down to earth

Our garden is doing good things this year, thanks to Hanno and all his soil prep and maintenance work. We're eating from the garden most days and it's still overflowing with healthy abundance. I have a bag full of green beans in a plastic bag with a little water in it, sealed off from the air and when I checked them a few hours ago, they were still crisp and green. Just the thing for the green bean salad I want to make for tomorrow's lunch. We'll also have potato, egg and herb salad, just picked red and green lettuce leaves, rich red tomatoes and beetroot. Everything, except for the potatoes, will come from our garden. Our potatoes are growing but they're still about two months off being harvested. I'll serve that salad with the leftover roast pork I cooked for Sunday lunch, and a bit of mayonaisse I'll make from scratch before serving. There may even be warm rye bread with caraway seeds just out of the oven. The possibilities are endless.

Borage is one of the many flowers attracting pollinators to the garden.

I feel rich having a garden. It's so easy to go out and pick herbs for a pot cooking on the stove, or tomatoes for a sandwich, or oranges for a snack or juice, but those simple acts are enriching and empowering and give us the best food possible. We are rich.

We are lucky in that we can grow a wide variety of fruits and vegetables here. We have snow peas, broccoli, cauliflowers and cabbages growing because of the cool nights and tomatoes, capsicums, beans and herbs growing because of the warm days. In the photo above you can see the first of the cauliflowers peeking out. There are also beans, peas, onions, garlic, potatoes, kale, daikon and much more. Sunny and Jamie will be back at the end of the week and it will be such a pleasure to share our vegetables with them again.

Above are cherry tomatoes growing like a house on fire, while furthur over, to the right on the photo below, the large Rouge de Marmande tomato have dropped most of their leaves after producing delicious tomatoes for the past six weeks. They'll be pulled out in the next day or so and will be replaced by sweet peas and Brandywine seedlings. In the meantime we'll survive on the tomatoes in the kitchen, as well as the cherries and Amish Paste.

The chooks feast on a sprouted lettuce. They love eating whatever is thrown over the fence. Except, that is, for Jezebel the big Australorpe girl standing there staring at me. I took about eight photos and in all of them she's just staring. She's my favourite girl at the moment. I love walking behind them so I can see their downy bottoms from the back. They all look as if they're wearing big black bloomers.

They are the potatoes straight ahead, with beans and passionfruit on the right and cabbages on the left. In summer, that trellis will provide some good shade for the chook house.

This is part of our parsley patch. It's a good year for parsley. A tip for those who want to grow parsley, buy good heirloom seeds such as Giant of Italy and sow plenty of them in pots. Often it will take a month for parsley to germinate but they can be helped along by watering (once) with a pinch of Epsom Salts in a litre of water, or by soaking the seeds in hot water the night before you intend sowing. Tend them well in their pots, don't over water, parsley hates too much water, and when they're about two inches tall, transplant them to a full sun position in your garden, close to the edge of the garden to help with frequent harvesting. When the parsley season comes to an end, it will send up a tall flower. Allow that to develop and turn into seeds. Harvest all of the seeds, and sprinkle some around the garden for the following season. If they like the place they're growing, parsley will self sow and you won't have to wait for it to germinate in pots again.

The tiny speck in this calendula is a native bee. They're stingless and usually live in holes in tree trunks. These bees produce a delicious concentrated honey that the aboriginal people call "sugar bag".

We are so lucky to have the land, skills and mindset to grow our own vegetables. Not only do they feed our bellies, they feed our souls too. Walking out into a garden I've helped to plant and nurture gives me the feeling of wellbeing that many companies try to sell in the form of vitamin pills and holidays abroad. Wellbeing is a simple concept though and it's available to everyone who has a flourishing garden and the will to be part of their surroundings.

Don't forget we have a busy Sustainable Backyards section over at the Down to Earth Forums. Robyn and Vikki are the moderators there but we all chime in when we can. If you have any gardening questions, go there and ask. There are many good gardeners there willing to share what they know.

I've been moving towards this project for some time. A few months ago I found this curtain, added it to my Pinterest pages and started putting together my old doilies so I could make it. When Tricia came up a few months ago, she made it up for me as two kitchen curtains. They didn't fall well because instead of hanging in a long single length, they were very wide. After a couple of weeks looking at them, I took them down, put them away and made kitchen curtains using the cutoffs of our bedroom curtains. Then I happened upon Jane Brocket's garden party quilt and it ignited my passion again.

A few days ago, I got the curtains out of the cupboard, did some alterations, added a middle section, sewed the curtains into one piece and turned them into a table cloth. When I laid our table with that cloth, those doilies felt as if they'd come home at last and were made to grace our table. Now I have the pleasure of seeing those old doilies - some of them with family history - much more often. With just a little work, it's become part of my every day. I much prefer to use what I have instead of keeping them in a cupboard. And it's made up a beautiful cloth that used to be part of my family history into part of daily life.

You can make something like this too. Search for doilies, embroidered table cloths and hand towels, tea towels and old handkerchiefs, or even small pieces of fancy fabric you like the look of. If you don't have enough, stitch a few pieces of plain fine cotton copying the older styles in the pieces you have. Try to make each piece fairly similar in weight. My cloth has very soft handkerchief cotton, light linen and a lot of fine cotton but most of them are very old, have been washed a lot and have lost any heaviness they once had. Set all your pieces out on a bed first to work out your patterns and size and to be sure of the colours and shapes, then pin it and sew on the sewing machine.

In the photo above, I think that little red flower spray was worked by Tricia when we were at school, the white lace doily at the front is mums, the blue cross stitch I bought at Blackheath a few years ago and it looks like one of Tricia's old hankies on the left. The white lace at the back was bought at an antique shop a few years ago and I think it was once church linen - I think a candle stick stood on it. When the cloth was laid, I added roses and gerberas from the front garden and stood back. A few more tweaks and I was satisfied, the project was finished. I had a cloth to be proud of that makes me think of my wonderful family and all the fine stitchers among our ranks. It also gives me the unusual opportunity to sit at the kitchen table with them again and that, my friends, is the icing on the cake.

Do you have a cloth or curtains like this? Do you have any handiwork that reminds you of your family?

Judy has started a thread at the forum about this, click here to go there.

I recently found these photos of a Jane Brocket quilt, made with vintage embroidery pieces, and it sparked my desire to embroider again. I love hand sewing. Now that these stitched pieces are popular again, it's become very difficult to find enough old embroidery to make a large project such as a quilt or tablecloth. I thought it might be a worthwhile exercise to make up a few pieces, modelled on these old patterns. But first I had to organise myself and my sewing threads.

So yesterday I did a job I've been putting off for months. I sorted through my embroidery threads and organised them in boxes, according to colour. I've been a stitcher for many years and have quite a large collection of threads, mainly DMC. These threads are quite expensive and it's worth my while to look after those I have. The last time I looked, these skeins of thread were between 99 cents and $1.25 so my collection, and maybe yours too, would cost a lot to replace.

A lot of us have a tin full of threads like this. I decided to organise mine into these little boxes.

I already had a couple of boxes full of my threads, but I needed more space and a couple of new boxes.

Start by sorting it all into colours and then wind all your skeins onto a little plastic spool.

Threads are easier to keep without getting tangled if they sit on a spool rather than held together with their little labels.

Don't forget to write the colour code on the spool with permanent marker.

If you're starting out and only have a few colours, I still think it's a good idea to buy one of these little organising caddies. I used the Birch Midi Organiser Box available at Spotlight. It keeps the threads clean, dust-free and ready to use. You'll soon fill a box as threads are the type of product you tend pick up a few at a time when you buy other craft items or start a new project. It doesn't take long to fill a box. You can use an empty compartment to store your needles.

Start off by winding all your threads on a plastic spool onto which you've written the number code of the thread. You'll need that to buy an exact colour replacement in the future. I've found the best way to store them is to colour sort them, but if you've like another way better then do that.

If you want to try this craft, I've written this post about how to get started with embroidery and if you feel guilty about sitting down during the day with your crafts, read this post I wrote many years ago. It might ease your mind.

Here are some embroidery links:
Purl Bee stitchery tutorials
Vintage patterns 1
Vintage patterns 2
Some of my stitchery patterns

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You are invited to participate in a study into the way we consume goods and how that affects our life experiences. Why does it matter? Because there is currently not enough understanding in this area; and understanding can lead to change for the better. But to understand we need you!

All you are asked to do is spend thirty minutes of your time completing an anonymous questionnaire. It can be completed online or in paper form on request. Easy. Participation is entirely voluntary and you can opt out at anytime before completing the questionnaire. There will be no repercussions either way.

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Alternatively you can email the investigator at sarich@students.latrobe.edu.au for more information or to receive a paper version of the questionnaire.

Thanks for your help.

Before I start my post, I just have to say this to the world: Sunny and Jamie will be home again next week! I have missed them so much, I can't even begin to tell you. So there, it's on the page, I am breathing easier now................and waiting. :- )

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I turned an invisible corner on the weekend and yesterday got back to my "normal" routine. My season of hectic work schedules and deadlines is behind me now and I'm settled in my home again, not just physically but emotionally as well. When I was so busy, even though I was here at home, my mind constantly wandered to the work I was doing and rarely to what I needed to do in my home. Consequently I cut corners, stopped doing some things, became a bit of a sad sack and yearned for the day when I could get back into my true rhythm. I wanted that daily familiarity again.

So yesterday I changed the bed linen, opened the bedroom windows to let in the light and fresh air, put a few whites on to soak, tidied the laundry and washed the hallway floors. Hanno did some renovations last week and the floor has been quite dusty since then. The weather is warm and sunny so I wandered around the garden looking at what needs to be harvested or tended to. When I came back inside Hanno was performing one of his winter rituals - washing and sorting a bucket of kale ready for his big annual pork and kale pot. It's one of winter's high points for him. And yes, it is winter here, and still 25C/77F. Sigh. I am hoping that as we move further into June, the weather will be colder, I'll need a shawl and we'll warm up with hot chocolate and tea instead of cool down with cold water and cordial.

Mid-morning I cleaned my desk and put aside the fabric I'll be using for my quilt. I still haven't started it but yesterday afternoon, I sorted through the pieces and have come up with a random non-pattern that I'll be working on today. I'm no patchwork expert by any means. I tend to focus less on the pattern and more on the practicality of piecing together some scraps to make a beautiful and warming quilt. I might hand stitch some of it, simply because I enjoy hand sewing a lot and I fancy the idea of sitting with needle and thread with the quilt over my legs.

Lunch for Hanno was his pork and kale dish and for me, ham and eggs. We both had a glass of homemade orange and passionfruit cordial made with sparkling mineral water. Morning tea was pikelets with black cherry jam and tea, and dinner for both of us was just a little snack. Easy.

The only thing I didn't do that I had planned on was to make bread. Now that we have our main meal at lunchtime, we eat less bread, so I'm still not sure when I'll make the bread, whether I'll make it every day like I used to or what form it will take - bread rolls, small loaves or free-form no knead bread. That, my friends, is what I'll be working out today and I have to say that it is good to be back home solving such quiet, gentle and simple problems.

Have you too discovered that daily routines and rhythms help you get through your work? I hope you have a lovely day and that it's not too hot or cold where you are. xx

I've been reading about recycling and reusing lately and two of the facts I came across absolutely shocked me. Source They were:

Australia is the second highest producer of waste per person in the world at approximately 650 kilograms per person. This is second only to the United States America, which produces approximately 715 kilograms per person.
The average Australian family of four people makes enough rubbish in one year to completely fill a three-bedroom house from floor to ceiling.

What are we doing!

Plant a garden and make compost.

The local Council here has been encouraging residents towards a more responsible attitude about recycling and waste for some time. In 2009 they thought our landfill dumps would be full by now, 2014, and although that hasn't happened, I'm guessing it isn't far off. It's time for all of us to take this seriously. What we're doing is not sustainable. Not only do rubbish dumps emit gasses into the atmosphere, they use a lot of land that probably can't be used again.

On average, every year every Australian throws out:

330 kilograms of paper
552 aluminium cans
118 kilograms of plastic
74 kilograms of metals
414 kilograms of food
206 glass bottles/jars

I wonder where Canada, UK, France, Germany, Italy and Holland stand on this. I wonder about Japan, China and India too.

Just looking at that list shows me areas to target. Paper can be composted, aluminium cans can be taken to a recycling depot. Food can be managed better and some bottles and jars can be reused at home, the rest recycled and made into new glass. I don't know enough about metals and plastic to comment on them but at the very least they should be sent to the recycle depot for processing.

Bottle and jars can be recycled for preserving and storing.

Get rid of as many disposable products as you can and reuse your homemade products over and over again.

Use modern cloth nappies/diapers.

Feed waste food to your worm farm or chickens.

Waste management for all of us starts at the shops. As well as choosing products, you also choose the packaging that comes with it. If you think your products are over packaged, tell the manager of the store, either in person or via email, and tell them you won't be buying that product until it's packaged responsibly. Changes won't be made until consumers complain about it. As consumers, I don't think we fully understand how powerful we are. Manufacturers have to keep us happy and when we don't complain, they think we are. It's up to us to stand up and tell them we won't buy their products unless the packaging is consumer and environmentally-friendly.

Cut up old towels and sheets and use them as cleaning rags.

Buy food in bulk when you can.

And what can we do in our own homes?

Before you go grocery shopping, do your menu plan and only buy what you need, not what you think you might use. That will cut down on waste and it will keep money in your pocket.
If you have a garden, compost as much as you can, and give waste food to the chooks or dogs.
If you have a stockpile cupboard, only buy what you know you'll use, add new products to the back of the cupboard and use from the front.
Buying food in bulk will save on packaging. Or if you can, buy large packets and then break them up into smaller, reusable containers when you get home. You'll still be getting the product you want but you'll have less packaging and it will be cheaper.
Replace as many of the disposable products as you can with reusable ones - nappies/diapers, dishcloths and rags made from old sheets and towels come to mind.
Don't buy water or drinks in plastic bottles when you go out, take a refillable bottle from home.
If you buy coffee when you're out, take a reusable cup with you.
Avoid using plastic utensils and paper plates.
Shop at op/thrift shops.
Join Freecycle in your area to give away appliances and furniture you don't need.
Growing some of your own food will help cut down on thousands of plastic bags that contain store bought produce.
Make your own produce bags and carry bags and refuse the plastic option at the shop.
Swap clothes, kids toys and books with friends instead of throwing them out.
Use the library instead of buying magazines or books, or use your computer to read the digital versions.

I have been meaning to show you this bottle for a long time. I got two of them from the wonderful Biome store in Brisbane. It's a reusable glass bottle with a silicone covering to protect the glass. The thing I love about it is that I can clearly see inside the bottle to make sure it's clean and the top is very easy to tighten and remove, even for my older, weaker wrists. These bottles would be ideal for someone with arthritis and for children. This is the 400ml bottle, they are also available in smaller and larger versions. They are fairly expensive but mine have lasted two years and have been dropped; I have a feeling they'll last a lifetime.

If you have a bin specifically for recycling, go to your Council or local authority website and read about what you can recycle in your area. Many Councils now have a Waste Minimisation Strategy. You should read that too. Your Council will probably also have a list of what it accepts for recycling and if it needs any special treatment by you before it's placed in the bin. Here, for instance, we must rinse out all the plastic drink, milk, yoghurt etc containers, and newspapers must have any plastic wrapping removed before we place them in the bin. And when you have your recyclable waste in the bin, don't contaminate it with anything. If your bin is contaminated, it will probably not be recycled because that kind of sorting just doesn't happen at the depots now.

I hope you'll join me in trying to reduce the amount of materials sent to the land fill. What you do will affect your local area both now and in the future. Surely many of us could cut the amount of waste we generate by simply using some of the methods listed above. There certainly is no better time to start than right now. How do you recycle? Do you have some special tips to share?

I'm starting my library talks today at the Coolum Library and looking forward to meeting the people who come along. It's booked out. No doubt there will be some who read this blog. If you're going, please introduce yourself. I'm not sure how many posts I'll be able to do this week but I'll leave you today with this recipe for passionfruit and orange cordial and a link to yesterday's podcast of my second talk on ABC radio.

We have a glut of passionfruit at the moment and our navel oranges are having a very good year. I think we had rain exactly when the fruit needed it. Jamie loves passionfruit but he's still in Korea so I decided to use some of the passions to make cordial for him. Otherwise they'd be a faded memory by the time he's home again.

Most cordials are made the same way. You need a simple sugar syrup and you combine that with the fruit you have. Most fruits need to be juiced, or in the case of pineapple, crushed. The sweeter the fruit, the less sugar you add to the mix. You'll have to use your own common sense by tasting it as you go. Remember, all cordials are mixed with water - either cold tap water, sparkling mineral water or soda water. Again, you decide how strong you want your drinks to be and add less or more of the cordial to water, according to your taste.

PASSIONFRUIT AND ORANGE CORDIAL
8 oranges, juiced
12 passionfruits, scooped out

SUGAR SYRUP
Regular sugar syrup is one cup of water to one cup of sugar but I am using sweet fruit in this one, so I made a weaker syrup. This syrup is two cups of water to one cup of sugar.

I made up 1½ litres/quarts of fruit juice and added 1½ litres/quarts of weak sugar syrup. Simply mix it together, pour it into a bottle and that's it. It will keep in the fridge for a about six weeks. The sugar preserves the drink. Remember to dilute the cordial with water before you drink it.

And finally, this is the link to the second ABC radio interview I did with Jess Hinchliffe recently. They'll be running on Monday afternoons for the next two months on Mary-Lou Stevens' Drive program.

Enjoy your day.

Do you know you can use the seed of a just eaten avocado to start an avocado tree? You often hear or read that it's a useless exercise because the trees take between seven to ten years to produce fruit, but I still do it. I'm not interested in speed. All natural things take time. If you were to buy a grafted avocado tree today and plant it, it would take a couple of years to produce decent avocados. So if you have the land, and you love avocados, why not grow a few from seed and see how it goes. You're not losing anything.

This seedling avocado is two years old.

When we moved to the home we live in now, there was an old avocado tree full of avocados in the backyard. A few months after moving in, the council used our backyard as the beginning of the installation of sewers in our town and the machinery moving over the tree's roots killed it. Avocados hate having their roots compressed, interfered with or excessive moisture. Since then I've bought a few grafted trees but everyone of them died from Phytophthora and at over $30 per tree, it hurts. A seedling tree grown from a seed might take longer before fruit form and it may even die, but I'm not throwing away $30+ each time I have another go at home grown avocados.

Avocados are categorised as either A or B. Each flower is bisexual and opens twice, once as a female and once as a male. You can produce avocados with one tree, but you'll increase your yield a lot if you have more than one tree, preferably one A and one B type. Avocados will grow anywhere there is no frost and even in frosty areas you can grow them in a large pot that can be brought inside. They also make an excellent and lush indoor plant. If you're in a cold area, Bacon is the best variety for you.

Type A - Gwen, Hass, Lamb Hass, Pinkerton, Reed, Rincon, Secondo and Wurtz.
Type B - Bacon, Edranol, Fuerte, Llanos Hass, Ryan, Sharwil, Shepard and Zutano.

We love avocados but they're quite expensive so we limit ourselves. We have a generous neighbour up the road - organisedcastle, and she sometimes brings us a few from her tree. The avos I love the most though come from my friend Meryl because she grows the magnificent Reed avocado. Reed is round, creamy and large. Just one will make a big bowl of guacamole. In my humble opinion, I think it's the best tasting avo. You rarely see them on sale in the supermarkets because they don't travel well but often the organic boxes and some CSAs carry them. We had a few of of Meryl's Reeds in early autumn and I've now got a sprouted seed. It will soon join my other seed-grown avocado that is now about two years old (photo above).

It's easy to sprout a seed. Simply wash it and put it in a small container with the bottom of the seed in the water. Change the water every few days. Soon the roots will emerge, then the top shoot. When the seedling is about 10 inches tall, snip off the top half inch of the top shoot to encourage the seedling to develop side shoots. When there are leaves and the seedling looks healthy, plant it in soil. You can plant the seed straight into soil too instead of sprouting it first but I like sprouting them on the window sill in the kitchen.

This is the sprouted Reed seed. It's still about two months away from planting out.

The most important part of growing avocados in the ground is to provide excellent drainage. They love deep, sandy soils and need to be kept watered during hot weather - a bucket of water every two days in summer. If you're mulching, use hay or straw but keep it away from the trunk because it will encourage disease.

Mindful of the failures I've had in the past, I'm planting these in a different way. We had quite a high annual rainfall here so I want to keep the avocado's roots out of the sometimes flooding rain we get. If the roots stay in water for 48 hours the tree will probably die. I'm going to plant these in large pots with extra large drainage holes in the base and sit them in full sun where they'll grow in pots in top quality potting mix and manure. I am hoping the roots grow out of the base of the pots and into the soil - that will give the tree increased vigour and fruit growing ability but it will keep the main root ball out of the wet clay soil. We'll see how this goes. So far the score is Avocado 2 vs Rhonda 0.

Varieties of avocado