down to earth

I have been nominated again for Bloggers for Positive Global Change Award by Kate at Our Red House. Thank you Kate. At first I wondered whether I should accept the nomination again, but I've thought about it carefully and I think it's a good thing. I'll be able to nominate five more bloggers and thus spread the love.

The award was started at Climate Of Our Future to highlight blogger's efforts around the world to share their knowledge and thoughts in making our world better, healthier and more sustainable.

One of the rules of the award is that I have to tag five other blogs that I believe are sharing what they know and inspiring others towards positive change. Those five blogs are:

Hedges Happenings Kim is working tirelessly to live sustainably. She lives on a farm in the US and is working towards reducing her impact on her environment. Her blog is always interesting, informative and full of encouragement.

gobblers run Kirsty is new to the blog world but already shows us what's possible on her block in rural Victoria. This is a blog to watch as I'm sure she and her partner will continue to show us many positve changes on their sustainable path.

fiveandtwo Susan is often busy sewing lovely clothes for her children. She recycles and has done a great job organising her home. She teaches her children by example how to lessen their footprint, and shows us along the way how she is working towards a simple and sustainable life.

a vision splendid This blogger is working towards a more simple home. She's gone back to basics and already has made great changes to her life. Another blog to watch as her journey towards simplicity continues.

pea soup I'm new to this blog and am still working my way through the older posts. But I'm happy to report that she is knitting, sewing, recycling and making the most delicious looking sourdough. Her life, via her photos, looks interesting and right. I know I'll be reading a lot more and hope to learn the secret of her sourdough.

Fellow Positive Global Change Award recipients, it’s easy to participate in this meme. At minimum, you can proudly display the BPGC badge (Click here for the image url) on your blog and bask in the glow of our collective good will. If you are sharing the kudos, however, please make sure you pass this list of rules to the blogs you are tagging. The participation rules are simple:
1. When you get tagged, write a post with links to up to 5 blogs that you think are trying to change the world in a positive way.
2. In your post, make sure you link back to so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme.
3. Leave a comment or message for the bloggers you’re tagging, so they know they’re now part of the meme.
4. Optional: Proudly display the “Bloggers For Positive Global Change” award badge with a link to the post that you write up.

It's difficult when one person in the family decides to change in certain ways and the rest of the family want to stay the same. I think this might be happening in many households where one person sees the need to change to a more simple life and then agonises over how to create the same need in the rest of the family.

I was no different. H was certain that we needed one of us to remain working, I was certain we didn't. I'm not blaming him for a lack of vision here. It was simply that I felt the dissatisfaction first, then did some reading and found information that convinced me that we had to change. But our story of change probably started before that. I had been operating a successful technical writing business for ten years before I realised I wasn't satisfied with what I was doing. I was spending a lot of money on rubbish that I didn't need and I was unhappy. I thought long and hard about my life and what I wanted. What made me happy? Well, my family did and I loved them dearly, I also loved reading, gardening and my friends. That was it. None of it was connected to money or how successful I was. What a surprise! I closed down my business.

I made it my job then to save enough money in the home so that my lack of income had a reduced impact. I read everything I could, I joined a forum where I learnt from others about making do, cutting back and living frugally. The longer I stayed at home, the more I learnt about homemaking, the frugal arts of bread and soap making, stockpiling and looking after what we owned. I'd always had a vegetable garden and chooks but we expanded our gardens and bought more chooks with the hope of providing all our vegetable, fruit and egg needs from our own backyard. That eventually lead to worm farms, aquaponics and sprouting.

While all that was happening, I didn't try to persuade H one way or the other. I wanted my actions to speak for themselves. I wanted him to realise for himself that it wasn't just a change in the way I shopped and looked after the house, it was a lifestyle change. Over the months our costs dropped dramatically. We ate more wholefoods, stopped eating out and generally became healthier for it. H had managed our money very well over the years and consequently we were debt-free. He was amazed and delighted when I always had money left over from my monthly allocation. We built up an emergency fund, kept our private health insurance and still had money left over. He started to make suggestions about other things we could do and we started talking about simple living, slowing down and enjoying life.

It was then I talked to him about him giving up work too. Initially he was against it so I let it go and just continued what I was doing. Eventually he realised that he could go on a pension, he was over 65, and we'd still be financially sound. We closed down our shop. That was a momentous day. It was our liberation day.

All along I encouraged H to quietly observe what I was doing. I didn't challenge him to join, I didn't ask for his help (much), I just wanted him to watch and see for himself and for him to realise that we could do this. Good men have an overwhelming need to provide for their families, they will not give up traditional ways just because you ask them to. They need to see for themselves that it works and they can only know it by seeing it with their own eyes.

Now I don't expect all of you to want your husbands to give up work to live simply but you can start with small steps and gently demonstrate that simple ways will work well in your lives. Start with the obvious things like saving electricity and reducing the power bills. Then the water, petrol and housekeeping. I guarantee if you can consistently save money on these things and put that money in a no-fee savings account, your husband will be surprised, happy and impressed that you did it. The next step is to teach everyone in your family to do it too, saving even more. The payoff can be a family holiday with the money you all save. And along the way you will teach them that simple living isn't about giving up things they like. It's more about giving up what you can do without so you have money for things that are important. That is a significant lesson for anyone to learn, be they 6 or 60.

After that first family change, you can introduce others ... slowly. You might move on to other things like getting chickens, starting a garden and keeping a worm farm. You might get rid of your second car and use public transport or start paying off the mortgage faster. Small steps, but once the ball starts rolling you will pick up momentum and a couple of years down the track you'll be living more simply and reaping the benefits of that. Small steps pay off in big ways.

I made some lemon syrup cakes on Saturday, recipe from Lisa at Altered Cutlery. I made three cakes - one we are eating this week, the other two are in the freezer. H and I are going away on a little holiday soon and I want a few nice things in the freezer for my son who will stay here to look after everything while we're away. So thanks Lisa! It's a very nice recipe, the lemony syrup makes such a difference. You pour the syrup over the cake when it's hot from the oven and it soaks in to give you a deliciously moist and tangy cake. H has been raving about it. I'll definitely be baking it again.

Today will be a really busy one for me - I'm off to work at the Neighbourhood Centre soon and I have a lot to do while I'm there. I work by myself today. I'll start off writing articles about our various activities for the local paper, then carry on with whatever needs to be done. We should have had some new appliances delivered last week so I'll check them out and make sure they were entered on equipment sheets I did up. I also asked that they be engraved with our name and phone number, in case we have yet another burglary, if all that's been done, then I'll have the rest of the day to write a budgeting course for the Flexischool.

Tomorrow I'm talking to the Flexischool kids about credit cards, mobile phone and ring tone deals and budgeting in general. I should have already written the course, but haven't. I work better under pressure so I usually leave things till the last minute. I hope I get it right as there will be a liaison officer there from the high school and if this course goes down well at my Flexischool, they're going to trial it in others.

I'm guessing the writing and photocopying will take most of the day as it will be interrupted by answering the phone and people coming into the office. I might end up staying a little longer if I don't get it done.

This winter has been a 'real' winter, with temperatures dropping to one degree this past weekend. Many of the ladies from aussieslivingsimply recently sent warm gloves, hats, scarves, socks and jackets to me to give to our homeless people. The other volunteers and I have been happily giving these out over the past week and it's made me smile like a loon when I see our people around town later on wearing their gifted warm things. It's a wonderful feeling to be able to surprise someone with something that will make them more comfortable during these long cold winter nights. Thanks again, ladies.

Before I go to the Centre today I need to put away clothes that I ironed yesterday, make my lunch and a flask of tea to take with me, make the bed and tidy the bathroom, so I'd better get a wriggle on. Hopefully I'll have time to stop in again later. Thank you all for stopping by. : )

It's a beautiful, crisp, winter day here. Mid-winter, my elder son's 27th birthday. Unfortunately we won't see Shane today as he's gone away for the weekend with 15 of his friends. My other son, Kerry, will be here for his 26th birthday next week, so we'll take them both out for dinner at their favourite German restaurant. Kerry will stay with us for a few days before he goes back to his current home on the Gold Coast. Fun times!

I've spent the morning ironing and gardening. The vegetables are growing well - some too well, if I have to eat anther turnip in the next ten years, I'll run into the bush. The willy-wagtails were out and about this morning and although I had my camera in my apron pocket, they wouldn't stay still long enough for me to snap them. I did get a photo of a new bird feeding area H put in during the week. It's for small birds like wrens, the willys and finches. We have a large bird bath for the bigger birds and make sure it's always full of fresh water, but the smaller birds don't use it. I think it's too deep for them, even with a large stone in it. Hence the new place. There is enough room for food and a shallow saucer of water. I haven't seen any birds there yet but the seed is being eaten so they must have discovered it. Further down from that area, is a perch for kookaburras. They like to watch us in the garden and usually sit on the bean trellis. This spot is much more stable for them.

I haven't written about our aquaponics garden for a while but it's going really well now. Last week I harvested the last of just over 14 kilos of pink brandywine tomatoes and pulled out the plants. I sowed some more brandywine seeds a couple of weeks ago and noticed they're starting to come up now. I hope these will produce many more tomatoes and now we're about to plant up our second lot of aquaponics plants, we have a better idea of placement and shade needs.

We have some ruby chard and silverbeet growing and even though they're small, I've been harvesting them as salad greens. They're very tasty and crisp. That's one difference I've noticed between the soil and the aquaponic vegies, the ones in the aquaponics garden are much more crisp.

The parsley and celery continue to grow, as does the cayenne chilli. I picked some this morning and cut back the plant to stimulate new growth in Spring.

And the fish. Well, they're doing really well. Even though the temperature is getting down to 3 - 4 degrees overnight and the water temp drops to about 12, they're doing fine. They're not eating much, and therefore not growing a lot, but they're surviving well and they look really healthy. They'll make up for the lack of growth in Spring and we hope to have some to plate size early next year.

We'll pass the 5000 visitor mark sometime today, so I want to thank you all for reading and giving some great feedback. I wonder if Gary and P are the only men reading. Cooeee all the men, if you're out there, please let me know.

I wrote about neighbours yesterday and have been thinking since then about how we connect with others and become friends.

I failed to realise before now that we are all online neighbours. You, me and all the others, we are a new kind of neighbourhood. We might not see each other nor have the potential to hear voices, but we share, teach, encourage and comfort each other just like I remember it back in the 50s, when I was growing up. I remember our neighbours showing my mother their latest home-sewn dress or table cloth; I remember those same women teaching my mother to do things she couldn’t do, and I can still see her teaching others how to knit, make ice-cream and curl their hair with plastic rollers – the new craze. LOL We do all those things – with our computers and digital cameras, we show and tell, share our lives and encourage each other just as my mother’s neighbours once did.

We have built a beautiful, caring, thoughtful and open-hearted online neighbourhood in Blogdom and I for one am very pleased to be a part of it. Some of my readers comment that I am generous and share, and I do, it is something I think carefully about every day. I believe that generosity makes us better people and to encourage other women, and to share what I know, is one of the most important things I can do at this stage of my life. But how many others are doing that in our blog neighbourhood? Lots. It is what powers this part of the internet. It is where we gain our energy and strength. Sharing our lives makes us part of this neighbourhood.

We are the leaders here. We have no politicians and no rules. The blog neighbourhood is what we have made it – a place of friendship, encouragement and learning. This, my friends, is how real life should be, but usually isn’t. My hope is that the loving spirit of our online neighbourhood will overflow into every one's life and bubble out into the wider community via random acts of kindness and sharing.

Now if only I could work out how to borrow a cup of sugar online, I’d be set. : )

The second stage of a revolution started yesterday. I went out to the front verandah at 3ish and found a box of food scraps. It was a large polystyrene box full of wholemeal bread crusts, beetroot tops, assorted vegie scraps and old baby spinach. The revolutionary's note was short and sweet, it said:

THOUGHT YOU MIGHT LIKE THIS FOR THE CHOOKS.

ANG

Ang, is our next door neighbour, Angie.

I have been trying to build up a neighbourly relationship with the people we share our street with. We live at the end of what most modern Australians call a cul-de-sac, and what I call a dead end. It's a tiny one lane road that further down has a small family run business for making roof trusses but across from us is just pine trees that surrounded and hide a deserted saw mill. There are four other families I'd like to be more friendly with. Ang is on one side with her husband and one ten year old son, there is another young family on the other side of them with a dad, a SAHM and two small boys. On the other side of us is a young couple who were married last year. Next to them is an older couple.

When we walk by we say hello and we talk over the fence with Angie, but that's all we do. I decided a year ago that we should be more supportive of each other - more neighbourly. So I started giving spare eggs and vegies to those four families in the hope that would spark reciprocation of some sort. That we'd all start sharing and giving, look after each other if there was a crisis, and be neighbourly. I didn't want us to be in each others pockets, I don't want neighbours to drop in for coffee every morning, but I wanted to share and I wanted all of us to know that if any of us needed help, neighbours would be there to provide it. Well, my gifts were received gratefully but it always ended there. The revolution that started with one step, ended after a walk around the block.

Until yesterday.

Efforts will now be increased. The box will be returned with fresh vegies, a few eggs and the hope that the revolution will be in full swing by Christmas.

I wonder sometimes why our paths lead us to this simple way of living. None of my friends live as we do, neither do any family members, although both our sons don’t have cars for purely environmental reasons and one is an organic gardener. But here we are living a kind of ideal life that has made us more relaxed and happy than we’ve ever been while the others are still off shopping, playing bowls or bingo or travelling around the country with a rolling sea of grey nomads. Strange.

There are days when it suddenly hits me that we don’t work for a living now. That whatever we decide to do on a particular day is what we’ll do, with no input from a boss or a looming deadline that requires us to do something else. Our days are spent in the garden and the house, listening to the sounds of a quiet home. We hear birds, and now know some of those birds live here with us. It never hit me before that while I think of this land as “ours” there are a few families of birds, some snakes and lizards, who, while they don’t spend all their lives here, spend a significant portion of it here and regard “our home” as their home too. It’s a nice feeling to be part of the natural world, to have birds you know by sight sit near you when you’re in the garden.

Our days are punctuated by meals and tea breaks, with chores and rest served in between in equal portions. Although we’ve never actually divided up the work that needs to be done, we’ve naturally fallen into doing what suits us best. It doesn’t seem like work, it feels like just making things comfortable for ourselves.

And we’re easy on each other now. We never argue, it’s all relaxed and effortless. I’m not sure if that’s come with age or if it’s because we live well with very little stress. Maybe it’s a bit of both, whatever it is, it allows us both to do what we feel like doing without the unspoken disapproval of the other. I haven’t seen “THE Look” for a dozen months.

I go to work at my voluntary job two days a week and that really suits us because we need time apart too. Working where I do gives me a feeling of being in the right place, and when I come home each night, I feel satisfied, tired and grateful that I am accepted by the homeless and the disadvantaged as well as the business leaders and local government officials who are able to make life easier for my people.

H has just called me for morning tea. He’s been quietly making tea and pikelets and the aroma here now is something special. We never say to each other that this is the good life, but I often think it. I wonder if he does too. I must ask him while we sit in the sun and sip our tea.

I discovered the benefits of good homemade soap several years ago; I love how it nourishes my aging skin. I usually make a cold pressed soap - for soap novices, that is soap made from scratch - but I discovered Greenfrog's recipe for easy peasy soap at ALS a while back, so I made a batch. It's not too bad. I still prefer my cold pressed soap, because I know what's in it, but this soap will be a good standby soap when I can't make the other.

RECIPE

4 cups Lux flakes

1 cup milk - goat or cow's

1/2 cup powdered milk

Fragrant oil and colouring are optional

Add four cups of Lux flakes to a saucepan and mix in half the milk. You want the consistency of dryish mashed potatoes.

Begin stirring on a low heat, make sure you keep stirring as the milk will burn it you don't. Add more milk if it's too dry and keep stirring. It doesn't matter if it looks lumpy now. As you stir, you'll notice the mixture start to dissolve. At this point you can add the 1/2 cup of milk powder.

Keep stirring until the mix is smooth and has no lumps. You can now add your fragrant oil or colouring and mix it in.

Take it off the heat, give it a good stir and pour it into a greased mould. In my case, I used a plastic Ikea lunchbox that I'd sprayed with cooking oil.

Let it stand overnight. The next morning it will be solid but still softish. Carefully tip it out of the mould and slice it, with a sharp knife, into whatever shape you want . Allow the cakes to stand on a drying rack for about a week. When they're hard and dry you can start using them.

If you look at the thread at ALS here, you'll be able to see that Kirsty added herbs, oatmeal and colouring, as well as fragrance to her soap. It looks really good and shows you that you can modify this recipe to be what you want it to be. I'm a bit of a plain girl myself and rarely add colouring or fragrance to anything. But it can be done successfully and to your taste.

I also collect all my old bits of soap and when I have enough I rebatch it to make soap for the laundry and our outside sink. I remember my Aunty Joy collecting soap scraps when I was growing up and making new soap from them. I thought then that it was a miserly thing to do. Now I realise how smart she was to never waste anything and try follow her wise lead.

I wonder if there are any others here who make soap. My favourite soap is a mix of olive oil, coconut oil and sunflower oil. It is a very simple soap that has a good lather and one batch lasts us about six months. I'd be happy to do a tutorial here on cold pressed soap making if anyone wants to learn how to do it. It's quite easy.

One of the things H and I are trying to do is to bring as little as possible into our home from outside. We try to make or grow what we need and that applies in the garden too. Here are some recipes for homemade fertilisers.

COMFREY LIQUID FEED
Cut the leaves from the comfrey plant before it flowers and throw the leaves into a bucket that has a lid. Half fill the bucket with leaves and put a brick on top of them to stop them floating. Fill the bucket with water and put the lid on. It will smell ... a lot. Stir it every couple of days and in two or three weeks you'll have a nice brown liquid that is an excellent feed for your green leafy plants. It's high in nitrogen so it will really give them a boost. USE: Strain the leaves out of the mixture and put them in the compost. Add 20mls of your comfrey mix to every 2 litres of water and add a couple of grated pieces of soap to help it stick to the leaves when you spray it on. If you have any comfrey tea left over, pour it onto your compost. It will help it decompose.

MANURE TEA
Take two shovel fulls of horse/cow/sheep/pig maure, or one shovel of chook poo and place it in a hessian bag. Place the bag in a large barrel and fill to the top with water. Let this sit of 7 - 10 days. USE: It can be used straight, poured onto the soil around plants, or dilute it (50:50) for delicate plants. Don't waste what's left of the poo in the hessian bag. Dig it into the compost heap.

WORM CASTING TEA
Almost fill a watering can or bucket with water. Add half a cup of worm castings, one tablespoon molasses, one tablespoon of fish fertiliser and half tablespoon of seaweed concentrate. Stir this well for at least five minutes. USE: Pour this on and around your plants first thing in the morning.

GREEN MANURE
If your garden bed will stand empty for a while, plant a green manure crop. This can be any legume type plant like cow peas or broad beans, or you try a grass like oats or barley. If you have left over peas or beans, use them, or buy green manure seeds from somewhere like Green Harvest (see further reading below). When the crop is about a meter high, cut it off and leave it as mulch. When you're ready to plant again your soil will be alive and healthy and ready for the new crops.

FURTHER READING:

Isabell Shipard's comfrey info

Green manures