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