Sandra's garden

Letters from Wetville - new blog

2009-04-07T20:46:00.003+12:00

It seems time for a spruce up, a tighter focus. Or something. I feel like my blog has become a bit like parts of my garden. Sprawled out with weeds everywhere. No longer with a clear function. So this is my attempt at a slightly altered direction.

Letters from Wetville

Either over on the new blog, or here, I would really appreciate any feedback, any thoughts on what you would like to see and/or what you think could be improved.

Thank you :)

rose nursery

2009-04-04T19:47:00.003+13:00

The April edition of New Zealand Gardener features a useful guide to propogating your own roses from cuttings. I decided to try it, using several shortcuts from their version as I know that if I put the cuttings into a pot or propogator tray, the garden murderer will kill them for certain.

The garden murderer went to sleep soon after 4.30pm, sleeping off days of toddler partying. So the gardening began...

I've decided to turn the garden along the back of the house into a rose potager with garlic and other vegetables and herbs around them. Roses climbing up a brick wall which gets full sun almost all day seems a gorgeous plan to me. So I weeded the next section (I've got my first rose cutting growing well along here already, plus raddiccio, rocket, broccoli, welsh bunching onions and florence fennel) adn then tipped a 40 litre bag of sheep poo over the top. I've had this bag decomposing for about six months. Then I tipped a 40 litre bag of potting mix over the top. It would have seemed wildly extravagant to go and buy these especially for the job, but as I've had them a while and it is improving and building up the soil no matter what goes in after the rose cuttings, I thought it was worthwhile.

I trimmed the big branches of roses poking through the fence from our neighbour's place. Shirley is a very keen rose gardener who grows as many roses as she can possibly squeeze into her small section and shows the best blooms locally and at shows throughout the South Island.

I made eight cuttings, all with four leaf nodes on them. I trimmed the bottom leaf node off, scraped down the sides of the bottom 4 centimetres and cut the leaves back to just two on each of the top three branches. Then I pushed each one into the soil, making a bed of eight cuttings in a space about 100 x 70 cm. If they all 'take', then I will transplant six out. There is room to have two growing there long term though. I watered the area thoroughly, mulched with pea straw and watered again. I will be watching with interest. If even one of them turns into a flourishing rose bush, then it has created beauty without the expenditure of nearly $20 per rose bush.

While I had the gardening window, I also weeded and watered and mulched around my youngest cavolo nero plants and planted daffodil and freesia bulbs. I admired the pretty pink flowers coming out now from some bulbs gifted by a friend in early summer. Not completely sure, but I think they might be autumn crocuses (croci?).

bread and Maori potatoes day

2009-04-03T21:22:00.004+13:00

It's been a hectic week, made more intense by waking up with flea bites on Wednesday morning. That would be the return of fleas after treatment which was guaranteed for two months then. I turned into a laundry zealot and washed all the sheets, the wool underlay, the duvet covers and the duvets themselves. I got my super-sucker Dyson out and vacuumed the mattress and the pillows and put the dehumidifer on in the early evening to help be sure that the duvets were properly dry.

I also rang Piner the Pest Man who arranged to visit the next morning. That night, in our super clean bed and bedroom, I slept well and woke with no new flea bites. But I was too freaked and itchy to be leaving it to chance. On Thursday Mr Piner nuked the bedroom with even stronger chemicals than last time and goodness what things I could find on google to freak me out about the gas he put on.

But I haven't been bitten since.

Tonight I dug the first of our Maori potatoes. They look beautiful and tasted lovely, cooked up with my home grown zucchinis, cauliflower, thyme, garlic, chives, parsley and eggs. Only the onion came from elsewhere.

This afternoon I made some rye bread. I missed a few beats on the cooking temperature front, due mostly to the rather unsuccessful combination of tired Sandra, tired two year old and tired six year old. I guess most of you know that motherhood isn't always easy to recommend. So it is in plastic bags now because I am not supposed to cut it until tomorrow. Whereas earlier attempts were too dry, this one is possibly too wet, based on Whitley's troubleshooting guide and the sunken top.

I've also started some pumpernickel bread. The kibbled rye (finally getting used) is soaking overnight, as is the sourdough fermenting. I notice the pumpernickel should be cooked very slowly and gently and I'm wandering about using the slow cooker. No luck finding this option on google so far, but I'd appreciate hearing from any other pumpernickel makers.

On my baking plans for the next few days: crispbreads (now that I own semolina flour) and hot cross buns. Should be able to fit that in around planning for May Day. I'm not in the garden much because my garden murderer is possibly at the peak of her powers.

Agent Provocateur

2009-03-31T21:03:00.002+13:00

Isn't that from a movie? It conjures two images for me. Firstly of some incredibly sexy French woman from a James Bond movie. Or secondly when I think of 'provocateur' I think of the history of the seedy Soho area in Inner London, the Seven Dials and the prostitutes who propositioned.

Both less and more significant, it turns out that a provocateur merely provokes and I might be doing some provoking on May Day in Blackball this year. Some details below

Forum: The legacy of neo-liberalism
Can we think the system or does the system think us?

What should we be talking about?
Workers rights? Money?
Social dysfunction? The planet?
Food? Revolution? Culture?
Housing? State surveillance?

And what action should we be taking?

May Day always seems important and appropriate to me. But this year, it is hard to overstate it's significance. The world around us changes and shakes and the money system turns out to be rusted through. It's time for some careful thinking and vigorous discussion.

Scottish morning rolls

2009-03-31T20:49:00.003+13:00

This recipe is taken from Andrew Whitley's Bread Matters. It is absolutely the best bread book I've encountered (though I've not encountered them all) and I am very glad to own it. Ask your library to buy it!

Overnight sponge
2.5g dried yeast
130g warm water
50g wholemeal flour
100g white flour

Dissolve yeast in water, then add everything else and mix. Put in large bowl, cover with plastic and leave on the bench for 12-18 hours.

Final dough
285g overnight sponge
350g white flour
100g wholemeal flour
5g salt
270g water
15g butter/lard/olive oil

Mix everything into a soft dough. Knead 6-10 minutes. Leave to rise for 1 hour. Divide into 12 pieces. Roll each one into a ball and then dip it into a bowl of flour. Then put each one on a baking tray (12 to a tray). I greased and added lunch paper (cheaper than labelled baking paper and seems to do the same job) but next time I'll see what happens or doesn't happen if I skip the paper.

Cook at 230 celsius for 5 minutes, then 210 for another 10 or so.

painting and baking

2009-03-29T21:27:00.004+13:00

Today Favourite Handyman and Fionn painted the new lean-to. Fionn also painted his clothes and for good measure FH painted a stripe of Fionn's hair. Nobody owned up to giving Brighid a paintbrush but she got paint nevertheless. She mixed hers with soil from my precious blueberry plants.

While they were on a painting roll, I mentioned my plans for a bright red shed. The neighbour's shed borders our property and is the backdrop to the rampant garden (invited guests: mint and comfrey; admissable gatecrasher: nasturtium; unwelcome and uninvited: wandering jew, convulvulus, unidentified spikey weed and slugs). I've had this idea for a while, but photos of the Elerslie Flower Show exhibit "I see red" (pictured below) have provided fresh inspiration.

A strong slash of red would set off the deep greens of our wet west coast perfectly. I quite fancy those tall sculptural plants as well - the article I read said they are everyday, not expensive and exotic. We've been talking about paint a bit lately. I think 2009 could well be our year of paint. Certainly the lean-to looks much lighter and attractive painted white than bare wood.

Inside, as per my goals this morning, I got baking. In between doing dishes, changing nappies, managing children and doing laundry, I made two dozen bread rolls, two dozen banana muffins and a double recipe of hummous. I also made vegetable curry for dinner. The bread rolls were a doubled lot of Andrew Whitely's Scottish Morning Rolls and this time I think I got them just right. I kneaded them for longer than yesterday, upped the proportion of wholemeal flour (this partly helps because I have better quality wholemeal flour in stock than I do of white bread flour) and also I remembered to dunk the shaped rolls in flour before putting them on the oven tray. If you would like the recipe, please shout in the comments. I'm not feeling moved to copy it out if all two readers out there are gluten free this week.

Cauliflower is an overnight phenomenon. Seriously. No sign of a head yesterday and then today two beautiful cauliflowers, replete with green caterpillars and 'pillar-poo on them. So tonight's curry featured our own cauliflower (which the children LIKED), chilli pepper, celery, garlic and curly kale. How could I not like today?

I ran out of time to make new and wonderful lunch food like bread sticks or crackers-from-scratch. Hopefully another day - I am looking for a new staple for lunch boxes. I finished off my cookathon by burning myself when cooking the scraps up for the chooks after dinner. Oh yes. Woe is the idiot.

Kitchen Day

2009-03-29T07:56:00.002+13:00

In our house, on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, we all go out in the morning. Favourite Handyman to work (all day), Fionn to school (nearly all day), Brighid to our friend Robyn's (morning) and me to work (morning). What happens a lot is that I make nice home made nutritious lovingly prepared for everyone else and once I've droppped the others off, realise that I am starving and buy something pre-prepared and of lower quality for me.

On st-ret-che-d mornings, the children get the home made lunch and the adults buy theirs.

On s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d mornings where too much sleeping in was involved, I drive FH to work with the children still in their pyjamas, then stop at the Do Duck In bakery/lunch food place and buy everyone's lunch to put in their lunch boxes. Then we drive home and have a mad scramble to look like loved and organised people instead of the chaos units which we actually are.

Today I am having a cook-athon/bake-athon to try and pre-empt all this rushed lower quality but higher expense food. Yesterday (Saturday) we went out to the very beautiful Point Elizabeth walk and had a picnic on the walk. Home made bread rolls filled with leftover roast chicken from the night before, followed by juicy oranges. After our gorgeous walk we went straght home and had ice cream sandwiches. If I hadn't bought icecream and wafers in the supermarket shop on Wednesday, we'd have been at the dairy instead, spending a lot more on inferior quality icecreams. So it can be done. And getting this completely home made food thing going right through the week is my goal.

So,

sourdough starter begun last night. That should be turning into rye bread for next weekend. Sourdough rye bread is the perfectist bread for underneath poached eggs.
Started the sponge for more Scottish morning rolls last night. This afternoon I will finish and bake them, providing rolls for Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday, with the aid of the freezer.
Filling for rolls/sandwiches. Need to make hummous. I think some hard boiled eggs could be made and turned into sandwich fillings.
Muffins. This is one thing I have going already reasonably well. There are still some in the freezer, but not enough for the whole week. So, another batch of banana muffins today.
Brighid doesn't do muffins. I am sick of the mess she makes with rice crackers and the fact that they are mega-ly processed. So if the Gods shine on me and I haven't run screaming from the kitchen before I get to number five, I am going to have a go at making crackers. I gave Fionn bought breadsticks last week and he adored them, so it is either crackers or breadsticks for today's brand-new-to-my-cooking-repertoire food experiment.

That will be quite enough for one day.

bread + cred

2009-03-27T20:42:00.005+13:00

This week, being pay day week, I finally purchased some electronic scales. My Mum bought some for me as a present about six years ago and my then baby son got hold of them, threw them across the room and killed them. A while later I found some lovely old balance scales with the weights in imperial measures. That has been mostly quite useful, but hasn't cut the mustard since I started working with Andrew Whitley's Bread Matters book. He puts absolutely everything into gram measures, including liquids, and I was floundering in my seemingly limited kitchen.

So yesterday I started a Whitley recipe for Scottish Morning Rolls, using my new scales. I guarded them carefully against my offspring. Cooked tonight, they have turned out very nice. I first thought not especially flavoursome but as I've scoffed almost half of them, I think that has to be revised. They are quite a lightweight bread after my rye sourdoughs though. Tomorrow I think I'll start another sourdough starter as I ditched the other one. Well the last three actually.

The scales are very wonderful, it turns out. Lots less use of bowls/cups/spoons as I can reset the scales to take the existing weight off and measure the new ingredient straight in. Without doing fancy maths as I go along. They weren't cheap though. I was tempted to go to The Warehouse where they definitely were available and much cheaper. But I gave myself a big talking to (several) about keeping local businesses afloat in hard times. I bought it from our specialist kitchen shop here in smallwettown where I know that they will deal with any warranty issues promptly and cordially. And I saw the mugs I want, finally. Intense bright red with large white dots. They had them in egg cups as well. At $7 each, I didn't think they were flabbergastingly out of reach pricewise.

Coconut oil. Supposed to be extremely good for all of us and the goodness does not disappear when it is heated. I forget what caprylic acid does, but coconut oil (processed the right way) has lots of it and it is good. From my admittedly holey memory. So the local health food shop, where I routinely hand over a shapely percentage of our pay packets, or so it seems, now has virgin coconut oil in stock. I bought some this week and tonight I rolled partly boiled potatoes in some before roasting them in the oven with the chicken. Then when the chicken was resting out of the oven, I cranked the heat up and crisped the edges of the spuds. Yum yum yum. Favourite Handyman was(is) at the pub and the children ignored them but I liked it all. I'll be telling FH how yummy it all was and what an adoring and kind wife I was making roast dinner on a rainy Friday night all to no husband. When he has a sore head in the morning I will be telling him all of this.

Important for cranking up a sense of needing to make amends. I have the amends project lined up, one I seriously do not want to do. I heard scurrying in the roof above the study this morning. Which almost definitely means rodents. Which means someone needs to get up into the roof and investigate and either lay traps or bait. I'll go buy the death means. It's a wonderful thing, marriage.

I've been thinking about budgeting skills a lot. Well you do when you buy KFC for lunch after spending $489 on three new car tyres don't you? I see we've missed the boat for the cheapest 3-4-5 year fixed rate mortgage rates - should have gone in last week and fixed. Talk of huge inflation in the medium term seems to be growing. I could always do better on my budgeting skills. But at least I know what goes in and must come out and how to at least keep spending within what we actually earn. I appreciate so much that my impulse buy of KFC this afternoon when it was after 1pm and I'd had breakfast before 7am was a luxury that on many budgets would just blow the week to smithereens. I also know about the nutritional badness of KFC. I know I'm bad. I'm a lapsed Catholic, remember?

I had a look through the National Qualifications Framework online yesterday, curious to see if there were any units on budgeting which our young people (and adults) could study for and gain. Not that I could find. This really has to change. The fallout for families of not having budgeting skills, the despair and loneliness and danger, is so serious. How come we have all these healthy eating and growing and sexual health and exercise and so on lessons, all of which do have value in my eyes, but nothing on financial management? That seems a gaping yawning cavernous hole to me.

Yet more Autumn garden pictures

2009-03-27T19:18:00.004+13:00

Globe artichoke. This is in the raised bed I made last year from seaweed, horse poo and home made compost.

One of the compost heaps.

Wet west coast garden wilderness. I was entranced by Enid Blyton's books as a child, including the ones set on rather idyllic farms which were full of diverse animals and a zillion years from the monoculture of most of our farms today. The wild area out the front with the big climbing tree takes me back to those early reading days of magical discoveries. But it is the flax which also marks the scene out as distinctively New Zealand.

This is the horse poo enriched wilderness. Eleven months ago I created a new garden here on rather barren soil by layering horse poo and pea straw thickly along an area about 3 x 1.5 metres. Then I planted spring bulbs and later, pumpkins and sunflowers. The manure and pea straw certainly helped all those dormant weed seeds!

more and more Autumn garden pictures

2009-03-27T19:02:00.002+13:00

Rua potato flowers. Useful that these are out the front away from Brighid as the flowers and fruit are poisonous.

The rampant yams. I hope these taste utterly divine. I planted them last August or so and don't get to harvest them until this July, so they are using up a lot of space over a very long period of time. In the background is part of our firewood for this winter. I find looking at it very satisfying.

Radiccio turning deep red. Rocket beside it.

My only pumpkin harvest. I cut it this evening. It hasn't had intense sun so may not be full of flavour. At the very least, I can cook it up for the chooks.

more Autumn pictures

2009-03-27T16:49:00.002+13:00

The feijoas inside Poultry Palace. No flowers this season, but they have grown quite a bit since they have been inside the chook run. Come Spring, I think we will move the Palace and see how the feijoas get on then.

The rampant garden. This is mostly mint and nasturtiums, but the convulvulus in there is rather less welcome.

Chilli peppers. Just starting to turn orange. Probably time to harvest some this weekend.

My favourite kale, cavolo nero, also known as tuscan kale and lacinato kale. I first saw this in a gardening magazine, towering over cottage garden flowers and was captivated. The blue-green colour is lovely and the shape quite different to curly kale. I planted this one in early summer and have been killing caterpillars from it as much as possible, saving it for winter use. I learnt after last year not planting my winter brassicas until Autumn. When growth was very limited, I started to see why neighbours had grown their silverbeet all summer and kept huge specimens for winter eating.

Autumn pictures

2009-03-27T16:03:00.003+13:00

Our first home grown cabbage.

Successful broccoli!

Curly kale and marigolds. We've had fewer caterpillars on this kale and I've seen hoverflies on it. I wonder if the marigolds on this side and the phacelia on the other side helped.

The old chook run garden last weekend. The edging at the foreground is thyme. Most of this garden, now the tomatoes are out, is kale, silverbeet, perpetual spinach, celery and bay trees, all for the coming winter. There are Maori potatoes and a chilli pepper plant in there as well. The draped shade cloth in the background is our temporary chook run for daytime use.

knitting

2009-03-24T22:51:00.002+13:00

The depression dress is taking shape. Not that it is really a depression dress because then dresses were made of flour bags and not thick luxurious wool. But the wool is all my remnants, hence the term depression dress. As in 1930s, not as in depressed mental state.

I've knitted all of the skirt and most of the front bodice. I've done one strap and have another to do and then the back and we are all over. I'm making longish straps so they can be altered and Brighid can wear it for two years. At some point I'm going to need to make buttonholes, so if anyone can help with instructions or a link to some, I'd be eternally grateful.

I am seriously sick of cleaning but I am soldiering on. My goal is simplicity. Everything in its place and a place for everything. Sounds so simple. Today I did some cleaning of odd and old things in the fridge. Brighid emptied more pots of dirt, all over the back step, while I did that.

We ate our own cabbage for dinner. It was great. I had to wash it of quite a few crawlers and slimers. The supermarket cabbages must have a LOT of spray on them.

grow some sprouts

2009-03-23T23:51:00.002+13:00

That whole thing where people read Barbara Kingsolver's Animal Vegetable Miracle or read Michael Pollan or some other clip in tv of wherever about eating local and organic and growing your own and cooking from scratch. Then they pout and say it is all very well for those on a farm in Vermont, but what about the rest of us?

That whole thing. For goodness sake, grow some sprouts. Even when we lived in a tiny flat in East London, beside the railway line and polluted with no growing space or even washing line space and even the cactus died in the one windowsill that got some sun. Even then we could have grown sprouts. (No we didn't, I wasn't in a sprout phase. But we were earning good money and I bought localish and organic food and did not whinge about it being impossible. I don't think I whinged anyway).

Buy some organic sprouts. Get an old agee jar from the Sallies, or a large jam jar or really any clean plastic container. Pour some seeds into it. Pour some cold water on top and cover with a piece of muslin or other loose weave cloth (those chux multicloths work fine, ditto for thin, worn teatowels). Leave overnight. Drain the water off. Fill with water and drain immediately twice a day for a few days. When there are sprouty things trailing off the seeds, store it in the fridge and eat them. Don't miss out the last step. That is called wasting your own time, although I have done it myself.

These will be good for you, locally grown, organic and yummy.

Stop whinging that you don't have a farm in Vermont. If you were before that is.

This is an encouraging piece of news though. New York Times. I'm not usually an American news girl, but I'm getting to admire Michelle Obama quite a bit.

One small task short of perfection

2009-03-22T21:26:00.003+13:00

or maybe two. The dishwasher didn't use up all the stuff on the bench first time round. And as it doesn't have a Cat in the Hat type side arm, I need to be involved in the cleaning of the bench. At 9.30pm.

The one small missing task was actually, bloody dishes notwithstanding, that Favourite Handyman fell asleep with the children tonight instead of uploading all the garden photographs which I took this morning. Today was going to be a blog-with-pictures-day. Now it will probably be next month and everything will look out of date and I will sigh and not use it. And you won't get to see what happened when we cleared lots of scrubby trees and put horse poo and pea straw down and then let the sun, the annual weed seeds, the pumpkins, the blackberry, the sunflowers and the rampant perennial weeds do all of their many growing things. Last month when I wasn't looking, another adult and his Dad put a small gate and some chickenwire there as well, which adds to the rampantness of it all. A gate doth not keep out ivy/blackberry/nasturtium/convulvulus - but it does provide a frame for the glory of these imports.

So the perfection of the day part. All of our firewood is now stacked. Much of it is stacked under our new lean-to, a sunny space with a transparent roof where there is still room for winter pots of blueberries and lemons and silverbeet and maybe just maybe some ginger. The chooks had some time out in the temporary shelter while I made alterations to their palace. They don't like being grabbed by children much, and Brighid and Fionn are alternately frustrated and enraged by this.

Favourite Handyman mowed the lawn. Brighid and I are going to rake up the long clippings tomorrow.

I went to the dump. We filled the boot of our station wagon right to the ceiling with beer bottles, broken crockery, endless broken plastic pots and bits of tarpaulin and just junkety junk. I am going again soon. The look of simplicity that I want, the calm almost emptiness, is a way off yet.

After more than 12 months of gentle cajoling, stroppiness and just plain endless persistence, FH has agreed to me gifting two of our lounge chairs to the Salvation Army. So we now have no wallpaper, vastly fewer items of clothing and possibly no more bank statements from 1996 in our lounge and there is going to be more space yet!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Two fewer chairs on which to pile nappies and socks and underwear and then all the much bigger things on top so it is really difficult to find the little things just before work and then they fall down the back and. well and and and and and. If you don't recognise this, then you should say a prayer of thankfulness for your skills of not being hopeless. Or maybe you should go and open your smelly cupboard and do some washing. At least my lounge laundry mess is clean.

We have been eating from our garden. So have the caterpillars. When the chooks eat my garden, I eat their eggs. When the caterpillars eat my garden, I do not eat their butterflies.

Yesterday I made clever food. Clever food is when I haven't made it before. Clever cheapo special food is when it grows wild in my garden and I haven't made it before. Yesterday was my debut effort with nasturtium leaves. I made pesto with the remaining pine nuts from that week when I went mad and spent $23 just on pine nuts. (Supposedly to save money by making my own pesto. Supposedly.) Not content with just nearly burnt and then whizzed pine nuts, I added garlic (from my garden of cooooooooooourse), parsley, nasturtium leaves and mint leaves (allllllllll alllllllllll allllllllllll from my garden) and some olive oil. Then I folded in some parmesan cheese and then I mixed it into some mashed potato and made it all green speckled and then I cooked up onions, carrots, broccoli (er, yes actually the broccoli is from our garden, as were the caterpillars which I fished off just before cooking), thyme and fish in a oven-proof and element-proof dish and then I plonked the green speckled mash on top and put it in the oven and everybody ate it. It tasted nice, but it looked pretty homely rather than dinner party fare.

Oh how could I forget? I ate our blackberry harvest.

One blackberry.

It was very yummy and yet - and yet - I do look forward to an improved yield next year.

Grace has brought me home

2009-03-20T19:28:00.002+13:00

Do I really know how lucky I am? I hope so. I hope I make good use of the grace showered upon my family.

This morning online, I read the news that another UK friend is out of work. Specifically, her husband has lost his job. In my mummy world, that is just as bad. She is expecting another baby and they had just moved house. Amongst this group of treasured friends who have worked together, there have been several job losses this year. How come I got so lucky? A New Zealand passport and a place in the sun (well the rain here in smallwettown, but we do get sun as well). How come so many people in the world, on the Gaza strip and in Rwanda for example, are so unlucky?

After I had read my emails I went out to feed the chooks. I'd kept my exhausted son home from school and Friday is a no-paid-work day for me. A whole day with both of my children and food in the cupboards. I looked carefully at my blessings in the garden. Chooks laying every day, kale, broccoli and silverbeet growing for winter and spring, a bed of yams for winter and potatoes in various spots in the garden for late Autumn eating.

I don't find it simple to see the ways in which fortune and fate hit people. I read not long ago of an environmental scientist who believes sincerely that our earth is overpopulated by a factor of seven. That's a lot of people to lose. I admire the gesture of hope and love of each new loved child in a family. I have a particular admiration for my friends Tania and Rachael, on different sides of the globe, who love life so much they want to share their breakfast table with a new little one most years and have done this for a long time already. It may not seem a rational admiration in these straightened times (or ever, from an environmental perspective), but a loved baby is such a positive gesture and yet for many people, I can see that news of babies is going to bring great great fear and the fertility rate will drop, worldwide. In my family, the immediately post WW2 generation is largeish, 3-8 children per married couple. The generation before, the young couples of the Great Depression, they all had families of just two children.

This prospect, not at all hypothetical for many men and women, intensifies a situation which already exists around poor women and abortion. Not a fan of abortion myself, I would march to keep it legal in this country, protecting the lives of women who have a desperate need to terminate a pregnancy. I would like to see the end of unsafe, back street abortions world wide. The presence of safe, clean and legal channels for abortion does not make a woman abort, but it does diminish and hopefully eliminate the power of illegal, literally dirty and unsafe butchers.

[If you are new to my blog and feel cheated by there being hardly any gardening talk and mostly my rants on everything else, I can absolutely see your point. But it may not improve until one day suddenly it does and there might even be photos of the garden. It has happened before.]

Long rise oat bread

2009-03-20T13:25:00.003+13:00

The long soak and ferment oat bread is a fantastic success, the best bread I have made in a long long time. This is what I did:

Long rise oat bread
soak 1 C rolled oats in 1 C water and a splash of whey or lemon juice or yoghurt (this is to neutralise the phytates) overnight.

Next day, dissolve 1 T treacle in 1/2 C milk (I did this in a small saucepan over the stove). Then put the oat mixture, the milk mixture, 3 C flour (I used some white and some fineground wholemeal), 1 t salt and 1/4 dried yeast together in a large bowl. Mix everything together and then cover the bowl with a plate or plastic film and put somewhere warm overnight.

Next day, grease a loaf tin (standard issue NZ small baking loaf tin will be fine) and pour/scrape the mixture in. It will be quite wet. Cover with plastic and leave on the bench for two hours.

Cook for 30-35 minutes at 230 degrees celsius.

The oat bread is adapted from a recipe in Browne, Leach and Titchborne, The New Zealand Bread Book. Next up I am going to adapt their wholemeal baps recipe to a long rise method. Instead of 4 t surebake yeast, I'll be using 1/4 t dried yeast. This next recipe has no milk in it. I was a little unsure about leaving dough with milk in it overnight in the warm, although it has all turned out beautifully.

One night out gardening

2009-03-19T21:57:00.002+13:00

I think this is the last week before we lose daylight saving time. It was nice to break the gardening drought and weed and mulch this evening.

I weeded around my rhubarb and cleared the path leading up to the rhubarb. It is a brick path which the birds flicked mulch and compost onto and then the weeds took hold in the lovely growing medium. I think the bricks can come out and go somewhere where the lovely red can be enjoyed. We can replace the bricks with wood chip next time we get a big bag.

I found a broccoli head!!!! Oh lovely lovely. I've had such mixed experiences with broccoli that I hadn't expected success. Broccoli for tea tomorrow then. I did weed and then put my comfrey brew on the younger broccoli plants and mulched them up with pea straw.

Of course I killed a lot of caterpillars.

I weeded around the hydrangea cuttings which I planted earlier this year. Then I laid the weeds around the plants as mulch. Of the four which I inspected, three have 'taken'. I think the fourth was the one which Favourite Handyman drove the lawn mower into.

The radiccio is turning deep red instead of green! Yes I know this is what it is supposed to do but there was no sign for so long and now it looks completely gorgeous. I think it would be worth planting for its looks alone. Maybe it will feature in some whimsical potager in my future garden. I've read about creating magic garden spaces for children before and the idea does appeal. We have the beginnings of a tree hut to start us off so far...

Sometimes I encounter people who turn my life upside down, or some part of it. There is an educational psychologist called Laughton King who is pressing all my wow buttons tonight. It is nothing to do with gardening, or anything I tend to blog about. But now I'm thinking about how some people think in pictures and what it means for them in a word-biased education system and I'm looking at my son and thinking about one thousand things and recognising so much in LK's book. Tomorrow I get to start [again] on really the biggest challenge to every morning: changing how we get our son to get dressed so I keep my cool for the first hours in each day. Nova if you are reading, I am very interested to know if you and/or Paul have encountered LK. As LK acknowledges, his stuff isn't particularly original, but it is so accessible. And it has walked into my life at just the powerful time.

Two nights in a row...

2009-03-18T21:45:00.003+13:00

St Patrick's Night, out without children. Tonight, out for writers' group without husband or children. Went to a bar after writers' group and yackity yacked some more. I feel like a kid who got Christmas and then a birthday straight afterwards. All this adult company.

In other news, I'm playing around with turning a standard modern fast bake bread recipe into a slow soak and ferment version. I'm using this oat bread recipe as my base. I had a phase last year of making this oat bread quite often. It is a Browne/Leach/Titchborne book and one thing I really like is the simplicity of their instructions. I do much prefer to make bread using cup and spoon measures. Measuring 60gm of water and 270gm of flour is just irritating and given my current kitchen tools, difficult. This afternoon I measured the cup of oats and the cup of (cold) water into a bowl with a splash of whey to soak overnight. Tomorrow afternoon I will heat the golden syrup and milk and add all the ingredients (using just 1/4 tsp of plain dried yeast) together and leave it in the cupboard overnight. Then two hours proving on Friday morning before cooking it.

I haven't been near the garden it seems, apart from a few stints of caterpillar squashing. The neglect is showing but the price of working in the garden with Brighid is that anything I plant will be pulled out, so just not worth it. Our chooks are still laying an egg each every day. Favourite Handyman put more wood chip in their run and I can see we may get access to quite a bit of untreated wood chip. Time soon then to dig up the lawn paths on each side of the old chook run garden and lay them with wood chip. Another job is to harvest the comfrey again and make more comfrey brew. I need to use my current brew to feed the brassicas around the garden, especially those which are only a month old or less. Much of the rest of the work is weeding, especially along one fence where the convulvulus from the neighbours is taking hold.

My decluttering is progressing. Two plastic bags of outgrown childrens' clothes went to a work colleague in the afternoon and I finally gave my maternity togs to the sallies. Finally. These togs which I bought new and wore only twice and which have for more than two years hung round the house, mostly the lounge being useless, are the emblem of my ridiculous clutter habit. So I have, I like to think, broken through an important barrier. I put out four bags of rubbish for landfill this morning. Not so very long ago at all this would have seemed a terrible failure. I kept almost everything and prided myself on having half of a bag most weeks for landfill. But the house was growing inside but not in the walls. We no longer had anywhere to sit. Flotsam and jetsam dominated my days and my nights. The cans didn't get recycled anyway, just squashed with the old cars. It will probably ease off a bit now all the lounge wallpaper is gone, but there is much clutter to be disposed off still and for a while yet, lots of bags are symbols of victory over chaos.

fat for the downturn

2009-03-16T19:43:00.003+13:00

I read recently that KFC's profits are up in recent months in New Zealand. Then I learnt that pizza chains and other budget end fast food retailers are booming in the UK from this article by Peter Preston. I love the Guardian Weekly title of the article:'Recession is a wonderful gastro leveller'. Here are a few sentences from the article which struck a chord:

Conventional wisdom going into the crunch held that eating out would fade from
everyday life. We'd be back to simple ingredients and verities. ... But it
hasn't turned out like that. You have to look at the way society moves on as it
struggles to function. ... A takeaway isn't a treat, merely a particular sort of
retail therapy. Recession simply means we are eating worse, then slumping on the
sofa. We are supposed to shape up. In fact, we're calling Domino's and ordering
extra cheese.

Preston, armed with statistics I didn't know about before reading his article, debunks some polyanna ideas which were popular in blogosphere last year. It brings to mind another one which I felt unable to thrill to: that in severe economic depression we would start working together as a community better, getting to know our neighbours and helping each other more.

It's not that it is a bad idea. I feel part of my community here in smallwettown and the egg and clothes and childcare swaps, the school gala and the endless raffles which are part of the fabric of my life are treasured (perhaps the childcare swaps more than the raffles, but you get the idea).

It is just that I think it is naive.

Methamphetamine use is destroying individuals and families right now in New Zealand and it was last year and the year before that. Don't even get me started on pokie machine addictions. These are but two examples of fragile communities where the recession will intensify the pain and helplessness, not save through potato swaps.

In a country where cooking and gardening skills have been off the school curriculum for decades (yes I know there are semblances of cooking, usually called something obscure, but have a close look at what the actual learning focus is - let me know if you find meal planning and budgeting in there as I'd be ecstatic to be proven wrong on this), baked beans and McDonalds happy meals are routine default options.

With big business making so much money from our collective lack of cooking skills, I don't see any change in the school curriculum coming, not even on the furthest horizon. The Ministry of Education have spent millions (I betcha anything it was lots of millions) on it's latest school curriculum (introduced 2008) in which students learn to be nice to each other as well as to count. That came out last year and no doubt a number of education consultants were very well paid for it. They probably did have input from the Otago Home Science people (what are they called this year - the university food tech department as another possible clue) who no doubt have some wonderful ideas on how to develop new food products and brand awareness and blah blah get their students jobs in the food industry.

How many parents who balance the home budget through careful rationing of expenditure, fruit and vegetable growing and cooking from scratch do you think they consulted? I know they are around because I count them among my friends locally and internationally and also amongst those I admire in blogosphere. We share our knowledge, our successes and failures and learn from each other. There is not money to be made from marketing us. We work collectively and cooperatively and our exchanges are not of cash.

In the garden

2009-03-12T20:34:00.002+13:00

Yes, in the garden. Although it is in the title of my blog, I haven't been out there much at all lately and not for lack of desire. But tonight after dinner I ripped out all the tomato plants (still producing but wouldn't be for much longer and I didn't much adore the green tomato chutney anyway) and then poured two bags of mushroom compost on some of the vacant area and planted them with red silverbeet and perpetual spinach. Maybe it is too late but I picked up the punnets for a song yesterday and they will definitely not produce if I didn't plant them out.

I plonked the sage in the herb garden. It had been sitting in it's garden centre pot for several weeks on the outside table. I only have the leeks waiting for planting out now.

The yams in the punga raised bed are looking good on top. They do use up a lot of time though - I planted them last August and apparently best harvest time is July.

This year has been lacking in zucchini sparkle. Last year wasn't just sparkle; it was flood. But this summer both myself and other gardening friends have found the plants haven't grown at all or haven't performed well. I had one survivor - a costata romanesco. The seed catalogue warned that production rate would be half that of the popular hybrids but the taste was really superb. That turned out to be an accurate verdict but I didn't think the taste was twice as good and we've probably only had a dozen zucchinis this summer.

The pest man came and we should have no fleas for at least three months. Hopefully for as long as I walk this earth.

We are off to Fox Glacier for the weekend with friends. Better go put some bread on. I think the use of a recipe is in order given other people will be eating the bread. We have self catering accomodation and I'm aiming to cook up a storm early tomorrow morning so the food is easy to sort once we are there. As well as the bread, I am planning on making South Beach Black Bean Soup (a Nigella Lawson recipe which I adore), more banana muffins and either a quiche, an eggy bake thing or (a small but fancier step) spanish omelette. Then, this done, I should be able to sit back on holiday and let the non-cookers do the dishes. The other motivation is to avoid paying a fortune for fish and chips or mediocre restaurant food which takes ages to arrive while tired hungry children express their dissatisfaction. I recall exactly this experience last time we went to Fox three years ago.

This might be about the state of the nation,

2009-03-10T21:10:00.003+13:00

maybe, but not just yet. I am consumed with horror at the arrival of fleas. We have no dogs and no cats and we've never had fleas before and despite their being four people in our home, only one person is being bitten. The wife of the pest exterminator person I rang today said I must have very special blood.

I don't like having very special blood and I don't like having fleas. I don't like anything to do with it.

I am using my cheese mould and cheese cloths for the first time tonight, gifts from the very lovely Tania. I'm making kefir cheese.

I'm making progress with Brighid's knitted dress, the one where I am making the pattern up as I go along. I am up to the armhole shaping so have switched to using flat needles. Before I was knitting in the round for the first time ever, having started this dress from the hem and working my way upwards. I think they are called 'flat needles'; I'm trying to resist the impulse to call them 'normal needles'.

Yesterday I even found my size 4mm flat needles because yesterday I had a huge cleaning spree in the lounge and ripped the last of the lounge wallpaper off as well. Today I had a huge cleaning spree in the kitchen. I know we don't have fleas because we have a messy house, but fleas make me want to turn the place upside down and get rid of almost everything before making some kind of new serene scene. I have other thoughts about fleas but I'll try and move on from them.

In readiness for sitting down and blogging, I made myself a sandwich. I was rather pleased with myself. Home made bread, home made green tomato chutney, home made kefir, home roasted lamb.

One problem.

It tasted awful. I made the bread without a recipe and without scales and that may be some kind of clue to why it tasted stodgy. Too stodgy. I think the kefir was not as fresh as would be ideal. I guess you all label foods in your fridge and include the date. I guess it is a good idea.

So here I am, thinking that I want a babysitter for St Patrick's night next week and simultaneously that the fleas absolutely must be gone by then. I'm still a long way off the state of the nation. Although I do now have a sandwich with shop bread, Hellmann's mayo and cold roast lamb and it is about 1000 times better than attempt #1.

But here goes. I am referring to some thoughts I began to have as I wrote and then read the comments on my last post before this one. What about working New Zealanders and shareholding? Do we have new levels of share market dependency? Well surely we do. The Cullen fund for one. So our taxes are being used to play on the sharemarket.

They could be used to fund the development of a milk processing plant which would keep West Coast dairy produce here instead of trucking it around the country and trucking other dairy products into the West Coast. Oh hang on golly hang on. The dairy farmers of New Zealand, who have run one of New Zealand's most successful ever cooperatives, are now into different games. Witness the antics of super-coop (formed from the merger of many many small dairy cooperatives around New Zealand) Fonterra in the San-Lu melanin contaminated milk tragedy. Witness talk last year of public floats of the company. Let's see what happens to our farmers, especially those in more remote areas, when China comes onstream with it's own dairy farms and world demand for our milk slumps.

Investment in productive capacity for key services is the best kind of investment, I think. So investment in power producing plants is good and the government can gain something back. Which is all of us gaining something. But buying shares in a sweatshop labour clothing company in order that I might retire and live off that portion which is my reward for merely owning some capital, that does not seem right. The cotton grower and harvester sweats, the sewer sweats, the buyer pays a sum for the garment of which a greater portion goes to the shareholder than to those who sweated for it's construction. So shareholders in this situation live off the fact of the workers being poorly recompensed for their labour. It is not honest.

What else to do? I an only conclude that a retired person can only live a life without recourse to paid work or a pension and/or private investment returns means if they live with their extended family.

Which really might be quite difficult.

But from an ethical point of view and from a blunt economics point of view in the coming decade, it is going to be turned to more and more.

I don't know that I've answered any of my own questions, let alone anyone else's, or even made sense, but I'm trying to make sense of how to live at least somewhat ethically in an inequitable world and this business of investing for retirement and how that money is produced seems a big nasty bogey which is not being talked about enough.

I have only one other thing to report. While writing this blog post, the pest man rang and he is bombing all flea life out of my home tomorrow morning. So although I have to leave this house before 8.30am in the morning and have lunches and nappies and blah blah all done as well, I also need to vacuum up the flour my children deliberately spread across Fionn's bedroom floor and duvet. Once they are awake. But before we have to leave. The carpet surfaces would be a good idea too. Although I don't expect crushed cornflakes protect fleas from death, it seems good manners not to present them to Murray the pest man. As for the lounge, where I removed about 8000 items yesterday only to highlight the remaining 16000, I don't know if bagging the detritus up would just mean the fleas get to escape into the bag and come out later.

I hate fleas.

Just the beginning

2009-03-08T23:11:00.001+13:00

I think there is more politics coming up on my blog. Today I read Rod Oram's Sunday Star Times article on the recent jobs summit in Auckland. He describes how some very sharp person surnamed Grant talked about the four phases of the rapid change we have experienced we had gone through and we are about to go through the fifth one: social unrest and protest. And no one bloody took serious notice.

Which given what is going on in the streets of Europe at the moment, gives me cause for wonder. Kiwis don't put up with everything all the time. she won't always be right. Thinking about how long ago the anti-nuclear agitation and the 81 spring bok tour was, perhaps we are moving towards an awakening, a thinking about what is right and who we want to serve in an earthly fashion.

Cos I do agreee with the protestors that the workers did not create the current financial crisis so why should they be losing their jobs to bail out shareholders?

We've already had major bank nationalisations globally. Will the ideas of national state assets ownership and some more radical worker ownership of factories come to the fore again?

Tomorrow is seed sowing day

2009-03-08T22:31:00.002+13:00

I am almost always hopeless at aligning my seed sowing with the moon and my germination rate suffers as a result. But tomorrow, tomorrow if I am good and no one is dangerously ill and it doesn't turn out that I have a biting insect infestation (still not sure what bit me earlier in the week when I was collecting chook house poo/sawdust but I got more bites last night when I shifted the bags of aforementioned chook byproduct) and I don't just plain ole forget,

I am going to sow some seeds two days before the full moon.

I'll have to have a good look at my options in my seed drawer, but for the moment I am thinking coriander (God have you noticed that I am trying really hard to grow coriander?), rocket, silverbeet bright lights (some of which I will grow in a pot under the new lean-to, basil (for growing on the kitchen windowsill now it has cooled outside) and calendula.

Maybe it is worth a go at pak choy as well - I think I have some seed. As if the slugs needed more food.

Plans from my study window

2009-03-08T08:01:00.003+13:00

Our study is only open to Favourite Handyman and I. Occasionally our six year old is allowed in with specific permission but it is never open to our two year old. When the others are out playing elsewhere and have forgotten about their mother (very temporarily full tummies I guess), it does feel like I have a room of my own, that wonderful asset Virginia Woolf wrote on my heart about.

So this damp and drizzly morning, when the fog of sickness seems to have eased enough on our house for me to be in the study blogging, I am looking out at our spring flower patch. This area is the top corner of our section. When we moved in it was all lawn and my Dad, looking at it closely, observed that it probably had the best drainage in the section and you could just make out a square definition which suggested this had once been the vegetable garden. Years before when it was last a family home.

We started our garden in this corner last Anzac Day, when we buried the children's placentas and planted a cabbage tree above each one. Later I made a raised bed garden nearby and grew lovely silverbeet, borage and strawberries. Then I pulled the logs away from the raised bed and let the chooks in. They turned it all over with great glee. There had, I now remember, been blackcurrants which I planted some time in 2007, and we added another blackcurrant another cabbage tree and some native grasses this year.

So now we have an area which is quite well mulched and supporting bushes or trees in a circle while it is still lawn or weeds around the periphery. The area is about 3 by 3 metres, so 9 square metres. Last night I made a new compost heapon one grassy corner. The chicken poo/straw/sawdust mixture from Raelene's chook house should break down nicely there and turn it to fertile, weedless soil in a couple of months. We did that in the corner of this area last spring and it worked well. There is still some weeding or compost building and some mulching with peastraw to be done to get the whole area the way I want it.

This area, which I look out to from the study (otherwise hidden by the chook run from) much of the back lawn, is perfect for spring bulbs to peek out from the mulch, amidst the straw and trees and not getting in the way of my next vegetable plans as has happened when I've put them in garden beds. Maybe I will try out the daffodils in the soil after all. I'm not overly fond of doing pots when I have so much lawn to be made into beauty and food. I have some yellow freesias and the yellow daffodils so far. There isn't much budget for flowers this autumn and I need to get out the very front and see if I can dig up some of last year's bulbs which were largely lost and unseen behind the huge flax and bring them out the back.

I do want some snowdrops for the shadiest back part though. Galanthus, they are also called. We had one snowdrop bush hidden behind a tree when I was a child and it was such a miracle, and thing of beauty in the still cold winter, to find it each year.

Also still in this area are some new borage plants, self seeded and one silverbeet plant still producing. There were others but they had gone to seed so they are pulled and prone on the soil. They can either compost there or be thrown to one of our 'proper' compost heaps.

Treasures and trials

2009-03-05T20:58:00.003+13:00

Treasure one:
I think it is a kind of treasure. We have fruits on our Rua potatoes. I found this out as they flop on to the path and I stood on them when I was harvesting a zucchini. This is not especially common - the swellings on the roots of potatoes are not the fruit at all. They aren't even a proper tuber but I forget what they are called. Aprt from potatoes that is. Whether I will do anything fancy like collect the seed, remains to be seen. But I have that opportunity now.

Treasure two:
A full boot of poo-enriched chook house clearings from the wonderful Raelene. This will go on to an area near my blackcurrants which currently has grass and weeds but is fiddly for the lawnmower to get to. I'm going to pile up the poos and sawdust and let it kill off the vegetation underneath and nourish the soil for growing something much more wonderful than grass on.

Trial one:
I left the bags of chook poo/sawdust in the car overnight. One of those terribly useless things that happen. I couldn't safely and easily drag it through to the back without another adult around to watch Brighid. I know she does murder my plants, but I still love her enough that I don't want her killed by our drive-too-fast nieghbours. Then we all forgot later on.

The car stinks. a lot. the bags were all hot from the nitrogen when I hauled them out this morning. the car needs cleaning from top to bottom and inside every everything. note the word clean.

Trial two:
cleaning. Why is it that every time I get the kitchen approximating to civilised, I turn round and start baking bread, muffins and cooking more meals in it? I do understand at some rational level (i.e. rather hypothetical and distant from what is uppermost in my mind) that good food involves work. I just feel grizzly about it.

inside outside world

2009-03-02T20:10:00.003+13:00

Today I remained inside my house for the entire day, excepting feeding the chooks twice and hanging washing out once. The purpose was to keep my children inside in the warm and to cosset and coddle my son out of his wheezing into improved health.

I will not even pretend it did great things for my sanity. The children were fine, within the usual realms of children challenges. Once again, the problem was the house. I need to leave the house. Every day.

So while I was inside more than ever, no longer discussing the financial literacy of the nation's youth with the local MP but instead teaching two young children how to share, then insisting on the sharing, more times than any non-parent might imagine.

I sneaked in some reading, but although I am enjoying Catcher in the Rye, the endless monologue of a depressed teenager isn't hugely uplifting. I read the weekend papers almost exhaustively, ignoring the milk spilt on them and blocking out the origins of the green shrek toothpaste smeared throughout my daughter's hair. I read about the woman behind a new book called Love in a Headscarf and found her blog. Spirit21 is my new must-read, a British Muslim woman thinking and analysing and living outside the square. Her header says it all:

'They built me a box to live in and painted my
caricature inside.
They said "this is you".
I said no thank you, I'd rather be me'

In my inbox today, the electronic version of the latest magazine of the (NZ) Labour History Project, formerly known as the Trade Union History Project. One of the best articles in this magazine was by David Grant on Mark Briggs and Archibald Baxter, conscientious objectors in World War One. Whereas Baxter wrote a wonderful memoir which I recall reading as a teenager (partly while in detention ha ha ha), Briggs was an ordinary working class man whose life has not received much attention until now. I copy here Grant's final two paragraphs from the article:

Mark Briggs will be best remembered for his experiences during
the First World War, and rightly so. I contend that Briggs was not a hero but
an ‘ordinary’ man caught up in extraordinary circumstances, events that
he faced with enormous moral courage. He and the other transported
objectors were tortured in varying degrees in the most astonishing incidence
of State-sanctioned cruelty in this country’s history. Forcibly taking the
14 men, without warning, to the front line to cure them of their
insensibility represented the nadir in the State’s bigotry towards legitimate
dissent. Twelve of the 14 succumbed to the army’s wishes, some in the most
trying of circumstances. In a poignant irony, one, William Little, was
killed within 18 days of becoming a stretcher bearer.

Baxter and Briggs prevailed, making them New Zealand’s
first successful dissenters, succeeding against all odds in a young,
immature, subservient, insecure and martial society that feared
nonconformity, even more so under the stresses of war. They stood at the apex
of the State’s intolerance towards such dissent. They are key in our
tradition of anti-militarism that includes Moriori leader Nunuku-whenua;
Taranaki’s Te Whiti o Rongomai and Tohu Kakahi; the brave young working class
men mostly from the West Coast and Canterbury who protested against
compulsory military training when it was first introduced in 1911; the
anti-conscriptionists of World War One; other pacifists before and in the
early days World War Two, and the myriad of antiwar activists who emerged in
the nuclear age. Briggs and particularly Baxter (through his book) became
heroes to many of these later activists. They are exemplars of the cause of
war resistance in this country, men of courage, spirit and principle, to be
lauded in the same breath as Te Whiti, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and
Nelson Mandela.

Grant also has a book out on these men and I'll be down at my local library making sure they have it/have it on order later this week. The Labour History Project website is here. Here on the Coast we have our very own labour history project and this is our website for the Blackball Working Class History Museum.

And the garden? I read in the (Christchurch, NZ) Press in the weekend an article by some uber-capitalist stockmarket enthusiast bemoaning people becoming hysterical about the market and planting vegetables instead of shopping. Like women who ask too many questions, lets paint sensible people who aren't conforming to the way the big boys want us to bail them out by describing them (me, probably 'us) as 'hysterical'.

I didn't get to get my hands dirty today, but I did consider the view from the study window. Since I moved the temporary chook shelter, I get a much better view of the far corner where we have planted cabbage trees over our children's buried placentas and a few blackcurrant bushes. The chooks have been clearing this area nicely and I think there is room for a plum tree this winter and - given how I get to see it so well from my computer now - some spring bulbs.

4am

2009-03-02T04:08:00.004+13:00

Isn't there a song with the phrase 'four o'clock in the morning'? I can sort of hear it in my head but not the rest of the song.

Anyway, while I'm up, more on my life.

Yesterday Fionn and I planted his broccoli. It is getting quite late for planting here, but worth a go, especially if the alternative is throwing the seedlings out. Before we planted, I emptied a 40 litre bag of sheep poo on the garden site, added blood and bone, kinpack sheep dags soil conditioner and dolomite lime and then dug it all over. We've planted the broccoli plants fairly closely - about 20cm apart, but I'm figuring that with the intense amounts of plant food we've given them, they should thrive. I'm not thinking too much about my frustration with broccoli last winter - when my six year old announces he loves broccoli and wants to grow some, there ain't no way I am squashing his enthusiasm.

I also made green tomato chutney. I haven't tasted any yet but am, naturally, hopeful that I haven't wasted my time trying to emulate Barbara Kingsolver merely for all noses to wrinkle when the chutney comes out.

While I was being so clever, I made ratatouille with the gifted field mushrooms, the aubergine which was on special and with our own red tomatoes and (green) zucchini. We had that for tea after snacking on smoked chicken sandwiches for much of the afternoon. A grateful person connected to FH's work gave him a home smoked chicken which we all enjoyed.

The other thing we did was Fionn and I went to the Warehouse. If you don't live in New Zealand, The Warehouse is a huge shop full of all kinds of supposedly cheap things. It makes a big song and dance about being NZ owned and having NZ made products, but the reality is that most of it's stock is made in China. Children love the Warehouse. I'm less excited but as I woke up feeling strong and brave, off we went to buy stationery, a new alarm clock and to research mugs (and from the other in the party, to oggle hot wheels cars).

Lots of very cheap mugs, generally under $5 each with some packs of 4 (that I didn't like) for $6. I realised that all red mugs were ruined because they all look like those Nestle mugs and yes surprise surprise I am a nestle boycotter. So two mugs of pretty floral patterned-ness went into the trolley. But wait. There's more. On the way to the Hot Wheels aisle, I saw a stand of 'urban revolution' branded items on remainder sale. Ha ha ha the irony. I bought, for $2.97 each, some rather styley mugs which were almost definitely made in China, but which had printed upon them, spanish text about Cuba and a romantic photo of a Cuban car and building. So in the capitalist temple, I bought remaindered mugs of probably sweatshop origin which glorified Cuban life, the socialist state which eschews capitalism.

I also bought some daffodils as I had to because they were called 'Sandra' which I've never seen before. It says they are polyanthus type, which I don't understand at all in relation to daffodils. I'll have to raise them in pots on concrete to reduce the likelihood of slugs eating them. By Spring, our garden will be a-slime with slugs and daffodils are a favourite food of the slimeys. So last year we had anemones because they were called St Brighid and this year is my turn. Haven't seen any flowers named for Fionn or FH.

While I was making a mess in the kitchen yesterday, I also got to listen to the second of Margaret Atwood's lectures on debt. Yesterday was debt and sin. Fasicnating stuff. This link gives more information and has the podcast of the lectures.

In a few hours, so long as I don't forget, overcome by the challenge of making school lunches and getting organised after having been awake in the middle fo the night, Brighid and I have a meeting with our local MP. Our local MP is Chris Auchinvole and the fact that he is a National MP hinders me not. He is paid to work for our electorate and I have some work for him. I've been reading and learning about loan sharks. I first started to learn about loan sharks when I saw the Ken Locah movie "Raining Stones" back in the early 1990s. For a nice, sheltered girl like me, it was a powerful eye-opener. Raining Stones is seet in Northern England but I've been finding out about loan sharks in New Zealand, about people in vulnerable situations being loaned money at interest rates of 8% PER WEEK.

Before the last election, there were noises being made about two things related to this topic. The first was a move to limit the interest rates which could be legally charged as parts of Europe, Australia and the US have done. The second was for the government to fund financial literacy education for New Zealanders. I have a particular interest in the effects on vulnerable young people of poor financial skills and knowledge and today I have several suggestions for Chris Auchinvole. I don't know that he is very important in parliament but I aim for him to be better versed on this topic and hopefully inspired to make a difference in some way, locally or nationally.

If I organised my blog nicely, there would be several different posts instead of this one altogether. There would also be a lovely photo of my green tomatoes freshly picked and then another one of the chutney in jars also looking lovely. Perhaps photos of the packet of daffodils and of the MP and of Margaret Atwood or her book and perhaps an image from the movie Raining Stones. But I'm not that kind of girl. You'll know if I ever do acquire such skills as downloading photos as suddenly there will be more photos than text. It's not on the near horizon though.

Goodbye summer

2009-02-28T21:10:00.003+13:00

When we awake tomorrow it will be autumn. The signs have been around us as we rise in the dark on work mornings, wear an extra layer until mid-morning, have shrinking gardening time after dinner.

I've learnt more this summer and have much to treasure from it. Perhaps tomorrow will be the day to make green tomato chutney. I've found a recipe which uses lots of apples as well which works in well with the box out the front which is going soft because it arrived at the same time as visitors brought us lots of fruit.

A treat tomorrow will be eating field mushrooms, picked about 30km north of us and brought as a gift by dinner guests.

Today Favourite Handyman put the rest of the plastic roofing on the new lean-to. C and I escaped to hang out under it while the men did the dishes and the children ran riot through the house. So we have a new outside space for when it is wet.

Fionn and I have started to strip the lounge wallpaper. It looks better already. I can see that once it is finished, the room will look much larger.

I studied the list of the 100 favourite books of all time at the BBC. I've only read just over a quarter of the list which was a rather mediocre showing. So I set to and finally got Salinger's Catcher in the Rye out of the library. I was just starting to find it interesting when everyone got up this morning and with the ensuing massive cleanup for our dinner visitors, I've managed to mislay it. I want to read at least another ten from this list in 2009. If the library doesn't bar me from getting books out permanently that is.

It really would help my bread project if I would remember that I have bread in the oven. Including when it is time to take it out. Getting it out when I can smell it in the next room isn't the best method.

How much is a cup worth?

2009-02-28T07:08:00.004+13:00

My daughter likes to use crockery as a tambourine. Which is why our cupboard of crockery which was not long ago full is now less full and much of what is still there is chipped. Normally I would go down to the Sallies and get some more mugs. Or to the Warehouse and buy some more mugs. But this time, I'm asking a few more questions, not all of them for noble reasons like wanting to save the world with my wallet but some of them approaching such goodness and earnestness.

The mugs at the Sallies were ugly. Which I don't always mind, but as we do have some mugs still left at home and I seem to be going through a phase of wanting things to look gorgeous (I've even been scheming to change the walls in the lounge if you need evidence of the phase), then I fancy some red mugs.

I haven't been to the Warehouse yet as I try and avoid going there. It is a dreadful shop, especially if you have to take children in there with you.

I looked on trademe. I could buy four cow print mugs for $15. Not red obviously, but perhaps some kind of indication of going prices for good second hand mugs.

I looked in our local specialist kitchen shop. Thirty dollars for one mug with a bold print on it.

So what is the real value of a mug?

I've read the literature on the rag trade, the sad tales, the admonishments and the defenders of fabrics and clothes made for a cheap over teh counter price here through the very bad treatment of workers in other parts of the world. I've noticed that the difference between budget and mid price clothing in New Zealand may well be in the mark-up to the retailer, not in the pay and conditions of the sewers in China. I did splash out of my usual op shop buying practice and buy a brand new, New Zealand-made skirt on sale earlier this month. But that was $120 in a half price sale and I still don't know where the material was made. I do know that given the price of fabric locally, my long voluminous skirt, expensive though it was, might not have been any cheaper to make. I don't care what I wear in the garden or at the pub, but for weddings, funerals and work, I try not to look like a slothful pauper.

Back to mugs. I don't know anything about the global trade in crockery. I know that the cheap china set I bought when we last moved house was made in China. I know how a plate is made from the times I watched pottery being made. Growing up in Nelson was lovely like that. I used to cycle round the potteries in the weekend as a teenager, watch what was going on and admire the finished work. I recall that parts of the UK - Shropshire I think - were at least once famous for theeir potteries. But I'm not after beautiful fine bone china. Imagine that as Brighid's tambourine if you wish - I try not to.

I haven't got an answer in this post. But I am on a fact finding mission and I'd appreciate any information anyone has to offer in the comments section.

Arrivals & departures

2009-02-27T20:06:00.002+13:00

Arrived here today:

2 bales of peastraw - to go around the brassicas and leeks I've either just planted or have waiting to plant.
about 3 cubic metres of untreated wood shavings from the local high school wood tech room - otherwise would have gone to the dump. It is now in the chook run where they can poo nitrogen all over it all winter. Come next Spring, it should be in beautiful condition, the soil in the chook run.

Departed here today:

the rocking horse. Part of a big clear out of everything possible in order to make a spartan lounge which we will then tear all the wallpaper from and then FH will paint the walls. Cream or pale butter on the walls and deep red on the board behind the fireplace.
the rest of the avocadoes from the avocado co-op.
Some more clothes for friends' children. We have too many - no two year old needs seven pairs of tights.

Condemned for imminent removal:

photos and letters etc from old boyfriends. Why exactly I thought that all these things needed to survive for the interest of any grandchildren, I do not know. But it's time to lose the junk. It's also possibly time to lose the many photos of people who I once knew and now I don't. Do I really need to keep records and momentoes of everyone I've ever known?
Loads of papery type things like ring binder organisers and overhead projector transparencies and those plastic covers for bits of paper. I don't care if I don't use them much at work either - at least I have room in my work office to store them.
Bags of perennial weeds. Not on my compost thank you. Together with the rather large collection of booze bottles in the garage, they can go to the dump. One of Fionn's favourite activities, smashing beer bottles at the dump. We're all class round here.
More clothes. I think it is safe to assume that as I've given away nearly all of the baby clothes (leaving just the special stuff and the organic clothing for my sister) and FH is still waiting for the motorbike which he asked for when I asked for baby #2, that we are not having more children. Which does rather negate the need for owning maternity togs, which I only wore twice anyway.

Frankly, this needs to be just the beginning on the removal front. I'll never be a minimalist, but I'd like to go a lot further down that path than we are right now.

herbs and dresses

2009-02-23T22:08:00.003+13:00

Two years running now I have sown herb seeds and forgotten about them. My favourite culinary ones I watch out for and if I don't get success with seeds, I tend to buy a plant from the garden shop. Ditto with most vegetables - if I don't get seed success, then I buy seedlings.

Other herbs have fallen by the wayside. Astragalus, elecampane, anise hyssop, chervil to name a few. After the first unsuccessful sowing, I clean forgot about having another go. So come the next day before a full moon, I'm going to sow some more seeds and see what will grow in Autumn. Better do some research before then or I will guarantee another no show on the germination front.

I'm still knitting in the round without a pattern. I've done the skirt part of the planned pinafore (for my daughter who is two) in three different 10-12 ply wools and have now changed down in needle size and length to knit the bodice part in 8 ply. The bottom wool is the lovely home spun home dyed wool from Granity. Then some black boucle type wool leftover from my cardigan last year. Then some red boucle type wool which I bought to do the tension sample for the cardigan and then decided to swap to black. Now I'm knitting the rest in an army green colour which was once in my Grandma's knitting stash waiting for her to turn it into a jersey for Grandad. I'm thinking that when I get to the very top part, I will make long straps which can be buttoned up in more than one spot. Hopefully this means it will last longer.

Today I've harvested the last of the potatoes from our first potato patch and dug blood and bone, dolomite lime and sheep manure into the vacant patch. I've planted cavolo nero (lacinato kale) along the front where I can check for caterpillars and eggs easily. Later this week I will plant leeks along the back. I've also started to prepare the site for Fionn's garden. He has chosen to plant broccoli because he likes eating it now. Enough to warm a mother's heart.

I'm going to try my next batch of coriander in pots. The seedlings which came up from my last sowing have disappeared. Maybe slugs love coriander? I've been trying for all of spring and summer for coriander this year, to no avail.

The way of Lucy Jordan?

2009-02-23T11:59:00.004+13:00

The morning sun touched lightly on the eyes of Lucy Jordan
In a white suburban bedroom in a white suburban town
As she lay there neath the covers dreaming of a thousand
lovers
Till the world turned to orange and the room went spinning
round.

At the age of thirty-seven she realised she'd never
Ride through Paris in a sports car with the warm wind in her
hair.
So she let the phone keep ringing and she sat there softly
singing
Little nursery rhymes shed memorised in her daddy's easy
chair.

Her husband, he's off to work and the kids are off to
school,
And there are, oh, so many ways for her to spend the day.
She could clean the house for hours or rearrange the flowers
Or run naked through the shady street screaming all the way.

At the age of thirty-seven she realised she'd never
Ride through paris in a sports car with the warm wind in her
hair
So she let the phone keep ringing as she sat there softly
singing
Pretty nursery rhymes she'd memorised in her daddy's easy
chair.

The evening sun touched gently on the eyes of Lucy Jordan
On the roof top where she climbed when all the laughter grew too
loud
And she bowed and curtsied to the man who reached and offered her his
hand,
And he led her down to the long white car that waited past the
crowd.

At the age of thirty-seven she knew she'd found forever
As she rode along through Paris with the warm wind in her hair
...

I have liked this Marianne Faithfull song for many years. Earlier this month I turned 37 and I wondered if the song would come to be me at all. When I was much younger I imagined myself living alone in a coastal cottage, wearing purple docs and riding a big motorbike. Right now, the coastal bit is spot on. I bought some purple docs when I first got to London but they didn't fit properly and hurt my feet. Some people are destined never to be hip.

I can still recall studying the play Equus when I was at high school and contemplating this psychiatrist who found his life numbingly normal and partly admired his patients for their lives outside of the norm.

My sister has recently started playing roller derby. She had to send me a youtube clip to explain what it is. You can view it here. The voiceover person at the beginning says she plays roller derby "to keep from melting into an suburban abyss".

hmmmmmmmmmmmm. So at 37 am I melting into a suburban abyss, alone in a white house with nothing to do but dream, stultified by normality? It seems a reasonable perhaps even important question. Particularly given that I am really very happy with my life. Am I too idiotic to want more? Given some recent experiences with people who do live to shop and value clothes over ethics and royal weddings over discussions of what I consider to be the big issues of our time, I am prepared to roll out the arrogance and claim that I am not where I am because of idiocy.

The garden is my anchor, the project which saves me from a life of cleaning. I never rode through Paris during my time in Europe and the UK but I did do a pile of things which made me think, gave me a wonderful sense of freedom and fulfilled some of the dreams of London life which I'd had since I first started to read.

When I first met Favourite Handyman, he shared some of the social justice goals I'd had/have. I'd had boyfriends claiming to be into some of these things before, but they always turned out to drop them once they left university. FH and I have and are getting to work on some of our goals for social justice in our town and I'm really proud of that. Not in big note ways - you won't find us in the local paper. But we are getting to use our skills in ways which empower others.
.
The children don't drive me crazy so much as the house does. But even the house, I'm coming to terms with how we keep from falling into total chaos and accepting that mess is us. We don't make anyone come to visit and when they do we usually find some small space of tidyness for them. We try to be nice like that.

So in a world where big time recession is never far from our newspapers and minds, I've got chooks and a vege garden, budgeting skills, love, books and the blessing of secure employment. I still love Marianne Faithfull's throaty voice, but I think I'll ride through thirty-seven with wind through my hair, dirt under my fingernails and no need for valium just yet. Homeopathic naturopathic nutters like me probably wouldn't choose valium anyway.

Transglutaminase

2009-02-22T14:57:00.002+13:00

Transglutimanase:

"[A] recent study has shown that this enzyme acts on the gliadin proteins in
dough to generate the peptides responsible for triggering the coeliac response
in susceptible people."

Andrew Whitley, Bread Matters, 2006, pp 281-2.

The study Whitley refers to was published in 2005. The authors suggested that transgutimanase be removed from bread products until more research was done. As far as I can find out so far, that has not happened. Can you find out whether your daily bread contains tranglutaminase? Not by looking on the label; tranglutaminase is an enzyme and enzymes do not have to be declared on bread ingredient labels.

Learning about transglutaminase is just one of the valuable things for me about reading Whitley's bread book. As a bread enthusiast with candida issues and a son with raised IgG levels, the possibilities for eating bread which tastes great and is easier to digest and lower in yeast is very attractive. Hence my sourdough project. I'm hoping it becomes a regular part of our cooking and eating life. One of the other attractions of long rise sourdough is the minimal kneading required. At risk of sounding like a decrepit old hag, I do find I get arthritic type pain in my joints if I knead bread for a long time.

Today we have tasted two breads made from my rye sourdough. I've put the rest of the starter into another batch of what I'm learning to call production sourdough which is now in the hot water cupboard until tomorrow. Of course I will be able to keep some of that back for the next batch of bread, but in the spirit of obsessive enthusiasm, I think I'll try making a wheat sourdough starter as well. There is a recipe for a starter using chickpea flour which I fancy making but have banned myself from temporarily. Artekana bread, that one is.

on a bread roll

2009-02-21T22:53:00.002+13:00

Something I have learnt this week: do not collect the eggs and then get distracted weeding the garden. Because not long afterwards, the crunch in my pocket was a too late reminder.

I planted the yellow climbing rose yesterday. Pictures sometime. But it is in the area where we sit on summer evenings and on sunny weekend mornings throughout the year.

Last night I went to a talk put on by the West Coast Horticultural Society. Flash name for the local garden club. Met many friendly fellow gardeners. Today Fionn and I went to the Daltons promotion event at the garden shop and made a mini garden in a planter bag for him. I also got my blueberry plant repotted into a much bigger pot for free and Fionn and I chose winter vegetables for his garden. I grabbed sage and leeks while I was there.

Tonight the four of us went out to a work do and had a truly lovely evening. Of all the places I have worked, here in smallwettown has been home to the workplace which is most welcoming and embracing of our whole family.

I'm back on the breadmaking lark again. This afternoon I made rye bread which had taken several days and just now I have pulled a country loaf out of the oven. Both using rye sourdough, although the second loaf used wheat flour for much of the mixture. Andrew Whitley's book is teaching me a lot. The use of metric weights and of grams rather than millilitres is a pain though given that I don't have electronic scales. So there is a fair bit of guestimating in my measuring. Whitley says these loaves keep very well. If that turns out to be the case, then I could make a lot of our bread for the week in the weekend. Or even do the sourdough parts in the weekend and have a big baking day on Monday. I'm ignoring the white flour recipes for the moment as I currently have 20 kilos of rye and purple wheat and otane wheat flour to bake with.

News of the recession both internationally and domestically continues to roll in. I'm very grateful for our chooks and for our vege garden. We are revising our plans for a holiday next summer in favour of saving for when our car (currently 18 years old) needs replacing. I'd much much prefer to be paying cash than negotiating to pay interest on a loan for a car which will be worth less and less each year.

year of the climber

2009-02-19T21:35:00.002+13:00

Last year was the year of the chooks and a very successful one I think. I learnt a lot and we ate vegetables, herbs and eggs from our garden in increasing quantities.

This year is, I suspect, going to be the year of the climber. I'm still interested in growing as much food as possible, but I've come to the conclusion that flowers are welcome and indeed needed across the fences and the sides of the house. I once thought the climbers would be beans and peas but after two years of very average to poor performances from peas and beans, I think roses and clematis deserve a go instead.

Tonight I gave some time to my little clematis this evening. I pulled the rampant nasturtiums away from it, weeded, watered with my liquid fertiliser brew (mostly seaweed and comfrey) and mulched with pea straw. I retrained the clematis vine which had been vining through the nasturtium to go up the bamboo, with the help of the twine recycled from the bale of pea straw.

I stared through the fence to look at my neighbours' beautiful roses and noticed that they use a dark green rigid mesh (looks like plastic coated wire) to train their roses up. I'll be pricing that down at the garden shop this weekend. As well as putting some up for the clematis, I want some against the house. My pink rose cutting (the one I struck myself) is looking happy so far and I have plans to put more roses in against the house. The house is made of bricks and I think roses growing up against it will look wonderful. Of course, I'll be putting garlic in around each one this coming winter.

In the punga raised bed is my first rose (apart from the ones in front of the lounge which were here when we bought the house) - a Dublin Bay climber. The punga raised bed is otherwise currently swamped by yams. I hope there are some tubers underneath come winter. The foliage is impressive, but not edible. But perhaps once the yams are out I could shift the white rose from the front of the house - the one which rambles and swamps everything else and flops onto the driveway and threatens to puncture the car tyres - into the punga garden where it can flop all over the punga logs and generally spread everywhere. I would still plant vegetables, or herbs at least, around the roses. Maybe carrots would like it in there with them? Maybe 2009 will be the year in which I successfully grow carrots for the first time ever?

I'm still undecided about my yellow banksia climbing rose. It's the yellow thing. I bought it for the front and I'm rethinking the front and moving towards stately tall things and perhaps a bush rose with garlic around it, but not a bold yellow climber after all. Which means the yellow goes somewhere out the back. White, soft pinks and bold reds, really bold reds, I do. But yellow, hmmm less often. Perhaps it could go where the last tiny kale seedling died, beside the rhubarb. Then it wouldn't be in the same eyeframe as my pink rose. Although as I type I'm thinking that two years running a tomato did very poorly in that spot and then the kale died. Perhaps it isn't the place to put a $17 rose. Seventeen dollars might not be super expensive in terms of roses, but it is pretty flash on my scale.

I'm also thinking flowers because the bulb catalogues and advertisements are out now. Every year I imagine that despite a straightened budget that year, the next I might splash out on hundreds of dollars of bulbs and have totally gorgeous profusion. This year is no exception. But I always always allow myself a few new bulbs each Autumn. Last year I left the freesias in the ground amongst the herbs down one side of the house. I got annoyed with the few bulbs which came up along the back of the house as they looked silly in isolation and dumped them on the compost. I gave up on planting special expensive canna lilies as Brighid ripped my one and only out last year and hid it somewhere where it has not grown. I've left the bluebells from last year in along the front of our bedroom and am hopeful that they will come up even more plentiful this year. I think I will get some more for that garden as I ultimately want a thick carpet of spring bloom there. I've already bought some yellow freesias - I planned to plant them around the yellow banksia rose.

Daffodils, which I always assumed were dead easy to grow, haven't done well at this house. Today I read that slugs love daffodil bulbs. I expect that explains the problem. I guess I could raise them in pots (where I can control the slug population fairly well) and transplant in spring.

Tulips are totally and utterly gorgeous and I'd love hundreds of them. I've had mixed success with them here.

I have found a catalogue with snowdrops in it. I've not seen them at the garden shop in the last three years that I've been gardening on the coast, but I have missed them. They were the first sign of imminent spring in the garden of my childhood. Onionweed provides a similar looking, albeit smelly, alternative, but I do fancy the 'real thing'.

On the vege front, the kale and silverbeet is looking well. I am about to cull one poorly tomato and plant some more winter veg. Brighid sat on the cabbages in the weekend so I'm not yet sure if they will survive the ravages of the fat bottomed nappy girl. We are eating our own tomatoes and the beetroot seedlings are perhaps a week off transplanting. The new rhubarb is looking sickly but I figure that often the old leaves die off and just when despair looms very close, new leaves appear.

garden redesign

2009-02-19T16:47:00.002+13:00

Despite knowing upside down and inside out that I should be sowing lettuce seeds every few weeks for a constant supply, I don't, which is why I had heaps go to seed in the hot weather recently and now have none. Could do better.

I am going to dig out some of my roses at the front of the lounge. If a rose can grow from a tiny cutting, then surely one could re-establish itself if I dug most of it's roots out with it? I want to remove the most vigorous white (palest pink actually) rose and re-home it. That should leave room for the others to live in better balance.

The area out the front of the garage is an odd shape and is currently home to potatoes, a globe artichoke, a zucchini, lawn, large and small size flaxes, some almost hidden sunflowers, blackberry and pumpkin, one rose, lots of weeds and a pile of diy materials to be recycled. The new lean-to has diminished this pile nicely. Oh and a huge tree which I don't know the name of which is good for climbing. Also a falling down fence held up by the stump of a formerly invasive tree and around another side some shadecloth rigged up on recycled stakes. I don't want to get a designer in to sort it out, and not because it would be expensive. I really feel that it is our home, my baby garden project and that I want to work it out. Even if it does take a long time. So I have worked out that the flowers need to be to the front and that where I first planted pumpkins actually needs to be a path to get to the climbing tree. I'd like roses there and in the raised bed where the pumpkins are, I'm thinking of garlic and a rose this coming winter. I need to post some photos, take measurements and get my thinking cap on for success.

I am now the very proud and excited owner of Andrew Whitley's book on bread. I made some rye starter and the beginning of a loaf the day before the book arrived. I managed to burn the outside of the loaves but the inside tasted nice. The 100% rye taste is very nice and I plan to make more, next time with a pleasant outside as well as inside.

More firewood today. $345. Better go be a mother again.

garden progress

2009-02-16T19:28:00.002+13:00

We have visitors at the moment. Favourite Handyman's Dad loves to do diy. Which is a pretty good thing in a houseguest given that he is also good at it. So they are building a lean-to on one of the sheds. They were talking about putting old roofing iron as the roof covering which may have squared with FH's ideas about using it for storing firewood, but didn't square so well with my ideas of using it as a greenhouse for frost tender plants and for raising seedlings.

So it was with a certain pleasure that I heard last night that the old roofing iron has too many holes in it to function as a cover to keep wood dry. Today fil and I went shopping for see-through plastic corrugated roofing. The wooden structure to support the lean to is now made and apparently the current focus is on spouting. I've also been hearing about something called flashings. I certainly have a renewed respect for the size of even seemingly small building projects costwise. We had a lot of wood to recycle, but still spent over $150 on wood just for a small lean-to.

My parents-in-law arrived with some rhubarb plants. These rhubarb plants were once in a garden of FH's in Canterbury a long time before I met him. Some of them then went up to Auckland and were divided and flourished in the garden of our brother in law. Who has now, many many years later, sent some down to us. I had to do a lot of weeding to get a spot ready but two out of three of them are now in the garden.

I planted my first rose cutting outside the study last week and it appears to be happy. In the weekend I went shopping for garden supplies and another blueberry plant and used up my garden shop loyalty card. Which meant I could choose a frivolous treat. So I am now the rather pleased owner of a yellow banksia climbing rose, which will go out the front. Out the front is the current plan but I am wondering if the area is too exposed to seabreezes for roses. There is certainly loads of old fencing to be covered all round the back garden where it is more sheltered. Although the back garden was supposed to be pink rose-wise, not yellow plus pink. I'd love to have garden spaces with colour themes, or at least harmonious colour accents, but I'm not sure I have the self-discipline to really make that happen.

On the kitchen front, I went to use the most recent batch of 'sun dried tomatoes' and could see danger signs instantly. I had overdried the first batch but I don't think that is dangerous, just cosmetically not so good. But the next batch went in too juicy. I opened the jar to find the top one puffed up and white growths. I licked one and rinsed my mouth out straight away. Not just unpleasant tasting but I had the warnings of botulism ringing in my ears.

I seem to have settled on a kefir management routine. Apart from if I know someone wants some as a starter, I eat almost half of the grains each day (yes mine is back to growing very quickly in the hot water cupboard). Combined with a little honey or jam it makes a lovely yoghurt like dessert or addition to a bowl of muesli. Yeah I've read the nourishing traditions and other soaking grain advice and I still have muesli sometimes. Just goes to show what an irresponsible person I can be. I comfort myself with the knowledge that as yet I'm not including brandy in my breakfast. I have a ways to fall yet.

another day in paradise

2009-02-11T19:24:00.002+13:00

It is paradise. Paradise. We are all alive, most particularly Favourite Handyman and Fionn and Brighid and I are alive.

I don't take it for granted. We live very close to Fionn's school. But a state highway lies between our road and the school. A busy state highway and despite endless lobbying, we have never been allowed a pedestrian crossing or lollipop flags much less the overhead bridge which would be much better. About half of the school population lives on our side of the big road.

Every day the staff of Fionn's school take turns bringing all the children across the big busy road and across the smaller one which runs parallel on the other side of the train track. We don't worry too much about crossing the train track as there are never more than three trains per day. Trains don't speed up from nowhere.

At the end of each school day, the traffic is crazy. Dense and going in all directions. Sometimes people stop to allow the staff to cross the children over the road. Sometimes we all wait a very long time for a gap to cross the road in. Last week a parent from our school stopped. Another car from behind came up and overtook from the inside.

Where are you going that is more important than the lives of our children?

If you have never encountered the short story The Lottery by Shirley Jackson, then it is an interesting read and provides much food for thought. I feel like our community is living that story each time we cross the state highway to and from school.

In other news, I made scones with my organic freshly zentrofan milled otane flour today. I thought they were a bit average actually. It could be that I didn't put enough liquid in them or it could be that given otane flour is a good flour for gluten sensitive people to eat, I need to add a bit of gluten flour to the mix, or adjust the raising agents. Or just experiment more. I am making another sourdough starter with the zentrofan rye. It was bubbling for the past two days but not today. That happened another time but this time I shall not chicken out and turf it. I fed it some water and flour and we'll box on experimenting.

I investigated tools (weapons?) for making sauerkraut today. I am the weird one who plagues the fancy kitchenware shop we have in town. Last time I wanted the perfect strainer for kefir. Just read Nikki's blog (comments) about how much sauerkraut smells. I think it would be wise to save the experiment until after this weekend when my parents in law are in residence.

At lunchtime I went to my first meeting of the Blackball Working Class History Museum Trust. The website is down at the moment but I'll update when it is going. The Trust has been going for a while before I was asked to join - probably a few years I think. Today's meeting wasn't riveting - financial accounts and debates on where the windows should go aren't really my thing - but I think the concept is fabulous and look forward to being able to contribute more later on.

love, food & laundry

2009-02-09T19:49:00.002+13:00

Today, from a capitalist viewpoint, I achieved nothing. I did not buy anything, or work for money, or covet anything material.

But...

On the way back from the school run (hardly onerous, we live across the road from Fionn's school), I saw my friend R and her boy. They had stopped to pick up their avocadoes. I run a small avocado co-op. So R and L came in and we spent the morning and lunch together. While the children played, we caught up on news and weeded the area around the sandpit.

In the afternoon I did more kitchen stuff to gain some order from my stock making missions of the night before and got the tomatoes cooking into rich pasta sauce. Then school run again and soon after P and his daughter A dropped off some of their washing. They live out of town on tank water and are low on water. Later they called back and chatted while I made dinner. Then dinner and family time before Favourite Handyman went back to work.

In the middle of that the laundry went. The washing machine and I breathe at similar rates. If you were paranoid about my health, you would put a checking device on the washing machine and call the ambulance people if it hadn't been in use for a certain (rather small) number of hours. I didn't buy the machine to look at.

So we ate 'proper' food and we linked up with our friends and I'd had such a nice day I was even moderately patient with my children between 4.30 and 7pm, which is something I am not generally good at.

Those speculatey people can go and speculate on their false promises and buy and sell imaginary paper money goods (or e-money goods). I have no plans to join them. A life of love is a life worth living.

Gelatine Sunday

2009-02-08T21:43:00.003+13:00

Two lots of stock today. I started the beef stock last night and cooked it in the slow cooker until midday today. Then I switched the cooker off and left the stock to cool until it was manageable. It is now strained and in the fridge. Minestrone later in the week I expect. Too bad that it is summer and thus quite heavy food. But any other favourites for using beef stock which are more summery in style are welcome.

The fish stock is cooking as I type. That will be used tomorrow night for potato and green olive tagine. Currently we have neither green olives or a tagine dish in the house but this recipe from Cuisine magazine has worked with lots of adaptations in the past so should work tomorrow also.

I also made sushi and basil pesto today. The tomato pasta sauce I am leaving for tomorrow. A girl can only be so good in the kitchen in one day. I put some finely chopped celery in the sushi as according to Laksmi my herbal/cranio-sacral/massage therapist, celery is very very good for me. So is ginger, which I also put in the sushi. I've been reading more on Chinese medicine and some people are deficient and others are excess. I'm excess. I am also damp and need cooling and drying foods. Well well well. It's quite fun being a food nutter. All sorts of new things to try and to think about. The book I am consulting for all of this (Paul Pitchford, Healing with Whole Foods) also says alcohol is bad. I did go alcohol free Monday - Friday last week, but not in the weekend. I'm not that committed.

I forgot completely about today being seed sowing day until I read Nikki's blog tonight once it was dark. Seed sowing is risky with Brighid around anyway. But I did spread some more pea straw on the old chook run. I left one tomato to grow along the ground unstaked as an experiment. I'd read somewhere that they can grow well like this. We are eating yummy cheery tomatoes from this snaking along plant and tonight I discovered that it has made roots in new places. One way of increasing the nutrient intake I guess.

I also watered the zucchinis and globe artichoke with my seaweed and comfrey brew. I've been watering the tomatoes and brassicas with this over the past few days but I've still got a few litres left. My comfrey plants have grown vigorously, all in places where many other plants don't grow. Two plants are in the shade and in a relatively dry spot. Two plants are in partial shade which is a bog for all of spring. As nothing else grows in the boggy spot, I'm going to put more comfrey there for next year. I've cut most of the comfrey down and chopped it up. It has half filled my large rubbish bin and been covered with water and then with the lid. Next time I go out to the beach north of smallwettown, I'll gather seaweed and add it to the brew.

The strip of garden along the back of the house is one I made myself in early 2007. I started with broad beans (which we mostly didn't eat) and then grew tomatoes in it last summer. The celery I put in there lasted all winter and the brassicas have done moderately well this summer. It is on quite a slope though and the bottom part gets very wet during the very wet season which here is about nine months of the year but particularly in Spring. I have often looked at it and thought we need to wait until we can afford a truck load of compost, or a trailer load at the very least.

But my latest, and definitely better, plan, is to build it up in small sections. I started last week with the mushroom compost. The rocket is poking through there and the radiccio (which I misnamed chicory when I last blogged about it) is looking healthy. Tonight I found a piece of wood and used it to set up a small terrace effect just under a metre below where the mushroom compost patch finished. Then I sprinkled dolimite lime, boron and powdered blood and bone. I covered that with sheep poo and covered the sheep poo with kinpack powdered sheep manure which is a product from ground up sheep dags. Then I forked on big wads of pea straw and grass clippings from the compost heap. I have only just remembered that this is possibly the site where I buried the chicken bones last week. It should be Jack and the Beanstalk country at this rate. I watered all that in with the hose and in a week or so I'll plant some seedlings.

A few weeks ago, maybe a month, I took cuttings from my neighbour's rambling rose bush. I potted up three cuttings and two of them 'took'. So I have them on the outside table hardening up a bit before I plant them. I had thought all new flower acquisitions would go in the side garden but I already have red and orange flowers there and the rambling rose cuttings are pink. Perhaps I should put them in along the back of the house, which would suit pink. Where I have just made the richest new soil imaginable? Hmmm. Then I could add garlic there in winter. Given that garlic and roses make each other so happy in the garden. Then maybe as there are two cuttings, I should put the other one along the side fence out the back (no I don't expect anyone else to visualise where that might be!) where a kale plant died last week. Hmmmmm. I was thinking more veges for those spots but gardens don't have to be all veges (though mine has to be mostly veges). I guess I'll have to sort out trellis or some kind of training apparatus for the roses, no matter where they go.

On the subject of roses, I assumed that the yellow one I planted out the very front by the big climbing tree and on the edge of the driveway, would be swamped and suffering. Everything else in the yellow garden patch seems to be rather overgrown. But no, it is growing and indeed has a flower on it. So it can stay there, where I shall build up some rich goodies like blood and bone and compost around it, and eventually it can wind and twirl itself along the old fence which borders the driveway and smother it with yellow roses. There might be a lot of mess and rough edges on our section, but it most surely is growing food, flowers and pleasure for my family.

More on food

2009-02-07T20:43:00.004+13:00

Not something I'm about to suffer, but this article about orthorexia, when people's lives become taken over by food dogma, is very interesting.

I am still reading as much as I can easily get my hands or eyes on about immune system building foods. It all seems to come back to the health of the gut. I'm watching Nikki's blog with great interest as her family embark on a diet to heal their guts, specifially in support of Nikki's young son who has had big health challenges of late.

Today I found some more broth ingredients. We had to go to Hokitika to get the car fixed, so got to shop at the fishmongers and at the local craft and produce market. The fishmonger gave me bones for stock for free and checked that I knew how to make the fish stock without it going bitter. So tonight I am putting beef bones to cook overnight and tomorrow I will make fish stock. I am looking around and thinking of recipes to use my broths in to expand from my standard risotto and soup usages.

I found the Hari Hari butcher's caravan and had a chat with the butcher. He doesn't use West Coast animals for his meat either, though he would very much like to. He has a homekill service as part of his business but is not allowed to sell that commercially. The costs of setting up a commercial abbatoir are prohibitive (I've heard this from another butcher on the coast recently too) and so his meat comes from Canterbury. Drives me insane. The logic of these regulations is very unclear. I was relaying this to the goat cheese people on the way home when I stopped to buy feta and they agreed. They had huge hoops to jump through to get their cheese production okayed and are still not allowed to export.

But the cheese people had another story for me. They used to farm beef cattle. Two of their three year old beasts tested positive for TB and so they were given $100 for each animal. They were not allowed to buy them back themselves. So they researched and found out where the animals went. They go into the supermarket meat chain. They calculated that each beast would have produced, for the people who paid only $100, six thousand dollars' worth of meat. Errrm, where are the ethics in all of this?

Last night I got out in the garden. I weeded the old chook run and pulled out spent plants and thinned where things were growing too thickly. Some of the lettuce has bolted or become bitter already so much of the lettuce went to the compost or the chook run. I removed zillions of caterpillars and eggs and still found some fat caterpillars feasting on the same plants this morning. I am part way through mulching the old chook run with pea straw.

Returning to term time, with school runs, tired children and me working part time, has turned me into a weekend gardener for the moment. It has also had an impact on my projects inside - I've nearly forgotten the kefir. But slowly I am getting some rhythm back and I've got my kefir tasting nice again. I bought a huge bunch of basil today (and somehow spent $23 on less than 400gms of pine nuts later on - ouch) and so have pesto to make tonight. I also want to get some sourdough going again. There isn't much point me paying good money for freshly milled organic flour if I leave it in the container untouched for months...

Then there are the tomatoes I bought this afternoon for making pasta sauce...

I fall off the good food wagon on a fairly regular basis, almost always when I am short of time. Today's pie for breakfast is an extreme example, but it isn't a once a year phenomenon. The hot chips we shared after swimming this afternoon now scream 'naughty' at me given all the reading I've been doing on carbohydrates, but they did taste very yummy. As I wasn't dressed this morning when our kind panelbeating friend rang to say it was time to get going and meet him, a chilly bin full of healthy goodies to sustain us on our day out was a romantic and pleasant idea, not something that was going to become reality. Once we were home again and the children had two parents in the house at once, I cooked proper food for dinner. I made raita to go with the fish, potatoes and salad and reflected that raita is probably a good condiment for probiotic purposes.

I've been seeing something called 24-hour yoghurt crop up in my gut healing reading. I presume this is any old yoghurt (including easiyo?) which has been fermented for 24 hours before going in the fridge? Because if it is, then I've been making that for a while now, 100% because I so often forget about the yoghurt's existence until 24 hours after I've put it down to culture. Although the packet says 8 hours, I generally do a minimum of 12, even on days when my memory is functioning well.

broth

2009-02-03T22:10:00.002+13:00

I've been learning more recntly about the benefits of eating broths. The minerals and gelatin in the meat based broths are wonderful things. Or so the books and websites tell me.

Last night we ate risotto made from chicken stock (home made stock but not home grown chicken). Tonight we ate lamb shanks with some of the juices from cooking them (in the slow cooker) poured over the top. I kept the unused juices from the cooking dish. They are in the fridge now and sometime tomorrow I will work out how to maximise our broth goodies by cooking the evening meal using the shank broth.

I guess I'll be at the butcher's more from now on.

a change of pace

2009-02-02T22:06:00.002+13:00

The long languid days of summer have turned into hot sticky days of school and work. I didn't even go to work today, just organised everyone else, and that alone wore me out. I'll get my stamina back some time this month I guess.

Kept my sunglasses on as I watched Fionn (6) in his new class and then watched the whole school assembly...

I even started proper mother activities like swimming lessons. I was the taxi and financial provider for them, not the actual lesson provider.

Tonight I have made lunches for everyone for tomorrow as we all hit the term time world then. I have put all the ingredients bar the hot water for spicey lamb shanks in the slow cooker. I figure the shanks can thaw out overnight and at breakfast time I will add the hot water and turn the slow cooker on. So that's tomorrow's dinner sorted. I have two loads of washing on the line ready to dry tomorrow and the nappy wash is on as I type. I've got the oats soaking in whey and water overnight (a la Sally Fallon) for tomorrow's porridge. I've got that going as a routine finally and hope that indeed the children do absorb more nutrients from the porridge with the phytates neutralised. Fionn has stopped asking me suspiciously if I've been putting kefir in the porridge because it tastes different. My children seem to be able to sniff out and reject products with kefir in them from a distance of metres.

I buried the bones from my most recent batch of chicken stock in the garden this afternoon. A friend who visited a few months ago recommended this as a way of returning nutrients to the soil and this is the first time I have made it happen. I don't know if this means that my whole garden will eventually be a graveyard or not. Maybe chicken bones rot down soonishly, but I suspect large beef bones would take longer.

Back to the subject of kefir. I got sick of the dishes and milk outlay involved in changing the kefir milk every day. So instead of several jars of kefir (old Hellmanns mayo jars of just over 800gm capacity) with the plastic lids on loosely, I put the kefir in a 2 litre jar with cling film over the top and put it in the ingredients cupboard instead of the hot water cupboard. I also got slack about the proportions and often only put as much milk in as there were grains. I only drained the kefir every second day and found this less of a hassle and less of an expense. I was using huge amounts of expensive organic milk every week on the old system. Except that today when I drained the milk off and sat down to have a kefir drink and check my email, the stuff tasted disgusting, really acidic.

So back to the drawing board, or to the hot water cupboard anyway. I've read that kefir can almost always be resurrected, except if it has turned pink or brown and my kefir has done neither of those things. I've split the grains into two old mayo jars and topped up with milk on a roughly 1:5 ratio and put the jars in the hot water cupboard. I'll be draining and adding fresh milk every day and we'll see what shape the kefir is in in a week's time.

My order of freshly milled organic flour from Terrace Farms arrived this morning. So I have rye and purple wheat and otane wheat - 20kgs in total. I can report that although brown paper bags have that enviro-aware aura, they also tear very easily. I'll have to rebag two of the four bags into plastic already. Come Wednesday and hopefully some time not at work, I'll get a rye sourdough starter going. Although I have tentatively booked in to clean my friend's chook house out then and nothing as unimportant as a food project will be allowed to get in the way of a compost project...

I will stick to using up my wool scraps...

2009-02-01T19:28:00.002+13:00

Last I wrote that I was part way through the gorgeous homespun and home dyed wool from Granity and that after that I would move on to other balls in my stash. A stash which I had thought was too small to be called a stash before I cleaned the study and faced the sum total of all the balls previously in bags all over the place. Today I used up the homespun wool and thought how very beautiful the dress would look if I picked out the green in the variegated wool at our local wool shop and did the rest of the dress in soft green.

Two things.

The wool shop is not open on a Sunday, it is Sunday today and I want to carry on with the dress.

We were at friends for lunch today and one of our friends talked about how people on secure jobs (very luckily, this includes us) are in an improved position and should spend up a bit. This really jarred with me, as it did the first time someone I heard the idea (from someone else again). It doesn't feel right. Is it because I feel there is too much wasteful consumption clogging up our planet? Is it because I feel sick, as I do, at the idea that I am benefitting from the misfortune of others as our mortgage interest rate drops and shop prices fall while others no longer have a job?

So I am continuing on the dress using up my odd balls of wool. I am knitting in black now.

Not to freeze

2009-01-31T23:10:00.002+13:00

To freeze or not to freeze is a discussion we seem to have at least every year at my place. Do we need a chest freezer? No. Would a chest freezer be very useful? Yes. Can we afford one right now. No. So I guess we'll shelve that one until next year.

I bought mushroom compost to build up the garden underneath the study window. Brighid considers it her new playground. If I can get up before her tomorrow, then I will plant the chicory there and sow some rocket and coriander and peas (and hope she forgets about the area). Chicory looks very pretty so far. As far whether I will like the taste, I'll report on that later in the year.

I found the right parts for the food processor liquidiser attachment. I made a blueberry, kefir and maple syrup smoothie. I liked it. The children did not. Ah well, at least my intestinal flora is getting the good treatment.

I have started Brighid's knitted dress again. This time I cast on by knitting into the front of the previous stitch, just as my mother taught me years ago. It made a neater and tighter edge and was much easier to prevent twisting given that I'm doing the circular needles lark again. Last attempt I cast on by making loops with my finger and sliding them on. Won't be doing that for circular knitting again. So I have 40 grams of this gorgeous wool from the Granity craft shop and then I'll have to switch to something else when that runs out. I do have some leftover bobbly black alpaca wool of the same thickness from when I knitted my posh cardi last year. When I get to the bodice part, I think I'll switch to 8 ply. I have some plain black 8 ply left from knitting Fionn's sleeveless hoodie. It's quite fun making it all up. The skirt part is surely not difficult and I'll use the size 2 version of the sleeveless hoodie pattern to guide me for the bodice. When I read Heather Nicholson's book on the history of knitting in New Zealand, she observed that in parts of Europe they rarely bother with a pattern. So I'm feeling rather European and I will feel rather more European if I pull it off and the dress is pretty and easy to wear.

My chillis are coming along nicely. I have a renewed interest in chillies as Paul Pitchford says that they are strengthening to the lungs. There was a doctor in California who found surprisingly low rates of respiratory problems amongst Hispanic smokers in Los Angeles and attributes it to chilli intake (presumably more than guesswork - the book I read doesn't elaborate much). So given Favourite Handyman is still scaring me with his lung burning habits and given that he likes chillies and hot foods, I might make up some harissa (or surely I could buy some decent harissa though maybe not locally) for him to add to whatever he likes.

food project rationalisation

2009-01-30T12:09:00.002+13:00

I made some beetkvass. I'd done a bit of online research and learnt that sometimes it does better than others. Mine was just salty pink water. I threw it out after drinking just a few mouthfuls. I'll try again when I have my own beetroot ready in the garden. Apparently the fresher the beetroot, the better the kvass.

I made ginger beer. It is nice. Very fizzy. But the children aren't overly fussed and I notice we are drinking it when we would otherwise drink water. So I'm leaving that for now. I might try again next summer.

The kefir is still bolting along. I've moved it out of the hot water cupboard which has slowed things down a bit. I'm still drinking it and I've made more banana muffins with it this morning. School goes back for Fionn next week so I've been baking baking and freezing lots of muffins for school lunches. Oh what a nice mummy I am.

Tomatoes. We got given a lovely bag of tomatoes earlier this week. Lots of different varieties, all home grown. We've eaten and cooked a few and I've sliced the remainder and put in the dehydrator this morning. I'll turn them into a jar of olive oil and herbs when they are nearly dry.

I'm reading Paul Pitchford's Healing with Whole Foods at the moment. It is very interesting. I suspect it is going to trigger another round of new foods/new recipes experimenting. I've got plenty to learn about Chinese nutritional theory, yin and yang and the five elements, not to mention all sorts of things about every kind of food.

Images from January

2009-01-29T19:44:00.003+13:00

These were taken a couple of weeks ago. Above is our front of house potato patch. Favourite Handyman built the raised bed for this patch just before Christmas.

Here is kale (red russian and cavolo nero) and borage, with tomatoes, lettuces, Maori potatoe, thyme and peas in the background or around the edges. This is part of the old chook run.

A photo from our day out mussel collecting on the beach further up the coast from us.

This is the raised bed which I built in January 2008. It produced some reasonable food over the last few months but I felt it wasn't high enough and noticed the spinach had yellowing on its leaves in this patch. So we piled it high with compost and pea straw and sheep and chook poo. Since this photo, I've planted cabbage, kale, cauliflower and broccoli in this patch.

The flowers in the vase are feverfew. It grew so prolifically that I've had to cut it back hard in order to let light in on the nearby parsley. I like to have a lot of parsley in the winter garden. It's magical stuff nutritionally. The wee pots on the table have basil in them. The orange and yellow flowers behind the table are calendulas. They grow there all year round since I cleared and composted that area. Calendulas are my personal emblem of hope and strength for my friends who are trying to conceive or who are pregnant. Right now Tania, they are glowing brightly and producing more and more flowers (despite Brighid's enthusiasm for picking them and making floating bowls in the rain-filled wheelbarrow). I'm still praying for you and your lovely baby throughout each day.

The corrugated iron you can see behind the table will be made into a very high raised bed in the too wet garlic patch later this year. The wooden pallet will go underneath the wood when it gets stacked (soon I hope) and the old car tyre will go in the corner on top of another tyre in order to make a cactus home. We have one cactus in a tyre and one of my latest ideas is to make a corner feature of cacti in tyres at different heights (i.e different numbers of tyres as the bases for the plants). Then I will dig bokashi along that strip against the fence, slowly across this coming winter. Eventually, the entire fence line will glow with flowers. The plant beside the calendulas is a canna lily. It has shot up and started to flower since I took this photograph.

camping

2009-01-27T13:54:00.002+13:00

Two nights away camping. It was fabulous. I think we should live in a tent all the time (apart from the heating in winter issue). We just don't need so much of the stuff in our house. I've come home ready to do a deeper cull.

We stayed at Nelson Creek, an old gold mining village up the Grey Valley (West Coast still). We walked past many relics and reflected on the lure of gold over the centuries. We swam and lazed around and watched the children and made friends with another family. There is a church (not generally used I think) and a pub (generally used) and a few houses clustered near the camping ground. The pub had a corner devoted to the photos of the past, including the century of the Nelson Creek School.` Wow. I recognised many of the family names and realised that they go back over 100 years in this part of the West Coast. My family have never stayed in one place for more than one generation.

Yesterday we drove further up the road and went to Lake Haupiri which was very serene and totally beautiful.

I found out more about a local homekill abbatoir. Although we have a good local(ish) butcher, he still sources his meat from Canterbury and I want to shift our meat consumption entirely to locally grown meat, not just locally processed. I am in the process of sorting out a co-op for half an organic (beef) beast for this winter. I'm making sure I get the bones as well as I've been reading more about the benefits of bone broths. Perhaps we do need a chest freezer after all. I have made a space for one with the last revamp of our home.

I have finished Fionn's sleeveless hoodie. It would look better with the edges on the sleeves (I certainly won't be undoing it to put them on!) and the pattern is very odd with respect to the way the hood attaches to the rest of the vest, but you can't tell when it is on. It looks good on. Fionn now wants me to make knitted trousers to go with it to complete the bumblebee outfit look. A vain desire.

Brighid is now two. She now has even more clothes than before and it is truly ridiculous. She also has the cradle which my great grandparents gave me when I was one and which Mum has repainted and made a mattress and linen for. Mum and Dad put (another!) doll in for her as well but Mum doesn't like the clothes the doll arrived from the shop in. Maybe I will use some of the rather significant stash of wool I found when I cleaned the study and knit a doll's dress. Maybe. I'm going to do the sewing night class at the local high school again this term. Last time it was winter and I missed a few sessions due to bad health and weather. So all I did from a supposedly eight week course was turn one dress into a skirt, sew some nappy wipes and cut out a pair opf pyjama pants. I'm hoping to at least manage to finish the pyjama pants and do something else as well. I do enjoy the chat though, which slows me down just like it did when I was in the classroom years ago!

The garden is looking well. I found the magic stick thing for saving files and photos onto when I cleaned up but I forget which safe place I put it into. Or the proper name for the magic stick. It is peak white butterfly season and I spend some time every day peeling off caterpillars and killing them. Tomatoes still seem to be slow even although the weather is wonderful. When they do ripen, Brighid and the blackbirds eat them. Brighid gets stuck in before they ripen sometimes. I have started to harvest the first potato patch.

I'm off now to make a bigger pile of things to give to the charity shop. We need fewer things in this house.

cauliflower mousse

2009-01-24T21:59:00.002+13:00

Dad gave us a beautiful cauliflower from his garden earlier this week. We also had stale bread (due to my low carb project) and a small glut of eggs. So I pulled out my Amrita recipe book (Wellingtonions may remember the restaurant which produced the book) and found cauliflower mousse.

They did: eggs, cauliflower, onion, bread crumbs, cheese, milk, optional sunflower seeds

I did: eggs, cauliflower, onion, bread crumbs, cheese, kefir, brazil nuts, garlic, rosemary, thyme, marjoram and oragano.

We are drowning in kefir. I have it all out of whack because I am not a smoothy maker and I think I've lost the rubber seal for the smoothie attachment on my food processor so the children have not had any more kefir than a few teaspoons on their porridge. We have had kefir cheese and Favourite Handyman likes it and I drink kefir twice most days but it is hot here and the stuff is growing so fast that the milk is getting expensive. I was pleased to oblige when one friend rang today and explained that her husband had put the kefir in the fridge (I gave her a big jar of grains two days ago) and killed it and could she have some more.

So kefir instead of milk in the mousse and all the herbs and garlic because the original sounded rather plain. Brazil nuts because I am trying to up my selenium levels and it can't harm the rest of the family to get a bit more selenium.

It tasted very nice. For anyone fancying making the recipe, you saute the onions, garlic and then drop in the herbs for the second half of the sauteeing time. You cut up the cauli into small pieces and then put in a pot, bring to the boil and then strain water off. Grate the cheese (any old cheddar though I expect if you had fancy stronger hard cheeses they would be nice as well). Whizz up the bread into crumbs. I used grainy bread. Chop up the brazil nuts quite finely. Mix everything except the milk/kefir and the eggs together. Then beat the milk/kefir and the egg yolks together and mix in to the rest. Finally beat the egg whites until fluffy and then fold in. Put in a greased casserole and bake for about an hour at 180 degrees celsius.

I've been reading about brassicas being especially good for us human beings. I've also decided that I need to get to like cauliflower more and eat it more as it does grow in winter.

I served the mousse with sliced carrots and red peppers and a dollop of hummous. If I had been a less frazzled person at ten-to-six, I would have added something dark green as well. But frazzled I was and frazzled at ten-to-six is not the slightest bit uncommon.

summer, recycling

2009-01-24T08:46:00.005+13:00

Summer is so beautiful, especially as January passes, that I almost fear to write, to acknowledge that the days are passing. Fionn is at his grandparents' at the moment and thus early mornings here are very quiet. Last night we went out to dinner and then walked along the beach. Brighid and Favourite Handyman both collected pieces of wood for the raised bed gardens and carried them back on their shoulders. Brighid wore a very beautiful smocked dress a friend had made for her and gifted when she was born. With a full skirt and a bow at the back, it is similar to the dresses my mother made for my sister and I when we were small. This one had spaghetti and berry sauce down the front and was wet from the sea around the hem by the end of the evening. It was made with love and she had fun while wearing it.

I bought some chicory seedlings the other day and now have to prepare a spot to plant them in. I sowed chicory seed last year but none of it germinated.

Now the market for recycled glass, plastic and metals has collapsed world wide, stories of recycling centres struggling to stay afloat are making the papers frequently. For me, living in a place which is a long way from anywhere, I think it is an opportunity to ask some different questions about recycling. Everywhere I have lived in the last ten or so years, we've been talking about recycling. Good services, bad services, improving services. The range of recycling services seems a badge of how enlightened a council is. For a city dweller, putting the recycling out, applauding the council or berating them according to their level of collection, is a pleasant way of feeling green.

But why the hell should we feel better about shipping plastics to China (how much fuel is that, not to mention how much fuel to get it all to whichever port it leaves New Zealand from) instead of putting them in our own local landfill? Is China not doing enough of our dirty work by producing clothes and toys and electronic goods cheaply and sweatedly, to feed our consumer desires?

I would like to see a lot more focus from the council here in smallwettown on composting. Food waste is one very significant portion of household waste that need never leave town. For many people, given that we live in a low density housing area where hardly anyone is in a flat without a bit of garden, most of the food waste need never leave our gates.

There is nothing saintly about my supermarket consumption. Nothing at all. We don't buy readymade foods like packaged pizzas and fish fingers, but we do seem to acquire a significant amount of packaging waste each week. There is no waste packaging from my home made kefir, but come term time, I do humour my son who has no tv and generally wierd parents and who especially asks for bought yoghurt not the home made kind for school. I say no to him about 8005 times per week, so the odd yes to yoghurt does not constitute ridiculousness to my mind. We usually buy bottled beer, but when I know we are having guests or will drink a rigger in a day, then I go to the fill your own liquor shop. They have Harrington's Wobbly Boot on tap for $9 a 2 litre bottle and it is a very nice drop.

There is more I can do to reduce packaging coming into my home and with a little more steel resolve, those reductions will become permanent. But I've stopped thinking that the council needs to collect all my crap and send it to China. Frankly, I hope everyone will rethink the way that we treat China as our lower class relation, servant and dumping ground.

magnesium

2009-01-21T12:45:00.003+13:00

Just for the record, so I can compare with next month's craze (hopefully something more exciting like vodka cocktails), I am thinking about magnesium a lot. I've been stepping up my project to learn more about the immune system and how to improve it. Seeing as I can't shove myself in anyone's womb and dictate that I'll have breastmilk and organic wholegrain grits thrice soaked in whey from Mohammed via the Caucasus. It's all too late on the setup front. Antibiotics, anasthetics and too many carbohydrates.

Last week it was all calcium. Then I found some more information and it turns out calcium is nothing without magnesium. And if I've concentrated properly, which is possible given that the small people who always want to be fed are away today, too much calcium can present similarly to too little calcium and really the issue is magnesium. Apparently they are antagonistic to each other, which is not quite what I was looking for. Harmony of my bodily elements is a much more appealing concept. I think.

Less sugar, less carbohydrates. Or is that fewer? Once I had a job where you risked being fired if you used fewer and less the wrong ways around.

Anyways, there are white butterflies hanging around my brassicas. Perhaps I should go evict them and scrape eggs off the leaves.

Magnesium and white butterflies. Yes, I am still on my lunch break from cleaning.

momentuous times

2009-01-21T12:09:00.002+13:00

I've got the radio on, listening intermittently to news of Barack Obama's inauguration. Big big deal.

I've got the entire house to myself for the whole day. Big big deal.

I am cleaning the study. It is a very small room, our study, described as a sunroom when we bought the house. In it we have my computer, FH's computer, my sewing machine, my craft stuff, all of FH's books, all of FH hobby/craft things, important papers, anything we don't the children to touch AND A TRULY PHENOMENAL AMOUNT OF RUBBISH. I can't clean it effectively with small people in the house as it does require removing the toddler gate. I have filled two black sacks already and I'm gunning to fill another. Perhaps by the end of the mission I will be able to find the tape measure. Today AND each subsequent time that I want to use it.

I'm only cleaning my side of it. We like being married, Favourite Handyman and I. That's why we don't tidy each other's mess if throwing out is part of the tidying process.

I did imagine writing or gardening all day but when the day dawned I decided to create some space where I could think and write and sew and knit for the rest of the year. Good luck to me. This is my lunch break. I'm not even hungry which is an odd sign all by itself.

Three quarters of the way up the hall is lined with boxes removed from my half of the study. Which need to be dealt with. There are more boxes to go into the hallway yet. I need to get a lot more ruthless yet. By the end of this there will be no excuse for not fixing the sewing machine. To give myself some kind of encouragement I am getting rid of lots of the clothes which need fixing. I don't want to spend all year playing Frugal Mother Seamstress.

Mercy

2009-01-19T22:00:00.003+13:00

In many ways, today was a good one. I found four nice tops and nearly 100gms of New Zealand made sock wool (i.e. old wool as no sock wool is made in New Zealand now) at the Salvation Army charity shop. Fionn and I had a lovely time making gingerbeer (the mixing and bottling phase) and then planting beetroots and brassicas in the garden. We planted some of the brassicas in generous pockets of potting mix straight into the compost which I had layered thickly on one of the raised beds. Later all four of us got involved in shifting the grass clippings (gifted to us by the local school groundsperson) from the front of the house to various compost spots. Later again we looked after our friend's 20 month old son, spending the sun filled summer evening at the playground by the beach near us and then watching as the children and the chooks clucked and chuckled at each other again and again and again. Once our young friend had gone home I made beet kvass for the first time. Beet kvass is something I would never have considered not long ago, but my success with kefir has inspired some more fermenting adventure.

Pretty good huh? But it could have been the end of my world. I thought it was amazingly easy and wonderful that I could try on clothes at the Sallies and the children would play happily in the playpen. I should have thought about their gymnastic abilities in other avenues of their lives. Just as I was thinking that I had heard Fionn's voice but not Brighid's recently, I heard my daughter wail and a staff member asked who this baby belonged to. I opened the curtain and there was Brighid in her arms. I ran to get her, not caring that I had only a long top and knickers on. The staff person had found her on the road. The main road through smallwettown. State Highway.

I am so so so lucky that God had mercy on me, that I didn't lose my daughter, my world. Every time I look at her today and tonight, each time I think of her, I am grateful that she is alive. I could have killed her with my neglect and I nearly did.

So the garden and the sunshine and the gingerbeer and kvass and the house and all those things are nice, but really they are nothing. Favourite Handyman and Fionn and Brighid and I are alive.

Another 24 hours

2009-01-17T19:28:00.002+13:00

So the four days of solo parenting has turned into five. Rather stumped for things to do given we were all devastated by the consequences of a fifty-minutes-late flight from Auckland to Christchurch, the children and I went out for dinner. I ran up the stairs first to check with the lovely Nell as to whether she would let us in given the children were barefoot and I was in gumboots. All okay. We bumped into friends with children at the restaurant so I got adult company and the children got to play.

I have started a new knitting project when I haven't finished the last one. This is a bad thing to do. But I didn't know how to pick up stitches to make armbands on Fionn's sleeveless hoodie. Since I gave up, a friend who has made the same pattern has advised that she left the armbands off completely with no ill effects. Which means that I can sew the rest up. Perhaps even tonight. But in the interim, I have started something for Brighid. I think it will be a dress and I have moved from the slavish following of a pattern which I was taught as a child and feared to deviate from, to making it all up. A drum roll would be appropriate. It is the home spun and dyed wool I bought at Granity last month and I am knitting 120 stitches in the round (in the round being a first for me also) which is going to be the hem of the dress. Something about the wool invites improvisation. I have the idea that I will knit up and along the way I wil learn how to decrease in the round and then I will probably split into two sides on straight needles and make a pinafore style. I chose 120 stitches because I had this idea that the numerical proportions would lend themselves to decreasing evenly around the skirt.

The garden is growing nicely given the good weather. Only the good weather has subsided as of today and the forecast is wet for most of the coming week. I think Favourite Handyman went away the wrong week. We ate potatoes from the garden yesterday. They tasted great to me. The tiny people were sniffy.

I've been hatching more plans for raised beds, this time using corrugated iron which we have in storage ready to be recycled. Favourite Handyman suggested it for the bed which is 1 x 2 metres, but for the work involved, I think raising the bed which is 1.5 x 2+ metres is a better idea. We would have to buy in some soil or extra compost as we would raise it about 0.6 metres. It would deal with the waterlogging problem quite well though, and provide quite a warm plot.

It's all in the soil

2009-01-15T21:55:00.003+13:00

Tonight after my children were in bed I dug up my garlic. Well actually one child in bed, but that's enough mention of my rather average parenting. I gave up at 9.50pm as it was getting too dark to see the last few garlic plants.

A very encouraging harvest. In the punga raised bed, the bulbs were huge. The soil surrounding them was soft and quite dry and it was easy to lift the bulbs with a fork without damaging them. I know the red one is Takahue and at least some of the white one is Kakanui. Some of my bulbs were from my own harvest last year (the source of those in turn was an organic grower in Raglan), others were from the garlic I brought from Bill and Leitu Jackson at Wangapeka, a few hours north of me and the rest I bought from Koanga Gardens. I will keep some of my recent harvest for next year's seed, one head of Gilly's for seed and order some more in. Given some of the problems New Zealand commercial growers have had with inbred seed (although I'll confess I'm not completely sure how that problem occurs), it seems a good idea to keep bringing bulbs in from elsewhere in the country. I haven't counted my garlic yet, but at a glance I have perhaps 50 heads of garlic. One head per week isn't really enough for winter cooking in my kitchen. I've already given Bill and Leitu a call to put my name down to buy some more of theirs.

Anyway back to my garden. In the other garlic bed, the soil is only slightly raised from the lawn level. It is also at the bottom of the slope of our section. Two garlic necks had completely rotted through leaving the bulb in the ground while the leaves pulled free when I attempted to dig it up. Some bulbs from this garden were a good size but many were not. The soil was wet (despite it being mostly dry for this last week - only two overnight rains being practically a drought here) and stuck together in clods. It wasn't as easy to dig the garlic out and I damaged several bulbs with the fork.

I went shopping at the garden centre this morning. Boron and dolomite lime. A globe artichoke plant, beetroot seedlings and a mixed punnet of broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage seedlings. I've not raised many plants from seed this spring or summer. I doubt I will be raising many from seed either until Brighid gets past her garden murdering stage.

Our chooks have been wondering free, unbidden. It took several escapes before I established exactly where they were getting out. Most remarkably, when I was out yesterday evening, two of the three chooks got out, so Fionn and his friend put them in the temporary shelter. Fionn was in bed when I got home, so I never learnt of this until much later. This morning I noticed the top edge of the temporary shelter wiggling from the study window. It was from a chook trying to get out. Yes, one chook. The other chook, it appears, got out from the temporary shelter (not especially difficult) and put herself back in the poultry palace. I think they were both anxious for their usual laying spot.

They were escaping from the door. Don't roll your eyes. They had wiggled a gap between the door and the wall beside it. So now I have wiggled some wires myself and added a bungy cord through the overlapping wire mesh section to hold the door closed. So far, no more escaping.

They were fairly gentle and unadventurous souls while we were fixing the door security. They poked around in the potatoes and the broccoli but didn't go anywhere near the old chook run, which is where they would have done the most damage. I do see though that they have scratched up some rather small potatoes, for the most part tearing them from their parent plant. So I need to collect the rest of those in the morning and cook them up. I also need to spread some more pea straw around the plants. I never mulched them as high as I'd planned. It just rained too often to get outside until it fell off my to do list. I think I will go and buy some fresh peastraw though. I'm sick of my current bale throwing up masses of pea seedlings. That can go via the chooks and hopefully the germination rate will be significantly less.

We have sunflowers in bloom now. I don't remember why I planted them so far from where we can see them though. It's akin to walking through a tiny forest to get close enough to see the blooms. The wild blackberry has no flowers on it. Wild blackberry not far from us is awash with flowers. Not sure what the story is there. Neither is there any fruit on my blackcurrants. Is that typical for the first year from a cutting? I'm sure glad we are not dependent on our garden for fruit. Eight strawberries does not a happy summer make.

Geodesic domes

2009-01-13T22:15:00.003+13:00

I saw a geodesic dome glasshouse (or maybe it was plastic) in North Canterbury once. Good choice of shape for such windy country. You know, I think bamboo could be used to make a similar shape, not as sophisticated but good enough. Then I could cover with shade cloth to mitigate the wind or to contain chooks, or plastic for a semi-glasshouse effect. I would end up with mandalas a la Linda Woodrow. Our poultry palace is making such a good home for our chooks and our two feijoa trees. The feijoas were looking rather poorly before the chooks and their palace moved in around them. Could I extend the concept for very little financial outlay?

I put the smashed mussel shells in the chook run this afternoon - hopefully that is a good source of calcium for them. We've had a few very pale, thin egg shells lately.

I had a lovely parcel today of a plait of garlic. Thank you Gillybean. I'm so pleased I actually made it to the post office to send your kefir last week. Sometimes the post office runs away and hides when I write it on my errands list. Shocking is the list number of gifts and cards and other things which hang around my study with the name of a friend on them, waiting forlornly for me to take them to the post office.

I might harvest my own garlic tomorrow and lay it out to dry. I have two beds of garlic, one happy, one spindly. The happy garlic is in our punga raised bed and enjoys lovely lovely soil. The spindly garlic is in a less well nourished bed which it shares with strawberries and peas, neither of which are good companions for it. There are some tomatoes in there as well and they are doing rather averagely-to-poorly. At least I will remember for next year. I shall take the peas (rogues from some badly behaved peastraw mulch) out at the same time as the garlic. The strawberries can have a bit longer to earn their keep. Then it will be time for the chooks to have fun in there I think. Two years ago I turned the lawn over and slowly weeded it myself, with only bokashi as fertiliser. Since then, it has had the odd bit of seaweed brew and some menstrual blood. Not really enough input for the kind of productivity I like to see.

When I went to feed the ginger beer plant tonight, it fizzed when I opened the lid! Hurray, we are definitely making progress.

Tree House

2009-01-12T20:08:00.002+13:00

This afternoon Favourite Handyman and Fionn made the beginnings of a tree house. They now have a platform up in the tree above the old large compost spot, so while they sawed and hammered, the chooks pottered around in their temporary shelter on the other side of the tree.

I think I have one ripe cherry tomato. I am saving the picking and eating until the children are tucked up in bed. Otherwise the Garden Murderer will get in and pick and eat all the green ones. It's in her genes, so my parents have told me.

She does get to do a few garden jobs though, ones where she cannot murder plants. She and I made a new batch of seaweed brew today. Later I remembered I had comfrey and added some of that to the lidded bucket.

We ate our own broccoli and zucchini as part of dinner tonight. I have quite a bit of silverbeet going to seed and not really the right weather to feel like eating it. I do wonder what makes some go to seed and not others. Perhaps I should wash, chop and freeze some? Perhaps indeed.

Foraging bliss

2009-01-11T22:35:00.002+13:00

But first the morning. Favourite Handyman shifted all the compost from the large old patch (which we had begun again recently, layering grass clippings, pea straw, chook poo and seaweed) onto the second raised bed. There is now a large hump along that bed, of compost which is partially cooked and can finish off there. At the same time it can kill any weed seeds in the soil underneath. In Autumn we are planting brassicas for winter and spring there.

We moved the temporary chook shelter onto the vacated compost site and put the chooks there for the day. They had a lovely time. Around the back edges of the compost pile, Wandering Jew had been getting more vigorous and we wanted the chooks to knock that back.

Favourite Handyman continued to be handy and spent several hours patching up holes in the shed rooves. Part way through we got a phone call from friends inviting us to go mussel collecting on the beach further north of where we live later in the afternoon. Would we ever?!! Going into kiwi girl (perhaps kiwi matron??) mode, I whipped up some muffins, bought some bread rolls and slipped the leftover salad from the night before (when in true kiwi style I had cooked for far more people than we actually invited) into a container. Then we all went up the coast and had a truly gorgeous few hours. We climbed in rock pools and collected mussels and then sat back in the late afternoon sun beside the fire and ate. I liked the mussels straight out of the shell which Favourite Handyman had cooked in their shells. But the food which I could almost die for was the mussels in beer batter, cooked in a frypan over the fire. They were close to perfection.

I got to try kina for the first time. I quite liked it, though it is a lot of mucking around for a small amount of food.

I brought home some seaweed for the compost. We also brought home the empty mussel shells and we will crush them to make grit for the chooks.

I will remember our afternoon musselling for a long long time. Just beautiful.

food finds

2009-01-09T21:16:00.003+13:00

We had a family day out in Hoki today, beginning with lots of swimming. I thought I'd share my food finds. Hokitika has a delicatessen now, with nothing less than a proper temperature controlled cheese room. I still remember the first time I went into a cheese room, with the beautiful French name 'fromagerie', in London. This one had everything under glass within the room, so lacked that intense yeast waft. I didn't buy any cheese - I was saving my cheese money for a later treat.

But I did buy some Clement Fougier chestnuts all the way from France. I have been trying to buy chestnuts (I even got given some from my aunt but they were mouldy - hoping to send her a courier box this Autumn, or get up to see her at the right time) that are grown in New Zealand but so far to no avail. I loved Nigella Lawson's recipe for chestnuts and red lentil soup in London and have pined for it periodically for the last three years. Now we can have it. I'll save the chestnuts for an Autumn soup.

I also bought some preserved lemons. They weren't quite so extravagant in terms of food miles - made at Ludbrook House, Northland, New Zealand. If I've cooked with preserved lemons before, then I don't remember and I do fancy trying it. I have a spud recipe which uses them which I will make soon.

Now we can't buy fish in our smallwettown, Hokitika is our only option for locally caught fish and so I bought some Hoki and Lemonfish.

I went into the bakery to get some bread to go with the food I'd brought from home for lunch. I bought some foccaccia which was very average. I also bought some rye bread which the label explains is made from sourdough starter with no other added yeast and that the starter has been going since 1999. I spent $6.60 on that loaf and I'm keen to try it and compare to my own experiments. It also gives me a benchmark for assessing how much money I am saving once I'm up and running making our own rye sourdough on a regular basis. I did feed my starter this morning and made up some dough tonight for baking tomorrow. But I'm down to white and wholemeal flour at the moment and waiting excitedly for my order of freshly milled organic flours (Rye, Otane, Purple Wheat) from Terrace Farms towards the end of this month.

The last find was the best one. We now have a local cheesemakers based only 15 km from us!!!!!!! Gaalburn cheese is a farm raising it's own goats for milk and turning that milk into cheese on site. I stopped in and bought some feta and some halloumi. We are particularly excited about halloumi which we used to buy cheaply and often at the Turkish corner shop in London. The price of Halloumi when we returned to New Zealand, and I wanted some to make vegetarian kebabs for a barbecue, was horrific. Steak kebabs would have been cheaper. But I thought the price at Gaalburn was okay and anyway I'd rather support local cheese which is dear-ish than cheese from anywhere else. I have since wondered if I could persuade them to sell me raw goats milk. It is legal up to 5 litres per day.

Workers

2009-01-08T21:49:00.003+13:00

The chooks: they ate more wandering dew in the wettest corner. They scratched the earth up there nicely and have made a space for another cabbage tree. They ate more slugs and grubs and generally behaved themselves in terms of egg production.

Favourite Handyman: he transplanted one blackcurrant bush and planted several cabbage trees. He got rid of more docks.

Me: I made the first lot of sundried tomatoes. Turns out that what looks like a lot of tomato on the dehydrator trays when first cut, is not really much tomato at all once it is dried and packed in a jar. I'll be having another go sometime this month. I made cheese and onion souffle for lunch. Souffle! What a fancy word. Turned out nice. I'll be packing a lot more herbs in next time. I made foccaccia dough and turned one third into foccaccia for dinner and froze the other two portions. Don't even ask me about laundry and dishes. I am sick of cleaning and yet I still did some. Is that called maturity?

Fionn: well he didn't do much beyond setting the lunch and dinner tables. But he does have a big desire to earn more money to buy another hot wheels car. And I took possession of eight cubic metres of firewood this afternoon. Eight cubic metres which await stacking. So Fionn and Favourite Handyman will be workers indeed over the next few days. I shall be paying the little one in Hot Wheels money and the big one in beer. Due to the great kindness of my heart, food will be available regardless of wood stacking productivity. Ingredients available that is, not necessarily cooked and ready to eat.

gingerbeer and hydrangeas

2009-01-07T20:26:00.004+13:00

I started a gingerbeer plant this morning. I cooked chickpeas and made hummous and reflected again that I like the hummous made with tinned chickpeas best. Which is not what I am supposed to think. I sliced up home made bread to toast and go under poached eggs for all of our breakfasts. I noticed that it is quite hard to slice and thought that perhaps I should go back to using a recipe instead of throwing any old amount of flour and a bit of salt at the sourdough starter and assuming it will be alright. I saw a recipe for using up old bread by making a cheese and onion souffle in a recipe book not long ago. Perhaps I'll try it tomorrow. Perhaps. I've never made anything as fancy sounding as a souffle before.

In the middle of gingerbeer and hydrangeas we all went out to lunch with friends in Blackball and talked about unionism and the lost generation who don't quite know what one is. And what to do about that.

This afternoon Brighid and I collected lots of hydrangea cuttings from paddocks near the airport. Yes we have an airport at smallwettown. No you can't really tell though because it is so small. We don't have any commercial services from it anymore. The planes got sold to someone in South America.

Tonight I dipped them all in a disprin solution, stripped the bottom leaves and planted fourteen along the back fence. It is sodden wet there and the sky is grey leavened with dark grey, so they should have a good start.

Also this morning I sliced up tomatoes (halved the cherry tomatoes and sliced the larger ones) and put them in my dehydrator. I am going to make my very own sun dried tomatoes. This is the third time ever I have used my dehydrator which I have owned since at least 1997.

Also tonight I weeded around the blueberry plants. I peeked under the potatoes and saw a very small potato. So those spuds can stay in the ground until the end of the month at least.

And just to jump around more, this afternoon on the way home we went to the wood and landscape materials place and ordered lots (but not enough) of firewood and discussed options for making paths around the old chook run.

Hydrangeas

2009-01-07T07:02:00.002+13:00

Apparently they root very easily and all I need to do is take cuttings and poke them in the ground. And keep them moist.

Moist we can do. Here in smallwettown we specialise in keeping plants moist. Without any effort at all.

Hyadrangeas, for a very long time like almost all my life until three weeks ago, were uncool elderly not at all charming kind of plants. But three weeks or so ago I happened across a comment that hydrangeas grow well when they are kept constantly moist. I think (but could be imagining) that it also said that they will grow in partial shade. So then I opened my eyes to hydrangeas and noticed that they are all over smallwettown, including growing up the hillsides and on the roadsides indicating where there was once a keen gardener and now no dwelling exists. They look glorious. They suit living in smallwettown. Then I noticed how they blended in well with native trees like pungas and cabbage trees. I noticed how they have thick bush characteristics and probably block out weeds underneath them once established. I thought about how they must be easy to propagate if they are growing up hills and on roadsides.

I started to plan. The helpful person at the garden nursery told me to stick cuttings in the ground, keep them wet and they will grow. I found a lifestyle farmer magazine when cleaning up yesterday which profiled a commercial hydrangea grower up north who commented that wherever he throws prunings, hydrangea plants pop up. Today I am taking loppers and secateurs and Favourte Handyman's pocketknife (I should get one of my own) and grabbing 20 cuttings from roadside plants. All along the back fence where nothing edible will grow because it is too wet and shady, I am going to create a hydrangea grove. Along the back of Brighid's forest where I have pungas and cabbage trees I am planting hydrangeas. If I get enough, I might even interplant hydranges with the flaxes out the front.

Two years into our garden project at smallwettown, I have conceded that some spots in our garden will not successfully grow food. Those spots are going to natives and hydrangea.

On the native front, has anyone raised rata trees from seed themselves?

dangerous domestic enthusiasm

2009-01-05T20:48:00.003+13:00

This morning no one interrupted me as I weeded the garden. Did you read that? No one. From 7am until 8.30am, I was on my own. I loved it.

Buoyed by a break yesterday from domesticity (we went out for a walk in the rainforest with friends and then back to their place for dinner) and by the solitude first thing this morning, I had much better energy levels.

We put the chooks in the wettest corner of the garden where they decimated the Wandering Jew (Tradescantia). They are so tame and one even let Fionn carry her today. Fionn asked me again how I know that our chooks are girls. He is not convinced, it would seem, that egg laying really is the sole preserve of female poultry.

I made pasta sauce with 6 kg of sauce tomatoes from our local tomato grower. I posted off two containers of kefir. I made blueberry and chocolate muffins for lunch which scored universal enthusiasm. I'm currently straining more kefir in the fridge. I have more sourdough bread slowly doing it's rising and growing thing in the hot water cupboard. I put chickpeas in a pot to soak.

After a trip into the shops for some errands and for Fionn to work out how much more money he needs to earn in order to buy himself another (another) hot wheels car, I came home and went mad. Again. Not content with cleaning the oven, with wiping down cupboards and with other cleaning projects of a serious nature which I've been initiating, I got stuck into the dining room. Gone are the broken clock, the empty containers of glue, the materials for making Christmas 2007 cards. On the mantelpiece I found cards from Christmas 2006, 07 and 08.

I've said goodbye to the pottery vase which I never use and which is very dark and subtly gloomy in effect. I've ditched all sorts of things, moved the iron to the laundry shelves where it is supposed to go anyway, rehomed our wedding photo and now I have a home for my recipe books. And they are now in that new home. I have even, for the first time that I can recall ever, washed actual curtains (I've done net curtains before, a long time ago). If this is boring, then too bad. Incredible events in my life belong on my blog and this degree of cleaning is incredible.

I am a bit funny about major cleanups. They do happen in my life, but not often. Always in holidays. And big disasters do sometimes follow. I cleaned things up in a massive and impressive way just before I turned 21 and then on my actual birthday my student flat got arsoned. All lost. Except a few recipe books at the other end of the house (the fire probably was started in my beautifully clean bedroom) and those recipe books, still fire damaged, are still in my collection above the dining room mantelpiece. In my first year flatting, aged 19, I brought back lovely preserves from Mum and had the kitchen all looking gorgeous when a shelf collapsed and bottled boysenberries went flying at eye level. That wasn't so cool either.

The study is the last bastion of total mess. I know it is still waiting, not going away. But really, overall, our home is starting to be quite nice.

Out the front in the lovely raised bed garden which Favourite Handyman made for me just before Christmas, the potato plants have poked through the ground. Out the back in the old chook run, we have bean and pea flowers. We have quite a few green tomatoes. We have chilli flowers. I've been inspecting all the brassica leaves 1-2 times per day and squashing little caterpillars. So far, much better than last year in terms of damage control.

holidays ...

2009-01-03T16:39:00.002+13:00

Crikey, it's amazing what holidays can do. I've cleaned even more today. The house is in such a nearly good state that I would invite people in for dinner on the spur of the moment.

I feel ill to think of how many clothes my daughter has. When I put the Christmas decorations away this afternoon I found another bag half full of size 2 (and other half of size 3) girls' clothes. Some of them are new, presents from when she was firstborn and others are handed down. Her drawers are already bulging. It's just not right that half of the world is starving and another big chunk of the world's workers eke out a pittance doing criminally long hours in terrible conditions in order to make more clothes than my daughter could wear in a month. Just as I've done with her brother's too many clothes, I'll be making up bags for friends, acquaintances and the Sallies very soon.

I've been tidying up the concrete path end of the old chook run this afternoon. You didn't expect me to stay inside cleaning all day did you? Well not even all afternoon - we spent the morning supping tea and gingerbread biscuits at a friend's house. I thought there was an odd shape to the garden at that end but actually there is not. There was just so much soil sitting on the concrete that things were growing in it. Weeds. So that is all gone and I've transplanted three thymes from another bed into the spaces around the bay trees. The bays, or one of them at least, has grown noticeably since I moved them from pots into the garden.

So I've pulled most of the thyme and welsh onions from the second raised bed now. Once I've got everything out of there, I think I'll move some existing compost in, add the chook poo which needs to be cleared from the coop right now and then put the next lot of lawn clippings on top. I want that area very fertile in readiness for growing winter brassicas in it. Maybe I'll add blood and bone and lime and sheep poo and comfrey as well. In with a penny, in with a pound.

sourdough and kefir

2009-01-02T20:43:00.003+13:00

Yup, in the kitchen again. Favourite Handyman has been painting the window frames and sills in the kitchen. To celebrate this, I have performed no less than extreme sport cleaning. I have cleaned the oven, even although I am not pregnant and we are not about to move out. Well well well.

On a more pleasant, subdued and comforting note, I have been playing round with my sourdough starter. It isn't a 'proper' one because I started it off with commercial yeast instead of using just flour and water. But this is the second loaf and whereas the first (entirely with white flour) was rather fluffy and not as good as the non-sourdough no knead loaves I'd been making last month, this second one was mostly rye flour and tasted good and had quite a good texture.

Tonight I went to drain the kefir and add more milk. The smallest jars were all set but the larger ones were still quite milky. Maybe I did it this morning and didn't remember. On my shakey memory front, many things are possible. So I cut a piece of my sourdough rye bread and spread it with some thick, unstrained kefir and it was nice. And I felt extremely clever and virtuous. Something to hold on to. I added a bit more milk to those little jars so the kefir grains had more food and left the draining until the morning.

Buoyed by my sourdough success and the yummy kefir spread, I thought I'd play round with the drained kefir I already have in the fridge. I like drinking the runny thin stuff, closest to whey but as I make kefir with full fat unhomogenised milk, it ain't all runny. Since I've been using my plastic colander thing for draining, I've also got more thick bits in as well. Thick bits are good on bread and thin bits in drinks. Why not separate them?

Using the idea taught to me by my Indian flatmate and talented cook Roopali in the 1990s in Dunedin, I put the kefir in muslin and went to permanently suspend it above a bowl in the fridge for the night. No bowls worked because they were too shallow. But a very large ex-mustard seeds catering size plastic jar which the lovely Nell from the best late night venue in smallwettown gave me when I asked for her castoff empty food supplies containers has turned out to be perfect. I'll report on the taste test tomorrow.

Thank you to all the lovely people who wished me a happy New Year. I hope you all have a fabulous 2009 as well. Another year, another growing season. What's there not to like?

Has anyone grown globe artichokes? They sound like they might suit my soil and climate from the descriptions I've read recently.

The loneliest pub

2009-01-01T05:16:00.003+13:00

Well probably not the very loneliest, but I wanted quite a lonely one.

I didn't want to organise a babysitter and go out for New Year's Eve. I wanted some peace and quiet and an opportunity to read. I didn't want to stand on lego, or answer the phone or change nappies or referee disputes or collect washing or make food. So on the afternoon of 31 January, I set out for town with an eye to a pub which would serve wine and not be so grotty that drunken pensioners would leer at me and also not at all in the public eye. Small talk was not part of my plans.

I settled on Revvies, an Irish theme pub which I've never been to before. Merciful choice. It was populated scarcely and by tourists. Inside, I found a table where I could face away from the television and could not be seen from the street or the bar.

So I got to have two glasses of wine and read New Zealand Books and no one interrupted me at all. It was bliss. I also fitted in a quick look at the latest Guardian Weekly. I used to subscribe to New Zealand Books as a student, back when I used to read lots and believed in supporting New Zealand literature-based initiatives. It's time for a return. There was much to enjoy in NZBooks and what grabbed my attention first was a review of a book on the history of male homosexuality in New Zealand (Chris Brickell, Mates and Lovers: A History of Gay New Zealand) and an article on the facing page of Peter Wells' response to the book in relation to his own experiences of being a gay man and gay activist in New Zealand, particularly in the 1970s. Wells found it fascinating to read of a history of gay activity in New Zealand before his time, as he hadn't been able to sense it as a young man.

This prompted me to recall a piece I read in Steven Eldred-Griggs new book, Diggers, Hatters and Whores about the goldfields of New Zealand. I've only read bits standing in the bookshop so far but Mum tells me she has it for my birthday next month. Eldred-Grigg is not one to make evidence a requirement for his historical claims and I expect I'll have more to say once I've read the book. But anyway, he suggests that homosexual intercourse was common on the goldfields. Rose Tremain had this as part of her novel set on the goldfields of the West Coast of NZ, The Colour and I just hadn't thought of it before. So I suppose it is perfectly likely and indeed probable but as for evidence, well I spent a loooooong time looking through records of life on the Central Otago goldfields as a postgraduate student and I never once found anything. Perhaps my eyes were closed to the signs.

This talk of the homosexual 'ancestors', as Wells terms, it also brings me to my disappintment in the Pope. I know this is no surprise to discover that the new Pope is extremely conservative but I still find it disappointing. In his recent speeches he has condemned homosexual intercourse and condemned the use of IVF treatments and of many contraceptives. It makes me angry. It makes me angry to think of the way in which Church leaders of many Christian persuasions use God as their excuse for defending and indeed encouraging homophobic behaviour and discrimination against homosexual people. Because I hold no truck whatsoever with any idea that God requires us all to procreate in heterosexual monogamous marital units. As for the idea that it takes a band of supposedly celibate single men to guide us in this practice... I hold my Catholic heritage close to me in many ways, the rituals, the social justice teachings, the memories of a suburban childhood otherwise terribly tame but for a bit of incense on Sunday mornings. But I feel so alienated from it by these terrible statements of Papal nastiness.

As I write, the morning of the New Year has dawned. I woke early and began writing in the dark but now I can see outside, outside to the stormy weather though the lightning has stopped. The poultry palace is still where it should be, which is what I check first after a stormy night.

I am going to give up book group this year and to concentrate my energies on writing more and on growing our little local writers' group. I have designated 2009 the year of my sewing machine simply because I have one and I also have a large pile of things to be mended or altered on it. I am considerably more interested in reading and writing at the moment than sewing though.

I'm still knitting away on the last piece of Fionn's sleeveless hoodie, even though it might not fit him. After that, tempting though a new piece of knitting might be, it is time to make the curtain out of a blanket for the front door which I planned last winter and which I want to be ready for this winter.

I have more plans for the garden than I can write down...! The development of the area near the chook run out of grass and into a tree and bush dense area with mulch underneath is progressing nicely, with the aid of my three Brown Shavers who peck and scratch for their suppers very well. That is my biggest garden project for the moment.

Happy New Year!

Tonight

2008-12-30T22:18:00.002+13:00

Favourite Handyman put the children to bed and I spent the lovely Summer evening in the garden. During the day my daughter and I had come to blows yet again as I was rash enough to try and garden without thinking that she would go wherever I went and copy me. So some tiny kale seedlings which I had sown myself were lost this afternoon.

This evening I weeded in the old chook run, added blood and bone, lime and home made compost and then planted six kale seedlings, bought from the nursery in the weekend. I watered the entirety of this garden, the tomatoes in the other garden beds and the potato and zucchinis out the front. It is the first time I have found it dry enough to need to water more than the tomatoes. Summer has arrived.

Inside, my kefir is growing well and I have a local friend who would like some. (Gillybean, I also have some for you, just waiting on a postal address so I can send it). I let the kefir grow for two days and the drink from it was nice, so maybe I could get away with every second day not every day after all. I bought a plastic colander thing from The Warehouse this morning as I was finding the bridal veil material wasn't really working how I wanted it to now I have so much kefir. So far, a good purchase. My candida symptoms have been much reduced since I've been drinking kefir most days, so the kefir project has definitely been worthwhile to date.

I made a sourdough starter yesterday. I started one last week and it flopped and I got the hump with it and threw it out. Last week's one was all about purity and wild yeasts and this week I thought I'd flag purity. I started off last night with 2 C flour, 2 C water and 1/4 t dried yeast. It was bubbling nicely by the next morning. So tonight I separated half of the starter into a jar for the fridge and added 4 C flour, 1.5 C water and 1 t salt to a bowl with the rest of the starter in it. That is spending the night in the hot water cupboard. I would advise against copying anything I do generally, but particularly this until I have got a loaf to actually taste good from my current method.

I haven't done anything about the summer gingerbeer plans. I have been festived out and there seems to be fizzy in the fridge anyway. I have now successfully lived through Christmas and Fionn's birthday. You may not think I was at serious risk of keeling over from the pressure, but I didn't have the same faith some days.

I've just realised tonight that in only one month's time, I am supposed to be hosting a book group evening where I have to bake/cook nibbles and read a book to review and clean the entire blardy house because if they are there that long then they will need to go to the toilet which is at the other end of the house from the lounge. I think I shall quit book group. Will this join the list of things I have quit in smallwettown? Sandra-who-quits-things again? It is true that a group of fine ladies of a certain age will find my calibre and backbone rather wanting that the thought of cleaning my house and hostessing just one night in the entire year is too much for me. But it is.

photos

2008-12-28T21:36:00.002+13:00

Nowhere near typical blogland gorgeous and up-to date standard, but I have um, borrowed FH's work memory stick and transferred some photos from his computer to mine. I haven't quite developed the adult maturity yet to tell him that I have mislaid the memory stick that he gave me.

Anyway, I added the photos to my recent garden planning post. One day I may turn into a proper blogger and upload photos I took the very same day. Don't hold your breath though.

DIY season

2008-12-27T20:54:00.002+13:00

It's a wonderful time of year. DIY season. The sun is shining, the children are healthy, Favourite Handyman is doing diy jobs and I am mostly in the garden. Today we put the chooks in the area I want turned out of lawn and into trees and mulch again. I pulled up the logs around the raised bed and turned them over for the chooks to feast on the slugs. While they were feasting and having dust baths, Favourite Handyman and Fionn collected some new bamboo (the older seasoned bamboo we have is not supple enough) and mended the broken arches of the chook run. The last big wind was a shocker for our poultry palace. He also replaced the plastic on the first section, this time with stronger and much better quality plastic. This home made lark is full of learning.

Brighid and I weeded the tiny garden patch by outside the wash-house (laundry in other parts of the world, but I like the word I grew up with). She could help because we were pulling everything out. As a team, we are not yet ready for selective weeding projects.

We talked paint. Favourite Handyman and I are pondering painting the lounge this winter. Favourite Handyman changed the ancient lightbulb in the funny recessed shelf in the lounge. It is probably sixty years old like the house and I wasn't wildly excited when he managed to zap himself. I'm standing there in the dining room crossing myself like a fearful girl brought up Catholic and telling Fionn not to touch Dad if he goes to the lounge. But anyway, there was no more zappy excitement.

We talked more paint in the back porch and I started preparing the deep windowsill in the porch. I scraped off a lot of paint, I would like you all to know. I have taken a fancy to a red shelf (windowsill). It would look good red, underneath my potted growing projects.

FH put more scaffolding up for the peas and I culled one sad little tomato plant and gave the rest a drink of very smelly seaweed brew. FH dug some bokashi in along the side fence behind the punga raised bed.

I found time to go to the liquor shop as DIY has its currency, to the dvd shop as we all like the odd treat and I am not totally immune to the charms of spoiling my son, to the golf putt shop to plot Fionn's birthday treat with his friend's Mum and finally but very importantly to the garden shop. I bought a lemon verbena plant and a punnet of six kale plants. I wanted beetroot but they had sold out, so I'll have to get my seed packet out and grow both seeds and patience. The lemon verbena smells divine.

New Year - gardening plans

2008-12-27T07:29:00.004+13:00

It's not, obviously, the new year just yet on the calendar. But now that Christmas is gone, a mass plethora of guilt and jobs which overwhelms me every time, I'm ready to look ahead. In just a few days Fionn turns six and so my festive mind is now switched to how to make a Lightning McQueen cake without the services of the currently closed shop which sells those fancy things which you put on the icing and make an impressive image with. It does seem at the moment that an actual miniature car on the top is the biggest attraction and I can do that. The shop that sells them never ever seems to shut.

I've been making plans for the garden for the winter ahead and to some extent for next Spring. I've got eleven garden beds, all differing sizes. I must try and create a map and label them consistently.

Bed one has garlic and strawberries in it this year (and rogue peas and three very modestly sized tomatoes and some calendula). That needs a rest and I'm thinking I'll put lupins in it over winter. I'll plant potatoes there next spring. I try and keep potatoes and garlic and tomatoes in a new place each season. Potatoes and garlic is a four year rotation according to my reading. Tomatoes - the information varies.

Bed two is the raised bed which I made last summer. It currently has thyme, onions and one sad looking tomato in it. Also some radishes and a yellwing spinach plant. I am going to transplant all the thyme over to the old chook run, use up the onions and then dig in some generous amounts of blood and bone, compost (if we have some at the time) and sheep poo. It is quite a low raised bed and perhaps we can make the sides higher and build it up more. It is at the esttest end of the garden. Once that is all in order, then in early Autumn I will be planting more brassicas and silverbeet there. This is the bed which I had an experiment with turning into a mini-tunnel house and we might try that again with stronger plastic.

In between beds one and two is a rhubarb plant, gifted by our friend Ruth and currently looking very healthy. we mulched with more compost around it the other day and then put a circle of wire mesh around it so the blackbirds couldn't spread it all over the path so easily.

Bed three is the other side of bed two. So bed one, rhubarb, bed two, bed three, all along the eastern fence of the section. Bed three has blueberries in at the moment. They are not happy. One looks dead. The other looks okay but all the flowers fell off. In Autumn I will transplant the healthy looking one to the top end of the section and buy another one to keep it company up there. I think the other one will be compost sometime soon. The bed they are currently in is not a no dig method and there are weeds showing through, nasty vigorous perennial weeds like convulvulus and docks. So I need to dig down and do some serious weeding and possibly change the border. It is made of logs but they don't seem to deter much in the way of weeds creeeping under and carrying on their breeding party. We have been offered more rhubarb plants, this time by a work colleague. Rhubarb apparently doesn't mind wet feet, one of the very few plants to be so accommodating. So I'm going to put rhubarb in this bed instead of blueberries.

Bed four is the old chook run. Currently it is home to tomatoes, some of them looking quite good, lettuces, beans (very small plants), marigolds, a chilli, some oregano and thyme and borage. For winter this area will have lots of brassicas and silverbeet. It will be our main winter garden and I want to produce as much green food as possible. This time I hope to have better patience and vigilance with the white butterflies in the summer garden and to have more greens ready for early winter and if I can improve my game enough, staggered right through. In the photo below you can see the old chook run about six weeks ago. It is now a lot greener and full of plants but I don't have a recent photo of it. To the far left, beyond the wind break cloth, are beds one and two.

Bed five is a small square up the top of the garden. It has recently had borage, silverbeet and some strawberries. But I cut all the silverbeet out the other day and put the chooks in for a couple of days. They have had a wonderful time. It is a great little spot, very warm, raised about ten centimetres above the lawn and was well mulched with compost. I am still considering exactly what to do with the area around this bed. It is about two metres from the corner of our section and just beyond that corner our neighbour has built a large garage recently. I would like to take the entire corner part (at least two metres square and maybe more) out of grass and that is why I've had the chooks in there. They work hard in terms of digging up grass. So where the raised bed fits into my plans, I'm not yet sure. If it stays as a raised bed, then more winter greens will be growing there.

Bed six is currently in potatoes, with some cavolo nero down one end. This is the bed which had tobacco in last year. It probably has the best drainage of any non-raised bed on our section. This is where I am moving the blueberries and raspberries to. So it will become a permanent fruit bed.

Bed seven is the strip along the back of our house. It had tomatoes in last summer which were quite successful. Currently it has onions, chamomile, raspberries, Maori potatoes and broccoli in it. The plants up the higher end are doing much better than the ones at the other end which have spent too much time in puddles of rainwater. We need to do some serious bed raising work down the bottom end. For the meantime, this winter I will use my horse manure and pea straw layering method which worked well out the front last winter. Thick layers of pea straw, then generous lashings of horse manure, then more pea straw on top. Let it sit for several months. I'll leave it to Spring to decide what goes there next Summer season.

Bed eight is the herb strip down the side of the house, nearest to the kitchen door. I've got chives, parsley, aloe vera, feverfew, oregano, rosemary, marjoram, pansies and some Maori potatoes in there at the moment. Aside from the Maori potatoes, the rest will stay the same. I'll add more herbs as and when I have room or they need replacing. The photo below shows a section with feverfew, pansies and chives.

Bed nine is the punga raised bed. It is a forest of yams, garlic and one beautiful Dublin Bay rose bush at the moment. The garlic will come out at the end of January. The yams are more winter food for us and will be harvested around July. When the yams come out we will probably put the chooks in for a few days of feasting and then add lots more compost. This is our best raised bed and we try to give it as much compost each year as we can. I'm not sure what will go in there next summer. This bed has now had potatoes, brassicas and garlic already. Perhaps it will be a summer cover crop. Below is a recent photo of the yam forest.

Bed ten, out the front, is the lovely new raised bed which Favourite Handyman made for me recently. It has potatoes in it now, and I plan to put either brassicas in for winter, or garlic. The photo below shows it as it is now, with netting and bricks to prevent the blackbirds and the neighbouring dogs (this garden is beyond our fenced area) from pulling it apart and spreading the compost and soil everywhere. I'll remove it when the potatoes start to show through.

Bed Eleven, also out the front, is the raised bed which I made last Autumn. It has zucchini and silverbeet in it at the moment. I'll put garlic in there this winter.

I had tried making another bed for pumpkins out the front. But I have realised that it is in the wrong place and the area I cleared for the pumpkins which aren't growing very much, actually needs to be made into a path for Fionn to get to the climbing tree. I'll be moving the flower bulbs away as well as they are at the base of the tree and liable to get injured by climbers.

This final photo is not from any of my numbered gardens, but from the rose strip along the front of the lounge. I like the sprays of deep red.

other people's gardens and weird scones

2008-12-24T20:48:00.002+13:00

The NZ Gardener website has recently posted a lovely collection of kiwi vege gardens. I enjoyed looking at them.

An update on my weird scone experiments. The buttermilk biscuits recipe from Sally Fallon was very salty, difficult to mix through because of the way she had the buttermilk (I used kefir) being absorbed by the flour long before the butter, baking soda and salt was added. I don't recommend it. I have also come to the conclusion that scones are supposed to be fast food. I am prepared to take ages to make bread, but not scones. So below I am copying (method slightly adapted to my shortcuts) the Edmonds Cookbook recipe for wholemeal yoghurt scones, which I will be using again. This is the one I used yesterday except I substituted kefir for the yoghurt, I also spilt the sugar, so ours were sweeter than strict adherence to the recipe would produce.

2 C wholemeal flour
1 t baking soda
3 t baking powder
50g butter
1 t sugar
1/2 C natural unsweetened yoghurt

Mix flour, soda and baking powder in a bowl. Cut butter into the flour mixture until it resembles breadcrumbs. Stir in sugar and yoghurt. Mix to a soft dough. Lightly dust an oven tray with flour. Gently press scone mixture into a rectangle (directly on to the oven tray works fine and saves the need for messing up the bench or board further) which will divide into 8-12 scones. Cut them up and move away from each other to give space. Bake at 220 degrees celsius or until pale golden.

the madness of sandra

2008-12-23T16:28:00.003+13:00

Or is it of Sally Fallon? One of today's projects was to use up the kefir in the fridge. I drank some of the freshest kefir this morning. This afternoon I decided to make kefir scones. I found a scone recipe in the Edmonds recipe book which used yoghurt and subsituted kefir for the yoghurt. They tasted good.

Then.

Not satisfied with the kefir project, it occurred to me that whipping up scones in about four minutes was probably quite sinful in Fallon's fermented everything, sprouted, rested, take an age to make everything world. So I go and get my copy of Fallon's Nourishing Traditions and find a recipe for buttermilk biscuits. Biscuits in the USA are scones in the NZ. Obviously there isn't an international body ruling on consistency of floury foods labels. Yet.

So now I have kefir and flour mixed up and resting in the hot water cupboard ready to turn into an advanced (or loonier) version of kefir scones tomorrow.

We are running out of room in the hot water cupboard. I've shifted the brewing kefir into a kitchen cupboard. The sourdough is back in the hot water cupboard though, as it looked funny and not very bubbly this morning after a night in the kitchen. I steamed on this morning and made up a sourdough dough batch to rest in the cupboard anyway. Who knows.

In case you think I have managed to forget that we are two days out from the great culinary, consumerist edifice of Christmas, well I have not managed anything so sensible. I have been cleaning until my very soul hurts. I paid Kathy-the-wonderful to clean for me as well. We are now up to three rooms being properly clean and tidy. Four if you count the toilet. I fancy three more yet. Which would just leave the wash-house and the study until after Jesus has had a few feeds and some kip.

The chooks are currently in paradise, because we let them into the raised bed garden which used to have silverbeet, borage, celery and strawberries in it for the day. I want them to root around the grass by this raised bed as well but would you eat your veges if pudding came at the same time? This is part of another project to get rid of more lawn. I'll report more when I have photographs to accompany my text.

Which could be a while. On last count, my computer still doesn't recognise the camera. Favourite Handyman's computer, erratic for a while now, has started turning on again but the internet connection is dodgy. Which is another way of saying the internet never works on his computer at the moment, but we don't know why.

You want more Christmas? You really oughta spend time with good people, not here on the lousy cleaner's vent space. But if you must, then I have just taken delivery of a lovely box full of stone fruit and berries for the occasion. None of it grown on the West Coast because everything is late here. All NZ grown though. And I've bought Lemon Z. The idea is that I'll use it to make a lemon trifle tomorrow, but the option remains of just quaffing the lot. There is icecream in the freezer for hungry sweet-toothed people after all.

Summer solstice planting

2008-12-22T20:35:00.002+13:00

It's Summer Solstice here today, the longest day and a beautiful summer's one, the kind which make you feel like summer could last forever. Perhaps here, it is a day which reminds me that summer hasn't finished already, or forgotten to start. Three days ago we had the fire on.

Last year we went to the beach to watch the sun. This year asthma boy is in bed early and we are not feeling so festive. Our friend in Auckland who was undergoing a bone marrow transplant died. I am struggling to come to grips with how much loss there is in the world. I feel blessed and lucky that I have Favourite Handyman and Fionn and Brighid. I guess we are lucky to have friends and the more friends and family we have, the more exposed to loss we are. That does make me feel more zen. But still sad for our friend's little daughter, four years old. Her Dad won't see her start school, or play soccer or do ballet or grumble over her first boyfriend.

Yes I am turning into my mother!! When I was at university, Mum would write letters to me which included details of who had had what operations and who had died at church. Not in the middle of Mass, you understand. Just in between. Now I blog the tips of my grief. And torture a wider audience.

Onto planting. Favourite Handyman and I filled up the new raised bed and I have planted 12 Rua potatoes in it. Around the edge and in the middle I also sowed calendula seeds. This garden is part of yellow garden area which I started planning almost a year ago. There are wild orange nasturtiums there already so my dwarf mixed colours (orange, yellow, lemon are what I've seen so far in other plantings) will fit in nicely.

chicken soup and bean dip

2008-12-21T19:57:00.004+13:00

When I was about 24, I got bells palsy. I had recently finished my Masters thesis, moved back to Christchurch and ditched the boyfriend. It was a lot of fun to go back to Dunedin for a weekend to present a paper at a postgraduate history conference and catch up with friends. On the Friday night we had a huge night on the town and I dragged myself to the conference just a few hours of sleep later to present some thoughts on women and booze. In Central Otago on the goldfields 100 years previously. Saturday night was more sedate and on Sunday I noticed with some alarm that one side of my face didn't move when I told it to. Well well well.

Once I had a diagnosis, I had to wait a week until I was well enough to travel back to Christchurch. During that week my lovely friend Asma came round each day and looked after me. And she made me chicken soup and that was when I understood that chicken soup was divine medicine. My previous encounters with chicken soup were of the maggi packet mix variety so it was no surprise that I had no previous chicken soup love. I remember that Asma put egg in it, that it tasted great and can't remember much else.

So two days ago when my son had a scary asthma attack, I wanted to make him chicken soup. With lots of garlic and ginger. My chicken stocks until today have always been made with the bones of roast chicken but this time I shelled out for a whole raw chicken. I cut the breasts and some of the leg meat off roughly and put that meat aside for a chicken stirfry tomorrow night. I then broke up the carcass and put it in a pot with two bay leaves from my own bay tree,`some carrots, some onions and water to cover the lot. I simmered that for just over an hour and then in another pot I sauteed garlic, ginger and shiitake mushroom (which I had soaked overnight) and then added chopped savoy cabbage and the stock liquid and the shiitake mushroom soaking liquid. When that was all boiling nicely, I added udon noodles, the shredded meat which I had separated from the bones while the cabbage et al was cooking and two raw eggs. Five minutes more cooking, lots of pepper, a little salt and we all had lovely chicken soup for lunch. And again for dinner. I will do this again. It's also a nice change from always starting a chicken with a roast. Because yes I am in the three meals from each bird brigade.

We eat a lot of hummous in our house. This is my standard recipe: 2 cans (390g each) of chickpeas, thrown in the food processor with 2-3 cloves of garlic, 2 tablespoons tahini, juice of 2 lemons, some fresh parsley and/or basil, pinch of salt. Whizz round for a while and then add some olive oil (I just stream it in - I'd guess it is 1-2 tablespoons' worth) and whizz that in also. Done.

I was feeling like widening my repertoire on the dip/spread front but hadn't come across anything I fancied making or eating or that used affordable ingredients. Until our coffee group went out on our Mothers' Work Do evening last Thursday and the lovely Nell, proprietor of the best eating and drinking establishment in our town, told me what was in her bean dip. So I had a go today and I'm pleased with the results. The colour isn't incredibly appealing but the taste is worth it. This is it:
1 can chickpeas (390g)
1 can red kidney beans (390g)
juice of 1 lemon
juice of 1 lime
2-3 cloves garlic
1 tablespoon cumin seeds (I dry roasted mine and then ground them in the mortar and pestle)
2 tablespoons tahini

whizz all that together and then add a stream of olive oil (1-2 tablespoons worth) and whizz a bit more. Done.

Is there a greater love

2008-12-21T18:12:00.003+13:00

... than a man who makes me another raised garden bed, when I hadn't even specifically requested it?

My delight is boundless. These holidays are off to a wonderful start. The sun is shining. The plants are growing.

Favourite Handyman has turned the area which I made a compost heap on out the front into an almost square raised bed and this afternoon I bought some Rua potatoes to go in it. After the potatoes, I'll be putting winter greens in there. We are talking about making a dome structure over the top of this new raised bed which we can cover with plastic for winter. I'm thinking of having a half round of plastic to offer some shelter and enhanced warmth yet still leave easy access to the garden bed.

Feeding time

2008-12-20T20:29:00.002+13:00

Favourite Handyman puts our children to bed while I feed the rest of the tribe I have acquired. Chooks, sourdough starter and kefir. I started the sourdough two nights ago. It is bubbling already. Obviously the hot water cupboard is a fertile place. I am going to feed this one each night for a week and then have a go at a loaf from it. I have found a recipe which seems to meld sourdough techniques/ingredients with the no knead recipe I have been using for the past few weeks. Although as I have no intention in the short and medium term future (maybe ever) of grinding my own flour, so this recipe is probably better again for my purposes.

I can report with mixed pleasure that I have not killed the kefir and indeed it has flourished. I have more than I need. I would love to know of anyone who has used the kefir milk in scones or other baked goods. Also, if anyone would like some and they live in New Zealand, let me know.
sustainable dot living dot wc at gmail dot com

In other small events which I am prone to passing off as news, we live in a bog. Thank goodness Mariella was joking when she asked me not to talk so much about all the rain. Because if I was going to blog about gardening and not mention the rain, I may as well give up now. I didn't garden today because it was raining, and there were big puddles all over the lawn and the garden. And also because I am on a cleaning mission.

Today, in a massive fit of cleaning frenzy, I cleaned our bedroom. There are now no extraneous objects in our bedroom apart from the beds, the chest of drawers and the dresser. None whatsoever. I evicted countless spiders, bagged up at least 85 bags of dust, removed 2013 pieces of tissue paper, moved pens, parts of toys, books, hundreds more books, cuddlies, junk mail, clothes, mould from the furthest corner which doesn't get decent air circulation. I dusted and swept and wiped and generally pursued my mission vigorously.

The lounge of course is now home to extraordinary mess. That job is tomorrow, because none of it is allowed back in the bedroom. I'd been considering a dehumidifier for winter and I've now decided that getting one is a priority and I'll be watching the January sales for store wide reductions on electrics.

I had been meaning to do all this for ages, but after our son had a terrible time with his first full blown asthma attack yesterday, getting the sleeping room (and, I hope, the rest of the house over the next few days) into a really healthy state seemed the least I could do for his health and indeed for the health of us all.

ways to grow peas

2008-12-19T08:51:00.002+13:00

Buy peastraw which is full of peas and mulch your garlic and then watch the sea of pea plants appear. Peas and garlic (or legumes of any kind and alliums of any kind) aren't great companions because the alliums have antibiotic properties which interfere with the nitrogen fixing bacteria of the legumes. But it is all looking green in my patch. I must let the shop know. Peastraw is not supposed to grow! I am going to leave it all there and see what happens. Better than a sea of dock weeds.

My kefir is still alive after a fortnight and indeed has grown a lot. I've been drinking it myself so far but I'm going to try it out on the children today. I have some friends interested in some but with the Christmas break, they don't want it until they get back from holiday. I have found a solution to my niggles with using baby muslin cloths to strain it (heaps of kefir gets stuck on the muslin and it is finer than I need).

A bridal solution.

I bought some bridal veil netting from the fabric shop yesterday and that works much better.

Yesterday I made a flash chocolate cake which called for six large eggs, some sugar and some chocolate and some butter. That's all. No flour. So I used eight of our smaller eggs and beat it all up and put it in the oven as required and then noticed the yolks still on the bench so pulled it out of the oven and poured it back into the bowl, added the yolks and back into the tin for the final effort. It tasted good. I made it for our lovely childminder Robyn but got to have some at her house when we took it round.

I also made sushi. I've been playing round with alternative therapies again in an effort to get rid of some boring things like constant neck tension and frequent headaches. So I'm now under instructions to (amogst other things) have lots of seaweed and ginger, most easily available as sushi. I'm learning to like wasabi as well, which I used to leave off my plate.

Roses and parsley

2008-12-16T17:06:00.004+13:00

I've been making grand plans in my head for draping roses all over fences around our section. This afternoon I decided that the best way to get going on these plans is to have a go at growing my own roses from cuttings. I found these instructions online and decided to take some cuttings from my next door neighbour's prolific rambling pink rose. Surely if it can grow so well for him under (I suspect) no special care, then it will suit our section as well. I used disprin for my rooting medium as a friend has recommended. I've bagged up three cuttings and put them in the window of the tool shed. This is a first for me on propogating anything from a cutting.

I tidied up the herb garden a bit, pulling out the parsley which had gone to seed and transplanting two self-sown parsley seedlings from out the front to the side herb garden which is much more convenient to the kitchen. I clipped away the dead part of the rosemary plant and admired the new growth from the part which didn't die.

I found slugs on the cavolo nero cabbage and fed them to the chooks. I admired my one head of broccoli and dug out a fast growing crop of clover in the corner of my thyme and onion bed. This is the bed which needs some more nutritional help. The clover end is the part which I didn't use the raised bed method for, hence more weed growth. I am going to transplant all the thyme elsewhere and use up the onions and then dig in blood and bone, seaweed and sheep based soil conditioner. Then it should be ready for growing more brassicas. I am having another go at brassicas, bouyed up by recent modest success.

Karamea

2008-12-14T20:04:00.002+13:00

We've had a completely wonderful weekend away. Of course we forgot the camera, but at least we remembered the children, each other, nappies, sandfly repellent and beer, so nothing vital was missed out.

We walked into the Oparara Arches. I think they may be the most marvellous things I have ever seen. We forgot to bring the Ergo (baby carrier) and Brighid was asleep when we got there. But usefully, Favourite Handyman had bought a too big but very good bargain price oilskin vest at the market earlier in the day and he also had long spare straps in his pack. So we strapped Brighid onto my front using the vest worn zipped up over both of us with the strap tied very tightly around my back and underneath her bottom. It worked surprisingly well.

We stayed in cabins at the camping ground and as they are not yet busy, it was perfect for the children. We went with friends so four adults and four children and we all loved it.

We had dinner on the beach (sausages and marshmallows cooked on the spot of course) and checked out various coffee and liquor establishments as well as making our own back at the camping ground.

On the way back today we stopped at Granity where they had a fun day. Fionn got his face painted, we admired many crafts and I bought some gorgeous homespun and home dyed wool (just a small amount, I'm not quite giving up my rule on not buying more wool before the last project is being worn). I thought it was a gorgeous hippy paradise and Favourite Handyman pointed out to me that it is also a coalmining town. No doubt that makes for some tension and in that it is a microcosm of the entire West Coast of New Zealand's South Island.

Next stop was Punakaiki where we stopped for an early feed and drink at the tavern there. The life size replica horses (carrying beer to the pub in the 'old days')out the front are always popular for playing on in our family and today was no exception. We took a walk down to the beach and collected some more seaweed. No I can never have too much seaweed!

In several places I got to have a close look at some permaculture-style home gardens. I admired the gorgeous cacti garden at Rongo backpackers, as well as having a closer look at his raised beds with sand paths in between them. He used drift wood and found stones to create a maze of probably a dozen raised beds. Then we called in to see the people at Atawhai Farm. I've met Bill once before when I bought garlic from him but no one was home when we called in today. Nevertheless, I still got to have a good look at the garden bordering the drive up to his house. At both Atawhai Farm and later at Granity, I saw tunnel houses which had wind break cloth for the first half or two thirds of the walls and then after that plastic, which also stretched over the top. So good ventilation and also the warmth of the plastic roof. Given the rainfall in the area, also some control over the flooding aspect. We are now talking about implementing this idea at our place.

We also talked about art a bit in the weekend and watched the five year olds make wonderful pictures. So far at our current home, my energies have almost all gone outside, on the garden. But I'm now thinking of painting the plain chipboard behind the fire deep deep red and putting lots of Fionn's pictures and our photos on the walls. This summer.

The entire trip was wonderful. We're planning to go back in January, with our tents.

compost

2008-12-11T17:50:00.002+13:00

Today our friend who works as groundsperson at our local high school delivered a trailer load of grass clippings. She is bringing another tomorrow. Wonderful for the compost.

I then realised I still hadn't moved all of the seaweed from the wheelbarrow, where it has been steeped in water for at least a fortnight. It turns out that some kind of insect larvae is now wiggling round in it. It is all dumped on the garden for the moment, and I hope we haven't unleashed some crazy breeder onto our garden environment. Presumably (and hopefully), this water-based insect will not survive on land.

I can do it

2008-12-10T21:53:00.002+13:00

I can do it and I will do it. It is true that our very high rainfall and short season summer make gardening challenging at times. Sometimes challenging equates to many things dying, or failing to thrive. My plans for eating our own fruit have been thwarted somewhat. The first lemon tree died and the second one has had a hard life but I do see a couple of new leaves, so still alive. The blueberries lost their berries and one of the two bushes looks very unwell. The blackcurrants are alive and have a few currants on them. They are up the best drained end of the section. The feijoas seem fine but no flowers. At least I have two this year.

So all the fruit needs to be moved to the highest end of the section. And nourished a lot. The glasshouse when we build it needs to go where the old chook run garden currently as. It needs to be raised off the ground quite a lot and have well drained (deepish shingle or bark or sawdust) paths all around it.

The garden along the back of the house grew us some lovely tomatoes last year. The part of it where I mixed in some blood and bone, lime and seaweed is growing quite well - I have a broccoli forming a head there. A head! First time in years. But the poor raspberry, even though I encircled it in seaweed, is definitely not happy. The onions are doing okay there but not fabulously. Though of course at least they are alive which is more than I could say for my onion attempts last year.

So last night I weeded and pulled out the flower bulbs which were still in the ground. I now have a blank patch of over a metre long (and perhaps 6ocm deep back to the house) with nothing in it except one tiny maori potato which has just peeked through. That could push it's way up through more soilish items though. It is time for intensive help. I think the biggest probelm over and above the wet is that the very large tree which is not far away from this garden bed has roots extending down into this garden. Deepish roots for the most part and if I raise the bed up with lots of nutrient-intensive material, I should get noticeable improvement. My fingers aren't crossed because then I can't type, but in my mind I have many things crossed.

I've got sheep poo, sheep dags ground into a soil conditioner, seaweed, blood and bone and pea straw all on hand. I'll have to check the state of the last batch of compost because it would be great if that was ready to use as well. I want to raise the soil by 10 cm and then put pea straw on top of that.

My kefir is still alive. I'm hoping that if I leave it in a coolish place (i.e not the hot water cupboard like I have been), then it will be okay to leave unstrained and unrefreshed by more milk for 2-3 days.

Why? Because we are going on holiday this weekend. Holiday. Holiday! To Karamea for two nights. I am so excited. Karamea is still on the West Coast and it still could rain but it is a very beautiful place that I have wanted to go back to (last went as a child) ever since we moved to smallwettown almost three years ago.

Soooooooooooooooo

2008-12-10T19:41:00.002+13:00

Favourite Handyman is missing in action, last seen in the pub.
Brighid has just emptied all of my new lettuce seedlings onto the ground. She sorted things efficiently - seedlings on the ground and the soil in her wheelbarrow.
Fionn is writing Christmas cards. Someone has to be good Christmas person round here and it turns out that this year it is Fionn.

My lovely friend Caroline visited today. I gave heaps of tiny baby-sized nappies and wraps to her son and his partner and we took a tour of the garden, admiring progress since Caroline's last visit. But the less exciting news is there isn't much hope for my raspberry plant. It has been in the soil since mid-April and is still less than 10 centimetres high. Perhaps it needs a different home. I'll be getting the fruit growing book out for more ideas later tonight. Out the front I showed Caroline my pumpkins and she advised against growing pumpkins in this part of the country. Not hot enough apparently.

But my borage is looking beautiful, quite ethereal. I'd love to have drifts of it throughout a curvy garden filled with flowers and herbs and vegetables.

But right now the children are falling apart and so I'll have to leave thoughts of dreamy garden vistas for another time.

baked beans

2008-12-10T06:01:00.004+13:00

The baked beans made from scratch were fairly successful. I will be playing around with the ingredients a little to get the best taste - not entirely sure about the amount of molasses in this batch. I've put two dinner's worth in the freezer. Now all need to know is several hours in advance that I will not want to cook proper dinner and then I'll have beans for dinner which are not from a can. Though the home made ones really suited being eaten with rice which does make it a two pot meal. Which then counts as proper cooking.

The kefir is still alive. I've been drinking the drained kefir milk each morning.

It stopped raining for a while last night. I transplanted five lettuces from the seed raising punnet into individual pots. They can grow like that on the outside table for another fortnight or so until they are big enough that slugs will not devour them whole in one evening. I weeded a bit in the old chook run where there are still plenty of weed seeds which germinated when I transplanted the bay trees into this garden. Then I mulched with pea straw. The Maori potatoes which I planted all over the place are coming up - mostly in places where I forgot about them and planted something else there as well. I also staked some peas which have grown in the old chook run out of the mulch. Maybe we will get more peas out of this wild batch as we've only had three pods' worth out of all the carefully sown, bought pea seeds which I started off months ago.

I'll be thinking of my Mum's family this week as they bury my Great Aunt Shirley. My Great Uncle Ron died just days before we left for the UK, when we were already in Auckland ready to fly out. I lit candles for him in Ireland where we visited just two months later and I never made the time to let Shirley know this. She was on my list for visiting next time we go to Christchurch. I used to visit Ron and Shirley when I was a student in Christchurch. My brother and I biked around there for lunch one day when he was still at boarding school. Later I got lazy and caught the bus. Ron, a skilled handyman like all of the men in my Mum's family, kindly fixed our student flat washing machine many times. Shirley was a tiny woman, always very neat, who looked after her father in law, my great grandfather, with great love and care in his last days. Rest in Peace Shirley. May your faith give you strength and your presence stay warm in the hearts of your children.

kefir learning

2008-12-08T19:02:00.004+13:00

An update on my growing things inside menagerie. I have been googling and have found some information on kefir from a very enthusiastic man called Dom. I've joined a yahoo group of making kefir as well. Now I need to read at least some of the messages.

Today I drank some of the kefir drink which you strain off the grains and I liked it. A very pleasant way to substitute for expensive probiotics from the health food shop. My grains seem to be growing and I've transferred them to a larger jar and added more milk. That's three days I've kept them alive for now.

I used the chicken stock to make risotto for dinner. When we were a gluten free, egg free household, we had risotto every week. I still like it, but I love having more options on the dinner front. I used the first zucchinis of this season in the risotto. From my own garden of course. This year I have an heirloom kind called costata romanesco which has a ribbed outer. I do apologise that that sounds like a description of the fancier kind of condoms. My zucchinis were very nice and I look forward to many more this season. From my one plant. The others died.

I've just finished making up the baked beans recipe and have put it in the slow cooker to cook overnight. I had to adapt it a bit for the slow cooker and for the unhelpful measures in the recipe. It is the first time I have cooked from my Sally Fallon book, Nourishing Traditions and I have a couple of niggles. A "small can of tomato paste" is not a helpful measure in an internationally marketed book. Not that it mattered too much as we had no tomato paste of any kind in the house and I snaffled a jar of pasta sauce from the charity Christmas giving bag to use instead. I used some apple cider vinegar and presumed rather hopefully that it would not matter that it is three years old. My other niggle is that a cup is not the easiest way to measure sticky liquids like maple syrup and molasses. By standing on chairs and searching behind the old kitchen chippy chimney, I managed to find our maple syrup and molasses. I hope this recipe is yummy, as it could be the answer to using up more things which have collected in my cupboard. The odd ingredients retirement home needs an overhaul.

I bought a gingerbread man cutter because I have this probably overblown, optimistic idea that Fionn and I will make gingerbread men and send up to his whanau (extended family) up north for that day.

I sneaked a bit of weeding in before it started to rain this morning. Christy I am sorry that your garden is dry. I am feeling like we can't possibly live in the same country - there has been absolutely no need to water here and our garden produce is a long way behind yours. My raspberry plant is still only ten centimetres high. But I did find an actual fruit as differentiated from merely some flowers on one tomato plant this morning. So there is hope.

projects

2008-12-07T19:51:00.002+13:00

It's like a menagerie, all the slow cooked, from scratch cooked, fermented, fermenting, soaking foods in this house.

Today I made bread which I had risen yesterday.

I strained the whey off the kefir which I am now growing indefinitely. Is 'growing' the correct term? Maybe culturing, maybe just looking after. Then I added more milk. I have a pile of things to learn about kefir, unhelped by the fact that never ever ever have I had a face to face conversation with anyone who has 'grown' kefir.

I put navy beans (which are white not blue) on to soak so that I can have a crack at making baked beans from scratch tomorrow.

I made ginger bread loaf which didn't involve any fancy waiting and soaking. It comes from the Edmonds Cookbook which is a salve for any kiwi in need of certainties in mad times of growing grains in milk and watching the world economy disintegrate. Tasted good.

I roasted a free range chicken which was on special. The level of ridiculous guilt and guilty ideas I had around this blasted chicken is so huge that some time I shall devote a special post to exactly how the greenies have taken over Catholicism's special hold on guilt. Now the chicken bones are in the slow cooker together with onions, carrots, bay leaves and parsley. And water. Making stock.

I made yoghurt. Or I put yoghurt starter in the easiyo machine. I haven't got a proper make the yoghurt from old yoghurt thing going but using the sachets is cheaper and more home made and creates less packaging waste than relying on bought, ready made yoghurt.

I bought some ingredients to make biscuits and to make ginger beer and I considered making radish and alfalfa sprouts but really enough is enough. I have two children, one husband and three chooks to care for without all this moving grooving food stuff as well.

Other useful things which I did today include planting out six celery seedlings, weeding and trimming the edges of lawn beside logs which are in turn edging and raising the garden beds. I also kept the children alive which was quite an accomplishment.

insulation day

2008-12-06T22:30:00.003+13:00

Today we used our carefully stashed home maintenance savings and bought a ladder, two bales of pink batts (fibreglass insulation wool) and some other home maintenance items which I didn't look so closely at. Something to do with soldering.

So now the worst-blocked part of the guttering is cleaned and we have 3.6 R batts through more all of the house. When we began the insulation project two years ago, 3.6 was two steps above the minimum but now it is the new minimum for all new buildings. Only the kitchen and the laundry are yet to be done now.

I planted some green beans and bought some butter beans and celery plants for planting tomorrow morning. My own beans from seed have been totally disastrous. Let's hope the timing is better for this round, bought from the local garden nursery.

I made spanakopita for dinner and felt very clever because using filo pastry does that for me. Another use for the home grown eggs and silverbeet.

I cleaned out the chicken coop and checked on the current compost heap.. Since I turned it a fortnight ago, it has matured very nicely and I'm closing that one down. In a few weeks I'll put it on the garden. One reason for this is that it is on the corner where our neighbours are building a new garage. It blocks all view of the northeast from our place and we want to get trees and climbers and shrubs growing in that corner as quickly and thoroughly as possible. Some foliage should soften the effect of the huge garage.

I did sneak out to the garden this evening and dig out a few silverbeet plants that I'd cut off for dinner. I weeded the little plot and fed the slugs from under the border logs to the chooks. I'm going to put some of the celery in this spot to replace the silverbeet. The borage is looking gorgeous and the bees are already visiting.

I am grateful for a very very beautiful day today.

Kefir

2008-12-05T19:38:00.002+13:00

Every now and then I do things which definitely put me in the nuts camp. I suspect that paying $17.50 for someone to post me a tiny jar of smelly milk with bits in it, which leaked in transit, may be yet another of those events.

The lovely Sharon offered to send me some of hers when she has a surplus and I forgot in my enthusiasm because one night when we had visitors and I showed my friend the Organics NZ magazine article on kefir, we both got quite interested and I got online and found Linda of the Whangaparoa Peninsula at the other end of New Zealand and offered her money which perhaps I should have spent on grog instead. Sharon, I could yet be pining and hoping for some of your kefir grains. I'm not sure that leaking in transit was a most desirable part of the kefir making process.

In other not-really-news today, the sun shone and I faffed around being a mother almost all day instead of gardening. Ridiculous really. I am trying not to get too jealous of people in other parts of New Zealand who are harvesting all sorts of fruits and veges. Wet can be beautiful... just not particularly productive in terms of edible things.

The pea straw which I bought about six weeks ago is sprouting peas all over the place. Maybe they are laced with terrible terrible persticides, or are genetically mutated, or are bad in some other way which my imagination has yet to conjure. But maybe they will grow peas which we will eat and enjoy without falling over. Out of the packet of zillions I planted ages ago, only one plant survived the rain and the blackbirds and it has produced three pods so far of which I have eaten two without telling anyone else. Now I think about it, I may as well go eat the third as well. I could just destroy the evidence of there ever having been pea pods there.

My borage is beginning to flower and is every bit as beautiful as the photos in the seed catalogue promised. There4 are no new plant-deaths-from-drowning to report from the garden. Which is progress of a kind.

The rocket is getting quite peppery as the air warms up. Some of my basil nearly died because I forgot to water it and it was in the porch. I gathered the peppery rocket and the faded basil and whizzed up in this evening's hummous. I like the results.

Season of sumptuous stupidity

2008-12-04T19:43:00.002+13:00

Things I hate about December:
secret santa. Do I need to explain about stupid gifts which end up in landfill?

Things I like about December:
The annual emergency services' food bank charity drive. I've started buying up cans and jars and bags of non-perishables ready for the big drive through our town next Thursday evening.

cow farts

2008-12-03T17:31:00.002+13:00

Morag raised this vexed issue recently. Could the world be better without cows? Some time last year further research came out which demonstrated that the ecological footprint of a cow was huge. And bad. I found the snippet from the New Scientist and went googling at the time but it appeared then that research was in pretty early stages. So I could not find out to what extent the conditions of living of a cow made a difference or how sheep compared on the fart impact scale. Or chooks or goats or pigs... Given how very different the conditions of a cow raised on grain, living in a concrete "paddock" in a US feedlot are to a cow raised entirely on grass in New Zealand, pretty significant questions remain in my opinion.

Beyond the basics of how stock are raised in different countries, I'd also like the research to go further and help us to understand whether some breeds are more efficient producers of meat than others when their fart impacts are compared to their meat production rates. I would very much like to understand how the impacts in terms of farts (colloquialism for methane emissions unless I have misunderstood things badly) compare between the different types of meat commonly available to me. For example, beef vs lamb vs pork.

Morag raised the issue of milk and the byproducts of the dairy industry in terms of unwanted calves. A proportion of each season's new female calves will be kept by the farmer in New Zealand as new milking cow stock, to replace old cows who will be phased out of production in the coming year (yes, that will translate to being killed). But almost all male calves in New Zealand and some female calves will be sent to 'the works' (an abbatoir) within two days of being born. My Dad worked in such an abbatoir for almost all of my childhood and I rang him yesterday with a few questions.

Bobby calves in New Zealand have not had time to acquire much meat on their bones. Dad explained that unless practices have changed (he left the works about five years ago), NZ bobby calf meat goes to the US and is turned into luncheon sausage.

I have never seen veal for sale in NZ but I know it is available in the UK and Europe and is a contentious practice. This involves calves being reared especially for their tender meat. Animal welfare activists have fought successfully to ban crate-reared veal in Britain. I don't know a lot beyond that.

I am thinking that the small or self-sufficient holding in the past probably carried a cow and a bull and a calf. Cow for milk and cheese and bull for ploughing paddocks for growing food in and a calf to initially keep the milk going but at some stage either to provide meat or to replace the ageing cow or bull. Or to provide a dowry I suppose. In terms of land usage and amount of meat in the diet, it is a far cry from today's meat-rich eating practices in the western world.

23 days

2008-12-02T18:50:00.003+13:00

Some days I wish Fionn had less interest in maths.

Today I bought a book for my Dad. Which means I have bought presents for the big bad day for both of my parents. They are the ones whom I feel honour bound to observe traditional Christmas practices for. They have a lovely house full of everything I can imagine they could want and I rang Dad earlier today and didn't pick up any hankering for garden plants so a book it had to be. Mountain Men.

So we were in town and I found Mountain Men and decided my quest for something good whatever good means was over. But the other bookshop in town would have it also and back home I had a 30% discount voucher for them. Being an evil petrol guzzling disorganised faded, overgrown chick who is rapidly turning into a broiler, I drove all the way home and collected the discount voucher and bought the book at another shop. I wondered if that was bad too as how could you make any profit with a 30% discount plus shop overheads to pay?

Also, just to show that marketing works, I bought a child's book with another 30% voucher. I found the story of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and bought it for Fionn. For in a number of days that I am not prepared to repeat. I cannot remember anything about the actual story except that the idea of a flying, sailing car grabbed my imagination as a child and I still think of it as we trundle slowly across Arthurs Pass once or twice per year. I still think of it when Fionn speculates how far we would have to drive to get to London.

For us adults, all two of us who have to pay taxes in this household, I have a wee stash of book money in the UK and this week we get to choose a book each and order it from Amazon for our very own Christmas treat. Thank you Tania for your offer of help to make this happen. I read this morning that Margaret Atwood has a new book out on the history of debt. Being a sunny side up kind of girl, this took my fancy.

More on books. The Margaret Mahy book I've been reading is actually a book about her and her writing by Tessa Duder. Margaret Mahy: A Writer's Life. I'm enjoying it and realising how very erudite and clever and wise she is in her communications with adults as well as children.

When I've finished that then I have a recent Rose Tremain book to read from the library. It is set in modern England and I'm looking forward to it. My friend Elizabeth and I went to hear Rose Tremain talk just before we left London. At the end I told her I was moving to the West Coast where she had set her book The Colour. She paled in her enthusiasm rather obviously. Visiting is quaint; leaving London for such hicksville significantly less so. I guess she couldn't handle the rain. What a wuss.

I can handle the rain. Pinot Noir is my favourite method at the moment. My children will not get overflowing bags of tat from their mother for Christmas because she has spent much of the family's money on red wine and fish and chips. Isn't it a shame how social welfare is underfunded and overworked? Mothers who make insufficient sacrifice in order to teach the merits of capitalism and endless consumerism to their offspring really ought to be dealt with more severely.

hahahahahaha. We've got a tory government and they're threatening to shut public services down in order for some idiot to go through each budget line by line. So far they've got to our local hospital board and to our beleagured local forestry and the options look bad. measly shutting things down not-at-all-positive kind of bad.

Back to books. Our book group has reorganised our bookishness and stopped belonging to the Book Discussion scheme and stopped meeting at the pub and now we share each other's books and host meetings at our houses. Once each per year. An enormous amount of discussion has been devoted to the expectation of nibbles and to the protocol of drink. So how bourgeoise (sp?) can I be(come)?

No I didn't get out into the garden today. Yes I am grumpy.

flowers and tomatoes

2008-12-01T19:48:00.003+13:00

I did finish weeding the watercress out and I dug that end of the old chook run over, removing the dead zucchini along the way. I've now planted the rest of the tomato plants in the new space. They may be too late going in, but I think it's worth trying.

Last night I had admired some beautiful flowers in my friend's garden and this afternoon she brought some bulbs (in plant and flower) around for me. Very very lovely. They are now living in the corner of the potato patch, which is a space where we can see and admire them often. I don't know their name yet.

Although one zucchini has died the other, planted out the front quite a while ago, is doing wonderfully and I think we will be eating zucchini by the end of this week.

I planted out the rest of my sunflower seedlings this evening. They are out the front in my yellow garden. The yellow garden is all weeds at the back (too much to attempt at once and that is still our dumping ground for large tree clippings and rose prunings) and is also sporting a riot of orange nasturtiums. I must put them in a salad soon. The pumpkins are also in the yellow garden and they are doing rather averagely. My explanation so far is that they need deep compost and do not have it. Underneath the thinnish layer of horse manure and pea straw which has been settling down and baking compost all winter, the soil is not very rich and is mostly taken up with large tree roots.

Today is Westland Anniversary Day so we were all home which is how I got to escape alone into the garden. I do appreciate it. I also made bread and turned traffic light peppers (red/yellow/green peppers in a plastic pack - yes green God I have sinned) and baked beans into something that looked exactly like that but made me feel like we weren't having beans on toast for the millionth time. I still had some garlic butter mix left over from the garlic bread I made up last night and that went on the toast with the traffic light beans most satisfactorily.

No cooked beans or gingerbread so far nor is it particularly likely. I am reading a book Margaret Mahy which I'm enjoying and being inspired re: children's literature. Favourite Handyman has spent much of the day reading The Faraway Tree to Fionn. Ah, Enid Blyton. My childhood friend. Great to see my son making friends with her as well.

digging

2008-12-01T09:49:00.002+13:00

I am going to have to dig. The old chook run is not ready for the no dig method. I spent a chunk of yesterday weeding the watercress out. I may try watercress in the compost but I am not putting it in the chook run ever again. It is all going to have to come out as I can see that the root structure lends itself to world domination.

Once the watercress is all out, I am going to dig some of the old chook run over. The zucchini is looking quite sick and I suspect it has caught something fungal. I recall from somewhere (Linda the Goddess probably) that zucchinis are prone to fungal things which often make them die. The beans all rotted in the ground instead of germinating, doubtless due to the rainfall sufficient to build a large lake with that we've had over the last fortnight. The marigolds are doing fine but the alyssum has succumbed to the elements and will be compost sooner rather than later.

The problem which I want to dig away is that although the chooks ate and killed the grass beneath the mulch, that was not long enough ago for the roots to have turned back into soil. Add to that the high rainfall and there is an almost impenetrable layer just less than ten centimetres down which is thick tangled muddy dead grass roots. I figure if I turn that over, the aeration and the mixing in of the straw will be helpful.

And if that doesn't quite work, then surely I'll learn some more things in the process.

In other news, we've been gadding about our community enjoying the company of good friends and celebrating the late but hopefully here-to-stay arrival of summer here in smallwettown.

I've been making the no knead bread at least once a week and often more. 3 cups of plain flour, 1/4 t yeast, 1 and 1/4 t salt, 300ml warm water. Mix and cover with a plate and leave in hot water cupboard for 15+ hours. Then put on floured bench and fold over three times and put the bowl on top of it for 15 minutes. Then sprinkle a clean tea towel with polenta and put the dough on one side and cover with the other. Leave for two hours. Oven to 230 degrees celsius. and casserole dish and lid in - this 1.5 hours into the 2 hour resting part. After 30 minutes, the dough can go in the very hot casserole dish. Cook with lid on 30 minutes and then another 5-10 minutes with lid off.

This bread has a thick crust but is very yummy and keeps well into the next day. It is also very cheap to make. I have yet to work out the cost of cooking so I can be confident of exactly how cheap. But given it takes almost no baking-work time, I think it is a great choice for cash strapped families to make their own bread even when they are short of time.

Today I am either going to hide and read all day or hide and garden in the rain all day or I am going to make gingerbread cake and more bread (resting now) and soak and cook lots of beans. I can't do anything about the many tins of tomatoes we use until January when I'll be cooking up a storm on the days I'm not drinking instead. But I can do something about the many cans of beans we use by cooking lots of beans from scratch and then freezing them. Surely I can?

I've got some good books though...

strewing seaweed

2008-11-28T15:19:00.002+13:00

This morning the garden murderer had a big sleep and I got to do some gardening. I've hardly done any this week and a big part is that I fear that any I do will be pulled apart in the interests of science. Maybe Ernest Rutherford pulled the garden to bits when he was 22 months also, but if so then I bet his mother got mighty annoyed on occasion.

I finished weeding the garlic and strawberry bed (these are supposedly not good companions but they were in there together before I found out) and then chopped lots of seaweed into small pieces. I strewed the seaweed over the garden bed and then threw around trowel loads of sheep poo. Apparently this is 'cold manure' and won't burn plant roots if it is put straight on the garden. Chook, cow and horse manure are hot and need to be composted first.

On top of all this went a thick layer of pea straw. No doubt the blackbirds will strew this to every corner of the earth, but a girl has to make some effort to stop the weeds from taking over.

I placed a cloche over top of one strawberry plant recently which is how I got to eat three strawberries this week instead of the blackbirds. Very yummy.

The rest of the gardening time I spent harvesting slugs from underneath logs and taking them to slaughter. The chooks were very happy with this.

recession

2008-11-26T22:48:00.002+13:00

All positive love and sunshine today then, obviously.

Today I learnt on the radio that the US government has pumped lots of money into the banks so that they are able to lend money more easily because the big problem is that ordinary people have stopped spending in America. They want the banks to be able to extend credit.

Today I learnt on the radio that in Australia, mortgage defaulting is on a significant rise and that in New Zealand, rent defaulting is on a significant rise.

Today on the radio they played an Elvis Costello song about how the army entices young men from poor backgrounds into the army in tough economic times.

Today in the late afternoon I spent time with the people running a programme for young disaffected people who are interested in a career in the miltary or fire services. I heard of how the military services provide widely encompassing support for its people.

Today I thought of my brother joining the army at sixteen. I remembered being the pacifist sister and slowly coming to terms with the good things the army offered and continues to offer young people.

Big price to risk paying though.

While I was listening to the radio, I made hunza pie, a dish using cooked rice, silverbeet and egg to make a pie. I am grateful again that we have chooks and silverbeet in our garden.

I am still coming to terms with the nature of the pain and the changes our community will experience as the global downturn and financial markets crisis makes it's impact here in smallwettown. I knows that material life will change for many and I suspect that we are well placed for job security to feel the pain less than others in our town, our island, our country. What I still wonder is how we will live in an interior way. How will I make sense of these changes? What will be right and wrong? If there are not enough jobs to go round, then which jobs should change? Should we stop having children? (I will personally but that's not what I mean) A society based on endless growth has a clear rationale, even if it isn't one I am ion full agreement with. A society forced to retract - well what is the rationale for that society?

Guttering

2008-11-24T18:26:00.003+13:00

We are now on the third consecutive day of rain, with the added excitement that it is now raining harder than in the weekend and blowing very hard. The poultry palace is still in the right place and I'm hoping that it stays that way.

I've worked out a key problem with my former tiny herb bed which I converted to a salad bed last week. The guttering above it is leaking something terrible. It was pouring out is afternoon (and now I expect, but I'm not going out in the squall to check).

When we first moved in, the entire back side of the house was under water and my Dad explained how to dig a trench and make a gravel bed (I forget the proper word for this) and then fill it up with soil and have better drainage. A bit more standing round staring at different times of day soon established that the water from the bathroom and the wash-house (laundry) was leaking . Which is how I got to know Ken the Plumber. Ken and I had slightly differing ideas of how quickly this job might be achieved, but he did oblige beautifully and finish it after I left him a message explaining that I was eight months pregnant, planning a home birth and wanting to have the waterworks in the house functioning properly before I went into labour.

Tonight Favourite Handyman tells me that the spouting is blocked, not broken. Which does sound much cheaper to fix. Neither of us is in any doubt as to whose job this will be. I'll buy his favourite beer when he fixes it. I try to be lovely like that.

There is water pooling all over the place. This includes the area beside the tiny once was herb and now is salad garden. This is the grassy path to get to under the house. So that needs to be dug out and gravelled I think.

Water is also pooling all around the old chook run. This area is in desperate need of being dug out and some kind of free draining paths being laid. Did I mention that I love Favourite Handyman a lot? FH thinks that the actual garden needs walls so that it can be built up a lot. I'm still wanting to try this plot without walls. I think our rainfall is so high that we almost never get the opportunity for soil to get dry and crumbly and slide down. Of course we could have a mudslide. Hmmm.

I'm almost looking forward to going to work tomorrow. We've had visitors this morning (we could because the house is still looking pretty swish from the grand weekend cleaning project), I've made banana cake, shepherd's pie, cooked chickpeas which I'll shortly turn into hummous, done some tidying (what about that aye?), knitted, read children stories, done the school run in the rain. I don't think I could sustain this level of domesticity without any leaven of gardening for two days running.

A rethink on the watercress front

2008-11-23T15:25:00.004+13:00

We cleaned the house yesterday. If you want more exciting details of this too rare event, then look no further.

Today I made something swanky. I punched some holes in the bottom of a used olive tin, just like the one in the picture (except empty so topless), and sowed basil in it. Why do I think this qualifies as swanky? Because in wannabe Italian restaurants but not, I suspect, in Italy, they are forever displaying large tins of olives and tomatoes. I did actually like the kiwi touch of a pizza place in Wakefield (Nelson, NZ) which added tins of peaches to the display.

So I thought as basil and olives go well together and as I increasingly choose to sow my basil direct into small pots and harvest from them, that it might even qualify as stylish to have basil growing in olive tins on my kitchen windowsill. Especially as I even cleaned the windowsill yesterday.

I've been inspecting the old chook run garden this afternoon as it has stopped raining for the first time all weekend. I have changed my mind about throwing lots of watercress to the chooks. Mine didn't eat the stems and the stems (of which there a large number) have all sprouted many new plants along the length of each stem. Other plants in the same plot are growing well.

None of my tomatoes look especially healthy. I don't know why.

I let the mulch on the strawberry and garlic bed get a bit thin and have been rewarded with weeds.

compost

2008-11-21T20:06:00.002+13:00

Good living is all about compost. So is good dying for that matter.

So this morning I turned my current compost heap. I didn't bother on the previous site but suspected this one would benefit. I removed the piece of roofing iron which has been keeping it warm and mostly dry of late and forked most of the heap onto the wheelbarrow. The very wet stuff down the bottom from before I started using the iron had decomposed quite a bit and had lots of worms. I shovelled it all back, mixing the dry straw with the wetter material. I think this will speed the process up nicely.

I planted another tomato while my daughter was asleep. While she was awake, she created merry messy hell in the garden and in the kitchen. I didn't mind much about the kitchen.

Speaking of kitchen activity, this morning I made biscuits and had them cooled and ready to go in Fionn's lunch box before it was time for the school run. I'm just going to pause a little now to admire my own efforts once again.

before school. an entire batch of biscuits.

Muesli chocolate chip biscuits they are called.

I began to tidy up the area where the potted tomatoes will go (cordoned off from tiny fists by the temporary chook run I hope) this afternoon. Fionn wanted to play with all the tyres I had moved. Play means spread everywhere. I said no. They call me grumpy. They are right.

Local Spring dinner

2008-11-20T19:21:00.002+13:00

I've met my biggest deadline at work and with an afternoon free to clean the house, it was pretty clear that I should drive out to Runanga to Jonesy the butcher's and do a spot of local food shopping. I got bacon ends, a stuffed lamb roast and some sliced ham. On the way back I spied some lettuces at the fundraising op shop at the old miners' hall and bought 4. Grown by a local person, hydroponically. I look forward to learning more - I hope he is growing more than just lettuce. Back in the tiny sized smoke, I stopped at the mad man from Hoki's trailer stall. I bought asparagus, broccoli, tomatoes and potatoes, all grown half an hour south of our home.

Back home I found various non-cleaning things to occupy me. On the school run I popped in to see the principal about the $500 donation to the school for gardening which I had organised. Turns out I'm well connected which can never be bad. Outside Fionn's classroom we chatted about the progress of our children's potato plants. Just three more weeks until weigh in time.

Dinner was roast lamb, lettuce salad (with the first of our own radishes), asparagus and new season's potatoes. The sun is shining and my world feels perfect.

fuel prices

2008-11-20T19:16:00.002+13:00

Today I paid $1.45 per litre for petrol. $50 to fill up the car. That was heading close to $80 a couple of months ago. Petrol then was $2.21 per litre.

The green movement has been rather quiet on how petrol prices are a sign that we are running out of oil and that armegeddon is nigh, of late.

All the fault of the big bad men in suits, speculating crazily.

All the same, what goes up and down can go up again and with the endless talk of much deeper recession, I'm keeping my petrol consumption mostly reigned in.