Organic honey from Bali

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Recently we relocated our bee family from the traditional Balinese bee hives hanging up in the trees to a more classical bee stock - square wooden boxes.

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Here you can see the first results of the organic honey production.

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We already manufactured the first jars of organic honey. The taste is a unique bouquet of aromas of wild flowers. Highly nutritious and is locally also used to put on stings and wounds for healing.

On our website you can see the results:  Our products

The guardians at Jiwa Damai

On our wide-spread premise we house several stone statues made by local Balinese stone carvers. It is a Balinses tradition and necessity to put up stone figures as well as special offering statues/ places on the entire grounds. These statues are meant for protection and to keep away the evil spirits.

The lion is facing to the east,  guarding the entrances.

Lion statue

The elephants, female and male are the guardians of the whole place.

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Elephant in the garden

The water goddess is the guardian of the "Home of the Water Angel", our secluded meditation spot in the midst of lush nature.

Water goddess

Organic bananas from Bali

At Jiwa Damai we have about 150 banana plants, spread all throughout the permaculture garden. The bananas are harvested green and then covered in a box to ripen. We do have about 8 different kinds of bananas in our garden. Their taste is so incredibly aromatic and sweet.

Bananas

They ripen throughout the whole year and can be harvested at different times.

We also dry the banans in our food drying oven - these dried bananas are very delicious as well.

Dried bananas

Rainy season - overflowing rivers

Downpouring rain

The rainy season has arrived - but these downpouring rains cause us some problems.

Due to the incredible powerful rains, our little river swelled to a ripping torrent. Many trees along the river were uprooted. Those trees which remained standing, lost most of the supportive earth and now their roots are stretched into the air.

river

To prevent other tree losses, the sand bags were placed directly around the roots to prevent possible future torrents from uprooting more trees.

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Bee hives at Jiwa Damai

Bee hive up in the tree

Some of our readers might already know about the Balinese bee hives that we set up some time ago in the organic garden.

We started out with only few bees living in these traditional Balinese bee hives located in different locations all over the garden.

After a few months we were able to harvest the first honey. It was quite difficult to extract the honey from these traditional bee hives and the men doing it had to operate with a lot of care.

(complete post: First honey harvest in Jiwa Damai)

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Since then, the bee population has increased, thus more honey is being produced. To give more space to the bees and to facilitate our honey production, we decided to move the bee family from the traditional Balinese bee house  into a new house. In this classical, western bee stock it will be much easier to extract the honey.

Bee hive

Bee hive

Bees

Bee hive

The relocation of the bee family was not an easy task.

But now they are living in the new bee stocks and we are excited to see how much honey can be produced.  We will keep you updated !

Tomato blessing

Fresh tomatoes

Our fertile lands at Jiwa Damai produce delicious tomatoes.

Since we can not eat all these tomatoes at once, we regularly process them into other products.

We use our fresh tomatoes to make Balinese Sambal. We already shared our recipe for original Balinese Sambal in one of our older posts. Click here to read the post.

The sambal is cooked and then filled into plastic bags, sealed and frozen.

Balinese sambal

Another option is to dry the tomatoes (with our raw food oven). This is an excellent method to conserve fruit and vegetables.

Dried tomatoes

Butterflies in our garden

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These are just a few of the many beautiful butterflies that live in our gardens at Jiwa Damai.

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Homemade basil pesto

In the permaculture garden we also grow basil - Balinese lemon basil as well as western basil.The land at Jiwa Damai is blessed with fertile grounds - and the basil bushes are growing really well !

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We use the basil to make basil pesto - Today we want to share with you the recipe for our old fashioned basil pesto.

Fresh Basil

For our flavourful pesto we use the Balinese lemon basil from the garden, combined with stronger flavored Italian basil. At first all the leaves have to be cut in tiny pieces.

Cutting basil

Once the basil is cut, we add garlic, olive oil and shredded parsley. Et voila - the pesto is ready to be eaten.

Basil pesto

Enjoy with fresh pasta !

Selamat makan!

Dried organic fruit and vegetables

Our latest project here at Jiwa Damai is to produce dried fruit and vegetables. We only use the organic produce from our permaculture garden, grown without fertilizers and chemicals. For this purpose we invested in a food dryer / raw oven used in the raw food kitchen.

This is the first batch of bananas ! They are air-dried at very low temperature to retain the flavour. What an incredible sweetness !

Dried bananas

We also dried tomatoes and hot red peppers.

Dried tomatoes

Dried peppers

We pack the fruit and veggies in FDR recommended plastic bags to retain the flavour.

These products can be bought at Jiwa Damai.

Come by and taste for yourself!

Organic potatoes from Bali

In August we wrote a post about the potato tower that we built in the permaculture garden. Since it proved impossible to grow potatoes in the wet soil here at Jiwa Damai, we decided to create a tower that is filled with stones, sand and earth, so the water is able to flow through it and that the potatoes are kept dry.

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Now, that some months have passed, we can finally see the results !

The potato plants are growing really well.

Potato tower

We can't wait for the harvest & to taste our homegrown organic potatoes :-)