I had a sore back yesterday so all I did was make bread and butter cucumbers, rye bread and some sweet potato soup for lunch. In the morning and late afternoon I walked around the vegetable garden and took some photos. It's not much to show for a day but my back is feeling good now so I think it was a wise investment.

I've spent a few Saturday mornings on Skype recently chatting away to people I know through this blog. It's been a lot of fun and many of the women I chatted to said they enjoyed it too. We were all in our own homes, many of us had a cup of tea or coffee and it was like meeting up at the coffee shop with the girls. So I've been thinking I might make it something I do just to socialise. I wonder if there are six people who want to chat on Skype for an hour on a Saturday morning (Brisbane time). You can ask about bread, or cooking, or mending, or whatever, or we can just socialise and get to know each other. Isn't that a great idea! I'll start it in April because I still have a writers chat and a bloggers chat coming up. When they're finished, I'll pick a date and if you comment here or follow me on Instagram, you can email me and let me know you're interested. I think we'll have a great time.

ADDED LATER: Please not, I'm not taking names now. In April, I'll let you know when to contact me via the contact form on the right.

I made a new bread recipe yesterday. Well, I suppose I can't call it a new recipe, I just added oats to my normal bread.  I ground it up in a small food processor and substituted one cup of ground oats for one cup of flour.  I wonder why I waited so long to do that, it was fabulous.  Here is the link to one of my bread posts with the bread recipe.

Most of the year we grow food in the backyard that will feed us on a daily basis. Whether it's vegetables, herbs, fruit, eggs, or honey from just down the road, the work we do in our garden pays off in the form of fresh food that we know has not been sprayed or "treated" in any way. It is planted in rich soil, fertilised with seaweed, comfrey, blood and bone or manure, watered with rainwater from our tanks and when it's ripe, we pick it and eat it fresh.  Except when we don't. We also preserve, pickle and freeze some of our food so we can eat or drink it much later in the year.

March, week 3 in The Simple Home

There has been a sharp rise in the number of products labelled 'organic' and 'free range' on supermarket shelves in the past few years. Often I am asked if the weekly shopping should include organic or free range fruit, vegetables, meat and chicken, as well as the newer organic products we’re seeing now – butter, cheese, wine and tinned goods. It’s a tricky one to answer because there is never just one clear path to follow, we’re all so different; we have different needs, tastes and incomes, and we all know that 'organic' and 'free range' come at a price.

Over the past few days our time has been spent in a steady, slow stream of work here in our home. Meals have been cooked, cleaning done, drinks made, morning teas enjoyed and the vegetable garden work has been finished. I've also been reading Gay Bilson's magnificent Plenty, Digressions on Food. It's such a good book and as I read it I realise I'd love to sit down and have a good talk with this talented cook and writer. She, like me, is a bit of a recluse now so I doubt our paths will cross any time soon. 

Meanwhile, out in the backyard, I reconfigured the back verandah to move the table and chairs back into the shade.  The garden is now fertilised, watered and mulched. We've netted our thriving blueberry bushes to save the coming crop from local birds who actively look for berries. Tomatoes and some herbs have been removed and with the onset of warmer weather, it looks like we were just in time. Now all we need is rain. The tanks are almost empty.

I thought it would be a nice change to show photos instead of write about what we've been doing. So here are a bunch of photos, taken over the past week, that show a small part of what we do here on a regular basis.

Jamie was here yesterday and we made brownies for his dad for Father's Day.  These were just about to go into the oven.

 Ginger was harvested ...

... and made into another batch of ginger beer.

 And outside, Grace was on duty watching the rain forest for a bush turkey that comes in every day.

 

A bale of mulch ready to be laid on the gardens. 

 The garden working bee in full swing. 

 Some of these herbs have been thinned out to make room for the peppers.

And those of you who are following the saga of the Cecile Brunner rose, here it is yesterday with many new shoots.  If we get a bit of rain, I think it will be a bumper year for these tiny roses. The small bush at the front is a salvia.

Just a short note on the War on Waste post. There is no radio program, it's an online digital program as well as a downloadable podcast. I hope you have the time to listen. It is relevant to all of us.

I've been concentrating on my family tree recently and was very excited last week when I received my DNA profile. This is what I discovered:

It's pretty much what I expected although, even though I "feel" very Irish, I didn't expect my Irishness to be 68 percent.  Win/win, Australian AND Irish. My main cultural group is Munster Irish, which is the southern parts of Ireland - Cork, Limerick, Tipperary, Clare and Kerry. I had often wondered why I'd been compelled to name one of my sons Kerry, and maybe there is a reason. Maybe I have a significant but forgotten link to County Kerry.

Since receiving my DNA profile, I've been contacted by a cousin I'd never heard of. Our great grandmothers were sisters.  When we were on the book tour, Tricia and I took advantage of our visit to Wagga and visited the house our mother was born in. This "new" cousin was born in Wagga too, so knowing my DNA profile connected me with a place and a time and through that, a relative. The past is such an intriguing, engaging and endlessly interesting place and having done this research I'm very comfortable with my own history.

Hanno and I had an easy Monday. Most of our days are easy now, I think it's the payoff for growing old.  We had our breakfast and were at Aldi when the doors opened at 8.30am. We had a moderate amount of shopping to do - vegetables, fruit, groceries and meat, and we were home again with everything packed away by 9.30am. It's easier and faster when we shop together. Our local Aldi was refurbished recently and reopened in April. It's made the store easier to shop in and the products seem to be in a logical place now. It still has that big area in the centre with all the cheap specials, which I'm not a fan of, but the rest of the store flows well and the displays and frozen goods are easier to access.  Has your local Aldi been transformed too?

Clearing the mulch to add more fertiliser. The soil here, once heavy clay, is now fertile, friable and full of worms.

The garden is growing really well this year. All the turnips and bok choy have been harvested and the lettuce and daikon will be finished next week. We've been drinking fresh orange juice every day for the past couple of week so the oranges will be finished soon too. Tomatoes are flowering and the first tomatoes are hanging like green jewels on the plants.  I am really looking forward to having home -grown tomatoes once again. The chickens have lifted their game too and yesterday we got eight eggs.  Looks like a spinach and cheese pie will be on the menu next week. Hanno removed the mulch where the turnips had been yesterday and added more organic fertiliser. Today we'll plant sprouting broccoli there.
I've been moving pots around again and brought in an old bird bath and filled it with smooth pebbles so the birds and insects have access to clean water and a safe place from which to drink.  It's always a work in progress, things change all the time in vegetables gardens and with care and work, we can keep ours productive and beautiful well into November. It seems that 2017 is a good year for gardening. How is your garden going?

Over the past couple of posts and their comments we've shared how we organise our finances by tracking spending, saving what we can and cutting back as much as possible. That is all usually done to enable us to live well on whatever income we have and to either save or pay off debt.  The final piece of the puzzle is to use the information you have about your spending and create a realistic budget that will give you the life you want to live while you pay off your debt, and when money is left over, saving it.  Those savings may well be used for a house deposit, buying a car, or identifying family needs or treats.

So that is your next step, or if you've already got a budget, review it.  Here are two links that I hope will help you in this process. The first is the Australian Government's Moneysmart website with many calculators, apps and articles on money management.   The second is a post I wrote in 2013 - Budgeting - take control of your money.  Good luck!

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We've had a busy time over the past few days. We looked after all the grandkids on Saturday and Jamie on Sunday, and the rest of the time was taken up mainly with seasonal tasks like gardening, harvesting and juicing as well as frugal home management.

With a roast chicken in the oven, I zipped out to the garden for the accompanying vegetables. About 45 minutes after they were picked, they were eaten. 

I love Autumn. It's my favourite season, not only because the weather cools down and I can cook warming stews and soups, but also because I know there will be a six month block of good (cool) weather. We do the bulk of our food gardening in Autumn and Winter and that is in full swing now.  Hanno has been picking lemons off both trees and juicing them so we have plenty of juice for cooking now and for cordial in summer.

Yet another whole orange cake.

The violas and thyme are dwarfed by the daikon and turnips.

Another whole orange cake has been baked, I made up a couple of baskets of vegetables for Sunny to take home and this afternoon, as soon as I finish this post, I'll be planting out the sprouting broccoli seedlings I grew from seeds.  The garden is growing well, mainly due to the excellent preparation Hanno work spent time on a couple of months ago. That work will continue to pay off for the coming six months while we continue to harvest fresh organic vegetables and fruit right in our backyard. 

We have an over abundance of lemons, we're now picking the oranges and when the grandkids were here on Saturday, I really enjoyed them picking oranges with Hanno so we could squeeze them fresh to enjoy with our lunch.  Such simple pleasures!

It was a very nice task sitting on the back verandah in the late afternoon sunshine, cutting up rags and ties. The radio was playing, I could hear the birds in the garden and all was right in my world.

I cut up a worn out sheet to make another batch of absorbent cleaning rags and cut the elastic edges off the sheet for tomato ties.  The fridge was cleaned out, bathrooms cleaned and all sorts of bits and pieces taken care of.  There is one sure thing here, there is always something to do.

Quite a few readers have asked about Gracie and yes, HRH Princess Grace was taken to the beach yesterday for a walk around with real people and other dogs. She loves meeting new people and she's very good in the car so it's always a pleasure to take her out and get a bit of variety in her life.  We used a new groomer last week - Julie from My K9's Keeper, a hydrobath service, came to our place and washed Gracie. I told Julie how difficult it is to wash her but Gracie was on her best behaviour with Julie, she must have known she was a dog trainer too. We've booked Gracie in for monthly baths with Julie because Gracie liked her and we were both very happy with how she handled her.

So that's me. What have you been doing these past few days?  If you have time, let me know your news.  xx

It's been a pretty busy week and on the weekend all beds were full here at the Hetzel house. Cups of tea were made, grandchildren were running around and simple home cooking was enjoyed but I was out of action for most of it.  On Friday night my nose started running like a tap, on Saturday morning I was sneezing and febrile, and Sunday I developed a cough and asthma. I think I'm almost over it now. I was really pleased Tricia was here because she cooked dinner for everyone and with Hanno's help, they provided scrambled eggs and bacon for breakfast to a full house on Sunday morning.

On Sunday afternoon, Tricia went down to Brisbane for a few days to visit friends, our visitors went home and everything returned to normal. Tranquility descended on our home again. We had a bit of rain yesterday so that stopped me working in the garden but I did manage to sow sprouting broccoli and aquilegia (granny's bonnets) seeds. The aquilegia seeds were collected in Tricia's garden.

The garden was planted up on 17 April and it's growing like wildfire. Just three weeks after planting I've started feeding bok choy to the chickens. We're leaving them in their coop until about 9am now to avoid the early fox visits.  We also have frequent visits from a wedge-tail eagle looking for a quick meal, so the chooks aren't getting out to free range on the grass. I try to make up for that by giving them greens from the garden.  If we can keep that going, even when they aren't feeding on grass, the eggs we eat will continue to contain omega 3 oils.  Tomorrow I'll plant up another large tray of bok choy seeds to continue a regular supply for the chooks. Bok choy is the fastest growing of the greens. They germinate in a few days, start growing within a week and can be harvested about three weeks after that. I hope to harvest some silver beet (Swiss chard) next week and two small turnips for my vegetable soup on Thursday.

It gives me a good feeling when I can work out what we need here and then do a bit of work to provide it on a continuing basis. Home is such an interesting and productive place when you have active and meaningful projects to take you through each day.  I've been doing research on berries lately and as a result of that, I'm taking out the very prickly youngberry we've had growing in the backyard for a few years, and will build up our Heritage raspberries again. If I can weed, feed and mulch the raspberries this week, they'll produce fruit in late winter/early spring. Our lemons are growing like mad and are juicy and sweet.

Soon the oranges will be ready to pick and yesterday morning I noticed they'd changed to a vivid orange colour.  Now they just need a couple of weeks of cold weather to sweeten them up. Oh, how I love orange season.  Last year we transplanted another Washington naval orange into the vegetable garden and added a Lane's Late orange to extend our orange season. The Lane's Late will allow us to continue our harvest when the Washingtons end in late July and will continue right through till late August.  In a year or two we'll have plenty of eating oranges with more than enough for juice and marmalade. Thank you sweet citrus family.

Tricia will be back on Wednesday and will stay until the following Wednesday. No doubt we'll go out and sightsee but the majority of our time will be spent here at home where we all feel so comfortable.  We feel protected from the outside world here - the influences, dangers, pollution, the busyness and the business.  When all is said and done, it doesn't matter if you're odd or strange or if you're the same as everyone else, the good thing is you'll fit like a glove into your own home. By the way, I consider myself to be in the odd category. I used to be a mainstreamer but now I don't fit any type or pattern and when I go out, there is increasingly more that is unfamiliar to me that I have no desire to know anything about.  Such is life.

I finalised the forum recently and a few days ago made a donation of $280 to the McGrath Foundation. For those who don't know of the McGrath Foundation, it's a charity that supplies breast care nurses to various communities. The donation was made on behalf of all of us "In memory of Rose Marshall". I miss you, Rose.

Dear readers, if you wish to leave a comment, and I would like to hear from you, just click on the text bubble in the Share section below this post. That will take you to the comments.



Nothing makes as much sense to me as growing food in the backyard. Hanno has been working hard over the past week digging, adding manures, compost, blood and bone to the soil and sifting out the ever-present nut grass. Finally, after all his work, the garden was planted up yesterday.  

After the lush overfull vegetable gardens we used to grow here, this one is more restrained, it's smaller, less showy and just right for our energy levels now. And I think we've got the mix of plants right for us too. We grow herbs because paying $15 every week for fresh herbs is crazy and I want freshness and taste - herbs that are cut, added to our food and eaten within the hour. Supermarket herbs that are tasteless and go limp within a day or two are a waste of time and money. We have to grow tomatoes - it's an interesting challenge to grow tasty tomatoes and it keeps us slower gardeners on our toes. I've never eaten a supermarket tomato that comes close to the excellent taste of a just picked heirloom tomato still warm from the sun. And we grow leaves because we can - they're so easy and as long as we give them enough water, they usually look after themselves. Overall, we've chosen the things we can grow easily as well as a couple of things that will keep us interested.


But the production of organic food isn't the only benefit of gardening. It creates a feeling of independence and self-reliance and when I go outside early in the morning to let the chickens out, or when I wander around picking herbs for lunch, or decide to sit in the cooling fresh air in the late afternoon, this garden of ours wraps itself around me and I know there is no other place I'd rather be. Further off in the distance I see the edge of a pine forest and a rain forest, I see homing pigeons out for their afternoon flight, butterflies float through, bees buzz and I listen to the sounds of the neighbourhood around me.  I feel protected here, I look at the seedlings just planted and feel pleased that we've put in the work, yet again, that will provide us with good food in the weeks ahead. As I walk back towards the house, I make a mental note to move this and that, to clip that rose back in the morning, to give the orange trees more seaweed tomorrow. There's always something to do in the vegetable garden and the work we do there rewards us just as much as the food does.



Are you planting vegetables, herbs or fruit this year? Are you adding anything new or going with your favourites?