Earthy Sweetness

I’m using the time before everyone gets up to get some ordering done. I usually wake up as it starts to get light, which is about 5ish at this time of year, let the chooks out and have a wander through the garden. We went up to Sue and Rob’s last night for a roast, including some roasted beetroot and parsnips from our garden. Delicious. The beetroot caramelises as it roasts, intensifying the flavour and adding depth to the earthy sweetness. The parsnips are the first of the season, still small but long and straight. My parsnips are going off this year so I can afford to pick some early, pretending to myself that I’m thinning them but really just impatient to see how they taste and keen to avoid a glut later. It was a moment of such anticipation, grasping the first one and pulling it free, surprised at how fantastic it looked.


The garden has been getting a bit more energy in the last couple of days. I netted the tomato bed to keep the bower birds out and then yesterday we worked on extending our latest bed. It is another good sized space and we’re still deciding what to use it for. I like the idea of planting sunflowers along the fence so they lean to the north and over the chook fence. If we plant the ones with the enormous heads that are full of seeds the chooks will love it. For the rest of the bed we could use it for growing more chook food like amaranth or maybe turn it into a perennial bed for a big crop of sweet potatoes or rhubarb.


The grass really likes our rich beds so keeping it out is a constant focus and something that we’re paying more attention to, pushing it back and trying to work out how to keep it out with the least effort. We’re trialling comfrey, hoping that the deep clumping roots combined with the thick foliage will do the job. I say trialling but really once it’s in I think we’ve got no chance of ever removing it completely, every little piece of root left behind will shoot and shoot again. Fortunately it’s a good bio-accumulator, rich in potassium and excellent for stock feed, mulch and compost.


The ordering I’m doing is for our food co-op, adding bulk dry goods to our fruit and veg. We’ve recently set up an account with an organic distributor and everyone is pouring over 14 pages of things like raw cashews, dried cranberries and unhulled tahini. Everything is so much cheaper than the prices we pay in the shops and makes eating organic more affordable. Between the garden and our co-op ordering I feel swamped with food at the moment, enjoying the abundance and at the same time aware of a lengthening shadow cutting out the sun and threatening to drown us in a rapidly approaching tsunami of food. We need a chest freezer.

Done

It is done.

I've got three

I’ve been out turning my compost this afternoon. I’ve got three piles on the go at the moment. I combined two of them the other day to make room for turning the third. The two piles are the ones made with lots of shredded bracken and horse poo, not bad but not many worms and a bit woody, needing some more nitrogen to break down more. As I combined them I added the tail end of a bag of blood and bone and as there wasn’t really enough I sprinkled in a bag of sugar to attract the worms - a tip I picked up from Chris Eggert. Now the heap is heating up again and the worms are back in big numbers.


The new heap has a mountain of grass clippings, a couple of barrow loads of sawdust, some pigeon poo, and a few other special ingredients.

It
Really
Stinks

Pimm’s and Lemonade

It was Em’s birthday last week and we had a lovely garden party with croquet, badminton, bocce, and some Swedish Kubb. And some cocktails.


However as we’re all very good at pretending to be grown up (or maybe because the memories from parties past linger on) there was no puking face down in the garden beds, instead it was Pimm’s and lemonade, Elderberry summer drink and the occasional good spirited “Ra ra!” - all to the swinging sounds of the Squirrel Nut Zippers.

Sweet and summery

I may have counted our chickens before they hatched. El Dorado’s last chick didn’t quite make it. It made it out but it didn’t survive for long. Now Uki has hatched three of her little chicks too, bringing the total to five. And Zombie has managed a stay of execution, fortunately for him he’s off to a new home up the road where he can strut around and hang out with some new hens. He is looking more beautiful each day and I’m kind of glad he’s not ending up in the pot.


Our house is filled with the sweet and summery, almost cloying smell of ripe mangoes – a constant olfactory reminder that they need to be eaten. They arrived yesterday as part of our organic fruit and vegetable box, the first steps of our little food co-op. I’m not sure I can convey how satisfying it is to get together with a bunch of friends and bulk buy organic food but it has so many good elements involved – friends giving up some time and energy to bring into existence something they are passionate about and believe in; supporting organics, not only for our health as consumers but also for the health of the land where they are grown; working together co-operatively, a little more empowered and connected; and saving some money. I do hope I’m not going on too much, I’m really quite happy.

There’s been a lot going on lately and I have been a bit slack in recording it here. I’ll leave it to you to pick the appropriate adjective – lazy, sick, busy, or my favourite, all of the above. I have been sick with a recurring gastro thingy that comes and goes and lays me low, exhausted and in need of a lie down and a good book. I think it’s giardia and I’ve had enough, ready to dose up on drugs just to be done with it. Ange and Ken’s house is still struggling to get going, hampered by rain but getting there. We’re ready to pour concrete and this Friday will be our fourth attempt at it, all the others coming undone as rain filled our holes, buckets, pumps and siphons getting us up and ready to go again.


We’re having 15 cubic metres of concrete delivered tomorrow, and a big concrete pump truck to get it into the holes. All well and good but when it rains it means we’ve got the best part of 15 cubic metres of water and mud to bucket out. What really gets me though is why the footings have to be so big in the first place. I can’t shake the feeling that the engineer is just covering his ass. Each of the pier footings are 500mm deep and 450mm diameter, with half of them anchoring nothing more than a verandah post. At least it won’t blow away.

Noah had a Christmas party at pre-school last week. One of the dads did a fantastic job making all the kids balloon things. Noah waited so patiently for so long, about half an hour, just standing and waiting until it was his turn, then refusing offers of swords and flowers. He knew exactly what he wanted. He wanted one of the curly balloons and he was prepared to wait even longer in order to get one. He eventually got a green one and I’m not sure Santa arriving later on a fire truck and giving him a present could match the excitement of getting his balloon.


And sadly Nugget and Coco have gone to their new home, not up in the sky or the proverbial “farm” but Gum Scrub, back to our friends who have recently returned from their trip around Australia. We’ll miss our horsey pals.

Peepers everywhere

There’s new life happening here. El Dorado, one of our broody hens, has hatched all three of the eggs she was sitting on, the last chick pecking its way out this morning as I write this. What better introduction to this new world than snuggled up amongst the warm fluffy breast feathers of your clucky mum? The other hen is still devotedly sitting on her clutch of six eggs, so it shouldn’t be too long before we have lots of peepers everywhere. Or am I counting my chickens before they hatch?


I harvested the potatoes the other day – such soil! Dark, moist, rich and full of worms. Big fat wrigglers everywhere. All up our five square metres yielded 45kgs of spuds– about half as much as I thought there was going to be - but big and tasty. It is interesting to see my reactions to this bounty. At first I was really disappointed, expecting more. More. MORE! But then that hard won, little voice of wisdom kicked in and I came to my senses. We’ve made some fantastic soil and grown heaps of organic spuds. Yay us. And…we discovered last year quite by accident that we could get two crops in a season. All the potatoes we missed when we harvested sprouted again and we got a second crop a few months later. So now it’s time to redo our trenches, add some more horse poo and start again.


I bought some hessian to try and store them. I’m thinking hessian to cut the light and still let air through; then something rodent proof that still lets the air in (a bird cage maybe?) and then under the house for coolth. Or perhaps our friend's house in their gimp room.

Dionysian pleasure

I’m reading The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan. It has thought provoking gems in it like this, where he is discussing sexual reproduction in apples:

“…the modern history of the apple – particularly the practice of growing a dwindling handful of cloned varieties in vast orchards – has rendered it less fit as a plant, which is one reason modern apples require more pesticide than any other food crop.

In the wild a plant and its pests are continually coevolving, in a dance of resistance and conquest that can have no ultimate victor. But coevolution ceases in an orchard of grafted trees, since they are genetically identical from generation to generation.

The problem very simply is that the apple trees no longer reproduce sexually, as they do when they’re grown from seed, and sex is nature’s way of creating fresh genetic combinations. At the same time the viruses, bacteria, fungi, and insects keep very much at it, reproducing sexually and continuing to evolve until eventually they hit on the precise genetic combination that allows them to overcome whatever resistance the apples may have once possessed. Suddenly total victory is in the pests’ sight – unless, that is, people come to the tree’s rescue, wielding the tools of modern chemistry.

Put another way, the domestication of the apple has gone too far, to the point where the species’ fitness for life in nature (where it still has to live, after all) has been dangerously compromised. Reduced to the handful of genetically identical clones that suit our taste and agricultural practice, the apple has lost the crucial variability – the wilderness – that sexual reproduction confers.”

Perhaps also a hint as to why Dionysian pleasure remains so powerful and important in our own lives, the antithesis of the regimented and the everyday.

Very yummy

Yesterday I went to the dentist with Dad and met the ladies, the dentist. They gave me a balloon and a sticker and next time I go they’ll give me a toothbrush.


I was going back with my Dad and at Holisdale Hall I drew some pictures on the chalkboard.


Today we were making the icypoles and I cut a few of the apricots and the nectarines with the knife. I think the icypoles are going to be very yummy.

Noah

Bicicletas Locos

It’s a beautiful morning here and amazingly there’s not a cloud in the sky, just beautiful blue. Yesterday evening was gorgeous too. After three days of solid rain it finally gave up in the afternoon, giving us time to walk down to Blackbutt Bridge and then across the Olsen’s bridge which was about a foot under water, the sound of roaring water able to be heard from the dairy.

We’d been into town earlier for the Farmer’s market which had a hard time attracting a crowd in the pouring rain, which was a shame because it was the final of the local food cook-off. The dishes were delicious though and it probably just meant there was more for me. An Indian take on an Australian open steak sandwich won over duck breast with an avocado and summer berry relish. I was too late to taste the duck but the steak sandwich was delicious – marinated local Kindee beef from Brian with a toasted flatbread and a homemade tomato relish.

Noah is enjoying finding and catching bugs at the moment. Christmas beetles, crickets, caterpillars, moths – all get put into his bugcatcher, usually to be given to Morrow at a later date. With him distracted with bugs and the exercise bike Em and I had a chance to get into the garden and work in the beautiful late afternoon. So beautiful. And not raining. I pulled out our garlic which looks fantastic, surprising because I had given up on it with it’s skinny stems and no bulb action. But it was all going on underground and it’s now hanging up to dry under the verandah. Next year we’ll plant a lot more – a dozen heads just isn’t going to cut it.


We’ve also started harvesting the potatoes. I dug up one plant and got two kilos of tasty spuds, boggling at how much food is in the ground – I reckon we have over 50 plants. Would we eat two kilos of spuds a week? We picked our first zucchini, as well as our first beetroots, small and sweet, really just thinning them out so the rest have more room to grow. Our onions are drying well and we’ll hang them up soon, although the ones still in the ground haven’t really formed good bulbs. We’ll see.


The beans are starting to go rampant so I finally got around to making a trellis for them. I have been wondering what to use, considering harvesting bamboo at a friend’s place, until I was stacking onto the bonfire big long straight lengths of privet that Em cut last month. A few hours later I had recycled our waste, weedy privet into a zero-cost bean trellis that Em describes as “…a bit Andrew Goldsworthy but not as beautiful.”

The exercise bike Noah has been playing on is a gift from our friend, eager to see the bicicletas locos come to fruition, putting things in front of me. The what? Bicicletas locos – crazy bikes. Things like this. I want to make a pedal-powered butter churn. And blender. And … the bike is a beaut – a Malvern Star from the 70s or 80s with clunky old pedals and a seat big enough for your Aunt’s ass as she puffs away, shedding those kilos. Noah loves it.



“I’m grateful that I catched some bugs.”
(Confused? Look)

Ducks

It has been raining now for over three days. Solid. Without stopping. Over 130mm of rain. Quite a lot but less than half of what we had over three days in June. Great weather for ducks.

Fatherly Duties

I think Zombie Chick knows we’re going to eat him. Last night as he slept unsuspectingly we snuck up on him, grabbing him off the perch, squawking and protesting. Now he’s in a chook tractor in solitary confinement, but not without perks - he has got lots of food. He's had one successful escape so far which led me to suspect he knows his fate. The chook tractor he’s in is one we’ve borrowed from our friends as ours already has two broody chooks in it, both sitting on clutches of eggs. This is the first time any of the chooks other than Gladys have gone broody so it’s quite exciting.


Work was rained out today so I’m looking after Noah, doing my fatherly duties – finding spiders, making mechanical dinosaurs and introducing him to the Ramones. The hot humid weather here has broken and now it’s just raining. We’ve all had a turn being sick in the last week or so and we’ve all been working hard, clearing debts and dreaming of mountains of things, well….perhaps some new gumboots. And a singing trip to Holland.

Crimson Red

There’s rumblings and whispers in our little valley of starting a food co-op, well… I say whispers but once you start putting notices in the local newsletter advertising a fact-finding trip to another food co-op nearby I guess it’s gone past that stage. Anyway, we met at Hollisdale hall in the morning and before you could say “allons-y” our little convoy was off, winding our way across and up to Comboyne. Like any good fact-finding mission there had been time allocated for drinking, but as it was morning tea time we settled for a yummy coffee at the little café in Comboyne, right next door to the Comboyne Hall where Elly directs the local choir on Tuesday nights.


And what a hall it is. Sadly the ceiling at Hollisdale Hall has been lowered so that it sits flat at the top of the walls but at Comboyne the ceiling is high, leaving the big timbers exposed and consequently a bigger, more impressive space. It’s also got a funky paint job, a stage and extra little ornamenty bits that really tie the room together.


Our trip was to the little village of Elands, higher again than Comboyne and further out – big trees and steep country. Em and I are having a Radiohead and REM revival at the moment, all the mellow, soaring songs, and we wound our way through the hills singing along with Thom and Michael. The food co-op in Elands has been going for over thirty years and has obviously evolved along the way but it has presently come to rest in the corner of an enormous old shed that was once a sawmill. Quite an amazing space but waaaaaaaay to big for my liking – I imagine it would be perfect for a shed co-op. Enough room for at least a dozen workshops along the sides and then a big space in the middle for big projects, a fire pit and a pool table. And a swimming pool. It is a big space.


We were early so we went and checked out the beautiful Ellenborough Falls and then headed back to the co-op for a yummy lunch with our kind hosts and a guided tour of their set-up. We came away with heads full of seeds, ideas growing in our minds. If we are going to get a food co-op going I think we’ll need a very clear, simple objective that we can promote and refer to; we’ll also need a core group of people with lots of energy and enthusiasm prepared to drive it; and we’ll need to do it well. Judging by the experience of our little field trip I think it’s going to happen. And once again thanks go to Elly for organising it all.


We also came away with a return trip planned in a couple of weeks to get some rhubarb crowns from a fellow Zombie Apocolypse’r we met who is dividing up his patch soon. He grows a variety called Sydney Crimson Red which has a sublime colour – far better than the pink-tinged green stuff that we grow now. We had some with custard for dessert – delicious! Anyway, I must go, we’re off to PLAGGA today and poor Em has gastro, out the front as I write this, doing her best impersonation of a dog barking underwater. We’re converts to Ken’s approach to gastro – at the first sign of any belly shenanigans drink lots of water and make yourself vomit until it is all out. Too much detail?

Treasure

And yay, verily, Noah of Django bettered the great beast Rustilatch, passed through the Azure Gateway and went forth into the abundant plains of Vegigaarten. He knew the treasure he sought was unseen, deep beneath the earth. Seeking the guidance of his Father, whos sits at his right side at the Table of Dinar, he thrust his arm into the rich soil and drew forth his Holy Grail - the first potato of the season.

And there was much rejoicing.

Zombie Apocalypse

I’ve recently come across a term I completely love: the Zombie Apocalypse. For me it encompasses all the different end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenarios that people buy into (including us of course), whether it be Peak Oil, Climate Change, the Second Coming of Christ and associated Armageddon, or the collapse of Capitalism. Whatever colours you choose to nail to the mast, one thing is certain: life is going to be very different after the Zombie Apocalypse.


Photo: Philipp Stark

Delicious and True

I’ve been away singing for the weekend. Choir singing isn’t a spectator sport. It sounds nice and all from outside but it’s not comparable to standing in amongst the other voices, your body resonating to the notes you are making; the same notes reinforced by the other voices in your section and then intertwining with the other sections to create a fat, soaring sound that you are an intrinsic part of. Then, when it really comes together, your body starts to move, layers peel away and you stand with your heart exposed and held within the sound.

At choir last night those who went away for the weekend relived the fun from the weekend – dance moves, silliness and harmonies. Such fun and pure life. I feel very thankful to Stephen, Rachel and Seka for guiding the space and sharing their songs. And a big thankyou to Elly who organised it all, insisting that I go, knowing how good it would be. She was so right. Saturday night was almost indescribable, a room full of people dancing and singing while people took turns belting out favourites on the piano. Home is where the heart is but every now and then it is nice to get away and experience something different, so delicious and true.

Horse poo and some calendula

I have finally got my shit together (worm shit that is) and made my worm juice concoction. I have a 250L container which I filled with water and added worm castings tied up in cloth, as well as 2kg of molasses and 200mL of fish emulsion. The brew was then aerated for 24 hours with a little aquarium pump attached to an air stone in the bottom. The idea is the bacteria in the castings pass into the water and breed up in great numbers fuelled by plenty of oxygen, carbon and nitrogen. I watered the garden with it this evening and the bacteria will keep feeding on their brew before looking for organic matter to eat. As they chomp through the organic matter, converting it into rich humus, generations of bacteria die leaving their nitrogen-rich bodies in the soil, attracting earthworms to incorporate it into the layers of soil below and releasing carbon dioxide for the plants.


I used to think that if I sorted the worms out I’d have great soil, but now I think it’s the bacteria that I have to foster. The worms inoculate the soil with bacteria, and are also attracted to bacteria in the soil so it’s easy to concentrate on the wrong thing - focussing on the finger and not what it’s pointing at. I am a bacteria farmer with a guitar and a harmonica but no single-celled songs. I read today that a tonne of humans eats about 50 pounds of food in a day, a tonne of worms eats 1000 pounds, a tonne of fungi eats 4000 pounds, and a tonne of bacteria eats 40,000 pounds.


I turned my compost too as I’m going to a singing weekend tomorrow and won’t be back until Sunday night. I have two heaps going at the moment, both quite exciting. The more mature one is bracken, horse poo and privet and the other is bracken, horse poo and some calendula, well…a little calendula, well…I say a little but not much at all really. Anyway, they’re both lovely and hot, breaking down with reckless abandon. The bracken and horse poo heap is working well but I think it needs more variety, leaning as it is towards being a monoculture heap. I’m contemplating growing herbs especially to put in my compost but perhaps this is one of the signs I’m taking it far too seriously.


Noah and I went down to the creek the other day and found a little waterfall and a bit of a kiddie pool. I was astounded how full of weeds the whole area is. Nothing but weeds really - if we took all the privet out there wouldn’t be much left. I’m hatching plans to take it back.

“I’m grateful that Morrow came over.”
(Confused? Look)

Belief and love

I forked the onions this morning. The bulbs look way too big but the one I picked last week shrank as it dried – and besides, what’s the worst that can happen? We have almost 150 onions in and I forked less than a third, the ones that went in at the right time. I have my suspicions that the rest won’t do as well. My parsnips have all germinated well, as did the beetroot, but the carrots failed. I’ll have another go using some peat to keep the seeds moist – it’s so easy for them to dry out and die otherwise. The big question after growing all this food is whether we can store it. Not much point having a big surplus of onions if you have to eat them all within a few months. We’re not the best at saving our surplus but it follows on logically from growing lots so hopefully we’ll be led along as our garden pumps out its produce.


I’ve been up the mountain a bit lately helping Mountain Ryan saw up some logs for a new shed he’s building. He has access to a Lucas Mill so we set it up and have spent a bit of time fine-tuning it all. I’ve been in two minds about whether it’s worth the effort but I think I’m coming around. On the downside is that it takes a while to set it up, and for the hours invested the returns aren’t great; but on the upside is that it has a very low carbon footprint, it is another self-sufficiency skill to have, and if you get to the point where you know what you’re doing it does start to become more economic. And how cool is it to use timber that you’ve milled sustainably off your own block? Ideally it would sit in a shed, all set up and ready to go, or perhaps you could aim to have a week or two of milling each year and go hard and build up a supply of timbers to use throughout the year on the latest project.


Ryan has been thinning the trees to the north of his house for more solar access so he has a supply of nice big logs which he has dragged up to the mill using his beast of an old army truck, a Ford Blitz, kept afloat from sinking into a puddle of rust and neglect by Ryan’s belief and love - “I DO believe in the Blitz, I DO believe in the Blitz.”

Down the path

I want to make an almanac for our farm. Not so much information about the weather but more about what needs to be done when, although it could evolve into all sorts of things over time. I want to be reminded that it’s time to manure the fruit trees, or when to sow seeds so they’ll be ready to plant in spring, even things like servicing the car and cleaning the gutters. I realise this could be seen as too much, perhaps too rigid or regimented, but what can I do? This kind of thing floats my boat, and rather than head down the path of self-denigration I’d rather see things in a more positive light. Having passion for what you do is so valuable and can take you to such interesting and satisfying places so I’m going to let my bright light shine. I’m going to write down when it’s time to rotate the beds in the veggie garden; when to worm the chooks; make time for going on regular adventures and when I need to prune the fruit trees.


I’m quite a compost dag at the moment. To work out the thing I was most interested in I imagined myself at a party that was really boring and wanting to go home, then just before I leave I change my mind when someone starts talking about……compost. I go to sleep reading about compost. I get a little excited when it’s time to turn my compost, to see how it is going - how hot it is, how wet it is, how broken down.


Today I had fire training but when it was finished I went and cut a trailer load of bracken to shred for my next compost. The light was beautiful, showing off the surrounding hills... and the compost. See? Dag.


“I’m grateful that I goed to Morrow’s and had a nice day.”
(Confused? Look)

Happy cheeping

In a quiet moment, just before bed, Noah told me that his favourite friend is Brooke, the eight year old girl up the road. He has been quite challenging lately, wilfully disobedient as Em and I never were as children, but when he told me earnestly in his quiet and confiding voice that Brooke was his favourite friend it was very sweet, like he had given me a little present.


Chatterbox Salmony is an only chick. Sadly none of the other eggs hatched and so after about 25 days we took the eggs away at night and returned Chatterbox to her mum, along with a broken egg shell for added effect. She was quickly ushered under a wing and snuggled up in her Gladys’s warm feathers. We don’t know why the eggs didn’t hatch but we have a few theories. It could have been that she was sitting on too many - she had ten for most of the time and she looked like she was struggling to cover them all. Or maybe it was because she kicked the straw out and the eggs were just sitting on the cold plastic of the lawnmower catcher with no insulation from the cold underneath. Next time we will give her a different box, and not quite so many eggs. Until then Chatterbox is happy cheeping and peeping with her mum as she shows her how to do chooky things like gobble up worms.

How to fly

I asked Noah what he was thinking about as we had dinner. Without pausing to think he replied, "I'm thinking about crocodiles, how to fly and dinosaurs."

“I’m grateful that Morrow came over after school.”
(Confused? Look)

Long catkins

The asparagus soil is duplex – sawdusty, moist and full of worms in the top and hard, sticky soil underneath. The worms need to work their magic and incorporate it all together so I need to keep them happy. I know you can’t overfeed asparagus so I’d like to be giving it a liquid nitrogen weekly, ideally some liquid manure left to brew for a long time but until I’ve made some I could use some fish emulsion. I like thinking about how to provide all our garden’s needs from what we have. I’m trying to make potash rich compost using bracken; we’re increasing the size of our chook flock to provide us with some hot nitrogen fertilizer; we’re making regular batches of compost; we collect horse and cow manure; and we have a good working worm farm. We need to get in lime and rock dust, which if we buy in now hopefully we won’t have to do much again.

I’d like to have about a dozen compost bins. I think we need about half a dozen up at the top of the orchard just to use on the fruit trees. If we made a pile every two months we could let it break down properly over a year before using it. Woody compost giving the trees lots of fungi which they love. I could also use about half a dozen down here. Maybe a few more. I’d like two big bins over by the deciduous trees on the road so I can collect the fallen leaves and make leaf mold. Then I could use that instead of buying peat blocks to hold moisture for things like planting little seeds, making potting mix and seed raising mix. The other bins I’d use just for normal compost, once again trying to keep it for a year before using it so it really breaks down well and gets populated with lots of micro-organisms.


The pecan tree is covered in long catkins, male flowers, but no sign of the smaller female flowers yet.

“I’m grateful that I went to preschool.”
(Confused? Look)

Chatterbox Salmony

Our chick has been with us for over three days now but Gladys's other eggs are still sitting tight. We candled them tonight and there's chick action in all of them. Emma might be in love with our new chick, which Noah has named Chatterbox Salmony.

Rhubarb

What a beautiful day, hanging out with Em – a little singing, a little weeding, a little cake. We’re still adjusting to daylight saving so we’re only just working out that in order to get Noah into bed before 9-9.30pm we need to be having dinner while it’s still light outside. Subsequently he’s been sleeping in until about 9am in the morning, sometimes playing with his toys before he comes out - the other day he emerged around midday. Imagine what he’s going to be like as a teenager.

My choir teacher is sniffing the valley to see if there’s enough interest for a local choir so this morning I went along to the singing workshop she was holding at Hollisdale, armed with a rhubarb and apple tea cake. Our rhubarb is going off at the moment and we're loving it. Unfortunately only six of us turned up, enough for a good sing but not enough for a regular class. Singing is such a pleasure at the moment and I’m determined to keep it that way. I don’t need any extra worries in my life so I’m just not worrying about it. It’s a nice feeling.


Back at home Em and I made a start on clearing the track down to our new waterhole spot. It has been raining a little here in the last few days so the days are still cool and not too sunny – nice weather for working. Or pottering. We pottered along, clearing privet and making big piles to put through the shredder for the compost. By the time we have cleared it all it will probably be summer and we’ll be able to jump straight in.

“I’m grateful that I went up to Morrow’s house.”
(Confused? Look)

Cheepy and peepy

Yesterday one of our chicks hatched. Gladys has taken to kicking the straw out from under her so we found our new little chick squashed beneath her, slimy and wet and pressed against the cold, hard plastic of the old lawnmower catcher. It looked barely alive so we decided to remove it, worried that she wouldn’t look after it as she waited for the other eggs to hatch.


A day inside under a lamp and it’s all fluffy, cheepy and peepy. Now we’ve just got to wait for some more of the eggs to hatch and we’ll have a go at slipping it back under our good mum at night.

“I’m grateful that the little chicky survived.”
(Confused? Look)

No more blue lego

I’m not a big fan of organised religion but one thing they get right is rest days. It’s easy for me to fall into the trap of never-ending work, keeping on until I’m completely exhausted, so remembering to have a break every now and then is essential. I don’t see my rest days coming but I get the first hint when the couch develops its own gravitational pull. Once there I do make some genuine attempts to get up but it’s not to be.


It all started yesterday and I was well ensconced on the couch until Em rescued me and took me for a walk down to Blackbutt Creek, showing me where she thinks we should create a little kiddie swimming spot. All well and good except we signed (yes signed) a piece of paper the other week pledging to not spend any money or have any big ideas until we were back on our feet financially. We are not there yet and the path to the creek is almost impenetrable - thick with privet, lantana and blackberry. I could put the woody buggers through the shredder and use them to bulk out my compost heap but…..we promised. I would like to add some woodiness to my compost. I’ve been making a new heap today from bracken and horse poo but as it's for the new fruit trees any added woodiness will help encourage fungi in the compost which trees prefer.


The spot by the creek is quite pretty with shady spots and shallow, fast-flowing water but there is quite a bit of work to do. Instead we planted a few more trees around the house – a black mulberry in the chicken pen to the north of their house so it will be shaded in summer and also let the low winter sun through when it loses its leaves. The chooks also got passionfruit planted along their fences, as well as watermelon and chokos. Em has been thinking about our lack of chook forage and shade and has decided to do something about it. Very admirable. Each hole got some horse poo, blood and bone, a little lime, worm castings and compost, before being watered in with a little liquid seaweed. The compost is thick with worms and looks great.


Now that it is warming up the lace monitor lizards are on the prowl again, raiding eggs and probably even sizing up the chooks. Twice our early warning system went off – the kookaburras go crazy with a distinctive call before the magpies swoop in and give them hell. We caught one just outside Gladys’s chook tractor where she’s sitting on her eggs (it didn’t get in though!) and shooed it off and then later harassed another that was in the big chook pen, closing in on the eggs. It took off and climbed the pecan tree, staying there despite the magpie continuing to harass it. I am so pleased that we have our bird-powered early warning system I am prepared to forgive the bower bird for its incessant thieving. At least we know where to look when there’s no more blue lego left.


“I’m grateful that Morrow came over to play.”
(Confused? Look)