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.”