down to earth

My sister Tricia arrives tonight! Excitement is beginning to rise. Kathleen and Kerry arrive on Saturday.

I've had two fairly quiet days at work with a little bit of housework when I come home. Beds have been made, pillows fluffed up, Hanno cleaned windows yesterday, the lawn is mown - I think we're almost ready for our visitors. The weather has been quite cool, so it's a pleasure to work away knowing I'm preparing my home to share with my sisters, and son, and the friends who'll arrive on Saturday to have lunch with us all.

Soon, bottoms will fill these chairs, we'll drink tea and catch up on things not discussed over the phone or in emails. We will all help prepare the food for lunch, we have wine and beer for those who want it, and local organic coffee and organic tea for those who don't. I've changed the menu as we have a few men coming along now and I know they struggle with not eating meat - my son included. The new menu is spinach pie, homemade macaroni and cheese, beef lasagne and if I have time, a vegetable lasagne. I'll make bread, and butter from local cream, and serve some local cheese. Dessert will be a coffee and brandy cake.

I have to go to the shops to pick up a few things after work tonight and then I'll drive into Brisbane to pick up Tricia who is flying in from Sydney, due at 8.30pm. Good times.

I know there are quite a few ladies reading my blog who came to me from Jewels, and I've had emails from some who want to know how she is and if she is blogging. I received an email from Jewels yesterday. She isn't blogging - she invited a small number of us to her private blog just after she shut down public access - but that only lasted a few days, then she closed it. The family moved and she hasn't gone back to her blog again, although it is something she might do in the future. For the time being, she and her family are happy and well and enjoy being in their new home. She is praying that Hanno and I will travel over to visit them. I have invited Jewels to do a guest post here but she's very busy so it might be a long time coming. I'm sure many of you wish her well and I'll tell her that when I reply later this week.

Hello ladies. While we wait for all the totes to be posted and received, Rhonda, Lorraine and I wanted to have another swap. This swap will not be about making anything. It is a seed swap. All you gardeners out there, this one's for you! We would like those who are interested in swapping heritage or heirloom seeds (not F1 seeds from your local hardware or big box store) to leave their name, their e-mail address (spelled out to keep the spammers away) and their province, shire or state, as well as their country in the comments of this post. Since we are swapping seeds, which are agricultural products, we have to be very careful and keep swap buddies in the same country, and for some, in the same state or province. I will pair the buddies based on the information you leave so remember to leave me your state, or province, or shire and country. You may sign up until Monday, April 14, 2008. I have some links for all those who would like more information. Some of the links explain heirloom or heritage seeds and some are very specific to certain countries such as Canada, and Australia. Scroll down on several of the links for lists of many more links (sort of a link within a link :0). If any one has links for the UK, please e-mail them to me so I can post them; I seem to have come up short there and would love to hear from UK gardeners! http://www.vegparadise.com/heirloom.html http://www.seeds.ca/en.php
http://www.greenlivingtips.com/articles/130/1/Heirloom-and-heritage-seeds.html
http://www.daff.gov.au/aqis/mail/cant-mail
http://www.forkand%20bottle.com/garden/seeds/seedsource.htm
http://www.agric.nsw.gov.au/reader/pe-plantquarantine/quardomesbroc.pdf Please remember that the seeds need to be open-pollinated seeds or heirloom seeds, not F1 seeds. This should be a fun swap and the seeds will most certainly grow into something very special! Edited to add links from the UK Thank-you Clare!! Check Chiltern Seeds or Sutton Seeds as well as the following: http://www.gardenorganic.org.uk http://www.thomasetty.co.uk

I was so happy with the feedback from my guest post here last week, thank you all for your kind comments. It’s lovely to hear from others living similar lives too.

Sometimes I think that I am a bit obsessed with food. But given that ‘we are what we eat’ and I am responsible for feeding myself and another seven people, and that it is our next biggest expense after housing - I guess my focus on food is valid.

We have a varied diet. The ethics of food currently has me swaying between organic vs. local produce and vegetarianism vs. growing our own meat. I have no clear answers to these questions regarding food. My ideal is local, organic and affordable. Preferably home-grown! I am fascinated by comparisons such as this one featured in Time last year. I have also read books from the library about the ethics of food, and wonder why I didn’t ask questions earlier!

My number one tip for saving money and staying healthful is to stay away from the large supermarkets. I do still go to a big supermarket for cat litter, toilet paper, bulk olive oil and so on, but for the main part of our grocery items I stay well away from those aisles of temptation and packaging!

I buy bulk nuts, dried fruit, oats, lentils and flour with a group of friends through a company in Brisbane – which is a city about 1750km away from where I live. It’s our nearest capital city! I package these items into smaller bags and containers and store them in the freezer, taking out approximately a standard packet’s worth when we need more. Keeping them in the freezer means that they’re fresh and safe for longer.

Of the few jars and tinned foods we eat, I buy these from an organic seller, often in cartons of 12. I store most of them on the bottom shelf of my linen cupboard and ‘shop’ from this stockpile when we need more, moving 2-3 tins or jars to the kitchen pantry. So those two shopping options, with the rare supermarket buy-up (of toilet paper and olive oil etc) cover most of our staples.

We are lucky to live on a farm where we can grow fruit and nuts, harvest wild foods, keep chickens and plant herbs and vegetables. Having and using these fresh foods cuts a great amount from our food budget. When we moved house about a year and a half ago I had no garden for awhile and I really noticed the difference having to buy all of our produce and eggs. Even if you can grow some sprouts, a few potted herbs, a couple of tomato plants in pots, and a foam vegetable box (or planter box if you wish) with salad greens – you’re making a difference. And if you’re doing this with children, you’re teaching them something very special. As a child I had many gardens, including one on a window ledge in an inner-city apartment. My mother encouraged me to grow plants wherever we were, and to this day it is an important part of my lifestyle. In turn, I encourage my own children to care for the chickens, plant seeds, help me to harvest from the vegetable patch and forest. Last week they took a basket to the edge of the forest, just metres from our house, and harvested enough yellow guavas for me to make 6 litres of guava jelly. Most went to the pantry and some was given to a friend who brought us some of his excess bananas. Next time he visits I’ll have a banana cake to show my appreciation.

Living in the country does offer more blessings in the way of space to grow food, roadside stalls, country markets, wild foods and free food from friends’ and neighbours’ gardens. In urban areas, families can try the ideas above if they have some balcony space or a courtyard. Or perhaps look into community gardens, food co-ops (where you buy food in bulk and share it out) and farmers’ markets. In cities there are also warehouses for bulk buying, larger supermarket chains with very cheap products and international grocery stores. In case you’re wishing for what you don’t have, please take advantage of what you do have and work with it. I have lived in urban, suburban, semi-rural and now a farming area. I’ve had many homes and many gardens and I know that there are pros and cons to every situation. For me, having the land is great because I love the work and don’t miss the benefits of city living too much. For others, the land could be a burden and the city full of blessings. Whatever you have and whatever you do, involve your children in obtaining food. Let them help you shop wisely, without the I-wants. Encourage them to grow food. Teach them about your local wild foods. Preserve the bounty and see their wide-eyed joy. The advertisers want our children to be thrilled by character-packaged nothing-foods. I want our children to be thrilled by the taste of a cherry tomato plucked from the vine, the crunch of a snow pea, shiny bottles of jam and the thrill of discovering that the fruit is ripening on the trees.

Once I’m done shopping (which, when you avoid the supermarket, is quite complicated but very worthwhile), I focus on planning our menus. Here is a post on my own blog describing my method of menu planning. For me, menus are a sanity-saver rather than a chore. Having a menu means we’re within budget, on time, never run out of what we need (so no ducking into that supermarket or buying takeout food unless we want to!). We have back-up options such as swapping meals to different nights, and meals in the freezer from bulk cooking.

Cooking in bulk occasionally happens on purpose – if I have a lot of something to use up I’ll set aside time one afternoon to cook and freeze some meals. But it usually happens as I’m cooking the family meal with my children. Instead of cooking for eight, we make double or triple that amount. Yes, we have some big pots! After our meal, I pack the excess and label it and into one shelf of the freezer it goes. Our usual frozen meals are curries, pasta sauces (also good with rice) and soups. These reheat easily and taste better than the first time.

I hope you can also find new ways to feed your family on a budget, healthfully and with the planet in mind. I have made one small change at a time, saving money to buy in bulk and planning shopping and meals to suit our lifestyle. What changes can you make right away? Where will your food come from in the future? Will it cost more than you’re spending now, or less? How much garbage will you be producing? How can you involve the children? Our daughters aged nearly-14, nearly-12 and 11.5 years can cook full meals on their own. They love to cook and feel proud when they help me or serve up a meal of their own creation. I will be teaching our nearly-9 year old son to cook this year, if he stops bouncing around the kitchen and eating the ingredients long enough to learn!

Oh, did I mention I am a little obsessed about food?

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

Part one and part three of Belinda's story.

We had a wonderful weekend with little bits of work and a lot of relaxing thrown in for good measure. Much of our time was spent outside in the garden. Almost everything is planted now, we just have the peas, beans and cauliflowers to go. The kale has started to grow, tomatoes have been planted and staked and the potatoes are in. I'm on the lookout for some golden nugget seeds or seedlings now, when they're planted, I'll be happy.

So far the following has been planted: three types of tomatoes - amish paste, brandywines and moneymaker, capsicums (sweet peppers), chilli, kale, silverbeet (chard), wom bok (Chinese cabbage), bush cucumber and Lebanese cucumber, Darwin lettuce, French radishes, Dutch cream potatoes, Welsh onions, parsley, Tendercrisp celery, carrots and button squash. We might have some room left for a few other odds and ends, if so, I'll buy open pollinated seedlings and get them in next week.

The capsicums (peppers) have been growing since last year and are still going strong. I'll definitely be saving seeds from these plants to grow in the coming years. It's a robust and flavoursome capsicum and I doubt I could kill it with an axe.

At the moment there are about 20 capsicums growing or ripening on three bushes.

The largest of the new chickens are very happy here and cluck around exploring their new home. The small chicks are still in a fenced area but they're happy too as they can scratch the earth and eat bugs and grass. The photo below is of Anne Shirley, Lotte, Kylie and Margaret who wander around together most of the time.

Hanno hasn't done anymore work on the coop but will do that while I'm at work over the next three days. So far he's installed these nifty roosts that we can pin to the rafters when we're cleaning the place out. It's much easier than moving them and better than letting the footings sit in water.

This is one of them attached to the rafters. That wall between the roost will come out - that used to be the outside wall of the coop, and the new nesting boxes need to be made. You can see the one solitary nest box above and with only three hens laying that has been enough for the girls.

Work was also done inside. I tidied up the guest rooms, cleaned bathrooms and all the floors. But there was also time for morning tea on the front verandah and this citrus cake was made for the week's morning teas. I found that candied orange peel in the fridge when I cleaned it out last week so I used it up before it went off.

Hanno had a nap yesterday afternoon while I did some stitchery, and while I sat in the lounge room, puffs of cool air blew in to remind me that Autumn is here and Winter is approaching. I love this time of year. It makes me feel that anything and everything is possible.

Don't forget that Bel will do her guest post tomorrow. I'm really looking forward to reading it as I'm sure many other readers are. Take care everyone.

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.