My Countryside Cabin: Cooking from a Garden Harvest and Building with Traditional Techniques

Lighting a fire is always such a beautiful act, the gentle warmth growing slowly outwards as paper burns into twigs that burn into hardwood, and today we have big plans for this fire. Julia is cooking up a pumpkin soup and I'm boiling a treatment for bamboo. Ever since we were kids we've come down to this special camping spot and just hung out every weekend or every school holidays. We love this place and since I renovated it a few months ago we've also just reignited that love for this place and we've been coming down here lots and just experimenting with different things and sitting still for a bit, camping, doing all of the beautiful things. So I wake up early when the sun first reaches through the rainforest and the golden glow initiates the birdsong so that I can get this fire burning. Happy decided to go for a swim on her own and she's not allowed to do that because it's dangerous without a human. Happy come back! But I really don't want to go in. Hi you're excited to see me, you thought I came to join you, no I came to scoop you out and take you home. Get in again. Ducks are cured. She's so naughty I'm gonna have to keep her from coming down here it's too dangerous to swim without a human. It could be eels or snakes or a walker bum. You sit here and if you try to go to the dam again you'll be in trouble. All right I'm watching you. It's pumpkin season at the moment so this week we've been harvesting lots. This patch is full of delicious pumpkins and every time I harvest them I get so excited for Julia's pumpkin soup. Pumpkin soup always feels like it catches the season's essence so beautifully, like the winter sun mixes in with the spices. Last week I harvested lots of bamboo to build a trap camper from. You can see more of this process and in-depth treating and designing over on my own channel Anastacia Vanderbilt. So today the plan is that I'm going to light a fire so that I can start soaking the bamboo. I need to create a mixture so I need hot water for that so that's what the fire is for and then I'm going to mix it with borax and boric acid and that's going to treat the bamboo. No job can be done without Happy the duck by my side. She just loves hanging out with humans so we often just bring her with us. She lives with seven other ducks and goes home every night and must tell them all the adventures that she got up to. In kiwi season the sheep are hard to convince to move anywhere except for the paddocks with kiwi in them which I guess is fair enough. If I were a sheep that lived in an abundant food forest and ate organic fruit straight from the trees I too would probably become pretty spoiled. Reluctantly though they're moving paddocks with help from Julia. These scales were our grandfather's. He was a postman and he used them for work and then our parents used them for weighing fruit. Some of our earliest childhood memories were playing with these weights as our parents weighed kiwis to take them to the markets. I love using traditional vintage tools because often they work so much better. Instead of making this complex with scales that need power I'm able to just use this simple system of comparing weight. That's so cool! I'm weighing boric acid to mix into hot water. After it dissolves I'll add the borax and then I'll add the rest of the water. The next step is to mix together all of the ingredients for treating the bamboo. Basically this treatment method just makes the bamboo taste really salty instead of sweet. Have you come to help? Are you my little helper? This way no insects are going to want to eat it so termites and borers will hopefully stay away. I've hung all of these bamboos up into the tree and so that way I can pour the mixture in from above and then they'll stay here for two weeks soaking. Next I added the rest of the water and started pouring the mixture in, filling all of the bamboo poles with the solution. Surprisingly a lot of solution fits into these poles and took a really long time slowly pouring it in until they were all ready to leave soaking. They will now be left for two weeks and then I'll pour the mixture out but I'll save it so that I can use it again next time that I want to soak bamboo. That's so cool you can hear it flowing through each of these. Hello! Have you come to close trouble? This recipe was passed down from our grandmother and who knows where she learned it from or how many hands have chopped these ingredients and pondered these spices before. Ancestral knowledge passed between generations can be small. It can be things like a pumpkin soup recipe or our grandfather's scales but it can also be large like the way that we interpret things or communicate or find strength. I think the secret ingredient is just one potato amongst all the pumpkin and onion and the potato kind of really creams up the soup and makes it so delicious. You can have this. After hours cooking on the fire we had the coziest pumpkin soup tasting the deep flavors of the season. Meanwhile Happy convinced me for another canoe. She loves playing on the water so I thought it would be rude to not let her go in but after she played for 20 minutes and it was time to go home she wouldn't listen and would not come home. You're going too far! Happy! Happy! Finally I got her back to land otherwise she would play out here for hours. Home to land and no more swimming today. Goats have been extra naughty at the moment. Well they're naughty always but they've been going up this valley which we have this really big paddock that they have the freedom to roam in but sometimes it's a little bit too much freedom for them because there's no real fence at the end of the valley so they just climb over and go for a big adventure so they've been doing that almost every day when we let them into this paddock which is really annoying so we're gonna put a little temporary fence over here which we do at different times of the year just to separate the two paddocks. The problem is that it floods through here so we don't like to do this in the summer because a big raging river of water can come through here in almost no warning so we like to just kind of put this down for the summer and up for the winter. We don't actually electrify this fence but the goats think that it's electric because it is an electric fence so we're just hoping that they won't notice that it's actually not electrified so don't tell them please. This year is the first year that we've kind of got this fence set up easily so that we can just re-put it up each time that it needs to go up and that way it's not the end Cliff also escapes through here so it's going to be very good to have this fence up again because then he can roam pretty free range in his paddock where he protects all the animals but if not he can get a bit too naughty or a bit too caught up in his role of protecting where he doesn't know where to stop and he just keeps going and ends up way up the valley. I'm just gonna weave this fence to this pole now and hope that the goats don't notice this hole but I'm sure that they will and I'm sure that one goat in particular the the boy goat he's so naughty and I'm sure it'll be him that finds this hole if slash when he finds the hole it will mean that I'll probably spend the whole afternoon trekking up the valley trying to find them worrying about these sweet little goats that I love so much and then I'll find them just like munching some food somewhere and being naughty I feel like a goat right now. Oh there we go Clover's still missing though. Clover! You're gonna get stuck! While we wait for Clover to come home from his little adventure I'm gonna get the sheep and test this out and see if they make their way through the fence but the thing is that sheep won't because sheep are angels but at the moment the tick season's just started again so a few of them have paralysis ticks which can kill animals quite easily they paralyze them first and then the animals will die so you have to get them off luckily these sheep are pretty immune to them but they still can get hurt by them so we have to pick them off especially in the springtime and they've come early this year so right now lanky boy has one on his cheek so I'm going to try to pick that off but they really hate it because it feels gross for them so you have to distract them with a big pat and then kind of quickly pick it off. I just wanted to say thank you so much to our patrons you support us to regenerate this forest and you can see how beautiful it's looking it's glowing we planted so many cool ones through here and lots of native trees and we're trying to regenerate it back into native bush. Thank you so much for watching if you want to stay in the loop with my tiny camper project then there's new videos out every Sunday on my channel Anastacia Vanderbilt.