Suko blog

One of the changes made possible by closing our restaurant is the return to lower volume food production. When we were feeding  many guests we could not possibly grow all our own produce, so we bought our vegetables, meat and eggs from local wholesalers.

Even if our cooking classes become regular occurrences (as we sincerely hope they will), the amount of food which will be consumed should not overtax our ability to produce it. Whilst we will still need to buy meat (council being unlikely to accept us turning our rural block into an agricultural smallholding), we are optimistic that we can grow many of the vegetables and herbs which Noi will need for her classes. In this way we hope to provide quality ingredients for our classes without incurring too many ‘food miles’.

We had our own chickens in the past but we were too lenient and often gave them the run of the garden. This proved over time to be less of a kindness to the chickens than we had intended, as they were one by one dispatched by the dogs which occasionally roam our neighbourhood without owner supervision. We eventually recognised that we were not the best of chook ‘parents’ and left the chicken coop vacant for a number of months. Recently though we decided that we could go no longer without the wonderfully fresh free range eggs which only our own chickens could provide. After a couple of weeks effort we had a new improved run attached to our coop, designed to keep the chickens in at all times, and the dogs out. Five point-of-lay chooks recently took up residence and are already on the way to full production. So not only will we have plenty of home-grown veg for ourselves and our classes, we should also have enough eggs to never again need to supplement our supply with dubiously free range eggs from commercial producers.

Noi harassing our chickens

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We have not had them for long so being handled is still a bit of a challenge.