Co-op Events

We are very pleased to announce some events coming up in the near future for co-op members, starting with:

The first KIWI FRUIT WINE making session this Saturday, in a joint venture between FIG and the Firescreek Winery. This is the first of an ongoing process spanning at least eighteen months, so let us know if you would like to be part of the small team making occasional trips to the winery for the wine making process. RSVP a.s.a.p. to fig.centralcoast@gmail.com.

Next, a COMMUNITY HARVEST & PRUNING DAY will be held at the end of this month. Bring your families and a picnic, and enjoy a day amongst the vines at the Kiwi Fruit Farm.

When: 11am until 3pm, Saturday 31st July

Where: Ourimbah. Full details provided upon your RSVP.

What to bring: Picnic, seats or picnic rug, hats, gloves, water to drink. Whilst we will be picking the remaining fruit, the main focus will be on pruning, and a list of equipment to bring, if you have it, will be provided. Bring a bucket to take home some kiwi fruit!

RSVP: yes please! Send an email to fig.centralcoast@gmail.com.

Families who have attended this activity before have enjoyed it immensely. This will probably be our last community day at the vines this year, so please make time to come along if you're able, even for part of the day...


AQUACULTURE TOUR
2pm, Saturday 7th August
Please email your expression of interest for the tour of a local working Aquaculture system, both large and small, on the northern end of the Coast. There is a maximum limit on attendance at this event so we suggest our members respond quickly.

FARM TOUR
Details will be announced shortly for an early Spring Farm Tour for co-op members. Bring your families and a picnic lunch, meet the farmers and learn about how some of our food is grown. Enjoy a day in the fresh air up in the Mangrove Mountain region of the Central Coast...

That's all for today...

Green juices

Here's another article by our Guest writer, on the health-giving properties of Green Juices:

Our family has recently begun a love affair with green juices. The inspiration came from the youngest member of our family having a slight obsession with the Spirulina smoothie from Charlie’s. We’ve recently been journeying more and more into raw food creations and green foods seemed like something wonderful to start including in our family diet. I know this is no big revelation, green juices and smoothies have been around forever, but I thought I would share with you some great combinations we have come across as well as share our enthusiasm for this very simple and yummy way to get so much goodness into our bodies.

The FIG bulk fruit orders are a great (and economical) way to stock up on produce for use in smoothies and juices. Storing the produce can sometimes be a juggling act – we know that, but last bulk fruit order when I looked at two fridges overflowing with fresh food and a bulk fruit order still to be packed away, I was grateful for our 105L icebox that sits unloved for most of the year until we pack it up and head off on a long awaited camping adventure. So dust off those old eskies, squeeze a second hand fridge into that spare space in the laundry (you can always find these on the side of the road or being thrown out by some relation somewhere who is trading theirs up) and stock up at the next bulk fruit order! Here’s how you can use anything green in the bulk orders or from the abundance of nutritious, local and organic greens we are blessed to receive in our boxes each week.

For wonderful raw inspiration, I always head over to Kristen’s Raw – a wealth of raw food information with wonderfully simple and tasty recipes. Kristen and hubby have just welcomed their little ‘monkey’ into their family, so her updates may be a bit less regular now, but the archived info will have you reading for years anyway. Kristen kept a wonderful online pregnancy journal about High raw food intake whilst growing a bub in the womb. Very inspiring journey. Anyway, back to all things green – Kristen’s blog is full of lots of wonderful green combinations; Plant blood, Green Juice and her Cayenne spiced green smoothie – just to name a few. If you spend some time looking around Kristen’s site, you’ll come up with a never ending list of ‘want to try’ recipes for a variety of raw foods, but also many wonderful smoothies/juices – green or otherwise. The Whole Life Nutrition Kitchen is another great recipe inspiration source, in particular (and back to subject!) we liked their Winter Green Smoothie recipe. Ours resulted as a Winter red smoothie, because we had red cabbage on hand, not green – but that brings me to my next point….

Recipes are great for inspiration and guidance, but that is really all they are. And for something like a green smoothie, once you have followed a few recipe’s you really get the hang of various nourishing and tasty combinations. The only rule with green smoothies is; “If it’s green – chuck it in!”… and even then, if it’s not green and you still want to chuck it in… then do so. But the main aim is to have predominantly green foods in these types of juices/smoothies. In a Westernised society, we are exposed daily to environmental pollutants, free radical damage and stress level impact – it’s just a part of living in the world we do, no matter how ‘clean and green’ we try to live, this fact is a reality. The benefits of green juices and green foods are that they are extremely cleansing to the body and are full of health beneficial anti-oxidants. A major part of our common place Western diet is extremely acidifying – green juices and foods offer a beautiful alkalising balance to this. There is a really eye opening list of acid/alkaline foods on this link. If you would like to read more about the benefits of green juices, there is some nice info here, or you can just google ‘health benefits of green juices’.

I thought I would share with you some tips and tricks that we have picked up along our green juicing journey;

• If it’s green, chuck it in. This means cucumbers, celery, apples, kale, cabbage, carrot tops, spinach, rainbow chard….. and all the rest I haven’t thought of whilst typing this list!

• If possible, juice with a slow juicer. Traditional style juicers that can conveniently ‘juice whole apples’ may seem like they are great, but because of the power and pressure needed to juice that whole apple, the machine and the fruit get very hot – this in turn depletes the nutrient content of the juice. Slow juicers (this link is to just one type of slow juicer available) result in a much more nutrient rich juice.

• Always include some spices, especially in Winter, but always, spices are good. We juice a small, thin 1cm piece of ginger into all our green juices. You can also add cayenne pepper, cinnamon, tumeric, cloves, whatever you are feeling inspired to include. Here’s some words about foods/spices to ensure we include in our Winter diet. And be sure to check out the ORAC scale - the information in the ORAC scale about the anti-oxidant levels in foods that we so commonly over-look is quite amazing.

• Juice what you can and then put the juice into the blender with fruits or vegetables that you want to drink whole; we often blend kale, kiwi fruit (how blessed we are to have the amazing local goodness of wild growing kiwi fruits!) and sometimes bananas (fresh or frozen) into our green juice. Blending is also a great way to add in your spices, you can even just blend the ginger into the juice. Be aware, with blending the ginger in, as opposed to juicing, gives a lot more ‘zing’ to the juice, so be mindful of how much ginger you use in this way!

• If you do ‘juice’ as opposed to ‘blend’ stiffer leafy greens such as kale or cabbage, be sure to do so as single leaves and alternate with other produce such as a stick of celery or a wedge of apple – it’s kinder to your juicer, especially if you are using a slow juicer – they start to complain a little if you try to wedge through a whole handful of kale greens all at once!

• Feed the dispelled pulp from the juicer to your chookeys - they’ll love you and you’ll be rewarded with golden, creamy yolk eggs from healthy ladies!

• For optimal nutrient content from your juices – make and drink. The juice will start to oxidize and deplete in nutrient content shortly after juicing.

• Grow some wheat grass to include in your juices. It is super easy to grow and such a powerful, healing, cleansing, alkalising green food. The link above gives a great guide to growing the wheatgrass, although their beginning soak instructions seem lengthy. We have just been soaking the wheat-berries for 24 hours, drain, sprout for 24 hours then proceed as the linked instructions suggest. Be sure to ‘juice’ the wheatgrass as opposed to putting it into the juice via the blender. The human digestive system cannot digest grass, but the juice is extremely beneficial for our bodies.

• If you want to add some extra protein to your juices, when you put your juice in the blender, add 1-2 scoops of rice protein powder, 1T of ground hemp seed (available from Gnostic Hemporium at Woy Woy), or 1T of chia seeds. There is a good comparison here between different varieties of protein powders.

And remember, in the words of the very inspiring David Wolfe in Food Matter’s “Drink your food and chew your juices!”

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PS: If you would like to invest in a second fridge to hold all the extra produce you may go through in making up green smoothies and juices every day, but don't want either the high purchase or running costs, maybe you'd be interested in knowing what Maree has set up in her home. Maree and family are totally off the grid, relying on solar only for their electricity. To lessen the power used by the normal power-hungry fridges, they bought a cheap chest freezer and purchased a freezer-to-fridge conversion thermostat, here. Works perfectly, on very little power, and now they're thinking of purchasing another, to store all the fruit & vegies they go through!

More courses and information

Well after that superb article on Kohlrabi this week, it seems there may not be any next Monday! We were under the impression they would be available for a few weeks however perhaps the next crop just isn't ready yet. If we do happen to find some, they'll be on the extras table.

The severe frost earlier this week has affected local green leafy vegetables so some adjustments will need to be made to the orders over the weekend, as usual! The red mustard greens will be turning up again and some of the co-op members wonder how to prepare them. Kel, the farmer, advises they can be eaten in salads but if you don't like the "heat", can be sauteed or popped in stir frys or any dish you would normally use spinach and silverbeet in, and it loses the bite.

This is the time of year for citrus and and we have chemical free oranges, mandarins and lemons coming in from Mangrove Mountain, Dooralong and Hawkesbury districts, as well as lemons, limes and grapefruit from co-op members. Vitamin C is important for general health and wellbeing, especially so at this time of year to help ward off or lessen the impact of colds, so keep up with the oranges and the kiwi fruit we have at present from Ourimbah, which is an excellent source of Vitamin C. If you would like some kiwi fruit in larger quantities, please see us at the desk to arrange.

In keeping with passing on information to our members about learning to grow their own food - the freshest and the best option of all! - we are pleased to advise of the following:

~ Workshops at Purple Pear Organics, via Maitland, are being held on Propagation and Seed Saving on 24th July and Making Compost and Worm Farming on 25th July. As Purple Pear make some of the best compost in the world, book in and learn their methods!

~ Permaculture Design Certificate held over five weekends at Purple Pear, beginning 7th August.

~ TAFE Outreach, Wyong, is going to be running some free courses in growing your own food, Permaculture, Eco Food Shopping and many others and enquiries can be made with Kerry on 4350 2370. These fill up fast so ring asap.

~ Interested in Aquaponics and growing fish and vegies in your backyard? One of our highly talented FIG members runs Tank To Table Aquaponics and will be holding an information session for FIG co-op members on a Saturday in August, with workshops following in Spring for those who want to take it further. Please email your expressions of interest in joining us on the day to fig.centralcoast @ gmail.com (minus the spaces).

We have added in some new links on the left in regards to buying seeds and growing information and update the blog quite regularly, so please call back soon and have a look around.
See you at the co-op....

Maree