down to earth

Hanno and his son, Jens, drove over to the farm country west of here yesterday to buy enough hay to do both our families all year. Jens and Cathy live close by and when we told them we saw cheap hay being sold on the road we took to collect our chickens, we all decided it would be a wise move to buy as much as we could fit in Jens' pickup and our trailer. The real sweetener was that the bales cost only $2 each. During the recent drought mulch bales were selling anywhere between $6.95 and $10. The rains have brought prices down, but even so, $2 was too good to pass up. We ended up with 30 bales which were divided equally between our two families.

We use hay or straw on our vegetable garden, in the worm farm and in the chicken coop. These 15 bales will see us through the year. It's being stored in our shed.

Mulching the vegetable garden has a number of benefits:

It provides a cover for the bare soil that will help keep the moisture in, and therefore reduce the amount of water needed for the garden.
It helps reduce weeds. Weeds need sunlight and bare soil to grow. Covering the soil with mulch cuts outs out both those requirements.
It insulates the soil surface against extreme heat or cold.
It helps maintain an even soil temperature.
It eventually breaks down to add organic matter to the soil, therefore increasing soil fertility.

When you apply mulch to your vegetable garden make sure you don't let it sit too close to the plants, as you'll rot the stems of some vegetables. However, this rule doesn't apply with tomatoes. It is helpful to go the other way with tomatoes. Push the mulch right up to touch the tomato stem as high as it will stand, and keep it moist. This will enable the tomato to send out more roots into the mulch. You'll get a stronger plant and more tomatoes doing this.

We always weed and water before we apply mulch. You'll find if you do that, you're giving the soil the best chance of producing bumper crops for you. The water you apply will stay in the soil longer, the temperature will remain fairly constant and you'll create the best conditions for growing healthy vegetables.

I'll be out in the garden today tending the chooks and worms, no doubt I'll also help Hanno mulch the garden. There is always something to do outside at this time of year. I have tomatoes to tie, the seedlings planted last week need some comfrey fertiliser and I have new seedlings to plant out. Hopefully the potatoes will be planted today.

I phoned Margaret, our chook lady, last night. It's bad news I'm afraid. None of the eggs has hatched. In fact Margaret said a few of them exploded under the broody! She's not sure why but thinks the fertile eggs exploded, the infertile eggs, which she candled, didn't. I feel sorry for the little bantam brood hen who was hoping to have a family of chicks to raise. After all that sitting and clucking, nothing. It's tough dealing with the disappointments of backyard farming. The joys of it are truly wonderful, but as is the nature of all things, the good is balanced out and you have to also deal with some harsh realities. This is real life being lived here - it's not meat and eggs on polystyrene trays with little thought to where they originate from. Real life is sometimes sad and doesn't always go as planned.

We are still hoping to increase our flock to around 20 hens. There are 12 there now so I might phone the woman we bought the other chooks from and take another trip out to pick up another half dozen.

Another week almost gone. I hope you have a great weekend and spend time doing something you love. Thank you for dropping by and for the comments left this week.

ADDITION: I found a very interesting blog that I want to recommend to you. Sadge is a reader here and I found her blog when I was visiting some of the new people who left comments. I really enjoyed reading about her life, her home, her memories and her natural environment; I hope you do too.

I’ve been wondering lately about the differences between a house and a home. What turns a house, flat, caravan, farmhouse or apartment, into a home? What is the magic element that turns a mere building into a haven for all who live there? For me, that element is focusing on the work I do to run my home – all that work I used to ignore or find irritating. I came to it slowly. It started with me knowing I had to do a lot of things that I used to think were unimportant and trivial; now those things are part of my day-to-day world. To be happy here I had to accept the old ways of homemaking; I had to make do, try to get by on less, cook from scratch and keep a natural home. I know now that what I do in my home every day defines the sort of person I have come to be. When I let go of the modern spray and wipe ways of cleaning and all those convenience foods and started to do more with less, it made me over, it made me into a different kind of woman.

Housework, who knew! Who knew that something so private and ordinary would be so significant. Nevertheless, the work I do each day makes me focus on how I live, it slows down my very fast brain to a calmer level and it makes me happy I am able to live as I do and proud of how I fill my days. It was only when I took time with my tasks and did them with a sense of respect and diligence that I realised that the work, time and effort I put into my home is a gift to myself and my family. I didn’t know that before.

There is no simple formula for living like this. I’ve thought about it a lot and because we’re all so diverse and different in our goals and what satisfies us, the elements of simple living must be different for us all. We are all at different stages of life - some with children, some without, some working outside the home, some discovering themselves within the home. I would like to give you a magic formula that would help you start on the road to a simpler life, or keep you motivated and inspired enough to continue with it, even when your child is crying for the doll her best friend has, when a teenager says he won’t wear second-hand clothes or when you come home from work, tired, to do the laundry and make a nutritious meal for the family. But the truth is, the path we all take to this life and what it takes to satisfy us while we live it, is different for everyone of us, and it is something private that must be discovered in the living of it.

With the benefit of hindsight I can tell you that while you’re developing your new way of living you’ll probably go through a series of changes. Not only in the physical day-to-day aspects of living but also in what your priorities are and what you believe you want. I found that when I discovered new skills it opened doors for me that I didn’t know were even there. When I look back now though, it was those unexpected doors that revealed the best treasures.

One of the seasonal treasures I deal with each year is our rosella harvest. I picked the first of them yesterday and dried them to make rosella tea. It was a very simple process of separating the red sepals and discarding the seed pods, washing the dust and insects from the sepals and drying them in a very slow oven. It takes one teaspoon of redness to make a cup of rosella tea – if you’ve ever had a cup of Red Zinger tea, you’ll have tasted rosellas. There was a time when making something like rosella tea would have been the lowest of my ambitions, but now I know that every single one of these small steps has lead me away from the mass marketed culture I used to wallow in. I’m so glad I changed.

x

There will be much hustle and bustle here today. This time next week the first of our guests will have arrived - my sister, Tricia - and we will be building up to my birthday celebrations. I don't want to do too much when our visitors are here, so this week will be busy with cleaning, preparations and fluffing the nest (ours, not the chooks'). We'll have three extra family members staying and several people visiting for lunch so I'll try to get the guest bedrooms in order today. There isn't too much to do in each bedroom but I want to dust, change bed linen and find some reading material.

We have four bedrooms in our home - one has been turned into a sewing room, there is one large guest room and one small one. My sisters will be in the larger room and one of my sons will be in the smaller one.

I like preparing for guests. I want them to feel at ease here, to be able to relax and unwind, and when it is time to go, to feel refreshed and better for having spent time with us. If someone is too cold or too hot, if they feel out of place or don't like the food I prepare that is a good indication that I didn't put enough time into thinking about their needs and how to fill them. Looking after family is easier because you know them so well, but it's still a challenge and it's important that I am mindful of my preparations.

Today I'll be making bread and doing the washing. There are also rosellas to be picked and dried for tea and made into cordial. I'll take some photos of the chicken coop later. Hanno hasn't done any work on it for a couple of days but one of the new roosts is being used and now he only has to finish off the other one and make the new nesting boxes. It should be finished this week but I'll take a photo of the work as it stands so you can see the progress made.

I hope there will be time for gardening too. I'd like to add some fertiliser to the greens and tie up the newly planted tomatoes but if I don't get to it today, it will be there tomorrow. It's no big deal if any of it is not done today, it will be done tomorrow or the next day.

I mailed my tote bag parcel to Chas yesterday so this afternoon I'll be doing a little bit of work on Helen's stitchery. Which reminds me, I must phone my chook lady, Margaret, to see if there are any hatchlings yet.

It's cold here this morning and I have my warm lambs wool slippers on. The baby chickens are just outside the window where I'm sitting and I can hear the first of their wake up chirps. Rosie is sitting here starting at me, waiting to be let out, Alice and Hanno are still sound asleep in warm beds. It's time to set to and start my chores, it will be quiet at first, then noisy as the day unfolds and settles into itself. It's good to look forward to a day of work here at home. I am a lucky woman to have it all ahead of me.

Our garden is producing very little at the moment but we did put food aside in the freezer when there was an abundance which we are making use of now. Even after it's been sitting in the freezer for a couple of months, our home grown silverbeet is tasty and nutritious, and when it's added to other ingredients, it makes an easy delicious meal.

SILVERBEET/SPINACH PIE

In a large bowl mix together:

4 large eggs
½ cup cream
1 clove crushed garlic
1 finely chopped onion or 4 spring onions - I used the red onions I wrote about a couple of days ago.
1 cup of cooked and finely chopped silverbeet or spinach. When it's cooled down, squeeze as much water from it as you can. The drier it is, the better.
½ cup finely grated Parmesan cheese
salt and pepper

Take 5 sheets of filo pastry, brush each sheet with melted butter and lay the sheets, one on top of the other, in a pie plate.

Place the spinach mixture into the pie plate on the pastry. Brush melted butter on the surrounding pastry edges.

Bake at 180C (355F) until golden brown.

Serve with a garden salad or vegetables.

If you haven't used filo pastry before, it's a wonderful pastry for sweet or savory dishes. You will find it in the fridge or freezer section of your supermarket. You could make your own but it requires a bit of skill with the stretching of the pastry. Be careful working with it as it will dry out quickly. If you have a complicated recipe that will take some time, place a moist clean tea towel over the pastry to prevent it drying out.

Easy apple pie recipe.

I used to do a lot more preserving, but we grow food throughout the year now, or try to, so we generally eat fresh from the garden. The only food I preserve now are the sauces, relishes and jams we eat. I find freezing is easier for storing what we have too much of at one time - like silverbeet or spinach, peas and beans, carrots, beets and cauliflower. I preserve cabbage by making it into sauerkraut and some of our beans I allow to dry so I can store them in the pantry.

I have asked my friend Belinda Moore to write about raising children while living simply. Belinda lives with her husband and six children to the far north of me in Queensland. She is a fine example of a modern woman who has not been caught up in the trappings of department stores and "I wants". Belinda writes from her own authentic experience, I hope you enjoy her story.

Living simply is an easy choice for an individual, I think. I’m married with six children aged 4-14, and sometimes I wonder about imposing my frugal ways upon my children. I feel a pang of regret that they don’t have bedrooms that look like pictures in a magazine. I micro-manage their wardrobes so I rarely pay full-price for shoes and clothing. Sometimes I make a deal that instead of going to the cinema to see a movie they’re really hanging out for we’ll buy it on DVD as soon as it’s released. We eat well, but simply and to a set menu, with few packaged goods and very little take-away, especially not from any of the fast food giants. There is a lot of pressure to provide our children with the best of everything – their own rooms, fresh new fashions each season, outings and holidays to expensive destinations. But we are choosing not to succumb to the pressure.

We bought a farm last year with a smaller house than we are used to, so the children are sharing rooms full of mismatched furniture including old wardrobes and bunk beds. For us this means keeping clutter to a minimum and ensuring they each have their own space within their room. There are other areas in the house to play and relax, and more than enough room outside. Our children generally get along well, know how to share and work together, and have company at bedtime. As we extend and renovate our house, some of them will still share rooms by choice, because they are friends as well as siblings.

Our children wear hand-me-down clothing, especially at home on the farm. I do love clothes though and they always have lovely outfits for going out – these are the better hand-me-downs, gifts, end-of-season and op shop bargains, occasional home-sewn items and store-bought for anything that’s missing when it’s required. To clothe six children in this way, I believe that I spend less than what it would cost to clothe a single child by buying all their needs in season, at a regular department store. And no complaints so far! This does take a bit of organising – I clean out their wardrobes and take stock of what they have and what they need well ahead of the change of season. I also keep a list of everyone's upcoming needs so I know what to look out for.

We choose quality toys and look after them. My kids don’t expect to get something new each time we go to a store. I prefer that they don't watch commercial television, especially the children’s shows because of the advertising. When they have birthday or Christmas money to spend I let them choose how to spend it, but do discuss the value of the items on their shopping list. Sometimes we end up with plastic, battery operated toys as gifts or bought with their own money. This doesn’t sit well with me at all, even with rechargeable batteries. These are the least-played-with toys, never last very long and usually don’t encourage creativity or imaginative play. They seem great in the box on the shelf, or on TV, but in reality are usually a disappointment destined for landfill.

There are many choices to be made by parents today. We need not listen to the advertisers, or try to keep up with what other households are doing. Ask yourself what’s best for your children, your budget, our planet… and don’t compromise your ideals to suit anyone else! If you’re being fair, and living an abundant lifestyle in other ways, your children will not wish for anything more.

* First in a series of guest posts by Belinda Moore.

I love being able to balance out the time I have at home with my voluntary work at the neighbourhood centre. Today is the first of my three days there this week. Monday is always busy because I have to write articles for the local newspaper and have them ready before lunchtime - as well as answering phones and dealing with the people who come in. After Monday morning, it's all down hill. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd find such joy in voluntary work. When I retired it was one of the things I wanted to do but I didn't have a clue where I would work or what I would do. Fortune, they say, favours the brave - one day I just walked into the Centre and asked if they needed helpers. Now I run the place and do things like teach budgeting, train volunteers, talk to people who need a little help and a hundred other things. It's a wonderful place with good people and I get a lot out of being there. If you're thinking of doing some voluntary work - dive right in. You'll find real joy in being able to help and if my experience is anything to go by, it will change you in many unexpected ways.

I had a very relaxed and slow day yesterday spent outside in the garden with a little indoor work thrown in for good measure. Our cat Hettie was asleep in the bushhouse when I went in there. She's sort of caught up in a vine because she had to sleep in a corner near my orchids.

I was sorting through photos earlier and came across these three photos of our garden in 2006. I studied them for a little while because I wanted to see where we'd planted certain vegetables back then. One of the benefits I've found in blogging and taking photos of my garden is that I have this ready reference of what we did, and when. I thought I should post the three photos as I know there are a lot of gardeners getting ready for the season and these photos might help you work out a plan, or at least help you see what others are doing.

Clicking on the photos will enlarge them. In this first photo we had Chinese cabbage growing in the foreground with zucchini just behind them.

In the next bed over was a wall of green beans. I think these were French climbing beans - probably Blue Lake. On the left are a few sunflowers which we grow sometimes for the chooks, with silverbeet just in front of the beans.

And finally a bed of cos and buttercrunch lettuce, JudiB's onions (written about yesterday), celery, radishes, rhubarb chard and a young peach tree.

One of my jobs yesterday was to improve fertility in our current garden. I used a combination of worm juice (above) and worm castings. The castings were scattered around seedlings and raked in, then everything was watered with some diluted worm tea. Worms are a very frugal way of creating fertile soil for your plants. You can keep the worms going with kitchen scraps, they will multiply, so you can give them to your chooks or other gardeners, and they make the most wonderful fertiliser.

When you set your mind to it, you can create, recycle, grow and make do with so many of the things already in your home. You don't need to go to the store and buy new - what you have already at your fingertips can be used for many simple tasks. All you have to do is to work out how to use what you have in a different way, and to think creatively. Forget what advertising tells you, what you buy is usually inferior to what you can make yourself.

With this mindset I have been slowly increasing the number of avocado trees in our backyard. Below is the seed of an avocado we recently had on our salads. I sprouted the seed and soon it will be planted out. Growing from seed takes longer than buying a grafted tree, but you eventually get the same fruit. It just takes more time - and the will to do it. This is a great project for children too. The seeds sprout fairly readily and it's wonderful to watch as it grows a little every day. All you do is to fill a small jar with fresh water, poke two toothpicks into the side of the seed to help the seed stay on top of the jar. The bottom of the seed should be just touching the water. Keep it in a warm, well lit area, like a window sill. In a week or so it will sprout, a few weeks after that it will look like the seed in the photo below. When the green shoot is tall and strong and when there are well developed roots, plant it out into a pot with well draining soil. After a year or so, plant it in the garden. A grafted avocado will produce fruit in about 4 or 5 years. This way will take about ten years. It's a long term project, but a worthwhile one.

Thank you all for your comments last week. I always enjoy reading them. Let's hope this week is a good one for all of us. Take care everyone.

Our little silver Hamburg chook, Stella Gladys, is dead. Hanno found her in a nest yesterday morning, she was wet over the top half of her body, dry below and sitting in a dry nest. It had been raining overnight but the roof doesn't leak. Hanno thinks a snake tried to swallow her but gave up, I think it was the stress of relocation.

RIP Stella Gladys.

It might sound cruel but Hanno and I have come to accept death as part of what happens in our backyard. We aren't what you would call farmers or graziers, but I do see our one acre block as a little farm which supports life and sometimes experiences death. We know this is likely to happen when we get new critters, because, for some creatures, the stress of being caught at their original home, being put into a container and transported by car to our place, is enough to kill them. We are gentle folk, we do care for our animals and chooks, but sometimes kindness isn't enough.

I made myself sit at the sewing machine until I finished two projects yesterday. One was a tote bag for my swap partner, Chas, the other, a tea cosy. I made the cosy from a small part of a recycled cotton jumper that was not able to be mended. I added some wadding for warmth, cotton strips for aesthetic appeal and Bob's your uncle, we have ourselves a tea cosy. I might cut the rest of the jumper in squares, hem each one and use them as cleaning clothes.

Earlier in the day I set up a small enclosure for the baby chicks. You can see them here on the grass, which they pecked at and scratched on most of the day. They are, in order from left, golden Hamburg - Jewels, Faverolles - Heather, golden Campine - Beatrice and buff Orphington - Martha. I gave them a little perch to practise on so when they progress up to the chicken coop, they'll know how to roost at night. I wish I had a broody hen to mother these little chicks. All creatures benefit enormously from a zealous and caring mother to show them the what, where, why and how of life. These babies have to get by on instinct, food and water on tap and a safe environment; the rest is up to them.

The last of the red Welsh onions where picked yesterday. We have problems growing regular onions here - our growing season is just a little bit too short for them, but we get by fine on spring onions. I have just replanted some of JudiB's green onions, which I consider to be the finest spring onion - for abundance and taste - that I've grown. Judi lives a couple of hundred kilometres from me, going west, and she has a bumper crop of them every year. I think she's given away hundreds of these onions over the years. Mine have been growing well and faithfully for two years now, and even in driving rain, the hottest summer and long spells of dry, they thrive. Some of these onions will be a added to silverbeet that was frozen earlier in the year, some backyard eggs, local cream and ricotta and a few sheets of philo pastry to make a pie for our dinner tonight and tomorrow.

It's only 12 C (53F) this morning, the first cold morning of the year. Sometimes I fantasise about living in a cold climate again with hot open fires, mittens and duffel coats, but then the first cold morning hits and I decide I'm best here where the winters are mild. Now that I'm older I feel the cold more than I once did. I think Hanno's the same because often in the winter he makes himself a hot chocolate before he goes to bed. Our dogs, Rosie and Alice, are growing old along with us and now that Rosie is 12 she struggles to stand up early in the morning and she has to be lifted in and out of the car. And that's no easy matter. I wish there could be life without death but that impossibility leads me to believe that while we are all here, we make the most of what we have, we show respect and kindness to all and we leave our home and family better for us having been here.

I'm sounding kind of maudlin and I don't feel sad at all. I just have a full and true awareness this morning of the fragile nature of life and the beauty to be found in just living. I will be 60 soon so I still have at least another 30 years in me. I wonder how old the oldest blogger is. ; - )

Sometimes I feel like I have all the time in the world to do whatever it is I have to do, often I slow down too much and have to make up for it later. Like now. The past two days have been quiet and relaxed, I went out yesterday to our local recycle station, then to the Centre to take in everything they donated to us. They gave a slow cooker, a toaster, coffee cups, cutlery, vases, tea pots and a kettle and milk jug. The baby chicks have been taking up a bit of time as they need to be taken to a sunny spot each day, fed and watered frequently, I've been reading, sewing and organising a few odds and ends.

And now it's Saturday! Yowzers.

Today I have a mountain of work. There is washing to be done and hung out to dry, folded and put away, baking - a cake and bread and sewing - finishing off my tote bag (hi Chas!). I have to start preparing for our visitors, two sisters and a son, which means I will move some things from the spare room back to where they were before we started painting all those months ago.

And gardening.

We have reached the time when we put structure in the garden. We have a few things planted so now the time has come to put in climbing frames and tee pees for beans, peas and cucumbers. We're adding the vertical to the horizontal, which always adds interest to the look and feel of the garden. There is still one garden to be weeded and planted but that will happen soon. The seedlings have put on new growth, seeds have germinated in the soil and it's all going according to plan.

Hanno is still working on enlarging the chook house but it's taking more time than we first thought. We're trying to use all recycled materials so it takes a while to find what we need either here or further afield. We had a big downpour of rain yesterday afternoon, 60 mms (2.4 inches) in about an hour, and all the chickens ran to the newly covered area and remained quite dry and warm out of the rain. There are nine chooks in there now, and four babies will join them soon, so it was good to see the new space will accommodate them nicely when they're all in there together. The back walls will go on today, new perches will be made and we have to move the nesting boxes. Hanno will make three new nests too but that can wait till after the coop is finished. When everything is in place, I'll take some photos for you. I know Patrick and Renee want to see what we've done.

Thanks to everyone who added a blog link yesterday. I'll go through them soon. I hope you all have a lovely weekend and have time to relax and enjoy life. Welcome to all the new people who still keep coming. I am amazed that there are so many readers here. If you have time, please leave a comment, especially if you've not done so in the past. Take care, everyone.