Permaculture design Archives

December in the food forest

January 4, 2019 No Comments

I’m taking the time while I have Dylan around to shake off the thick layer of digital dust my photo archive has been gathering. I have so many moments to share it’s hard to pick what to tick off first.

Baby is in a feather light sleep next to me which involves a lot of dummy sucking and arm flailing, but let’s see if I can finally post these photos of what was happening in the food forest as spring turned to summer. Today a scorching hot day, so I imagine it will look a lot different when we next visit. So glad we have a watering system!

Things were too hectic with the new baby to capture the apple blossom in all its powder pink glory, but we were organised enough this year to net the apricot and peach against fruit fly and the red apple against the birds. The billowing white nets are actually quite beautiful in a way, they float above the thick carpet of yarrow like a mist of benign ghosts.

Last year the feijoa had its first two, maybe three flowers. Now it is covered in red Christmas bauble blossoms. The jar of parsley seeds I saved from home and lazily broadcast months ago has also come good. The umbels are beautiful under the trees and promise we will have parsley this coming year too without having to resow. The nasturtiums and pepinos had withered in the late frosts, but their massive amount of regrowth following has smothered all competitors.

The food forest was looking a bit grim in November and I thought it just couldn’t cope without my attention, which had been elsewhere while I was pregnant. Turns out all it needed was a good water after a dry winter and a broken timer on the watering system. Drip irrigation operational and some heavy downpours saw the food forest lush and green in a matter of weeks. The weeds also awakened though and we had to do quite a lot of grass pulling.

The silvanberry fruit are ripening and unlike the thornless bramble we have at home birds seem less willing to grasp their stems to feast.

Garden, Permaculture design

Spring through her eyes

November 17, 2018 2 Comments

Time seems to liquefy in warm weather. A sudden ice melt that goes from drippingly slow winter days to a spring river sweeping you off your feet. Ember’s sudden developmental leaps are an even more poignant reminder of passing time. There isn’t a week that mothers of older children don’t coo over her and reminisce about the time their crawler was at that sweet and immobile age. It has made me want to document our days like I did when we were world travellers. I’m concentrating on revelling in the warm spring days turning into summer and luxuriating in the minutiae.

This week in November

Our first hot nights have been restless and wakeful after a glorious run of night sleeping. When the clouds smothered the sun and unleashed a soaking thunderstorm we luxuriated in the cool. The garden responded to the rains, unfurling spring green leaves from withered crowns. Pink roses and dianthus blooming seductively, calling pollinators to return in the stillness after the rain.

Crafting

Dylan completed our garden arbour, a structure I have longed for and romanticised for some time. Our little grape has a way to go but one day I will be swinging under its dappled shade with some elderflower cordial and a good book. The arbour also functions as a rather grand support structure for our washing line. I christened it with some hand dyed wool coloured bright yellow with turmeric. If I’m not quick on the needles Emby will already have grown out of the honeycomb cardigan I have been knitting although I started it before she was born. Yikes!

Learning

Little one has newly made acquaintance with her hands and now is curiously pawing and kicking at everything within reach. Only a few weeks ago she could only manage to bat at toys and now she grasps and caresses them. She spends playtime exploring them lovingly with her hands and devouring them with her eyes and more often than not her mouth as well. During this period we missed her baby gurgle talk as she concentrated on her favourite new hobbies: splashing water out of the bath in great cascades and kicking mummy in the tummy whilst being changed. The former a serious job demanding full concentration and a stern expression, the latter one of the world’s premiere delights.
After 2 weeks of loosing her voice, she is back to her lovely baby gurgle talk. It came back as suddenly as it stopped, but gaining a new octave of shrieks.

Growing

It has been too long since I shared the monthly happenings in our edible garden. Was it really 2010? A different garden, but at a similar stage, just finding its equilibrium. We have been absolutely plagued by every imaginable kind of aphid this year..Allium? We got it! Rose? You betcha! Brassica? As think as soot! Then more and more red spots appeared in our verdant tapestry lawn, ladybirds making a home in our garden for the first time in four years. What a joy! Ember hasn’t lost her newborn fascination with red and these little beetles require a little protection from her curiosity.

We have been harvesting a lot of parsley which now grows like a weed in every quarter of our garden, even between the pavers and in hanging baskets. Nothing much else is quite ready yet except for some deliciously sweet strawberries which have just given us a taste of the summer harvest to come.

We finally planted our summer vegetables over the Melbourne Cup long weekend. We are resting last year’s tomato bed, but there is still some room elsewhere for planting Periforme Abruzzese, one of my favourites saucing tomatoes and a something new, a Riesentraube cherry tomato as I have heard cherry tomatoes can be a good option in fruit fly prone areas which unfortunately now includes Flemington!

This year we bought lettuce, capsicum, chilli and basil seedlings, but next year we hope to have a mini hot house set up in time for seed raising. Dylan chose the capsicum by its name ‘Giant Bullhorn’, the chilli is a ‘bishop’s crown’ a variety Edible Eden has recommended for its sweet and mild flavour.

We reduce our expiring seed collection a minuscule amount by planting a few saved sunflower, borlotti, tromboncino and butternut seeds. The snails knocked some off before we remembered to put down some pet safe pellets, but the survivors are now almost thick stemmed enough to make it on their own.

Looking forward to sharing our progress with you soon. What are you growing, making and dreaming of this month?

Garden, Permaculture design

How to build good habits

April 8, 2015 No Comments

how to build good habits … instead of making then breaking new year’s resolutions.

RRecently we had some shocking heath news in our family and like an icy bucket of water to the head I was reminded that life is too precious to waste. Don’t we all have dreams, a desire to give our life some purpose and worth? Stagnating in an office cubical of status quos is probably not anyone’s life’s goal, and yet here the majority of us are rusting away. We try to shake things up every New Year, but isn’t it just like running on an unhappy hamster wheel of deny, binge, guilt of broken resolutions. Can you even remember what they were by April? Take this as a cyber slap in the face to get it together, if we have each other we can do it! *insert inspirational quote of your choice here*

Health, family, community and happiness are the big ones, right? So let’s help each other build good habits for life. That’s good habits forever that make our life better. I know, I know puns are the worst. Bad habits are hard to kick, but so are good ones so to achieve our goals let’s start scratching away at them, because our goals should be our life’s work not the work of a year and then as quickly forgotten.

Dream big then break it down!

So let’s come up with the big dream, don’t rush it, this is the fun part. We’ll work out how we’ll get there later, for now just get a nice blank piece of paper and some coloured pens for an old fashioned brain storming of all the things you ever wanted to achieve. Don’t rate them, let them flow, even the little ideas might help you work out the bigger picture.

Let’s make it worth it, what’s one thing that will make life better for you? Not make people envy you or make you the cardboard cutout of success, no no no, white picket fence and a sports car in the driveway is so last century. What will make you happier and healthier and more fulfilled? It doesn’t have to be grand, but a worthwhile aspiration will probably tick off a number of smaller dreams on your list as well.

The New Year’s Resolution Approach would be to select one (or even more disastrous, all), clink a glass of Champagne and stumble into January with blind resolve. Feeling inspired for a new you, working hard, getting bored, tired and frustrated (a merry cocktail indeed) and giving up or just getting distracted. So to win at life we might actually need a game plan.

So the best goal will have links to other things in your list and not be too whimsical. So ‘learn French’ isn’t really up there, if I had move to France with handsome French husband then it would definitely be part of it, but that’s not something I’m interested in (so don’t worry Dylan). Same with learn an instrument, unless one of my dreams is seriously to be in a band.

The why motivation

If you really want to reach your goal, and sooner rather than later, you better have some pretty good reasons to get you excited. It’s not just the getting started, it’s the not giving up. If you ask yourself “why the hell am I doing this for?” a week, month or year in and don’t have a good answer you’ll give up and maybe it wasn’t worth it after all. “Because it makes me seem more interesting and cool” just won’t cut it.

You need weapons to defeat the “cant be bothered” monster!

Here are some question to get you going, can you think of any more good ones to ask? Don’t limit your self think emotional as well as pragmatic, mental as well as physical.

What will it help you achieve? Why is this important? Will it give you better quality of life?
Will it mean doing more of what you love? (This one is important, if you don’t choose something that involves something you already like and will enjoy doing a lot of the time it just won’t be worth it.)
And less of what you hate? What are you unhappy about in your current situation?
And more of what you’re neglecting?
And will it support causes you admire rather than deplore?
Who else will it help?

This is the list you stick in your wallet, on your fridge or have tattooed on your arm because it’s important to never loose track of why you are doing something, the how and when can evolve but the why should be your solid foundation.

As you can see I have chosen “build a local sustainable community”, originally I chose be self-sufficient, but after our rocky start to this year it became clear that whilst being self-sufficient is an honourable ideal what I really need and the sustainability movement too is COMMUNITY. It’s just no fun if you do things alone, and I might just get a bit closer to my self-sufficiency goal if I work, learn, teach, share and have fun with a group of like minded individuals at my own back door. The only way to convince people to be more sustainable is to show that at its heart it is just more fun and fulfilling. I haven’t had a lot of fun lately so perhaps it’s time to start.

child-food-forest-playground

vegetable-garden-permablitz

seda-work-experience-students-permablitz

No your enemy!

It’s that little wheedling voice making excuses when your at your weakest, say when a task coincides with a rerun of Mad Men on a rainy day.

So why you haven’t been able to organically and easily achieve your goal yet. What internally and externally has made it hard? Once you work this out you can figure out how to overcome those obstacles. This is a great way to exorcise all those little demons of self-doubt, laziness and plain whininess. It’s not always easy to creak into gear, floating can be so much more fun, but you’re just drifting to a big fat boring nowhere.

The following might be issues:
Convenience of bad, inconvenience of the good
Addictions, whether they be too sugar, watching TV, facebook, or something harder
Social pleasures or pressures
Imbalance, exhaustion and over work
Money, generally the lack of it
Bad habits and routine
Lack of knowledge and confidence
Difficulty
Time poor
Fear of change
Boredom

So let’s work out your excuses while your feeling strong and motivated so you can pound that wheedling guy into dust.

Keeping it bite sized

So now we can finally start working out some good habits, a salve to those bad ones. So let’s break your dream up into mini goals, we’re short term thinkers for the most part, that is why our world’s going to hell in a handbasket as our adorable grannies would say, so let’s make it work for us. So short term goals for long term benefit. One of mine is to start up a Flemington Food Swap, perhaps I’ll see you there. It’s a way to connect to the community, find passionate people to help me and most important of all it will be fun! It’s one step, but when it gains momentum I will feel a sense of achievement. It’s important to be kind to yourself, you won’t always succeed, sometimes you’ll falter and give in to your excuses, but instead of beating yourself up, thing about what you have achieved no matter how small and get back on the horse.

flemington-food-swap-picnic-poster

Getting in the habit

So we’ve got our dream and we’ve got our goals but how do we achieve them?
Have you ever woken up exhausted, and some how you ate your breakfast, got your teeth brushed, dressed and out the door, you can hardly remember doing them, but you almost literally sleepwalked through them. That’s because they are habits, you do them everyday, they are routine. That’s what we have do to achieve our goals as painlessly as possible. Steps so tiny they seem ridiculous but the beauty is you hardly notice them and you can build them up slowly like dunes being formed by grains of sand.

I read one example of a guy who was told by his doctor to floss his teeth every night. He would always starts enthusiastically, but come his next appointment it might have been months since the last time he flossed. So he said he would floss one tooth every night, just one. It took only a second, so he could never justify not doing it and more often than not once he got started he would end up flossing his whole mouth. Sometimes it’s just the getting started that’s hard, then your body takes over from your mind.

So make a list of all those little things you do everyday, or every week. Then work out new little “habits” you can tag on to them to help you reach your goal.

A goal might be to eat healthier. An obstacle might be that you are so tired after work that getting take away is what you end up guiltily doing. You might then have a mini goal of preparing meals and freezing them so all you have to do is heat them up after work. Habits you might start to achieve this are: every Sunday morning go to the farmer’s market for breakfast; when you make a meal double it and freeze half; when you get up Saturday morning soak some beans, etc.

Or if you want to produce no waste, instead of starting cold turkey you might still go to the supermarket but a habit might be: when you buy packaged food only buy it in glass jars you can reuse for preserves or after you have filled your basket put two packaged items back.

It could even just be after you brush your teeth spend 5 minutes cleaning or blogging or practicing. You’ll do more than 5 when you feel like it, but even when you don’t 5 minutes is so little it’s not hard to smash through it. Don’t give yourself room to procrastinate by making it too formidable.

When you’ve locked in one small habit add another.

flemington-inaugural-food-swap

food-swap-produce-limes-seedlings-vegetables

crowd-at food-swap

Review and rework

This is the final step. Don’t just slavishly follow your plan into the ground, if things aren’t working they need a tweak. Start small, but don’t be afraid to reassess your goals, after all we change, sometimes we don’t realise something is not what we really want until we almost achieve it. Only you and perhaps the ones you love who have the benefit of perspective can know what’s right, dreams evolve.

But at the micro level if you’re struggling to make a habit stick ask yourself:

Why am I struggling to change?
Can I make it easier for myself?
Can I remove temptation?
What can I replace it with?
Now this is not replacing one evil with another, it’s figuring out what positive aspects a former negative habit had that you have lost. Things aren’t black and white. Perhaps giving up coffee or cigarettes meant also giving up a 10 minute break from staring at a computer screen, a chance to chat to co-workers, stretch your legs. My co-worker and I have come up with the idea of a “pause pomme” (an apple break) where we each eat and apple and walk around the block.

Could eating out be replaced with rotating dinner parties with friends or potluck suppers?

Is keeping your room neat as simple as having a drawer you can dump your clean laundry in until you have time to sort it rather than what happens to us, a vicious cycle of clothesline, hamper, bed, floor.

But most important of all, don’t lose sight of your ultimate goal.

goals

Well I hope you’ve gotten something out of this. Let me know if you have any tips!

I’ll share my progress with my goals as I go. Honestly finishing this post feels like aback patting moment for me, it’s been sitting in my drafts for so long!

So wishing you all happiness and inspiration for every day and every tooth flossed! Good night.

Craft + woodwork, Eco building, Garden, Permaculture design, Travel

barley runner

June 18, 2014 2 Comments

Tomorrow we would be riding the 30 miles towards Brighton, whenever we had spent an extended amount of time somewhere we were itching to move on, but not this time, I was missing it before I even left. I finished off carving some chainlinks around the fire that morning and then we finished off battening the roof ready for waterproof membrane and sedum. After some gorgeous days the sky grew temperamental and between bursts of sunshine it showered down upon us, no swimming today.

The end of the day approached and Millar got a text message, ‘free food from the wake’. We trooped down the road double time towards the holist. There is something about travellers and I guess poor apprentices in the woods that lights up at the words free food and we go into survival mode. We hovered up the leftover sandwiches on the bar, dips and pita gone, tabbouleh finished. the barmaid proudly told each customer how Sally had said the food would need to be thrown out if they couldn’t find someone to eat it and she knew who to tell “Millar free food, now”. We felt we had done them a service.

It was a beautiful golden evening, we trooped back to the campfire to make nettle pesto, a goodbye meal with Ben. My fingers burned with stings and good company and good food made it a memorable last night. We shared millionaire’s shortbread and as a final farewell, Barley did his routine disappearing act at dusk. Dylan ran after him calling and he returned half an hour later tail wagging, it wouldn’t be a late night for Ben waiting for the call to pick Barley up 10 miles down the road. A goodnight sleep for all.

Ingredients

saucepan of nettles
chard leaves
pinenuts
2 sorrel leaves
4 cloves garlic
6 garlic chive leaves
2 sprigs thyme
1 sprig rosemary
2 sprigs marjoram
butter

Nettle Pesto

Bring nettles to the boil in a saucepan full of water to remove stings. Add chopped up chard leaves to boil for 5 minutes longer, reserving stalks. Take off heat, strain and chop up finely.

Meanwhile toast pinenuts and set aside. Fry chopped garlic in butter until golden and add chopped herbs for a further minute. Add chopped sorrel and sliced chard stalks cooking until soft.

Combine with all ingredients and stir together until warm, add to pasta and serve with Parmesan shavings.