency, and then top it off with a spoon of lightly roasted desiccated coconut and cinnamon. Try it out and feel free to ask me any questions if you have trouble making it. 

Weekend in the garden | by Mariella

To forget how to garden is to forget ourselves’- Mahatma Gandhi.

This is one of my favourite quotes from “Jane’s delicious Garden”, by Jane Griffiths. It’s all about growing organic food in South Africa and has been my garden bible since I decided that I indeed have green fingers. I cannot recommend this book enough. It’s sensitive, insightful and easy to understand. Reading it makes me feel very capable of not killing everything in my garden!

I can also recommend spending a sunny weekend in the garden. It gives you time to focus on the details, the beauty of your garden. To meet the creatures that live there, like this little Slug eater and his 2 siblings hibernating under some cardboard mulching, 

and to meet the interesting vegetables and fruit that live in your garden too! We grow some heritage veg, like this ‘Purple beauty’ pepper which does go bright red eventually and this stuffing tomato, the last of the season, which dried on the vine and looks like a cartoon character! 

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Forming a relationship with the place your food comes from is like investing in getting to know yourself better!

I also learnt all about levels this weekend. It was one of those Mercury retrograde situations where, no matter how my husband tried to explain the concept, I just didn’t get it! After some time, I eventually understood how to work out the contour lines of the land in order to plan our new beds. Our vegetable garden is on a gradual slope and we do this to ensure that the water is evenly distributed and doesn’t dam up somewhere or create erosion somewhere else.  We used a long transparent pipe filled with water and two sticks with lines drawn on them in the same place. One person stands roughly where you would like the bed to start and the other plants stakes at intervals, making sure the waterline in both ends of the pipe is level with the lines on the sticks at each spot, simple really! We measured and planted stakes every meter. The row of stakes planted is the edge of your bed, and it’s good to do this several times down the slope as the eye often has trouble reading the incline correctly.

‘A year from now you may wish you had started today’, Karen Lamb.  This is another quote I really like! Even if you start like I did, with a small unintimidating garden box, you’ll be so happy you did, once those first little green shoots poke out of the soil. And now is the time!

In Mercury Retrograde and smiling

With Mercury in retrograde, it seems that communication foibles may be a constant companion until the 7^th of August. So if I appear to be reflecting a lot, it’s because there'll be a natural inclination towards that at this time and I’ve decided to just go with it! It’s apparently not a good time for taking action, public speaking, decision making, dealing with authorities, husbands, wives, ex-husbands, ex-wives, bank managers and the like! Oh goodness! What shall we do for the next five days?

I have set up a "Make the most of it" list for the next week of my life and I’m going to share it with you!

01. Make sure that my family knows that I love them, even though when I open my mouth to say something, it comes out all wrong! Try leaving them notes in funny places, draw smiley faces on their smoothie glasses in the morning with white board marker, and other forms of non-verbal communication!

02. Remind myself that if the Buddha in my garden can still sit peacefully with spiders crawling all over him, I can too!

03. Drink at least two liters of water a day even though it’s absolutely freezing outside and it's the last thing I want to do. If you are even slightly dehydrated, your short term memory can get so fuzzy you can forget simple things like names, have trouble doing basic maths, forget where you put stuff, have trouble focusing on the k@yb@#rd...i mean key board. Adding these kinds of minor mishaps to Mercury retrograde is asking for trouble.

04. Remember to laugh at myself. Actually remember to laugh daily. When you laugh, it strengthens your immune system, boosts energy levels, de-stresses, and diminishes pain (which is why I giggle incessantly when I hurt myself!). It also brings people closer together.

05. Eat raw and home-cooked food that I’ve picked myself out of the garden (see ‘The ultimate stress management’ post on 28 May 2012) Note to self: Do not be lazy about this, do it immediately as you get home everyday after work.

06. Go do something awesome out in nature this weekend. A winter picnic on the beach after a long hike down the cliffs to the coast may do the trick, failing that; a picnic on the lawn in the garden would work just as well! That way, if the temperature drops, we can put the kettle on! It may seem obvious, but there are real health benefits to getting out into nature that we don’t even consider, for example; it’s good for your eyes! It increases the attention span of children. It boosts energy, mental clarity, decreases mental fatigue, leads to faster recovery from injury and surgery.

Mercury retrograde can really be your friend, if you know it’s happening. If you don’t know, it’s fertile ground for feeling victimized by ailing electrics, blitzed mobile phones, car problems, miscommunication, and other patience pushers! Happy Mercury retrograde everyone! May the next week bring ample opportunity for clarity, introspection, re-budgeting, re-planning, reflection.  

Lessons from inside a Tipi

There is a notable difference between how people used to react when I told them that I currently live in a tipi, and how they react now, when I say that I lived in one. As if I have returned to the realm of sanity and they can now entertain the notion of having anything in common with me at all! That we lived in a tipi for two years has them itching with need to see cracks in my smile, confessions that it had all been a bad idea, a momentary lapse in reason!

Sometimes you just need a change. A radical, put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is kind of change! We needed to feel the earth, the seasons, to know what the moon was doing, to no longer have walls between us and our world, to sleep outside. A friend offered us her tipi, and we packed our bags, and started giving things away.

Living in a tipi is very much like living on a sail boat! You’re always turning the flaps to the wind. It was hard constant work. But I had started to feel like a domesticated cat, and I needed to know that I could fend for myself out in the wild!

It made me much stronger and I developed skills that I now take for granted, that I never thought I’d need, like making fire, using a cordless drill, securing loose ropes on my own in hurricane weather with the rain beating down on me in the middle of the night, sick kids inside and a fireplace that won’t stop smoking!

What did I learn in those two years?

-Having fireflies flapping through your kitchen at night when you switch the lights off to go to bed is cool!

-Rain spiders are not poisonous.

-Outside showers rock, no matter the weather.

-Community grows when someone is in need.

-You are tougher than you think.

-A view of the stars from your bed on a clear warm night through the open flaps of a tipi needs to be experienced at least once in your lifetime.

-We are better designed to sit on the floor than on chairs.

-Wet things dry.

-It’s important to understand your cycles and the planet’s cycles. When you fight against your natural context instead of understanding it, you put your body under stress and you stop coping.

-Kids like tipis!

-Life is simple.

-When you stop hiding for cover behind walls and windows, you find a humbleness in the face of the enormous natural elements of this planet which forever helps you to make decisions based on them instead of just yourself.

-Living in a tipi taught me to not take any comforts for granted. We de-consumerized ourselves and down-scaled without feeling deprived or lacking and we've never turned back.  

Do I miss living in a tipi? Nope! Would I take it back, given the chance? What do you think!?

Why normal toothpaste is NOT my friend!

When I started to look at the ingredients of everything I consume on a daily basis, toothpaste was one of the first things I checked. Something about this daily frothy soapy experience made me suspicious! After doing a bit of research I took the family off normal toothpaste. 


We tried all sorts of natural substitutes, amoung them, charcoal of Aubergine (homemade). I don't recommend it!
The cause of this hasty exploration into completely natural personal hygiene and beauty products?


Sodium Lauryl Sulphate. 


There are loads of other nasties, but this is my personal fav as it is in almost everything!

Both Sodium Lauryl Sulfate (SLS) and its close relative Sodium Laureth Sulfate (SLES) are commonly used in many soaps, shampoos, detergents, toothpastes. The reason? We have come to expect products which have a cleansing action to foam up and both of these chemicals are very effective foaming agents.

SLS has been linked with skin irritation, skin corrosion, eye irritation and cornea damage, scalp irritation, swollen hands, face, arms, fuzzy split hair, menopausal symptoms, drop in male fertility, baldness, and in a few cases, blindness! In research done in 1983, the Journal of The American College of Toxicology found that some soaps, which had concentrations of up to 30% SLS, were "highly irritating and dangerous".

It is often used as an absorbing agent to allow other ingredients like vitamins, moisturizers and minerals to be more easily deposited below the skin's surface. The problem is that many beauty products come with a host of other toxic chemicals which can now enter the blood stream easily. SLS has shown up in the tissues of the brain, liver, heart and other vital organs! And can we expect anything less from an ingredient which started off in Industrial cleaners? It's all a bit disturbing really and even though many sources say that there is nothing wrong with SLS, i'd rather take my chances with the charcoal!

There are many more options available than there used to be. We use Vicco tooth powder now, it’s an ayurvedic toothpaste made from many different plants. It doesn’t foam. It makes your teeth brown while you’re brushing so best not look in the mirror! 
It took a while, but we rooted out all SLS in our home. And I’ve educated my kids too. It does mean that we need to pack toothpaste for sleep-overs though!

The Forest Floor

Returning home is a grand thing, and when you live on the edge of a little forest, coming home is magic. A couple of years ago, I spent time in a woodland community project in Wales. We lived in a little house build out of ‘wiggly bits’ of wood and because there are no wood borers in Wales, you could literally cut the wood and use it, bark an’ all! Our little house had a turf roof with a sky light and a view of the stars. I learnt a lot about out door living and about myself. I thought I’d share this poem with you. I wrote it while I was there. I promise it's not long winded!

The Forest Floor

A poem by Mariella Rossi

It’s a place of healing,

the forest floor.

A place alive with secrets and knowing.

My learned sense of reality catches on the brambles and thorns as I pass,

and the tentative uncertainty of my untrained step

loosens with the soil on my feet

in the puddles on the path.

It’s a place of healing,

the forest floor.

A place intent on living.

Where each movement beneath the

towering company of life informs the next.

A little slower this time.

A little softer.

More quiet.

And with each surrendering breath,

another can be heard.

One more colossal and unified in its polyrhythmic sway.  

The trees and vines and creatures with their watchful eyes,

and the earth underfoot,

swell and recede in a merry yawn.

On my twilight walk to fetch water

the dark patiently dilutes all colour,

but allows detail a stolen moment to define my way.

The texture of bark on the lean trees around the spring,

the burbling contortion of their reflection at its yielding mouth,

the lichen-rough rocks,

smoothed at the water's edge,

all persist and scintillate into grey.

The soft pricked dendrites of moss cushion my knee

as I slip and fall,

one foot in the spring!

And my scream and giggle pierce the listening night,

and there is no other human being in sight.

So I sit. Wet and still. In the moss.

For tonight, when the darkness stretches its veil impenetrably-tight

over the forest I shall be inside,

to find my place within it's creeping, writhing breath.

Its a place of healing,

the forest floor.

Where living things may grow.

Rain and mulch and returning home!

The weatherman forecast 100 mm in 48 hours in the Garden Route, we got 52 mm on Saturday alone. We came home to much erosion damage and a virtual moat between our path and our house! Annual soil loss in South Africa is estimated at 300 - 400 million tonnes, nearly three tonnes for each hectare of land! If we start to address the situation on our own little pieces of paradise, it will make a difference. Top soil is worth it’s weight in gold and is difficult to replace when it's gone!

Only 13.5% of South Africa’s land surface area is considered arable/suitable for food production. Every year an estimated 34 000 hectares of farmland is converted for other purposes, such as urban expansion. At this rate, by the year 2050, there may be no more than 0.2 hectares per person available on which to produce food in South Africa. This is much lower than other countries and it really does enforce the point that we need to grow our own.

Mulching is every gardener’s best friend.

It is, by definition: A protective covering, usually of organic matter such as leaves, straw, or peat, placed around plants to prevent the evaporation of moisture, erosion, the freezing of roots, and the growth of weeds.

A layer of mulch 7.5mm thick can reduce your water consumption by about 70%! Just think about it, the only open bare earth you see in a natural untouched environment is desert! And desert is a hungry thing! The ground needs to be protected and there are many different mulches that can be used.

We use opened up cardboard boxes on our paths with saw dust over. In the beds we use Lucerne as we don't often find hay at the co-op here, but hay is your best option. You can also use stones, newspaper, leaves raked up from the garden. Grass clipping may leave you with a lot of grass in your beds!

Our veggie garden incurred almost no damage, being mulched and all, and we returned home to the last of the tomatoes and very happy lettuce! Thank you rain, please do come again, just wait until the moat dries!

A day on the farm

Three weeks ago, when we left for Gauteng there were weather warnings; rain, storms, heavy wind, flash floods, tornadoes! We delayed our trip by a day. On the way back home we spent the night by my sister in-law and her family on the farm. In the evening we checked the weather; rain, storms, heavy wind, snow, flash floods! Again! That was last night. We will be extending our stay on the farm until further notice and see this as a great opportunity to experience large scale farm living and stay warm and dry!

This morning at the not-so-crack-of-dawn we headed out onto the farm to see what there was to see. My brother in-law’s primary crop is maize. Not much to see in the fields as they’ve recently harvested, but seeing the machinery and storage needed to undertake such immense work made us all feel very little!

They also farm with pigs, sheep, cattle on a smaller scale. And it’s baby season. After ten minutes in the pig pen my son says, I feel like a farmer! With muddy shoes and covered in dust, he definitely looked like one! 

  

All the animals on the farm are fed off the land without the use of growth hormone and antibiotic, but because the process to certify organic is an overwhelmingly complicated one, they just get sold off to the usual places. It seems like such a waste to me as good healthy ethically grown meat is such a scarcity. I think this is something which needs to be demanded, not requested, from our supermarkets and grocery stores.

Watching the kids run around between the sheep made me realise how essential it is for us to be in the company of animals, it teaches us a necessary context. It reminds us of the broader company we keep on this planet! It was a day well spent and we’ll see what weather tomorrow brings!

My Winter blues P.O.A. (Plan of Action)

We rarely get sick, my six year old son has never been on antibiotics and my fourteen year old daughter hasn’t been on antibiotics since we stopped seeing it as an option for treating respiratory dis-eases.  Antibiotics are useless against viruses so all that you would be doing by giving your kids antibiotics for the common cold is depressing their already straining immune system.

Studies have shown that taking antibiotics may actually permanently reduce your immune system's ability to fight viruses. It’s making the problem worse! Overuse of antibiotics by misinformed adults is producing strains of super bugs, or bacteria, that we just can’t control. But I know, when that little person starts throwing a fever, and just lies there like a rag, it’s terrifying and it’s our responsibility to keep them safe and healthy.

So, what do I do if I see a cold coming on?

-Firstly it’s really crucial to stop it early. Just one morning can make all the difference, it’s much more complicated to cure a sick kid than to help a kid whose immune system is telling you it needs time out (to go pick tomatoes!) from getting sick. It’s kind of like gardening, if the plant is strong, pests stay away from it, if the plant isn’t happy, pests take it out!

-Take away all mucus forming foods (gluten, dairy, sugar)

- Up the raw foods, especially sprouts

-Juice (apple, carrot, pepper, beetroot, ginger, mint, whole lemon)

- Feed them as much of Papa’s special tea as they will tolerate:

Ginger (grated, as much as they can take)

Honey (3 spoons)

Lemon juice (half)

Apple cider vinegar (table spoon)

It tastes as bad as it sounds but if you put loads of honey, it’s actually quite yum.

-Echinacea

-The right homeopathic remedy for them every half hour.

-I watch them and give them different homeopathics as their symptoms change. I really recommend homeopathics for kids, and going on a home homeopathics course is the best thing you can do for your family’s health. Children respond so well to them.    

-Plenty rest

I know that this is a very controversial thing to say, but children can handle 40 degrees. It’s very stressful, but since bugs only die around that temperature, it really just prolongs their illness by giving them meds suppress temperature.

When my husband and I had our first anniversary we decided to have a home cooked romantic dinner together as our two year old baby boy was a little sick and we didn’t want to leave him. Half way through the meal, we heard crazy sounds and he had gone into fever convulsions and stopped breathing! Terrifying! We rushed to the clinic and the doctor said he was fine and with some cortisone and antibiotics would be over it in a week. My husband politely declined the cortisone, took the prescription for the antibiotics, and we left.

We went to our homeopath/GP the next day and learnt that the fever convulsions don’t come from high fever but from fever that rises too fast. He went from normal to 39.9 in half an hour, that’s what did it. Fever is the body’s strongest artillery against illness so we decided to let the fever rise slowly, so that the body itself wouldn't go into shock. The next week we didn’t sleep much, we wrapped cloth soaked in vinegar water (best traditional method I’ve ever found for fever) around his feet once the fever had started and had him on a humidifier a couple times a day. We woke up hourly throughout the night to check his fever and gave him children’s paracetomal suppositories half an hour after he’d hit 40 degrees. After about 5 days he was better. A few young children that I know got that bug that year, they all ended up in the clinic with convulsions. It was so scary.

 The reason for this story? We didn’t take the big Pharma route, we chose to do it our way, even though we were scared and sometimes unsure, and our son has never gotten anywhere near that sick again. Every winter we watch as all the kids in the class play illness ping pong and sometimes half the class is absent, but there is Luka, usually barefoot and healthy. He sometimes gets the sniffles, but nothing one day at home can't fix.

The route we took isn’t for the faint hearted, and I do believe that antibiotics have their place, we had a very good infrastructure of professional therapists and doctors to turn to and that made all the difference. We learnt a lot that winter! The secret is to be in touch with your kids, if they start getting sick, don’t wait, do something straight away. I’d love to hear your family healing secrets as I’m always on the lookout for home remedies. 

super easy healthy snacks on the move

The thing about sitting at a market for a week is that you’re surrounded by junk food! Quick, easy junk food! And even though I can easily resist the call of burgers and hot dogs, being vegetarian an’ all, there are some things that become tempting by way of proximity! Things like cupcakes, caramelized nuts, pancakes! Snack attack stuff.

So this time I decided prevention is better than cure and I made sure that we would be kitted out with all manner of snack that fits my happy health criteria. I’m off sugar in all it’s wonderful forms from fruit to potatoes but my husband’s not so this is what’s in our combined lunch box of goodies:

Dates slices (coz who has time to roll date balls?)

Ingredients:

1 date slab

Packet fine desiccated coconut

Sunflower seeds

Goji berries

Currents

Sesame seeds

Cut the date slab into thin slices and soak in boiled water till it cools, pouring enough to just cover the dates. The more water you add, the more coconut you’ll have to add later to stiffen the mix. Once it’s soft it’s time to get your hands dirty and squelch the dates up so that the mix becomes smooth and even, then add the desiccated coconut until most of the moisture is soaked up and it starts to bind together and then add the seeds, berries and currents. It’s best to do all this with your hands, keep adding coconut until the mix stops sticking and rolls nicely into a ball, then press into a tray, scattering a little coconut in the tray first and then again after so that the slices will be coated on both sides. Cut into squares, or get your kids involved in ball rolling. If you are going to make balls, roll them into shape first and then coat in coconut or sesame seeds. You can luxe this recipe with essential oil (no more than one drop for a whole batch), chia seed, minced dry fruit. Or you can do what I love doing, you can add cocoa powder and cayenne pepper and then roll in Cocoa powder, they look like chocolate truffles! Too yum! Can’t keep my kids away from these as you can see! 

Best kept in the fridge.

Savoury snack pack

sunflower seed

sesame seed

 linseed/flax seed

sun dried tomatoes

soya sauce

dried mushrooms

Nori sheets

Dry roast seeds in a pan on high heat. Stirring often. Once the seeds have finished popping (I recommend doing it with a lid on!) take the pan off the heat and add a splash of soya sauce, stirring the seeds around quickly so that it coats everything before it sticks to the pan. If you add too much soya, it will stay sticky. If you do add too much, just return it to the heat and continue stirring it around until you see the seeds aren’t sticking together anymore. Once cooled, add chopped up sun dried tomato, shredded Nori sheets, dried mushrooms.

Masala peanuts

Raw peanuts

Masala

Salt

Along the same line as the snack pack but spicy!

Mix water, masala and salt into a paste. I usually use a quarter cup for about 200g of peanuts. Play around with how salty or spicy you like it. Again, dry roast raw peanuts in a pan over medium heat till they turn brown, take the pan off the heat and add the paste, stirring as you pour. Leave a while to dry and cool.

Homemade chocolate!!!!

Raw cocoa butter

Coconut oil/butter

Honey

Stevia

Vanilla

Additional: finely chopped dried fruit, essential oil

I found the recipe on the back of the Souring Superfoods packaging works perfectly for me. I don’t make it with raw cocoa all the time as it can make you hyper and anxious and it get a bit dear.

Add equal parts cocoa butter and coconut oil in a bowl placed on top of another bowl filled with freshly boiled water (opposed to a double boiler on the stove), once that’s melted, add honey and vanilla or essential oil, Rose Geranium is a winner, but again, only one drop for a batch of 150g or more. Mix until the honey is properly melted. Then add cocoa powder until it reaches a ‘melted chocolate’ consistency. It should be thick without going fudgy. At this stage you can add goodies to it like desiccated coconut, raisins, cranberries, cherries, dry figs or just keep it plain.  Then place in the freezer for a couple of minutes. It’s really easy. And once you’ve had your own chocolate you’ll never turn back. I add stevia instead of honey but I know it’s an acquired taste!     

All of these snacks should last at least a week but generally they don’t last a day in my house! If I come up with any other quick snack survival tactics this week I’ll let you know!

Karoo Moment

I am currently sitting in a stop-and-go in the middle of the Karoo. Having spent the last week chasing around at full capacity in preparation for two shows back to back, Innibos in Nelspruit and a Gem exhibition in Menlyn in Pretoria, it’s quite a relief to just sit and be driven across the country!

I’m not completely off-hire (a term my civil engineer father uses to denote chill out time), with a lap full of gemstone beads, I intend to catch up on beading all the way from Plettenberg Bay to Gauteng.

Another task I have set for myself is to create a sensory collage for you, see if I can place you squarely in my seat in this vast expanse of land where, if you listen, in between the sparse birdsong and back to back heaving of 

Van Schalkwyk’s Vervoer trucks, you can hear the ghostly whisper of the slow steady role of voortrekkers’ ossewaens crunch their heritage into the hot Karoo ground. You can hear them loud and clear in town names like Vergenoeg (far enough), Moetverloor (given up will), Goliatskraal (as in Goliath), Agtertang (um… pliers in the back/derogatory name for someone on the opposite side of the tracks!).

 We careen past these places to a Sunday soundtrack of Bob Dylan, Tom Waits and something I can only describe as Baltic-dub-step-maybe! The sharp morning sun casts pink shadows underneath pink tourmaline beads in the tray before me and slowly thaws my frosty Garden Route hands! The everlasting highlight on the steel barrier along the N10 races us to Graaff-Reinet. I can almost hear it singing on the steel. Secretary birds, monkeys, baboons, meerkats watch. 

It’s so very open here, we are so very outnumbered by sky and clouds and succulents and space. I’m picking tomatoes big-time! Inside our moving cocoon its popcorn and home-made lentils burgers and Audio books and Onion, the hamster, charging around like an excited country mouse on her way to the big city! Makes the prospect of spending the next ten hours in a car all the more bearable!

Gauteng here we come!         

Olives and Childbirth

Every year when the Prince Albert Olive Festival breezes by we think, Next year…we’re there! And every year we miss it. We missed it this year too but received a box of fresh raw olives from family members who did get their ducks in a row in time to go. If you’ve every plucked a fresh sumptuous olive from the tree and popped it expectantly into your mouth, you’d know it tastes revolting and it takes a couple of weeks of soaking in salt water to get the bitterness out of it. It’s a little easier to dry them in salt than to pickle them, but they won’t keep as long. We did a bit of both and this is the result!

My kids even pickled their own, I have reservations about how my son’s will turn out, he decided to put a bit of everything in.…ginger, Seschuan pepper, Stevia, Rosemary….still beats supermarket olives!

And P.S: I experienced the great joy of removing my orange ribbon this morning! While I was pickling olives my friend was giving birth to a healthy baby boy, in the comfort of her own home with a doula and a midwife. And no drugs in sight! Woohoo!! What an awesome warrior mama she is!

Eeck, there's a rock in my drinking water!

I think it’s safe to say that I believe in the healing properties of stones. Having owned a Crystal shop for seven years means that I’ve gotten to hear the most incredible stories from people. Some of the stories that have crawled through our doors have been totally unbelievable but it’s always interesting for me to hear how others perceive the stones in their lives and their experiences with those stones. Whether you believe that they have a capacity to heal or if you just like how they look, they enhance your current state of affairs just by being in the room!

I’ve started putting a stone in my drinking water recently, and I can taste the difference, so I thought I’d chat about it for a bit. Try it out, and let me know what happens.

Stones all vibrate at a certain frequency which is beneficial to us as human beings. When you put them into water, the water takes on the vibrations of the stones. It’s important to note that many stones are toxic so it’s best to stick with quartz, there are many to choose from and are hard enough to not dissolve into the water. I use Amethyst, Citrine and Rose Quartz and I can taste the difference! And I’ve had so many people in my shop who swear that putting Rose quartz in their dogs’ drinking water staves off fleas! Give it a try!

Honey, Bees, and Yoghurt!

It all started when the yoghurt flopped. I make my own yoghurt you see. It’s so enjoyable; it’s like being an alchemist. You start with this thing and then overnight it becomes something else! It transpired out of necessity though, as I am not prepared to eat Gelatin (often obtained from pig skin and cattle bones) or Pimarison (an anti-fungal additive implicated in various allergic reactions) so I got into the habit of making our own from raw milk or hormone free milk. If you’d like, I can explain how to make it?

And it always works, except on one very cold night when I left it to cool and it got too cool and I decided to not reheat it to see what happened. The next day it was still milk, not surprising really! Same same only a little bit creamier.

So I thought to turn it into ice-lollies for the kids. Add honey, some vanilla, freeze it and everyone’s happy. Except we’d just run out of honey. And I had been forbade to buy any honey as we have our own beehive and there was still a full frame of honey in the freezer from the last time we’d harvested.

So, in order to do this little thing, I had to strain and bottle the last frame of honey first.

A bee hive frame, if you’ve never seen one, is a moveable wooden element that holds the honeycomb in the hive. Once the bees have filled it with honey, you just lift it out, leaving some full frames behind for them!

Bee farmers use spinners to extract the honey from honeycombs, leaving them intact so that bees fill them up faster as they don’t have to rebuild the combs first. We don’t have a spinner so we scrape the honey and honeycomb off the wax, press it all though a fine strainer in a messy delicious process which results in bottles of clean raw honey and some sticky kitchen items which I usually leave out for the bees to clean the next day.

It’s a fun process to watch; first one curious little bee flies past, stops mid-flight and checks out this stash of honey. He fills up, leaves, and returns with ten buddies who then return with a hundred buddies and so it goes until you have an entire hive’s worth of bees on your porch having the time of their lives!

It was all going well, until I noticed that the dew had watered the honey down in the night and the bees were drowning in it! Now, when bees are out harvesting, they have nothing to protect and are therefore passive, this is very important to understand, it is also very important to believe when you and your daughter undertake the task of rescuing hundreds of drowning bees! The idea was to lift the frame, spoons and strainer out of the bowl full of watered-down honey and tip the bowl over so that the bees could crawl out of the puddles of honey on their own. Suffice to say, we were covered with bees, but it was fine, as long as we worked slowly and didn’t get honey on us.

To be surrounded by a swarm of bees all frantically trying to have their fill was an awesome experience. My daughter insisted that she had to stay and help until every last bee was dry! They were drunk and delirious you see! 

We didn’t get stung!  

Please forgive the camera shake in the images; you try hold still with bees crawling all over you!

Oh, and the yoghurt lollies were a raging success!

Ps. Do not try this at home! The bee part I mean, try the lolly part at home. with any kind of milk or yoghurt. You’ll be very popular! 

Girl time!

Girl time is magical! There are very few things that replenish my soul like an evening of good food and the company of women. It’s an essential connectedness that binds us as a community. I call it ‘walking to the water’, like tribes women walking kilometers to the well to fill up, chattering all the way there and all the way back. Lots of issues get resolved ‘walking to the water’.

 This weekend we celebrated the imminent birth of a new being into this world and with that great big moon overhead, the evening felt truly mystical!

As a gift I made up a ‘Stones for your birthing day’ survival pack with Rose Quartz, Aventurine, Jasper, Chrysocola and Moonstone from my shop.

And I took the time to make the card myself.

We weave ourselves into the things we make; it’s more than just a card!

We all brought a bead along and whispered blessings into it as we each threaded our bead onto a necklace that she can wear during the birth, or, in my case, tear off, mid-labour, in a fit of wild craziness! And we all tied orange ribbons around our wrists as a reminder to keep her in our hearts. This is something we’ve done a few times now and it’s so cool when you get the good news that you can take it off, especially since, by then, it’s manky and grimy from living on your wrist for weeks!

I think the resurgence of ceremony is so very crucial in our lives and today I am so so grateful for it! But then again, it could just be the Moon!