insulation day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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...