He Giveth More Grace

What a beautiful song. This has been on my heart lately after hearing about Darlene Rose's testimony about being a POW in WW2. This song was one among many that she had memorized as a child, along with lots of scripture. She said "How many of you would manage if your bible was taken away tomorrow". He giveth more grace as our burdens grow greater, He sendeth more strength as our labors increase; To added afflictions He addeth His mercy, To multiplied trials He multiplies peace. When we have exhausted our store of endurance, When our strength has failed ere the day is half done, When we reach the end of our hoarded resources Our Father’s full giving is only begun. Fear not that thy need shall exceed His provision, Our God ever yearns His resources to share; Lean hard on the arm everlasting, availing; The Father both thee and thy load will upbear. His love has no limits, His grace has no measure, His power no boundary known unto men; For out of His infinite riches in Jesus He giveth, and giveth, and giveth again.

Finding Forgiveness

I just listened to this Focus on the Family. What a powerful testimony. I wept. I have never been in the situation of having an abortion or even considering it, but the underlying message of forgiveness is still amzingly powerful.

http://www.focusonthefamily.com/popups/media_player.aspx?MediaId={847B8BB0-A160-4487-B7B3-E0CDC78E1AF9}

Cheese and sourdough

I just realized that I had uploaded these photos to write a blog post, the date is a month ago, so I had better start typing. So I can put up some more posts, I seem to have hundreds of ideas in my head, I just don't have the time. I have been learning how to make cheese. Sarah and I did a one day cheese making course at Laurel hill Forest Lodge. Our instructor said that we should put a day a week aside to make cheese, so when I got home I got online and ordered my starters, rennet, mould, thermometer. I got some dairy sanitiser and went to work. First I set up the bowl with sanitiser and a bowl with cool boiled water, then made up some starter culture. My bench was looking crowded. Then I went to work pastuerizing the milk, I did three lots one for camembert, one for haloumi, and one for caerphilly. I was wanting to make cheeses for christmas.

This is boiling the when to cook the haloumi.

The haloumi just before I put it in the hot whey.

Camembert draining

Caerphilly draining

The next mornings breakfast. Fried Haloumi.....

Fresh from the oven, stond ground whole wheat sour dough bread.......

And fresh free range organic scrambled eggs. Can breakfast get much better.

Hopefully it wont take me long to get up some photos of the finished cheeses and some more sour dough treats that I made for christmas.

Whole wheat malt biscuits/cookies

Last week I brought a jar of Malt extract to make a sourdough starter.  got to thinking that some malt biscuits, or cookies for the Americans would be nice. I couldn't find a suitable recipe in my cook book collection, so I had a look online, but couldn't fnd a recipe there that I like either, well I liked them but it used malt powder not extract, I could have substituted but I decided that I would make my own recipe up, so here it is.

250 g butter

1/4 cup white sugar
1/4 cup golden syrup
1/2 cup malt extract
1/4 cup yoghurt
1 egg
3 cups wholemeal flour (I use freshly ground)
1/2 tsp baking powder

Beat the butter add the sugar and syrups, then add yoghurt and egg, lastly add flour and baking powder. Cover bowl and chill for at least 1/2 hour, but they are better if left over night. Place spoon fulls on a lined bakng tray and bake in mod oven for about 15 mins.

The photos didn't turn out quite as good as I had hoped. But the biscuits didn't last long enough for me to take any more photos.

The Good Life in October

I named this Blog "The Good Life" in honor of the '70's English sticom about Tom and Barbra Good and their quest for a simple, self sufficient lifestyle, as we were just watching the dvd's of the series borrowed from the library, I was struck as how similiar our lives reflected those of Tom and Barbara. So much so that every now and then I will call Mark, Tom. Any here are a few pics of our version of the good life

Mark is preparing our corn and potato patch, this is in our horse yard, the horses don't spend much time in there over summer, except when they get too fat, we call it the Jenny Craig Paddock. We limed this after the first rotary hoe and now it is getting a second hoe. Yesterday Kath and I planted two rows of potatoes right where he has just hoed in the picture

In true Good Life honour we had to have a pig, we cant remember what the pig was called in the show, but our pig is Miss Piggy, here she is with her favourite things, namely her food bowls and some feed bags and sticks that she likes to play with in the mud wallow she and her dearly departed brother made by constantly tipping their water bowl over. Now we just fill up the wallow when we fill the water bowl and everything is good. As I mentioned we did have her brother, but he and a steer now fill our freezer, YUM.

We dont have a goat called Geraldine but we do have some dairy cows that we brought to take to the dairy that we managed, and then brought home when we left, we have hopes of building a dairy on our own farm soon. This is the daughter of one of our dairy cows feeding a few calves. We are raising about 12 calves at the moment and instead of buying milk powder and feeding them we have 5 cows in milk that do the job for us. This is Baby, she is the only one with a name, when we run out of milk in the house she is the one who supplies it for us.

Here is a shot of part of our garden, we have asparagus under the straw then there is some cabbages, lettuces, wombok cabbages, snow peas, garlic, brocolli, cauliflower, silverbeet, herbs,and weeds

The same garden from the other side

The next part of the garden is more silverbeet, (no we are not great fans of silverbeet, it just self seeded) more brocolli and cauliflower and about 1/2 of the tomato seedlings from the last post

This is a shot of the whole garden area, minus the corn and potato patch from the viewing platform of our round yard, I have seedlings in the greenhouse, and some berries behind it, Mark went crazy with the rotary hoe, but this was really all wasted space and I do have heaps of seeds and seedlings to plant. I am just a bit nervous as to how I am going to keep up with it all.

Things are not always perfect in paradise, this is what our driveway looked like the day after a 1 in a 100 year flood, our car is still parked on the other side as we were not game to drive it over the wash out in the dark, late the previous night, so we rolled our jeans up, took our shoes off, well everybody else did, I left mine on, now I can say that anything they can do, I can do in high heels.(not stilletos though).

Mark standing on what was our culvert, the water used to go through here now the level of rock on the other side is higher than here so now we have a spillway. You can see the dirty water on the left, this is where the major wash out is, it was about knee deep

Does it take millions of years to cut a ravine? No it just takes one good flood.

The dry way to cross the creek.

This part of the creek used to gently flow around to the left, after this flood it has decided to go right.

The fence in the fore ground was totaly under water. The main creek, which is the Cudgewa Creek runs well down to the right. The last photos were of our small creek which feeds this one.

Resident wombat now has an inground pool.

Going for a drive later that day, we found that there is always someone worse off, here not far from the dairy we were on the asphelt was lifted and placed so neatly heading for the paddock. This is the work of the mighty Murray.

This is the damage at Tooma. Willow trees have been declared a weed so our local landcare had poisoned them, this is the result, there was not one green willow in the pile. As a result of the flood, a big dam upstream had also burst, this also had a major impact on bringing all the dead willows down. Can you see what else was brought down?

This man decided to try a spot of fishing. The boat was stuck so tight it didn't even wobble as he got in.

This tractor, seeder and some other farm equipment was caught in the flood. This particular farmer, almost a year ago was partly burnt out with a bush fire. It brings to mind the words of the John Williamson song "On our selection": The year we came we had a drought, Then floods they put the bushfires out.

Damage done to the downstream side of the road.

And then the bridge with all the willow trees piled up against it.

So I guess it is obvious that perfect paradise won't come till we get to Heaven, we will still have droughts, and floods, and fire, and weeds. But God is in control.

A quick note from Katherine

Hi everyone!
I just thought I would write a quick note to let you all know what is going on with this blog and Mum's other blog, as it all seems to be happening rather quickly and in a great deal of mess.
Well I guess I should introduce myself, I am Katherine, I think you get the general gist that I am Louisa's daughter :).
It would be an understatement to say that a lot has been happening. Spring is here so everyone is running too and fro fixing this and feeding that, as well as planting seeds and training horses. But during this time there have been quite a few vigorous 'Brainstorming' (my new word that has affected my whole family) sessions. Most of which are about school, my sisters working hours, making money and the all important garden and soap.
I will discontinue my very rambling thoughts and get to the point. I am the new 'Marketing Director' for the Upper Murray Soap company and co. In other words I sit at a computer and type out long speeches about Olive oil in all its greatness. So THIS is now my mother's writing space and I get the Upper Murray Soap blog as well as the in-planning-facebook-page and etc. etc. etc.
I have moved all of Mum's old posts from the UMS blog to here, that is why she has all of a sudden gotten more posts and you have read them all before, but if anything is unclear to you, because of muck ups in the copying and pasting I did, please leave my Mummy a nice comment and I will fix it if I can.
Thanks!
Katherine

A hectic week

As the title suggests, we have had a very busy week. Mark and I were asked to milk for the week at a farm about 1/2 an hour away. It is situated in the most beautiful valley, almost as beautiful as ours. And it was a joy to go there even though it was very tiring as we had to come home between milkings to care for our own farm. We organised with our new neighbours to take the girls to the bus each day. This was not something that we wanted to do but is a way of breaking the ice and getting to know them a bit better. Hopefully today we will get a chance to make them a batch of cupcakes to say thank you.

I was just reading the post on A Wise Woman about the womans place in the kitchen, what  a wonderful encouragement, during this week away the girls all put in and did the cooking of the evening meal, which is such a great learning experience for them, but my heart aches that I am not able to be there to help or maybe just oversee, what a joy it is for me to come back to my kitchen and be able to cook yummy and nutritious food for my family. I feel like this is where I am supposed to be. Dont get me wrong it is a joy to see my children do the same, and to know that they are capable of holding thir own in the kitchen, even the ones who don't particularly like cooking.

Another thing that has made my week busier was organising a soap stall at a sustainability fair in Wodonga, I had thought it was in about 2 weeks, but when I checked it is this weekend. So now I have to get busy making labels and business cards. Hopefully I will be able to get some photos up in a post next weekend, and really start getting back into selling the soap.