Greenbackyard

What to do with a small block of land full of fruit trees?

What would you do if you moved to a small block of land, smaller than a normal farm, full of established fruit trees? Well you might consider erecting a pot stil to make your own liquors and spirits. That’s just what the owners of the Tambourine Mountain Distillery did, in 1992, after they moved from Tasmania to the Glass House Mountains in Queensland.

“As we did not want to use chemical sprays on our fruit, we discovered that our products did not meet with market requirements’, their website says. “For a four person family, we had too much fruit, so we needed to ‘convert’ it into something which would make this small property productive.” See more of their story here.

What a wonderful idea! You should check out their site – it’s a delightfully personal and warm website, complete with pictures of their hand painted bottles, glowing stills, and caskets of maturing liquors. They’ve won numerous awards, and every bottle is hand-painted… and be sure to take a look at the peacock named Claude displaying his huge magnificent tail outside their show rooms. I can’t wait to visit in person.

Setting up a distillery in Australia is not easy at all, (which perhaps explains why there are so few of them.) Where-as in France and many European cultures, making alcohol at home is centuries old practice, that is still very much part of the tradition of cooking and food preparation, it is very uncommon in Australia, because the Government makes it very hard to own a Still. Owning a still even to make your own home made liquors, which you don’t intend to sell, without the proper license is illegal. You can’t own the still, make the liquor, store it, sell it, or move it, without a license.

When you get a license, the Government imposes what is called an excise duty on your goods. So for every litre of 40% proof alcohol you make, you need to pay the Government $65. A 750 ml bottle (think of a wine bottle) with 40% alcohol will have an excise duty of $18. Which you have to pay upfront, regardless of whether you sell this bottle or drink it yourself at home. If you sell it, you pay taxes and GST on the earnings after that. And just imagine the record keeping this all takes?!

And don’t even get me started on all the other licenses that you need to make your fruit into a tasty liquor. You need a license to store your alcohol, and to move it. I’m not yet sure how much each license costs… I assume the licenses themselves cost nothing, since the excise duty and the taxes on top would be a huge chunk of change for our dear Government anyway!

Which only goes to add an extra bravo to the family of the Tambourine Mountain Distillery, who have overcome these hurdles! Personally, I’m going to make my first batches of limonchello and orangechello with Vodka. I’m going to buy premade spirits and I’m going to think very fuzzy fuzzy thoughts about distilleries until one day when I finally have the gumption to face all the red tape. By which time , my next batch of Limonchello should b ready…

Lack of posts

We haven’t been posting many updates lately but everything is good, and we have a good excuse of course both fish and plants are doing well, which is great in winter. We have some crazy broccoli and the never-ceases-to-amaze tomatoes.

The good excuse is that we have bought a 10 acre property near Bellingen in the mid north coast is NSW and, once we are there we will continue with our aquaponics adventures except that in a larger and nicer place

Make basil into pesto

An abundance of beautiful, fragrant, potent basil straight out of your aquaponics system means only one thing – its time to make pesto!

You can’t really go wrong with pesto – spoon it on fresh pasta, spread it on toast, or you can even freeze it, pesto is a ‘must have’ for any kitchen. (Except my brother Stephen’s kitchen. He hates pesto, but then he always was maladjusted.) So here is my pesto recipe;

Ingredients:

basil – lots
pine nuts
parmesan cheese
garlic
olive oil
salt

Blend the basil, garlic and pine nuts together, add enough oil to get the consistency you want from your pesto. Add the parmesan last, then readjust the oil. Note – if you choose to add parmesan, the shelf life of your product is reduced. Pesto sans cheese ‘lives’ longer.

Now taste for salt. Your cheese may have been salty enough, but if your palate demands more salt, sprinkle a bit in.

Sterilise enough jars to take your pesto. I advise using smaller jars rather than large ones, as once you open the jar, you have to use it. I use old jam jars; wash with soap and water, or bung them in the dishwasher, then bake in an oven of 100 degrees c for 10 minutes. Add your pesto. Allow to cool. Store in fridge.

What would be extra nice is if you printed little labels for your jars – quite a few modern printers allow you print out sticky labels. If you can be bothered, be sure to include the date of creation!

Pests

Over the past few weeks, as our aquaponics system has been working and plants have been growing, a few annoying pests have made their appearance.

When we started this project, a few months back, we had no idea what we were embarking ourselves into . I thought that it would be straight forward (“how hard can it be to grow plants?”), just farm some fish and as a by-product get some organic vegetables, right? I loved the technical aspect of it all, i.e. connecting pumps, floats, etc. A system like this was something completely new to me, I had never done any plumbing or had any fish.

As time passes by, my respect for organic farms and aquaculturists (is that a word?) grows. It’s not an easy endeavour. Fighting pests without poisoning your fish (and yourself as the one that will eat the fish) is not simple.

The system requires some attention as well. When Ezequiel was born, on Dec 10th, we were away for 5 days during which I just came home a few times from the hospital to feed the fish but I didn’t do anything else, i.e. I didn’t remove anything that fell off with the wind, etc. At that time I thought to myself that the system wouldn’t take much work (this was 2 weeks ago). However since we have been back home, we had paid some close attention to the system and saw how dozens of caterpillars started to eat our chard, tomatos, even our marigolds. We take them away, feed them to the fish and every day there’s at least 4 more that appear out of nowhere.

I’ve read interesting posts on the Backyard Aquaponics Forums on using Dipel to fight off those damned caterpillars. My concern at the moment is that there doesn’t seem to be a consensus that it’s not going to hurt our fish. However I don’t seem to have a choice at the moment. So I will try that as soon as we can get it.