down to earth

We planted our garlic in March and true to form, it was ready for harvesting in late September. We bought our garlic from Green Harvest, a hard-necked variety called Glenlarge - it is suited to warmer weather and it's the best garlic we've grown so far. Hanno said the larger cloves, generally from the outside of the garlic bulb, produce the biggest and heaviest bulbs. You can still plant the smaller bulbs but they won't grow as big as the others, so don't think you've done anything wrong. We grew ours over our colder months and hopefully this crop will see us through until next September. I've already put aside the biggest and best bulbs for planting in March.

Above and below - our 2013 garlic crop.

Garlic is one of the easiest plants to grow in the vegetable patch. You plant them, 6 - 8 inches apart, in a sunny site and add plenty of organic matter to the soil pre-planting. Break the bulb apart and plant the cloves pointy end upwards, down to about the first knuckle on your finger**, water in with seaweed tea. Depending on your climate, the green shoots will appear two to four weeks after planting. When the green shoots appear, start fertilising every month with a foliar spray of comfrey tea or seaweed and fish concentrate. Keep watering regularly if it doesn't rain but don't over-water them, too much water will rot them in the ground. As the time for harvest approaches, ease off the watering. They're ready to harvest when the green tops start turning brown and shrivelling up. Don't pull the garlic out of the ground, dig them out with a spade to loosen the soil.

** Added later: I just read this again and wanted to clarify this first knuckle planting. What I mean is that you push your fore finger into the planting soil to the level of your first knuckle. Place the clove, pointy side up, in the hole and cover with soil. The point of the clove should be just below the surface of the soil.

When you harvest, treat them gently because they must be in excellent condition to store them for a long time. Place the crop on a table for a couple of days, undercover, and remove clumps of dirt and any obvious material that would prevent them from drying out - you'll clean them properly a bit later. Divide the harvest up into bunches and hang them to dry out for about three weeks, depending on your climate. If it's humid it may take a bit longer.

Every time you handle the garlic, be gentle and don't drop them. When they've dried out, take down all the bunches and lay them out on a table where you can work on them for a while. You'll need a small pair of scissors - I use an old pair of embroidery scissors because I can cut in around the root without cutting into the garlic flesh.

Take the first garlic and remove all the dirt, then rub it with your fingers to remove the outer loose papery skin. You don't want to take all the paper off because it protects the bulb while it's in storage. Cut the top off about an inch or so above the bulb. This will help the paper stay on the garlic. Cut the roots off the bottom and generally tidy the bulb up as much as you can without removing too much of the paper. When you're happy with that one, go on to the next.

Don't break the garlic bulb up, they will store better as whole garlics. Store them in a dark, dry space, not the fridge, it's too humid. The place you choose to store your garlic will have the biggest effect on how long it lasts. I have mine in a wire basket at the bottom of my pantry alongside the potatoes and onions. You could also hang them in a mesh bag or plait/braid them and hang them in a cool dry place.

If you don't get a year out of your garlic, it might we worth your while to experiment with two separate crops using two different varieties - an early and a late garlic. No matter what you use though, take the opportunity to use some of your garlic fresh on the day you pick it. Fresh garlic has a more subtle flavour than older garlic. I used two fresh whole garlics cut through the middle and baked with some roast lamb. It was so delicious and definitely worth growing for the wide variety of health benefits and recipes you can make with it.

Wiki defines food security as: the availability of food and one's access to it.

Food security is being able to access enough food to feed yourself and your family. The lower your income, the more you're at risk of not being food secure and while you would think the higher one's income is the less likely they'd be threatened, that's not the case. If there was a food emergency, war, national disaster or weather catastrophe, the rich and the poor would suffer. The people who would have the least concern are those who produced their own food or prepared enough food to live through the disaster. No matter what group you fall into, planning for food security is an important task that we should all take seriously, particularly those of us who are homemakers, mothers, fathers or caregivers. If one of your responsibilities is to provide food for yourself and others, you need to think about this.

When thinking about your own personal food security, the first thing you have to know is how many people are you feeding on a regular basis and, if there was a food shortage in the shops for any reason, would that number of people change. None of us know whether we'll be lucky enough to never experience food shortages so you'll have to work on guesstimates and the likelihood of you having to provide for more people. I look at it this way. We have Kerry, Sunny, Jamie, Jens and Cathy living within a 15 minute drive from us. If something happened to the food chain, I know we'd pool our resources. Don't think about food only. You also have to consider water, for drinking and personal hygiene. We are fortunate to have tanks that hold 15,000 litres of fresh rain water, but a catastrophe could happen at any time and if it happened during a dry season, we wouldn't have very much water in the tanks. So not only should you consider what would happen if disaster strikes and you're fully prepared with ample water and food, you also need to think about what happens if you're not so fully resourced when the disaster happens.

I doubt it's possible to write a guide that would suit the wide variations in lifestyle, climate and ability of the people who read here. All I can do is to write about what we do, it will be similar for many of you, and encourage you to think about your own situation and work out a plan.

We've all seen it. On trips to the supermarket to stock up, more and more food is being imported from foreign countries. When food comes from a place far away I believe there are two main problems. One, you have no idea how that food was grown and even if our laws prohibit certain practises, our laws don't apply in any other country. Two, we have no control over the food until we buy it. The supply of food could stop at any moment and for a variety of reasons such as weather problems - either drought or floods, war, or political reasons.

Our solution to both those problems is to grow as much fresh food as we can here and get whatever else we need from local markets. Of the products that come from from further away - olive oil, salt, rice, spices etc, we keep backups. It's worthwhile to work out where all your food comes from so you have something to work with when any of your products are in short supply or stop. We can buy local beef, chicken, pork and fish. Our lamb comes from Victoria. If the supply chain was compromised, we'd stop eating lamb.

We get our milk from the local dairy, and from that milk I've taught myself to make cheese. I don't make cheese often because we have many local cheese makers, but I know how to do it if I need to. In an emergency situation, if there was a problem keeping up the supply of milk, or if the power went off and we couldn't store it, I'd make cheese. That's one of the things you need to think about too - what could you live without? We could live without lamb long-term, but not milk, therefore I've made sure that I could make cheese. We also have backups in the cupboard in the form of powdered milk, condensed milk and evaporated milk.

Today I've written about emergency food supplies. I know there are many of you who have huge food stocks in case of an emergency. I would use my stockpile as our emergency food, along with any food we had growing at that time and what was in the freezer. I tend to think of emergency food in terms of the nutrients they contain. So instead of thinking I have 50 jars of beans, I think of the food pyramid instead and make sure I have protein, carbohydrates and fats - the ingredients to make nourishing food. It's not enough to have the ingredients though, you also have to know how to cook it and you'll need somewhere to cook if the gas and electricity are out - so have means to start a fire and cook on it.

Know where you can forage for food too. In most areas there are local foods growing that are there for the picking. Here where I live avocados, macadamias and mangos are often grown in parks or along the street. I know that at certain times of the year, I can go and pick them. I know there are wild apple trees and blackberries growing on the outskirts of Armidale. I live 15 minutes away from the Pacific Ocean. We have fishing lines. These are the things you should think about in your own area - what is available for the taking? If you don't know, ask around. One day, it might save your life.

I hope this has encouraged you to think about your emergency food supplies and if you have none, to start thinking about who you need to feed and how to do it in an emergency. If an emergency doesn't happen, you can keep the food rotating by using it as you would your stockpiled food. Keep adding to it at the back and take it from the front. Later in the week I want to write about day-to-day food, about growing food to eat fresh, and how to store food to eat later. I'd love to know what you're doing with your emergency food. Do you have any, what is it, where is it and how do you rotate it so it doesn't go off after a few years?

I haven't had a break from writing yet to think about the next post on food security. It will come, hopefully this week, but in the meantime I thought I would bring you up to date on what's been happening here at home lately.

Before I get into that, I have to tell you that I'm not allowing anonymous comments anymore. I don't mind constructive criticism but when I get comments about my hairdo and glasses (from an anonymous "stylist" LOL), well, it made me realise that life's too short to even read anything from people who only want to criticise. I've also had hate comments in the past. Strange that I've never had criticism from anyone who left the link to their own blog or website, hmmmm. I want to share and be a part of my community here and those comments get in the way of that. The lovely Tania over at Ivy's Nest has had a similar problem and all she was doing was writing about her new house cow. There are some very unhappy people out there who want to make others as miserable as they are. I'm sorry it's come to this but getting an ID doesn't take long and it's simple to do. I've kept anonymous comments going for the past six years but now it's time to get an ID if you want to comment here.

Our garlic just after harvest.

We've been very busy here these past few weeks. We decluttered our wardrobes and gave the charity shop a few bags of clothes. We also gave away, to a local family via Gumtree, a large cupboard we had no need of. When that went, we reorganised the living room. Hanno cleaned and reorganised the pantry yesterday. As usual, Hanno is always working along side me keeping our home maintenance on target. We're a great team. We harvested our year's garlic crop a couple of week's ago, they've been drying out since then. Yesterday I cleaned them up and now they're safely stored away. I'll write up a post about growing and storing garlic soon. It's easy to grow and worthwhile having your own crop because organic garlic is expensive and a lot of the other garlic is from China. :- |

This is the view along the front verandah.

We also replaced our seating out on the front verandah and got rid of the very old (antique) cane lounge and chairs. Now we're luxuriating on a new-to-us cane lounge we bought on Gumtree for a fraction of the new price. It's so comfortable out there now I go and sit there as much as I can. It's a great place to read and knit and it's where Hanno and I have our morning tea. Do you have a special place to sit and read?

I'm still clicking away on the needles. Right now I'm knitting a Miss Marple scarf in organic cotton, in Diligence, a dark grey, for my friend Kathleen. She is visiting her family in Texas soon and seeing as it's almost winter there, I thought a nice scarf would help keep her warm. This organic cotton is beautifully warm without being scratchy. My other project is for Johnathan, my nephew Danny's little boy. Johnathan turned one last week. Happy birthday Jono! His cardigan is also organic cotton, in Mercy, a pale blue. I just love knitting that EcoYarns cotton. It's my favourite of all the yarns.

From the road, the fence going up.

From the house, the finished fence.

The chook fence.

We had to replace some of our fences lately. A few weeks ago we had a local company come in and replace the side fence at the front of the house and later, the old chook fence. The front fence had been up for almost 15 years and had become rickety and unsafe. The chook fence had needed replacing for many years. In the past, Hanno would have done that sort of maintenance but it's too much for him now so we got the locals in. Still, it was an expensive exercise and we had to save up till have had enough to have it done.

Today we're having family lunch at Daisy's Place, our favourite local restaurant. It is our birthday gift to Sunny to take her, Kerry, her mum Sunja, Jamie and his cousin Jooa to lunch. I love Sunny like a daughter and I'm so thankful she is part of my family. It will be a real pleasure to celebrate her birthday with her mum here. Although we celebrate Sunny's birthday on 8 October, the day she was born, in Korea, it's the custom to celebrate on a different day each year, according to the full moon. They have many beautiful customs in Korea. I've been reading quite a bit about Korea lately, a country with thousands of years of traditions that are so different to our own.

I think our garden is nearing the end of its 2013 season. The chickens got in there yesterday and ate about half the new seedlings Hanno planted the day before. We still have a lot growing, and will continue harvesting for a while, but I doubt we'll plant too much more this year. I think it's going to be a long hot summer.

So, that's a bit of what's been happening in here. I hope everything is going well for you at home too. I send warm wishes to you.

When I was a young girl it was common for suburban backyards to have a vegetable garden and fruit trees; my grandma grew peaches in her backyard and my parents grew plums. They all lived in Sydney. Occasionally there would be a flock of chickens kept for eggs and meat, and maybe a meat rabbits or pigeons. I was born in the late 1940s so the second world war was still a fresh memory and the majority of people had lived through the Great Depression. People were much more self-reliant then; they had to be. There were still shortages in food after the war, and for many people, providing for themselves was just a continuation of what they'd always done. These were the days before supermarkets, people shopped for food either every day or every second day and very little food was wasted. Now, if something happened in the food chain that supplies supermarkets, most people wouldn't know how to feed themselves. Sudden unemployment also has the potential to impact on food security. We should all be learning as much as we can about our food, where it comes from, and if that source of food stopped, how we could replace it.

Climate change, peak oil, water shortages and population increases have all played a part in increasing the price of food. Unemployment, natural disasters, wars and terrorist attacks also impact on food security. No one knows what the future holds but I can't see any imminent improvements in the weather, oil prices, water supplies or population figures. I think things will get worse before they get better; but food security is something we should all be dealing with now. I have no doubt that eventually we'll learn how to live in a more sustainable way. We have no choice. The trick will be to live well during the transition and not, when food becomes much more expensive, get dragged into the changes, resenting every step along the way.

Most countries have a food security policy and while I think that's a good thing, I like the idea of being responsible for ourselves, being prepared for anything and, if possible, helping others in our communities.

As you know, we changed how we live over a decade ago and have not had one moment's regret. I can't say all of it was easy, but as a whole, the change was fairly trouble-free and straight-forward and I wish we'd done it much earlier. Our decision to simplify life also gave us the chance to learn about our food and water supply and to reduce the risk of food insecurity by learning about small scale food production, cooking, food hygiene, food storage, heirloom seeds, pure breed chickens, aquaponics, bees, water harvesting and many other concepts that make up the huge topic of food security.

Our path took us back to backyard vegetable gardening, chickens and stockpiling - all things we'd done on a small scale in the past and then stopped for some reason. But this isn't the only way to go. Community gardens, allotments, farmers markets, bartering, eating seasonly and locally can all play a big part in a transition towards food security. We still rely on our community to supply things like milk, honey, fruit and vegetables, depending on the season, and we shop at supermarkets for things such as tea, coffee, oil, sugar, salt. Our system is heavily reliant on the work we do for ourselves to produce food but as we age, I can see us becoming more reliant on our community when less comes from our own efforts in our backyard. I hope we can be a bigger part of the community system then and teach others what we know.

I guess the best way to move towards a more sustainable future and food security, is to assess what we can do right now and what we'll be capable of in five or ten years. You may need to learn how to grow some food at home while you're still doing all your shopping in the community. What you learn now can help sustain you and your family in the future. And its not all about growing and buying local food, it's also about cooking from scratch, harvesting water, saving seeds, keeping pure breed chickens and doing it all as cheaply as we can. And if you can do nothing, being okay with that and relying on your family and government to support you. Hopefully your situation will change in the future and you'll be able to do more.

Over the next week or two, I'd like to start off with the two systems of food security I know well - the backyard model and the community model. I'd also like you to discuss what your experience is and hopefully we can all help and learn along the way. I believe this collaborative approach will be the way of the future. I hope we can start right here to reduce vulnerability in our own homes and to work towards sustainability and building resilient and strong communities.

Further Reading

Australia' National Food Plan

Food insecurity in Melbourne'

Giant underground water reserves found in Kenya

Dwindling water supplies in US

When I first started living as I do now, I made lists of skills I wanted to reacquaint myself with or learn anew. It was not until I'd been working in this new way that I discovered that simple life has a way of telling you what you need to learn next. You learn something new, and then you see that it is connected to many other things, and often you must know about them too. All too often, I started learning about a new process and it opened up much more than I expected and lead me to on to a more comprehensive lesson and a deeper understanding. So I threw out my lists and just went where I was taken. For instance, when I enlarged the vegetable garden, I had to learn how to harvest properly and when the food was inside the house, how to sort out what to use fresh, what to freeze, what to ferment and what to put into jars. It seems simple but unlike the common monocultures that make up specialist farms, I wasn't harvesting an acre of lettuce. I was picking the outside leaves of spinach and silverbeet, florettes of broccoli, 12 radishes, two carrots, a turnip, six lemons, two tomatoes and half a basket of beans. What do you do with that!

Freezing wasn't just freezing. I had to learn about blanching, make up a blanching times chart, learn how to package vegetables to retain quality, and learn, through trial and error, how to store food in a freezer. Fermenting was the same. It wasn't just collecting a couple of recipes for ginger beer and sauerkraut, I had to read books about fermenting, learn about fungus and moulds and then put that into practice in a way that added value to the food we grew and bought.

Baking was certainly not as straight-forward as I expected it to be. I had to find a reliable supplier of good flour and yeast, learn about water-flour ratio, temperature and kneading, then put it all into practise. I had to make my fair share of mistakes and not be disheartened, or waste too much.

There was trial and error involved in making cleaners too. I'd make up a recipe and see if it worked the way I needed it to. If not, I'd modify it, try it again and keep modifying until I had a product I could use again and again. Once made, they also had to store well and be able to do the job after sitting on the shelf for a while.

I spent hours outside monitoring electric and water meters, recycling various items, making compost, sorting out worm farms, sowing seeds, working out the best way to water them while nurturing them to seedling stage. We've saved seeds, peeled loofahs, broken open rosellas, plaited garlic and watched on while crops were damaged by the wind and rain. We planted some plants in full sun and some on the shady side of a trellis or tall plant, I helped position Hanno's shade tunnels, stood back and watched while he built a greenhouse. We realised early that to make a success of what we wanted to grow, we had to create microclimates, extend growing periods and go beyond what we read to see how far we could push it in our backyard.

There were many hours given to mending and knitting. When I started knitting again, I undid so many stitches, but it taught me the valuable lesson of patience and that some tasks take the time they take. Over the years I felt a need to teach as many as I could the various old and new skills I'd become familiar with. This lead me to volunteering in my community and travelling out to various places to meet so many of you, to talk about this life and hopefully encourage and support others in their own transition.

We still have a lot we can do here. There is always work to do, we're not perfect and we have to always be mindful of what we're doing. The one thing I always have to watch is that tendency to slip back to convenience. I want these changes to be permanent for us. I want to continue here, living as we do now for as long as I can. I don't want to go back to mindless consumption, this is much better.

The most difficult part of this for me was the initial change of mindset and then maintaining that mindset even when it was easier not to. There are so many distractions, so many temptations. I carry on because I have been made happy again living this way, I am convinced that having everything you want is not good for the soul, I believe hard work builds character and I know that I have to give back some of what I've taken. I can't return those dozen pairs of shoes, the dresses, all the computers and TVs, but I can care for the land I live on, teach what I know to others and motivate people to live their best life. I know that the rampant consumerism we live with is killing the earth and I know that it will eventually change us. But how can you tell third world countries that they can't have the things we've had for the past 50 years because it's bad for the planet? How do you convince friends and neighbours that we should all be living with less? How do I look Jamie and Alex in the eye if I don't? They and their children will bear the consequences of what we've done. My way of answering those questions is to continue along our simple path and to show rather than preach. I want Jamie and Alex to see us living here, doing our work, making the place right for us. If we can start repairing past damage, hopefully those ripples will move out into the world.

But the message I'm really trying to give to you is to use your common sense, don't rely on others, read books, do your own research, push your own envelope and find out what works for you in your climate and in your home. Look after yourself and your family, know everything you need to know to do that and don't expect everything to be easy. Because this isn't just a few recipes for laundry liquid and orange cake; it's much deeper than that. If we're all going to make a small difference by living cleaner, greener, healthier, thriftier and by being more aware, we'll have to change our ideas about what success is, stop buying everything we want, localise our lives, connect with our communities and work hard. And that is easier said than done.

How are you coping with the transition from old ways to new?

... to be continued.