The free workshops I'm doing with Ernie start next week at the Sunshine Coast Libraries. If you come along, please introduce yourself. I'd love to meet you. There are also paid full day weekend workshops as well. Email me if you need details of those.

It's been a big week here and I'm looking froward to the weekend. I hope you enjoy yourself over the next couple of days and do something you love.  ♥♥

During the week a wonderful comment came in on the post about Kevin's Man Made Home. It was from rabidlittlehippy. I started writing a long response but then thought it was too long and I should make a post of it. The comment follows:

I'm a stay at home mum to 3 kids 4 and under and life can be very challenging sometimes. I've also battled with depression for most of my life and ante natal and post natal depression with my older 2 kids. I only share this for context. Since falling pregnant with my youngest who is now 18 months old I have finally found my niche. I am a homemaker and budding homesteader. Greening up our lives, making do, mending and doing without as well as "damning the man" by making at home as much as I possibly can (this is a learning curve and work in progress but we are getting there) and avoiding supermarkets wherever possible has become my life. We moved in December last year to our new home on 1/2 acre in rural Victoria and I realised on Sunday that I am actually happy. :) Not every moment is cotton wool and fluffy bunnies but the satisfaction I gain from baking my own sourdough bread, growing fruit and veggies (not much harvested this season but we've learned a lot) and I'm even learning to take satisfaction and pleasure from the most mundane and despised of tasks. There is incredible satisfaction in getting my overwhelmingly large pile of clean washing folded and put away or clearing the kitchen, even if it's just stacking the dirty dishes neatly. As much as I enjoyed my work before I had kids I am not planning to return any time soon as I thoroughly enjoy my slower life. I just hope we can one day be in a position that my husband can stay home with us whilst the kids are still young enough that we can all be happy together. :)

rabid, I sometimes go through a range of emotions when I read the comments people leave here. When I read your comment it was joy, and from "sunday" onwards, I smiled all the way to the end. I brought it over here so everyone can read it. Sometimes when I talk about happiness, I think many readers believe I'm smiling all through the day or that I have the most wonderful home life, or even that my expectation of happiness is so high, I trip over it.  But you know EXACTLY what I'm talking about. What you've described above is what I feel.

It's a feeling of low simmering contentment and fleeting happiness throughout the day. And it's brought about by the daily tasks I carry out every day. You're right, it's not all cotton wool and bunnies, it's satisfaction, self-reliance and doing the ordinary work of a simplified life that makes it so. When you go about housework by rushing through it, you don't feel this. The slowness of our days seems to magnify it, and makes it tangible.

Happiness is rarely one big thing, it's a hundred small fragments that come together to make what we feel. Those hundred things can be the tasks we carry almost every day, what we see around us, what we learn or simply knowing that our life is what we make it. Many others look at this life and shake their head in disbelief that anyone would want to make bread when you can buy it, or knit, or be made happy by folding clothes and stacking dishes. What they are seeing is the physical work carried out, but they don't understand that doing those things - knowing how to do them, having the time for them and being content to give that time brings about a level of satisfaction not much else can match. I'm sure there'll be readers wondering what I'm going on about just by writing that sentence. But you and I know. And that's enough.


This way of living gives you a real purpose. You feel that purpose when you know your house work is important and you know that by doing it you help make your home more sustainable. You take control of your domestic tasks, make menu plans, stockpile, work to a routine and a budget, you work with a purpose and to a plan. And during the day, while you're doing all the tasks that bring a family together by providing good food, clean clothes and comfy beds, happiness is always lurking. It's there for all of us, not just the mothers who stay at home; this is not tied to gender, marital status, or whether you live with two cats or ten children. It's there for all of us who work in our homes and love it.

I have an easy, frugal, vegetarian recipe for you today - stuffed sweet potato. It's delicious and I'm guesstimating that it cost less than four dollars to make for two people.

Start off by peeling the sweet potato and cutting them lengthwise - you want a larger piece and a small piece, about 2/3 and 1/3. Spray lightly with olive oil. Put them in an oven-proof dish and bake until they're just cooked, about 20 minutes.

On the weekend, me and my sister were talking about a TV program called Kevin's Man Made Home. Kevin McCloud from the Grand Designs program has this new show about building an off the grid shed in the woods in England. There's been a lot of debate about how self indulgent the project is, that it's not authentic and that building regulations would prevent most people building this way etc. etc. but I see the entire program from a different perspective. I'm interested in the happiness factor.

Of course this is not the first time such a social experiment has been done. I have this quote in my book, written by Henry David Thoreau, who did a similar thing. He went to live alone in the woods for two years on Walden Pond, USA, and then wrote this: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion."

At the beginning of the program, Kevin explains how work, stress, debt and traffic can make life difficult and miserable. He wants to see if living alone, slowing down, making the things he needs in a rural home will make him happier. I think it will and I'll be watching him as he goes about it to see what he does and how he feels at the end of it.

We can all do this. Not in the flamboyant way he is doing it but we can all slow down and take our time. I think that is one of the keys to happiness, or at least contentment. When I moved from working for pay to the domestic work I do now, I realised that slowing down, as difficult as it is at first, made me concentrate on what I was doing and live that moment. It made me look inward instead of outward. I stopped multi-tasking because I wanted to really experience what I was doing. The other key point is to find joy and happiness in your own life, and that includes the simple, small, ordinary, mundane things that go into day-to-day living, as well as the big things, the celebrations and the beauty that make us sing out loud.

The way modern life has evolved has turned many of us away from our homes, to focus on what is outside. We're told that we can rely on convenience and to buy everything we need, whether we can make it ourselves or not and whether we can afford it or not. To do that you have to work hard for a long time to pay for it. I'm not against hard work, in fact I think it plays a large part in defining who we are. I have always been a hard worker but now my work, if it defines who I am, tells me that my family and home life are paramount and that convenience, for the sake of it, makes no sense at all.  We are encouraged to work to pay for cheap products that break, for clothes that last only a year, for new technology that is quickly out of date. There is little encouragement to buy quality products that last, to look after what we have, to repair and mend, to make do with less.

I am happier now than I've ever been. I think part of that is that I know I can look after myself and my family. I am independent and self reliant and that gives me confidence to do whatever I want to do. All the domestic work we have done here has allowed us to built our relationship with this home and the land we live on. When you step back from it all and think about how you're living, it is very satisfying to know that we, anyone of us, can reduce the amount we need to live on, the junk we live with and the time we need to work for a living to pay for all of it.

I don't know what Kevin McCloud will discover in his quest for happiness. I do know it will be lurking there if he slows down, looks inward, makes as much as he can and connects with the work he does in that English woodland. Can it really be that simple?

Addition: The link in the first paragraph is to iView for Australian viewers. When I looked for international links to it, they were all copyrighted, so I couldn't check them out and therefore can't recommend them. Please google the name if you're not in Australia and want to watch it. If you have a weak stomach, you'd best not watch Kevin's Man Made Home because along with the innovation and all the building, there is a lot of human and animal waste.

The seasons seem to be changing here a little earlier than usual. Autumn can't come fast enough for me. Autumn and winter are my favourite seasons. Wherever you are, I hope the weather is becoming a bit milder and if you have snow on the ground, I hope you'll see signs of new life there soon. 

Thank you for taking the time to comment this week. I really enjoy reading what you have to say. Enjoy the weekend. I'll see you again next week.

The first of this season's vegetable seeds were planted in trays and then I stopped because of the rain. We had a drought in the last six months of last year, then all hell broke lose and since then we've had 1078mm/41 inches. About 275mm/5 inches of that fell yesterday. Now the seed trays are undercover because I don't want them to be wet for too long as this stage. Some seedlings are susceptible to damping off at this stage. So we have a tray of pak choi (they germinated in two days), Moneymaker tomatoes, pickling onions and curly kale, soon I'll plant up some sweet peas, and two large cherry tomatoes in pots. I'll need to made a trellis for them but I have the canes from next door's tall grass plant. I'm not sure what it's called but it's long and strong so that's all I need to know. A teepee of canes will hold them up nicely.

Hanno prepared one of the garden beds with manure and organic matter and he has another one dug over and weeded. When the rain stops, that will be were the root vegetables go as they don't like rich soil with manure. This year's root crop will be Derwent Globe beetroot, Chantenay carrots (sent by my good friend Sherri in Canada), Early Purple turnips, Gentle Giant radish and Miyashinge Daikon radish. We'll probably put in a few potatoes too. We eat celeriac, swede (rutabaga) and turnips but they don't grow well here so we'll continue to buy them. We want to put in climbing Lazy Housewife beans and dwarf beans at their base, along with some sugar snap peas. They'll have to wait for the rain to ease off too because they'll rot in the ground if the soil is too wet.

If you're keeping an eye on your money, the cheapest way to grow vegetables if to use heirloom seeds. Heirlooms come in a huge range of different vegetables and at the end of the season you can save the seeds from your best plants and keep them going the following year. If you do it right, you only have to buy one lot of seeds, not new seeds every year. This is how we all use to garden way back when. It's cheap using F1 or hybrid seeds too but you can't save those seeds for the following years. They won't grow true to type. If you can get your hands on heirloom seeds, you'll be on your way to some fine frugal vegetables.  If you happen to have seeds at home now and you're not sure if the seeds are alive, read this post I did a few years ago and test them for viability.

The best way to store seeds is to package them tightly in their own packet and put as many of the packs into a sealable jar as you can. Then place that in the fridge. They'll keep well for a few years. They'll also store well in the freezer but if you freeze them, do it in a plastic container.

The capsicums/peppers and chilli bushes are growing well and into that bed I think Hanno will add mushroom compost and manure and plant the Moneymakers I've just sown. He has planted two seedlings of Moneymaker that we bought at the market and hopefully they'll be producing fairly soon. What a disappointment the shop tomatoes are. When you're used to the freshest home grown produce, it's a big step down in quality when you have to buy weekly fruit and vegetables. A friend up the road, Fairy at Organised Castle blog rang to tell me she'd leave some Lebanese cucumber seedlings at the gate early Monday morning. Sure enough, they were there and survived sitting out in the rain nicely in their tray and plastic covering. That will save me sowing any cuc seeds and I'll have some to give to Sunny as well.

Our greens include silverbeet, sugarloaf cabbage, red cabbage, Lombok cabbage, Portuguese cabbage, the curly kale already planted and Great Lakes lettuce. It's really a cold climate lettuce but it does well enough here without developing the solid heart. I love it for its crispiness and sharp crunch.

This year's vegetable garden flowers include Queen Anne's lace - for attracting beneficial insects, nasturtiums - for salads, compost material and just for the sheer beauty of the flowers. I have a beautiful pale yellow type with a red centre called Peach Melba. It's so pretty. I still have calendulas in and hopefully some will self-seed as well, I'll have to keep an eye open for them because a certain over zealous gardener sometimes whips out self-sown plants along with the weeds.  I want to pot up a couple of hanging baskets too. I have Jolly Joker pansies and Alyssum Snow Cloth here so I think they'll look beautiful hanging off the side of the bush house. Later in the season, I'll plant up some sunflowers for the chooks and wild parrots.

If your sweet potato starts to sprout, allow the shoot to grow long, then plant them in the garden. You'll probably get a really good harvest.

After a lot of thought, we've changed the way we grow certain plants. Although we still grow tomatoes in the ground, and that is where you always get the best yield, we're also growing some in pots. With the weather so unpredictable, I want to be able to move some tomatoes so if there is a lot of rain we can have them under shelter, or a prolonged drought, we can easily keep the water up to them. I've also moved the thyme and oregano, both in pots, over to the bush house along with the potted blueberries. When the rain stops, I'll get out there, make a small ornamental garden on the corner of the bush house near the sand pit, and then scatter the potted plants around that new garden. It keeps them in one zone where I can keep and eye on them, they're sheltered during winter. I'll add a bit of colour to that zone by planting up a large pot of Sweet Peas - Galaxy, a scented pea. 

We have plenty of compost, straw, comfrey, seaweed extract, manures, water and enthusiasm and we're ready to go. It feels more important than ever to grow our own vegies this year. Food gardening has the potential to save us all so it's good you know how to do it, or you're learning how to. I know many of you join us every year in this journey into self-reliance and I'm guessing there are more and more new gardeners raising their first crops this year. No matter what category you fall into I hope you have a lot of fun in your garden, learn plenty and enjoy abundant harvests. If you need help with your planting and want to ask a question, we have a special section over at the Down to Earth forum. I drop in there most days and will answer questions but there are many excellent gardeners there who will be happy to help you along.

I was asked by a reader the other day why I don't do more posts on budgeting and frugal living. There are three reasons: 

Saving money is a life-long activity. While you're moving through life and paying off your home or rent, and all the other things we need through the years, you also need to make provision for your later life. It wasn't so long ago that life in retirement was very short. The idea of having a pension after the age of 60 or 65 came about when most people lived till they were about 70. Times have changed and it's becoming quite clear that most governments won't be able to pay the living costs of all their elderly citizen much longer.  I think that in Australia, when people start retiring after having worked their entire working life paying into a superannuation scheme (pension/401K), the government will start cutting back on age pensions.  Let's face it, many of us will live into our 80 and 90s, not the 70 year mark the pensions were meant to support. Compulsory superannuation was introduced into Australian workers' lives in 1992, so, in theory, all those people who started full time work after 1992 should have enough money on which to retire when they're 65 or 70. A lot of those funds are invested in the stock market. Of course, we all know that things don't always go according to plan. We're slowly emerging from the GFC which started in 2008. Self-funded retirees I know who thought they'd planned well and invested well via their superannuation fund, lost a lot of money in the stock market and ended up almost broke. Luckily Australia has the age pension which acts as a safety net for our citizens.

I don't think anyone should work until they drop but we all have to do our fair share of the work. It makes sense to me to work until you have enough on which to live then you stop paid work, whenever that may be. Our government is encouraging older Australian to work longer and put off retirement. From what I can tell when I ask around, my contemporaries tell me there are no jobs for older people and the jobs that are there always go to the younger folk.

In the past I've talked about a lot of ways to help cut back, pay off the mortgage and save enough for later life. I'm not going over it again because you either have the mind to do it or you don't. Me writing about it here on a continuing basis won't make anyone who is inclined to spend, pay off debt.

I will say though that if you do cut back, make do with what you have, develop a frugal mindset, be prepared to give up working for a living and then start working for a life, you might find yourself where Hanno and I are now.  We might have given up work but we haven't given up working. Not all work must be done in an office, a factory, a shop, a hospital, or a school. Many people make their living from home and even when they don't make as much money as they would working full time in their old job, they turn their backs on 2013 desires, have the time to grow food in the backyard, to shop for specials, to stockpile and cook from scratch. All those things help reduce the cost of living.

I have had some wonderful emails recently from young couples who have either just left the traditional workforce, or are about to. And please don't write in and tell me that if everyone did that the economy would collapse. I am so proud of those people who have confidence in their own abilities, who decide to step back from the mainstream and who believe in themselves and in how they want to live. I know it's not for everyone but for those who chose it, it's a wonderful and enriching way of living.

And after all that carry on above, if you were to ask me what my money advice is, it is this:

There were a few requests for the cinnamon rolls recipe so here is where I found it.  I didn't use their cream cheese icing though, my icing was a mixture of icing sugar, a little melted butter and lemon juice.

Last week I wrote about vegetable garden preparation, maintenance and production but there are many other parts of gardens that are interesting enough to write about. All gardens are a complete little ecosystem and if you want to plant, make the area productive or just sit, you need to take in what goes on out there. Gardens are safe havens for birds, reptiles, spiders and insects. In suburbia, gardens provide useful watering holes, hollow spaces for living, shelter from the weather and hiding places from pets, other wildlife and people.

If you have children, the backyard can be one of the best playgrounds. When my sons were growing up, they spent a lot of time in the backyard swinging on ropes and a homemade swing, watching the chickens, riding bikes, playing games, camping in the background and, on the rare occasions when it rained, running like super charged maniacs through the water that would pool in the backyard. I often think they were lucky to be born when they were. They had an old-fashioned childhood like I did, full of exploring, physical activity, camping out, riding bikes and playing with their friends. Later on in their childhood, computers came into our lives and from the age of seven and eight, there were computer games, but they were so basic and primitive that they didn't keep them glued to the screen. They were just a small part of life.

Now, with our two beautiful grandsons, we're setting up for children again. Hanno built a sandpit that is covered when not in use and we bought a standard little wading pool for the very hot days. The water from that comes from the tank, and when the swimming is over, the water is transferred, via watering cans, to the garden.

One of the many things I hope to show Jamie and Alex in the coming years is the amazing variety of insects, spiders, reptiles and birds we have in our backyard. Of course, we'll talk about their safety, as well as the respect, gentleness, water and food these creatures need. Much of it we can provide for them in a natural setting. There is a strip of remnant rainforest running along the creek and that provides habitat for many creatures that visit our backyard. We often hear the cries of Sacred Kingfishers and whip birds and sometimes we'll see a water dragon sunning itself on a tree stump. We must teach our boys not to be afraid, to be wary and respectful and that we share this land with all wild things.

When we first came to live here, we had to orient ourselves to the rising sun in summer and winter, take notice of where strong winds, rain and violent storms came from and, in the hottest months, where the shade and the coolest parts of the garden were. Our chooks taught us both of those places because that's where they went when it was hot. Our chooks live in a fairly secure coop that is rain and wind-proof so their backyard environment is comfortable and safe.

Before we set up the garden, we had to know about our soil and where the water pooled in heavy downpours and prolonged rain - something we hadn't been used to in our last home but is quite common here. Hanno did quite a bit of work putting in underground drainage that ran down to our creek. When we moved in we knew the creek hadn't flooded into our backyard in living memory, but we had to live here for a few years before we knew we were safe because the overflow on the other side of the creek was much lower than our side and the flooding rains went there into paddocks instead of into our backyard and home.

Above is our bush house and the water tank we put in when we first came to live here. Below is a 10,000 litre tank we installed a few years ago.

Very early on we decided to put in water tanks. We thought that if we were going to plant a garden that we should be responsible to collect water to irrigate it, so our first tank went in soon after we arrived. A few years ago we added another tank, double the size, and soon we'll add another space saving, narrow tank that can butt up against the wall at the side of the house. With the average amount of rainfall we get now, those three tanks should do us for the front and back gardens in the foreseeable future.

Backyards can be so many things but one of the most important parts of ours is a place to sit, relax, think and observe.  We don't have enough seating areas but we're working on that. My main seat at the moment is a simple bench Hanno made from recycled timbers, that is under the elder tree. It faces the vegetable garden and chook house so whenever I sit there I have more than enough to look at. Soon we'll move a cast iron table and chairs over near the sand pit so whoever is looking after the littlies will have a table on which to put a sippy cup or a cup of tea and maybe a magazine or seed catalogue. One thing is for sure, a good garden evolves into being its best. You don't move in and buy everything you need in one hit. It takes a few years of observation and living there to see what the garden needs and what to leave alone. And when you get it set up, don't be afraid to change it. Our backyard changes when it needs to. We've put in fences, taken them down again, started with a smaller garden than we have now and, no doubt, that will change in the future. We also bought things when we could afford them. You and your garden will change with your seasons and nature's seasons.

So if you're about to set up a garden in your backyard, or if you have one that isn't working as well as it might, take some time to walk around and observe where the shade is, where the sun rises and sets, where the water pools in the rain, where the natural runoffs occur. Make sure you check your fences and boundaries because runoff from a neighbouring property might cause a problem in your yard. Having a productive backyard is much more than just planting seeds and weeding. Your backyard is a haven, not only for the wildlife but for family life as well.

Just a quick post to let you know that my dil Sarndra is having a "giveaway" on her Facebook page. Sarndra explains what that is on her page. Click here to go there. It ends this evening (Sunday) at 6.59pm Australian Eastern time - that's about 11 hours from now. Good luck everyone!

There is so much going on in the backyard right now that it's inspired me to continue with the backyard posts next week. I hope you have a lovely weekend doing exactly what you want to do. See you next week!