I am always reminded at this time of year why the Universe brought me to this part of the world where food grows all around us with or without the help of humans. The rich folk (who represent 85% of the people living here) are uninterested in acquiring their nutrition any other way than the one to which they are accustomed, from the shops. So this leaves plenty for the rest of us!
These sunflowers actually grew in the garden but I really wanted to show you how beautiful they looked. The one on right was attacked by my children after they discovered how to access the yummy seeds ;)
If anyone knows of an effective way to shell these seeds on mass I would be very interested to learn it!
A few weeks ago I picked the grapes from one of those rich people's courtyards. When it is late in the season like this the grapes are mega sweet.
These ones are seedless so they make perfect raisins (after one night in the dehydrator).
For the last two months I have been using these locally grown grapes as the sweetener for my daily beetroot, carrot, ginger & lemon juice. But now they are done we have switched to locally grown apples instead. Indeed, it doesn't matter what time of year it is, there is always some kind of fruit growing in abundance around us which can be used as the sweetener for our daily juice. Next month the pomegranates come into season.
More recently I have been harvesting persimmons, walnuts, sunflower seeds & neem leaf, all seen in the top image. The neem leaf will be dried and turned into a powder. I will take a spoon of this powder every day and it will help my teeth repair from the abuse of various dentists over the years. Many thanks to @jin-out for his recent Odysee film in which he listed the benefits of neem powder. Funnily enough the Universe prompted me to plant four neem trees this Spring from the seeds of a local tree, but I had no idea why until now.
The mushroom hunt
For his seventh birthday Esteban received a little mushroom book which he was keen to try out so last week the children & I went on a mushroom hunt.
In truth I knew there wouldn't be too much in the way of edible mushrooms around us (not enough rain yet) but we keep spotting them popping up so thought we would give it a try anyway.
Look at these funky dudes!
We were able to identify most of them.
The little orange mushroom on the top left of the page tells us this one is not edible. Red means you can't even touch it. Green and you're good to go. Pick that baby and find its friends!
This guy looks so beautiful but like all the rest, not edible.
Are these things even mushrooms? Esteban put his gloves on just in case!
This guy is actually a cep I believe, which is edible. But he is all alone and looking too old to be yummy.
The fat stalk and spongy underside are good indicators.
Though if truth be told I am not 100% certain as am still very new to the mushroom game.
The Stone House
On our journey through the forrest we happened to pass the stone house I built two years ago.
For those of you who missed that particular adventure there is a post here and also a film:
I built it in the autumn and it was discovered in the spring by the owner of the land who seemed a bit stressed out by its presence. This was the first time Esteban had seen it like this.
The sign on the door (written in French & Catalan) loosely translates to this:
"By what right do you have permission to build a cabin on my land to make a smoker's den of iniquity. I have alerted the mayor and the police."
Don't you think that's a weird thing to say? Yes, this house is built creatively by a man who likes to smoke weed, but I don't see any evidence here to suggest it was a drug user's den.
This is what it looked like when he found it.
With a big heart on the blackboard! Crazy drug-fuelled madness ;)
I considered leaving him a note of response but in truth I am satisfied with this situation. My goal was to have a house in the woods we can run to in emergencies. The house must be hidden and able to keep us warm & dry.
Yes, he put a hole in the door, smashed the one glass window and also damaged the stove a little but these things can be repaired in a matter of hours. And now I know he only comes to his land in the Spring!
Really love my bottle windows.
When we leave this village I intend to take them with me.
The roof is still intact and it is interesting to see how those few tiles I had are still exactly where I laid them, despite using nothing at all to secure them down.
The structure of the building is 100% sound and my mud mortar looks to be holding up pretty good after two years.
So that was that. Esteban felt a bit sad but I assured him it wouldn't be long before we were taking on a much bigger and more exciting building project. The earthship we are going to live in!
Just at the right moment we bumped into one of my cats near the stone house. Fifi basically lives in this forest now, ever since the experience of watching me build a house there.
Chemtrails
We journeyed onward with Fifi and I noticed these chemtrails in the sky. Totally unrelated topic I know but we cannot very well walk around with our eyes closed.
There is a local airport in the direction of these lines and having checked I can tell you they are not commercial flights. No my friends, these flights are for something else. On days like this a plane goes over every five minutes and each one leaves a long white line which slowly expands and descends on us as a misty haze later in the day.
Hard to say with certainty what it is though easy to say with certainty it is part of the complex control mechanism designed to usher in the great reset. Could be weather modification? Certainly it is warmer than it should be at this time of year.
The Persimmons Tree
Moving on we ventured further up the mountain, still looking for mushrooms, but instead what we found was this most beautiful persimmons tree.
Glowing red amongst the green it was almost impossible not to be drawn towards it.
The fruit so yummy and ripe...
...we couldn't resist picking some.
Children are very useful for this job!
And so, at the end of the day we didn't have mushrooms, but we did have this :)
Even better, on our way home we found another stone house!
This one looks super old with no mortar at all between those stones.
I was interested to see how in the place of a chimney they have the fire off to one side underneath a small window and a large slab of stone suspended up high to channel the smoke out of the window. I wonder how effective this really is? Must still get a bit smokey in there.
I have since then visited a few other trees I know and this lovely looking bunch of permissions (also known as Sharon fruit) will be turned into wine when they are ripe.
The other kind of wine I will be trying this year is marrow wine. This guy in particular is too big and tough to be eaten in the usual way, so he is destined for something much greater!
I placed some of those raisins I mentioned earlier in sugar water a few days ago which is waking up the bacteria and creating the perfect 'yeast' for jump starting the fermentation process of my marrow wine.
Kefir grain fermentation
Last year I made cider with our abundance of apples but this year I am trying something different.
Every day I fill up one special bottle with fresh apple juice, at the bottom of which sit a bunch of kefir grains.
What this does is basically begin a vigorous fermentation process and after just 24h I have fizzy apple juice. I put this in the fridge for an hour in the morning and serve it up for breakfast. Look closely and you can see the bubbles.
It seems evident, now I understand the simplicity of this process, that the people of our great & forgotten past added fizz to their drinks in this natural & healthy way because it is quite simply the best way to do it! A few centuries ago this system was replaced however with carbonated drinks which according to google are not bad for our health. While I would say that's a load of rubbish and you only have to look at a food PH chart to see the truth. Carbonated water has a super acidic PH of 3, putting it right alongside red wine & energy drinks like RedBull.
PH is everything to a human body and while I don't know with any kind of certainty what is the PH of kefir fermented apple juice I would guess it to be more in the 8-9 alkaline region.
Having just described to you the two acidic alcoholic beverages I intend to make this winter I am evidently going to be lowering my PH, but life isn't about abstinence, it's about balance. The middle way!
So, I can drink my home made booze as long as I also drink my home made juices ;)
And by the way I can also smoke my organic home-grown weed!
We had some problems with spider mites this year but the plants still looked great at the end. And boy do they work!
Am feeling very relaxed at the moment. And a little bit forgetful ;)
Oh yes, one more thing!
I cooked my first Thai style lemongrass coconut soup.
We have this incredible lemongrass plant in the garden which won't survive the winter so I wanted to find a good way to use it in the kitchen during the next three months.
After reviewing some recipes I went with my own creation by infusing the lemongrass, ginger, garlic & chilli pepper into coconut milk and vegetable stock by simmering for 45 mins. Then I removed the bits and cooked a selection of vegetables in this juice for 15 mins.
Just before serving I added lime juice, Thai basil, coriander, salt, pepper & sugar. And man it was good!
Since then I have started experimenting with infusing this lemongrass flavour into olive oil so that I may expand on my range of creative pestos which this winter will be made from coriander, spinach, parsley, sorrel, hazel nuts & walnuts. All of which we have in abundance.
The children say it isn't cool to be vegetarian so we cooked up these two guys in a soup.
Not cool indeed.
Right, that's it for now!
I leave you with a proud Luna posing behind her first ever card castle.
Love & Light everyone 🌱
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Love how you and the kids forage for the various foods. The stone house is sad; hope you can do something with the new .
I do my best to take the children out on foraging hunts during the day but in truth I like to run around at sunrise (when they are still sleeping) to get the majority done in a rather more efficient manner.
There are actually a load of stone houses around here. One just has to know where to look! So yeah, I'm not stressing about what happened. Now we have options ;)
I just paid $3 per persimmon in Los Angeles, and they're not gnnabe ripe for 2weeeeks! Never seen a TREE 🌲 fullmof them in my life!!
Well that's why you really must run yourself over here some time and enjoy the 'all you can eat' landscape with me!
My favourite fruit is currently physalis. It is a Peruvian plant we have been able to grow this year in our garden and each little ball is such a dream.
I wonder if you have them in LA? Someone told me recently it is classed as a super food, so even better! Have kept seeds as am not sure if they will survive the winter.
How you doing over there bro?
If you like we can schedule a day for a skypey catch-up?
All going great here. I will keep randomly calling, usually my morning=your evening seems to work. I have set reminder alarms... I thiiiiink they had those physalis growing along VINES in Hawaii(?).... Kinda sour and full of crunchy seeds? (Not sure)
damn, looks more like that land owner stormed through that stone house in pure madness..
I guess he was quite angry and out of his mind throwing stuff around, it at least looks like it...
this and the chemtrails are the real madness
!
beautiful stuff you do! :)
beautiful garden! beautiful purple girl.. :)^^
Like many of the people around here the owner of the land is dominated by his emotions and they are fiery. We actually chatted with him while he was clearing the land in the spring and he described for us how annoyed he was and how terrible it was that someone could do this to him. We nodded our heads and agreed. Very terrible you poor man.
Pleased you appreciate the purple girl! Drying is always the tricky part for us as we live under the mayor and our home must be kept smell free. But that bit is done now so we can relax :)
Slept like a baby last night!
In regards to Neem powder you can make a toothpaste out of raw coconut oil, tumeric and neem, and use that to brush thy teeth.
I have my own toothpaste that i use:
Thanks for the beats man! Loving it :)
And thanks too for the toothpaste tips. Am currently using a mix of raw virgin coco oil, peppermint oil & baking soda. Which is great but doesn't seem to be repairing anything. So I will mix it up a bit this winter! My neem leaves are dry now and I realise I will have to do a few more harvests. It takes a lot of leaf to make one small cup of powder...
a small cup of powder is all you need my friend
Hello again brother.
I trust life is treating you well.
My borax powder finally arrived from Turkey this morning!
But now that I have all the ingredients I find myself unsure of how to mix them. Any guidance in this matter would be most welcome.
It is an unrelated subject but I wrote one post this year which felt more important than all the rest by a long shot, because it is relevant for anyone who grows anything. And not all that difficult to re-create electroculture techniques on a budget (as described in the two posts which follow this one).
https://peakd.com/hive-140635/@samstonehill/electroculture-a-synthesis-of-free-energy-and-agriculture-how-to-grow-massive-vegetables
All the best for the new year!
I like your posts, the visual tour with your images is welcoming, thanks for showing us your journey through the forest.
I do my best to infuse these posts with those two words I always put at the end. Love & Light. As an ex-film maker I enjoy capturing images (even if it is just on a phone) and every day I shoot many. Because I seriously love it! And it is my pleasure sharing some of this captured energy with you.
By the way, I bookmarked one of your posts this morning! Will read it later today as I am very keen to learn more about citrus plants...
Persimmons...my favorite,so many😋
Gonna need a bigger boat!
...or fermentation vessel ;)
Yeah, I have to hold myself back sometimes. 30L of wine is probably enough already.
Very impressive with the house building Sam!! As always, a great read. Have a good one.
Thanks! I seriously enjoyed building it and have no bad feelings about the way it turned out. In fact the experience planted a very important seed in me (never having built anything like this before) and I can more easily turn my visualising/manifesting attention to a future in which I am building a much larger house for my family and I to live in full time.
But this house will not be like other houses! As an Earthship it will work on the principles described in this post:
https://peakd.com/earthship/@samstonehill/earthship-this-is-how-i-will-design-my-future-home
It sounds awesome Sam. I saw that Eco-Alex was building Earth Ships too.
I will have a read, cheers.
Keep up the great blogging.
ps- Did you look at the charts of Bitcoin? Any FOMO before the FOMC?
Yes, Alex & I have chatted in the past about his passion for building in this way and when I find the right land it will very likely be him heading up the team! He was trained by the master Mike Reynolds himself so his experience here would be invaluable.
Not much time for trading at the moment. I did move some money around recently with the intention to place some long trades (small sense of pre FOMC FOMO!) but haven't seen a good entry yet...
That sounds like a great project, but you had some great practice when the SHTF during the last couple of years.
Dude, your posts are epic!
Are you using freshly juiced apples for that fizzy kefir or juice from another source?
Dig it up and put it into a pot and bring it inside! i have also heard of using layers of straw to insulate plants but that may only work if the winters are mild.
We live next to vast apple orchards so yes, the apples are from there. Generally speaking we only take the ones which have fallen to the ground already and won't be sold ;)
I wouldn't even try this with store bought apple juice. Best I would say with freshly picked & freshly juiced.
If you're gonna give this a go just watch out for the pressure created in the bottle after you sleep. (During the day I release the pressure periodically). So the bubbles take a few moments to get going when you open it in the morning but once they do, they can suddenly shoot out of the top in a fountain if you're not careful. I had to learn the hard way obviously! Opening and closing the cap repeatedly till all the bubbles have calmed down is the only way I have found to serve it without a total mess.
Thanks for the lemongrass tip! No point in letting such a beautiful plant die so yes, I will put it in a pot :)
Thanks for the info. i will keep this in mind for next year since i may be relocating to an area with several large apple orchards.
The levels of fascination and knowledge your posts give me... as well the inspiration...i can't describe simply :)
Especially this one going on for so long and giving new waves of insight.
I can relate to most of the stories and would try to comment not in the order of reading :)
1st i found your blog from the post of the forest house creation ..as I remember :)
your kids were also helping :)
this is the moment to tell you, that your family inspires me to have my own, because i just missed the chance twice (for the better) and now i'm 43 and i feel a lot more wiser :)
what is interesting for me to see is almost the same ideologies as mine, but applied fully ;)
i mean: perma/conscious lifestyle and all the natural abundance flowing freely :)
heheh i wasn't aware you are a cannabis lover too :) maybe it's your first post mentioning this... Your plants are beautiful :)
you can see some of mine @balcanna's blog :) (maybe you can say hi in the #weedcash tribe too ;))
HAHAHA good smoker's den you built :)))) driving the owner crazy in a gracious way :D
my backyard garden in the middle of the city is not as viable as before..
no problem this will make us more creative, building greenhouses and Earthships of course!
good luck with your deeds, man!
say hi to Sabrina, Luna & Esteban ~ warm hugs from Bulgaria! :)
i still have a little more to read/ see in this post :)
love persimmons / need to try the wine :)
once i had kefir grains but only tried with milk...
need to obtain some again and try the vegan way :)
thank you once more for inspiring and assuring me there is hope in humanity! :)
Thanks for reminding us of your location, Bulgaria. It is fun for me to explain where people are in the world to the children. And good for them to learn! I gave them all a hello from you during breakfast. Yes, having a family is great. Not easy at all in those first few years and as they get older the challenges only change but it is certainly easier now we can at least communicate clearly with them ;) I was born in my father's 60s so from my perspective I would say there is no hurry for a man. And we always get wiser with time so our judgement is better! Indeed, my father was wise to choose my mother who did a good job looking after us in his absence.
Great to see your @balcanna blog and yes, always good to find a fellow lover of the magic herb! I was on legal CBD for the last few months (as it is impossible to buy weed around here in the months just prior to harvest season) so this moment with my purple babies is a real pleasure. CBD is like drinking beer without the alcohol. The actions are there but the pay-off isn't. Not sure why I've not talked about cannabis more here on hive? Have been growing it since I was a teenager and I smoke a lot. It's the legality issues I suppose. Though in truth, pretty much every person who has a garden in this village also grows their own weed!
Great to catch up with you my friend and thank you for your lovely words. It is really good to know that my efforts here on hive have a value for others. Even better that it also serves as a visual diary I think my children will enjoy reading through one day ;)
exactly hemp & hops are cousins :)
i still love !BEER and their high combines very well :)
THC is also enhanced with mango or basil (just in case someone is interested)
web3 will be the wonderful diary of this age's children :)
there're always options to buy good weed here in town, sometimes less...
but i don't buy these years...i enjoy the growing season, even smoking some leaves, tops or pruned plants or if any kind friend offers to share :)
i love the period after harvest, because i always have the chance to experiment with some edibles, infusions, tinctures etc :)
thanks for sharing the vibe! ;)
I love all the abundance and yes it's crazy how much food goes unpicked, lucky for you and your family though. Otherwise the trees would struggle to keep producing.
Pity about the stone house, you done such an amazing job, if I had land and found it on my property I would be so stoked. different strokes for different folks though.
And the neem, I have to look into that, I need some dental advice and really don't like dentists. I have been taking horsetail.
Love your posts Sam and lots of love to you and yours xxxx
Feel that. Have been this way for years. Can barely chew any more because there are so many holes from fillings which have fallen out. This is actually one of the main reasons why I make juices every day! No chewing required.
Am actually supposed to be driving to Girona in a few weeks with a bunch of ladies from our village to visit a dentist who is going to have a look and tell me how much it will cost to fix them as French dentists cannot legally remove a tooth without giving you a root canal afterwards! Which is nuts. Anyway, I booked this appointment before I learned about neem so now I'm not sure what to do. And now you tell me about horsetail! Which by the way grows alongside our canal! Had no idea till now I could use it for this. So, thank you for that 🙏
How do you take it?
Am seeing someone recommending to make a paste with horsetail, salt & mint and then put that in the hole for two hours.