It seems like I've been gardening most of my life.  My mother was a keen gardener and my sister has a magnificent garden in the Blue Mountains so maybe the love of it is in my bones.  I know people who have been healed by gardening.  A couple of people I know who were suffering depression, took up gardening, got their hands dirty, created wonderful gardens and remade themselves in the process of doing it.  There is something about putting your hands into the soil that heals.  It brings you back to earth - literally- and puts many things in perspective.

Gardening not only helps you produce organic food for the table, it also helps you slow down.  Gardening is about time, the slowness of it and how using that time in a meaningful and productive way can make you healthier, both physically and mentally.  Your garden will not allow you to rush - there is a time for planning and a natural requirement for preparation and attention to detail.  Becoming a steward in your garden helps you become a providore in your own kitchen.  With careful planning you can provide food you often cannot buy in the supermarket and even if it's  the same, your garden produce will be much fresher that anything you can buy.  You have never really tasted a potato until you taste a new potato, dug that afternoon and steamed with butter and parsley.  Certain foods taste better when they're grown out the back.

But gardening isn't just about slowing down, freshness and taste, it's also a life skill - one of those skills our ancestors took seriously because it helped them survive.  And now here we are with the luxurious option of choosing whether to produce food in our backyard or whether to buy it. Of course, some of us don't have that luxurious option - it's been taken away by illness, lack of time or no land, but those of us who have that choice should grab it with both hands and teach our children as well.

I took a stroll through our garden early yesterday morning and although there are still a few empty spaces, it's lush and plentiful and is starting to fill with ripe vegetables and fruit just waiting to be picked.  I took these photos for you to see what is growing now.

I hope your gardening, or your planning is coming along well.  Take your time to make sure you're planting the right things for your climate, and when you know what to plant, make sure you have the right varities.  This is especially necessary if you have a short growing season because you only have one chance at a crop.  If this is your first year in the garden, take it slow, don't over do it and be patient.  Take the time to discover your soil and backyard.  Listen to the birds, look at the insects and come to know them - they are not all bad and can be your enemy or your friend.  When you're in the garden, be there, both physically and mentally.  Don't think of other things or what you'll be doing later.  There is a lot to learn in any garden.  I have been gardening for about 40 years and I'm still learning, discovering and being amazed at how complex, yet simple, our natural systems are.  If you're lucky, you'll harvest not only healthy vegetables and fruits, you'll grow in confidence, increase your skills and blossom in spirit.

There is something in every one of you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself.  It is the only true guide you will ever have.  And if you cannot hear it, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of strings that someone else pulls.....Howard Thurman.

Good morning everyone.  It's another beautifully cold morning here, the temperature is 10*C/50F right now and not 6C/42F like it was yesterday.  Our home is insulated so it's quite warm inside but I know when I go outside to feed the animals, I'll need a cardigan or jumper.

Oh, I just wanted to mention that my sister Tricia (Patricia Margaret) sometimes comments on my blog and did so yesterday.  It was really lovely for me to read her recollections of those times.   It seems to make it better when memories are shared.

I wanted to answer a few questions that have come my way recently.  The first is from Larissa:

"My question is does the oven proof dish rest on the bottom of the water dish or does it rest on the edges so that the bottom doesn't touch??? I hope that makes sense. A bainmarie as I know it (from industrial kitchens) had the dishes suspended over the water with the bottoms in the water. I'm not sure what size or type of pan to buy otherwise to fit my pyrex glass oven dishes."

Larissa, I used my stainless steel baking dish - the sides are maybe 6 inches high - and placed an oven proof bowl into the boiling water, directly on the base of the baking dish.  The bottom touches the bottom of the baking dish, but if you were to put a few smaller dishes in, instead of one larger one, the sides of the smaller dishes shouldn't touch each other.  The temperature in the oven is quite mild so it won't boil and bubble to de-stable the dish and move it around.

The second question is from Rachael:

"From your pictures and from conversations at the local home improvement store, I decided to use cinder blocks to raise my veggy beds. The yard tends to flood in the spring, and I think the raised beds will help with that. I put in my first raised bed, with cinder blocks, a few weeks ago... and those cinder blocks are not straight from any angle. What did you do to get your cinder blocks so straight and level? Did you use a base of gravel or sand? Or perhaps did lots of work to level the ground first? What have you let grow between the raised beds? (my yard is currently lots of drought/flood resistance native green things, which  many might call weeds, so figuring what to pull and what to leave)."

Rachael, the blocks are set in the ground about 2 inches.  Get yourself four short sturdy sticks and tie string to each of them.  The string should be a little longer and  wider than the dimensions of the garden bed.  So, for instance, if your garden will be 15 feet x 5 feet, have two strings of 17' and two of 7'.  That will give you your length and width with enough left over to tie the string around the sticks.  Go to where your bed will be and hammer in the sticks on each appropriate corner, then tie the strings so that you have a little string fence surrounding the garden bed.  You should now have a rectangle with straight sides that you can use as a guide to lay the blocks.  Take your spade and dig out a trench the width of the blocks you have bought, to a depth of about 2 or 3 inches.  Make the bottom of the trench as level as possible and place the blocks into the trench.  They will be touching end to end so that will support them lengthwise, and when you back fill with the soil you removed from the trench, that will support them on both sides.  You should end up with a block border with a straight and level top.

Now, the problem with the flooding.  If your vegetable garden is flooded regularly, it will kill your plants.  You may need to build up the beds quite a bit - I have seen high raised beds where people have used corrugated iron sides.  But if the flooding is minor you'll be fine with the blocks.  You'll have to add quite a bit of compost or manure to your garden soil for good results, when you do that, add some sand to the mix as well.  That will help with drainage.  To give you a rough guide, I'd use a bucket of sand for each bucket of manure or compost  you use.  Then dig it all in.  You will get much better results when you dig.  You'll open up the earth for the tiny roots to penetrate.  This is something you'll have to do every year.   Over time, your soil will improve and give you really wonderful crops.

I thought there was another question but I can't find it now.  If I've missed you, please let me know and I'll slot it in later this morning.

Added later:  I remembered it was for the chocolate cake recipe. Here 'tis.

200g soft butter

1 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 eggs 

100g chopped and melted dark chocolate

1 ½ cups self raising flour
2 tablespoons cocoa powder 

¼ cup milk

¼ cup boiling water  (boiling water at the end makes a moist cake)

Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.  Add vanilla and eggs, one egg at a time and mix well.  Add melted chocolate.
Sift flour and cocoa together and add it to the butter mix.  Add milk to help mix it.
When everything is mixed well, add the boiling water last and mix in.  Place in a 22cm deep cake tin and bake at 170C for about 50 minutes.  Check with a toothpick to see if it comes out clean, if not, bake another 5 minutes.

When the cake is completely cold, slice in two horizontally so you have two layers and add the icing of your choice.  I used this:
200g soft cream cheese
1 cup icing sugar
2 tablespoons cocoa
2 tablespoons milk
Mix all the above together until smooth.  I put some of this in the centre and topped the cake with the rest, plus some fresh ripe raspberries.
Happy baking!

Sandra asked about growing passionfruit.  Sandra, they need lots of manure and water in a free draining soil.  And FULL sun, never attempt passionfruits if you can't give them full sun.  In that photo of my passions,  that is the end of the row that gets the most sun.  They love it.  So sun, manure (cow, horse, chook or goat), water and well draining soil.  Oh, and they like to be mulched but ours aren't because the chooks walk there and they pick it off.  BTW, we have wire over the top of the soil so the chooks can't scratch the roots.  Good luck, love.  Let me know if it works for you.

I hope you have a beautiful weekend doing a few things you love.

I think snow is falling on the mountains.  Not the rainforest covered mountains I live at the base of but the cold and frosty mountains a thousand miles south of here.  When it snows there, it's cold here.  Nothing brings out the earth mother in me more than a cold afternoon.  It catapults me back to my childhood when my mother, in the days well before central heating and electric blankets, would lay thick pink and green woollen blankets out on the warm floor in front of our blazing open fire and wrap me and my sister each in a cosy woollen cigar shape.  Then dad was called in to carry us both to bed.  I can still see Tricia being carried, giggling, enclosed in her pink and green woolliness from neck to feet, into bed, and  remember waiting for my turn while I watched the fire and listened to its crackling.  When it's cold, like my mother, I want to wrap everyone I love in pink wool and put them to bed. Many things have changed for me since those days of my youth and the way we live now is not much like what it was then, but when I feel the chill of an afternoon come up from those southern mountains, I know the snow is falling and it never fails to take me back home again.

When I feel those cold winds and know there will be a cold (for us) night ahead, I think of warm flannel sheets, extra quilts and fleece blankets.  Much to Hanno's horror, I am still luxuriating in having the windows open when we sleep.  I love feeling the cold air on my face while I snuggle deeper into the warm embrace of our bed.  It won't be long though before I have to close the windows to keep out the icy air.  I started writing this blog yesterday afternoon.  It's morning now and yes, the night was cold, and I had to close the last remaining open window halfway through the night.

Almost every type of homemaking task is better for me when the weather is cold.  Not only does the colder weather make me want to fluff up my nest more, but working is more pleasurable when I feel that nip in the air.  And there is that intensity that comes with the coldness  of winter - a primal instinct from deep within tells me it's more important now to bake bread, keep warm, and to cook nourishing traditional foods for those I love.  It seems that work takes on a new significance now; that if I don't do it right, all will be lost.  I suppose many think of winter as a harsh season, but I never do as there are so many opportunities to soften the coldness with woollen cardigans, lambs wool slippers and hot chocolate.

I have had a lovely couple of days floating through my house work and I spent a morning with my good friend Bernadette who is in hospital at the moment.  We talked about some very personal and confronting things and when I left her, I felt truly grateful to be healthy and have the freedom to live as we do.  But the truth is that while I enjoyed the past few days I missed laying my thoughts down in this blog.  I didn't miss the computer or the internet, only the blog and the capacity to connect to you.  It was like missing a friend who used to drop by for a cup of tea, and then stopped coming.  I'm pleased to be back.  

I have a few questions to answer that I promised a few days ago, so I'll do that tomorrow.

Hello everyone!  I'm writing this from work because our ISP at home is being changed from one service to another.  This, apparently, even in these day of instant everything, takes a few days. Hmmmm.  Anyhow, I'll be back as soon as I can get online at home again.   I hope to see you all soon.

I had the glorious good fortune to be born the daughter of Jean St Claire McGrath.  I was the younger of Jean's daughters, my sister, Patricia Margaret, was born two years earlier.  I am who I am because of my mother; all my good traits, and some of the bad, where picked up while watching her live her generous and kind life as I was growing up.  Tricia says I remind her of mum.  That is the greatest compliment.  If there is someone I want to be like, it's her.  My mum died of non-Hodgkins Lymphona in 1993.  It was the saddest day of my life and literally took my breath away.