Nomad Mother

Introducing Mairead An!

2010-05-19T15:00:00.004+10:00

Here is our wee girl! So happy to have her here with us, she was born beautifully in the water April 30 after a very short, sharp labour! Ro has been wonderful with her, tries to feed her his brocolli and informs me she needs milk when she pokes out her tongue. We are happily tucked up in the yurt as the weather turns autumn and frost sparkles on our roof in the morning sun...

A wee turtle cave

2010-03-29T13:38:00.005+11:00

The other morning Cam found a wee baby turtle tumbled into the grease-trap pit (part of the greywater reed bed system, more on that anon), and duly plopped it in the dam.

Then a few days later our Canadian woofers found another one, also in the pit!

That afternoon we spotted some pieces of soft shell in a tiny cave broken open in the wall of the trench to the grease-pit, the pieces of about six or so eggs and in one the dried fragile leather of a small turtle’s shell, a little one who didn't make it to the water.

(P.S. Still getting my head around new Mac - no idea why this photo is coming in sideways?! If you would all obligingly turn your heads onto your left shoulders you will see the soft bits of shell in the foreground!)

Settled, truly in yurtish, nomad style

2010-02-22T09:29:00.000+11:00

Hello everyone!!! Apologies for the long radio silence, we've been madly on the road and the internet hasn't been handy, but - finally, and in what style! - we are settled again and able to roam here once more (albeit for the next little while on a friend's computer up the driveway a little way)....We have come to Mulloon Creek Natural Farm; a couple of Saturdays ago we unpacked a yurt from a box and built it, et voila! Stunning views, a dam out the window to jump in on hot days, a cow to share the milking of, and a huge farm out the door for Cam to run around doing keyline design and holistic management and natural sequence farming, etc etc! One of the etc's being to teach permaculture and all of the above through the Mulloon Institute, which aims to go beyond teaching and sharing about sustainability practices (from an urban to broadacre scale) towards regeneration and restoration of damaged landscapes. Woohoo!

Meanwhile I shall be growing our new baby along with all the fruit, vegies, berries, nuts, herbs and spices that could be needed by the eight families who live on site; the farm is several thousand hectares straddling the Dividing Range and produces free-range organic and biodynamic pastured eggs and beef. All in all, I feel like I'm in Heaven! I promise to be back soon with some photos...

Spring fertility

2009-10-23T10:43:00.002+11:00

Sneezing, itching, eyes streaming – wandering the garden like a small walking storm system, watering hankies, thinking how marvellous it is my body can intercept and register so well all this fertility of the plants!

Spring is sprung!

2009-10-01T20:57:00.002+10:00

Here's Ro and Cam preparing the terrace beds ready for their spring planting. Many little seedlings are sprouting in trays in the greenhouse, corn and tomatoes and capsicums and pumpkins, cucumbers and many other delicious things....

Ro aerating the soil with the very fine Gundaroo tiller:

Putting straw out over the slashed green manure crop (oats and broad beans) to keep the carbon in the soil:

Ready to go!

Herb harvest

2009-09-30T11:55:00.001+10:00

Cam and Yarrow collecting calendula flowers to dry for tea.

Spawning frogs

2009-09-19T19:49:00.001+10:00

One of our lovely students has given us some eggs from her established pond to hatch frogs into ours. I've slopped them in among the water plants and fingers crossed they make it through to frog-hood!

Go well, wee froglets!

Yarrow puts foot in mouth

2009-09-03T11:33:00.002+10:00

Fox-proof fencing to keep chickens safe

2009-09-02T20:16:00.009+10:00

Cam did a design at the start of the year for a couple in Eltham who are mad-keen bottlers and preservers, whenever they go on trips they scour all the little local op shops for forgotten boxes of Fowler's preserving jars...

They wanted a large orchard plum-full of all sorts of delicious fruit, as well as vegies and chickens and drought-proofing for the whole place, fire-proofing etc. Ro and I came along for the day as Cam took his students from the permaculture diploma course at Eltham College to do some prac about fencing and irrigation at the property.

Here's Cam laying out a "skirt" of chicken wire at the bottom of the fence, which will be buried, so foxes can't dig under the fence into the orchard, where the chooks will be roaming and feasting on fallen fruit and insects, and dropping poo as fertiliser:

The top of the fence is angled out, and deliberately loose, so foxes can't climb over it:

The skirt being buried:

The students tacking the fence to the poles (orchard swales in background):

Meanwhile, Yarrow just adjusting the mirror and getting ready to drive us home at the end of the day:

Tree lingering

2009-09-01T20:42:00.002+10:00

Out walking with Ro and we came across this tree, for all the world like it had its bark knickers caught in its bottom!

But stunningly beautiful, even as it made me smile.

Ro's first birthday

2009-08-30T16:13:00.001+10:00

It was Ro's first birthday just a little bit ago, and I was on midwifery placement caring for women in labour, thinking, "This time last year I was in Samoa doing this..."

Wow.

...woke up just before dawn in the glowing white box of our mozzie net in the moonlight, full moon out the window, with the first pains just starting quietly, and our little man was born in our bedroom with two local midwives, five incredible hours later.

And now that small, naked and slippery little fella, so freshly new - but surely somehow always here too! - is one! And I've been a Mum, and Cam a Dad, four seasons.

Wow.

Walkabout at the coast

2009-08-26T14:50:00.006+10:00

Mum came down to help us out while I'm on a midwifery placement at hospital. We went down south for a wander in the rainforest and played on a play-ship, washed up on the beach...

Harvesting winter spuds

2009-08-17T14:45:00.000+10:00

Our neighbour above us on our hill here, who has been gardening his patch for 20 years and every inch is growing an edible something, told us we can grow potatoes right through winter. So we have, and here are Cam and Ro harvesting one patch (we still have several more around the garden to go).

The joy of rich old books

2009-08-16T14:33:00.000+10:00

I was thrilled when Cam found 'Dinotopia' by James Gurney the other day at a secondhand bookshop.

I used to love his beautiful paintings of a magical island, surrounded by treacherous reefs, where dolphins guided shipwrecked humans to the shore... And there, in desert and mountain top, swamp and forest, in a city carved out of rock in the middle of a huge crashing waterfall, dinosaurs and humans lived in harmony together, sharing the wisdom of the old, old reptiles with the skills of the humans and creating together a vibrant and joyful life.

I think it is my idea of perfect community - creativity, sharing, purpose, colour, spice and FUN! (Minus the dinosaurs, nowadays, alas!)

Going, going, gone

2009-08-06T09:20:00.006+10:00

Swallowed by vegetable jungle, a small boy...

Extravagant abundance

2009-08-01T11:12:00.000+10:00

Saw this beautiful, paper thin and fragile seed pod spray in the garden, with all its very many hollows for all its many seeds, and was blown away at the generosity of our natural world. From one seed comes a brave plant, from one plant comes a hundred seeds. Such extravagance!

Everything striving towards life.

The preparation

2009-07-28T09:05:00.001+10:00

Should've put these up before, of Ro and Cam deliberating over the placement of rocks, and getting the depths right to invite in frogs (they like at least 50cm for their tadpoles to stay cool).

A food forest sprouts...

2009-07-27T18:14:00.009+10:00

The food forest has unfurled its leaves and let down its roots! A bunch of the participants from our last PDC courses (and now friends!) came over on the weekend with loved ones and kiddies and set to work - at the end of the day we sat back and admired a whole beautiful new system of fruit trees and herbs and berry patches, and ...

...this bit's a secret surprise for K+C when they come back from Uganda but I'm pretty sure with the rainy season and a solar power supply for their internet over there they ain't checking this too much - the water will come off the greenhouse and chookhouse roofs and gurgle and chuckle down a beautiful rocky creek bed, under a bridge made of railway sleepers and into a lovely pond, alive with frogs tadpoles hiding under lilypads. There are soakage points in the creek beside fruit trees, and the pond overflows into a mulch pit disguised as a path that waters another fruit tree. Any overflow then goes into the swale at the top of the native garden, and once that's full, heads off to the stormwater drain. Wonderful function, and very beautiful form!

Planting those little asparagus octopuses, for more perennial crops:

Jill asleep on the garlic in the middle of it all:

Wetting newspaper to cover soil with and mulch over to stop grass poking through, until the groundcovers grow and thicken and the grass can't get in:

Ro carting rocks for the dry creek bed:

Cam teaching folks the practical aspects of harvesting water, permaculture-wise: designing the interactions between water flows and water storages, using levels and systems such as mulch pits to soak water into the soil at the roots of trees where it's needed and safe from evaporation, and also to have the capability to send it off-site in heavy rain events. And not just the design but the practical how-to of cutting and joining pvc pipes etc:

Getting all the water levels right to spill from one soakage to the next with a laser level:

Ro getting set up to use the circular saw on sleepers for the raspberry patch:

Planting in support species under an apricot tree in the smoky light of the dying day:

The shrub layer is mainly red, black and white currants, delicious! There is a mix of different groundcovers, some will send roots deep down to draw nutrient up for the fruit trees to access more easily, others will fix nitrogen from the atmosphere into the soil. Some will attract beneficial insects (bees for pollination, native wasps to eat pests), others are delicious herbs and greens for medicinal and culinary use.

How lovely, to create a luscious forest in one's own backyard!

Jack tracks

2009-07-03T09:13:00.000+10:00

Tracking a small boy through the garden on his muddy knees...

Found him!

The greenhouse

2009-07-02T11:32:00.006+10:00

The greenhouse is coming along, even in the wild winds...

The chickens keep sharp eye on its progress at all times! After all, it's attached to their chookhouse to help warm it in winter, with roof vents to open in summer allowing cool air to draw through from below and hot air to escape out the top. That way we can keep the temperature inside fairly constant and humid through the seasons for the seedlings to germinate and thrive, and also for a few tomatoes and herbs etc that we can grow in there through winter, hooray!

A real true food forest

2009-06-23T15:19:00.010+10:00

K+C have given the green light from Uganda – we’re establishing a food forest! All the elf in Cam is rejoicing…

An edible forest garden follows the pattern of a wild woodland, mimicking what works so well in nature, but in this case is all edible. So the canopy will be peach, apricot and plum trees, the understorey red, white and black currants and other berries, and the groundcovers a fragrant mix of culinary and medicinal herbs – o! the delight!

We’ve already planted in green manure crops to prepare and enrich the soil:

Wheat, oats and broad beans growing amongst lots of horse poo, and a few weeks later:

.... and Cam’s staked out the spots for the trees and their support species – he’s valiantly holding himself back from blitzing the whole thing right now and waiting instead to do it as a workshop to give our students an opportunity to get their hands dirty beginning a real true food forest themselves. Then they can go home and plant their own… Oooo, imagine – ripe and delicious food forests, alight with birdsong and berries and a little bit of the wild, spreading home to home, jumping fences…

And so, to distract Cam’s attention in the meantime, we’re going to spend next week building a greenhouse attached to the chook house. Watch this space!

Meanwhile, just to mark what it looks like before becoming a food forest, viewed from the terraced vegie beds:

Ro sneaking into class

2009-06-13T10:48:00.001+10:00

Here’s Ro making a break from cooking lunch in the kitchen with me to join all his friends in class doing their PDC! The sacks of oats and wheat are meant to be a Great Wall but now he can bowl right over the top in his barbarian woolly vest…

What will it be like teaching the courses at the end of the year when he’s even more mobile?! He'll probably be in teaching with Cam...

The good smell of warm bread

2009-06-02T11:09:00.000+10:00

We made soda bread the other day, mainly to up our intake of bicarb soda! It binds well with phosphate which then flushes out of our bodies. Apparently with so much of our food grown these days using superphosphate we’ve usually got an overload of phosphate in our systems and it’s not great for you. Another great reason to enjoy home-grown organic food!

The bread came out smelling like scones, mmmmmm. Stayed fresh for the three days it took us to eat it, and was light and moist but dense enough to be filling. We used home-made yoghurt instead of buttermilk (not having a house cow – o! the bliss of having a house cow!):

2 2/3 cups wholemeal flour

2 1/2 cups plain flour

1 tsp salt

1 tsp bicarb soda

2 ¾ cups buttermilk

Knead til smooth, roll into a ball 20cm in diameter, then place on a greased tray and cut 1cm deep slashes in the top. Brush with milk, and bake in moderate oven for 50 mins. Enjoy!

Not as wonderfully delicious as sourdough, but quick and easy and avoids commercial yeasts.

Brown life, brim full

2009-05-22T20:47:00.008+10:00

Went for a wander this evening to enjoy the damp autumn with Yarrow and was amazed to find so many different fungi budding up through leaf litter and pine needles, even in the nooks and dark places of our own garden. Along the railway tracks and under our nasturtiums, soft nutbrown homes for wee folk.

It feels utterly magic - thinking of the soil crept through and rich with fungi, trading sugars with the finest hair roots of trees and carrying it miles, literally! to trees further down the line... Fungi and tiny soil creatures and questing roots, crystals of water brimful with minerals, huge monsters of worms churning through, the whole thing heaving and boiling and bursting with life!

The fungi budding up like periscopes, hiding in the dark, enjoying the damp and the fire colours of autumn.

Surely this little one is waiting for its fairy to come home

and light a candle in its window...

... while these wait for impish hobgoblins!

Rain can be a girl's best friend

2009-05-17T12:54:00.003+10:00

Beautiful rain! A dripping garden and filling tank. Pearls of water fat and opalescent in the crease of round nasturtium leaves, chooks fluffed up and snuggled into each other, the orchard misty and the smell of wet earth.

Rain like diamonds caught in the lace of fine leaf fronds.

Initially passionate

2009-04-18T18:31:00.004+10:00

Weeks and weeks ago Cam scratched Yarrow's initials into one of the passionfuit that are growing higgeldy-piggeldy over the chook yard. It scarred up and kept growing...

And now they're ready, lovely and sweet and tangy,
and Yarrow has his very own one to play with.

Old fashioned Easter for newly-fashioned boy

2009-04-18T17:19:00.009+10:00

Oooo, the joy of being a Mum and getting to make special things special! Ro's first Easter, and I found at the bottom of a drawer some dyes and stickers my Oma sent me two years ago to make German Easter eggs with him, like we used to when we were little...

We used to make Easter nests 4 weeks before, and get one small chocolate egg each Sunday in the lead up... It being autumn in Oz at Easter time rather than spring, we used to make our nests out of curling, crunching leaves - and then on Easter morning - eggs! bunnies! and hard-boiled dyed eggs with the cutest little old-fashioned stickers.

Dying our chickens' eggs, stickers at the ready...

So lovely!

We used to dye them, all four of us kids together with Mum, in margarine containers with paddle-pop sticks, heaps and heaps of them, and give cartons of Easter colours to friends.

This is the hole that Jack bit!

2009-04-06T19:17:00.002+10:00

Here Ro demonstrates his new bite: his first two teeth came through on our recent premiere wedding anniversaire, and now a top one is peeking through...

On the same day: a top tooth, he crawled, and ate a whole bowl of food! Methinks he is getting so grown up - and there's years and years of this to go!

The littlest biker of them all

2009-03-31T21:30:00.001+11:00

Cam came home tonight with a bike seat for Ro! We all saddled up and rolled on down to the creek, the first time I've ridden a bike in aaaages, was such fun! Ro wasn't very keen on the helmet but he loved zooming along, and peeking at me on my bike from under Dad's arm.

Thank goodness for whoever it was that invented gears, coming back up our very steep and very long driveway!

An Irish native peace tree

2009-03-30T09:20:00.002+11:00

We made up the garden for the Southern Cross Permaculture Institute by the river at the Sustainable Living Festival last month, with natives and fruit trees and herbs, a lovely grapefruit tree in its pot bowling over regularly in the wind! Ro was very happy sitting under the tree in the dirt on his Bolivian blanket from Mel and Tobes, laughing with everyone who came to have a rest in the garden, having his naps in his pram in the tent at the back.

A woman from Ireland and her husband came by and bought some of the beautiful natives and donated them to us to plant; they had planned to come to Australia to live but her mother was dying so they were going back to Ireland.

Cam and Ro planted them along the path to the chookhouse, where they’ll become part of the support for the future edible forest garden (fixing nitrogen in the soil, protection from wind etc), and meanwhile just be beautiful in themselves as well.

May our Irish woman and her mother have much peace.

First weekend of PDCs 1 & 2

2009-03-29T19:59:00.001+11:00

We began our two parallel Permaculture Design Certificate's from here this weekend - woohoo! Two lovely groups of people, one lot doing the course on Saturdays, and the other on Sundays, over 12 weeks. Here they are all penned in the chookhouse, inspecting the deep litter compost system the ladies have going on for us:

Here are some remains of afternoon tea, a lovely sort of composition of pips and peel and tea bags that took my fancy as I went to clean them up:

Funny potato creature

2009-03-23T09:20:00.002+11:00

Look at this funny little fellow:

He looks like a Bert to me!

Have pillow, will travel

2009-03-07T18:05:00.000+11:00

A nomad mother necessarily has a nomad baby: little Ro is seven months old, yes, and has finally gotten a bed! He’s been sleeping on the floor beside us in tent and boat and bedrooms so far, and thanks to ebay and the delights of settling down for a year is the now the proud owner of his very own white cot:

NB: In Samoa, Cam built this ingenious bed on the side of ours for easy feeding in the night, mainly so we didn’t have to blunder in and out of several mozzie nets all night long! I sewed an annexe into ours to fit over and tuck into his little sidecar bed.

Just the other day I saw the same sort of thing for sale in the ABA catalogue for more than $400!! It’s definitely a lovely way to keep your snuggling space as a couple but have baby with you too.

A gratuitous shot of Ro on his first day, just because he's beautiful:

Produce report

2009-03-04T15:12:00.000+11:00

Here is some kale, now in the headlights of the bulldozers, down the middle of what will be a path for the new beds. I had to take a photo – in my fancy they look like Egyptian fans for slave girls to wave over Cleopatra on a languid day…

…while feeding her grapes! They are delicious, sweet and slightly tart and taste like the deep colour purple, even if they are small and taken up by a lot of seed!

Tiger in the orchard!

2009-02-20T14:59:00.001+11:00

You know you’re getting your eco-habitat right when you have top-of-the-rung predators lurking amongst the foliage: this tiger turned up the other morning, to the consternation of the faint-hearted chickens!

And then an ibis! Who seemed very puzzled at finding itself in such a lovely jungle of fruit and no garbage in sight…

I felt quite like David Attenborough, stalking the wildlife through the orchard with my camera.

Trendy brooding chooks

2009-02-18T14:46:00.003+11:00

The chookies now have that staple of trendy 70s architecture: the split level. With Cam digging around in there and shoring up edges with salvaged sleepers we thought perhaps we’d ruffled a few feathers when we couldn’t find any eggs for a couple of days. Perhaps they were in the orchard instead…

Note the beautiful, dark humus
the chooks have already made.
Since dug out and put on the lower salad bed.

Now the chooks can scratch around to heart’s content – they like to scratch uphill so everything always ended up piled up against the bottom gate before, and the concrete footing of the top post was exposed. Now that it’s level, we’ve put in a good thick layer of straw (carbon) and chuck in our kitchen scraps each morning (nitrogen) and they can scratch around (aeration) and poo (more nitrogen) and as a reward eat the worms coming up for a bite a

t the scraps too. And over time they have turned and tossed and aerated and wet a lovely rich compost for us to shovel out and use on the garden. Thank you ladies!

And then we found the white hen was broody (again!) and on lifting her out of her box found all the eggs of all the girls from the last few days, neatly nudged from all the nesting boxes to keep warm under herself. She tucked straight into some grain and had a good drink – broody hens go for 21 days without eating or drinking, keeping their eggs a constant warmth – but of course sitting on unfertilised eggs there are no chickies tumbling out at the end and perhaps they will keep on sitting and sitting and sitting until…! And so out she must go, although I feel very rude to do it.

Colour book

2009-02-15T17:40:00.000+11:00

This is a little book I made for Yarrow when I was wandering round our house in Samoa, big and pregnant, finding little things to do to get ready for my new baby...

I scavenged old magazines from all the other ladies (when you're overseas a new magazine is like gold and gets passed around and re-read, and re-read and passed around, until it's completely tatty and sucked dry of any juicy gossip!) and cut them up to make a colour book. Each page has a funny little non-poem from cut-out words which will make no sense at all to a small baby (or most right-minded adults!). Eg:

I borrowed a laminator from a school teacher friend to make it tropical-humidity proof.

Here are details from some of the pages:

Thank you to firefighters

2009-02-13T14:42:00.000+11:00

A friend heard a woman on the radio saying, “We were all packing up our cars and leaving, and as we were driving out through the smoke, there were all the firey’s driving back in, to save our homes.”

Thank you for your bravery and effort upon effort even in exhaustion and such terrifying conditions.

Getting cultured

2009-02-09T19:51:00.000+11:00

The first time I've ever made yoghurt!

Boiled the milk, let it cool til I could hold my finger in it for 10 seconds (just!) then added a dessert spoon of good, organic, whole milk yoghurt and wrapped it all up into a snug, warm bundle for the night with plenty of baby blankets:

Then Cam walked in to admire my handiwork and realised I'd carefully wrapped up the SAUCEPAN!

So I had to unwrap it all, pour it into a container more appropriate than a saucepan to set in, and wrap it all back up again. Ah, the getting of (acidopholus and bifidus) culture can be a humbling experience!

The next morning, on porridge, voila:

(A bit runny! Maybe all the inadvertent cooling and warming... But yummy!)

More uses for zucchini

2009-02-09T17:03:00.000+11:00

First food: zucchini!

Perhaps not the most exciting introduction to food...!

He has been licking the juice of whatever fruit Cam and I have been eating for a while, especially mulberries and apple at his great nana's at Christmas. That mulberry tree has been feeding and staining pink many generations of Wilsons now!

Fire

2009-02-08T14:40:00.002+11:00

All day the garden has been glowering in a weird light, whipping in the wind, and I’ve had my heart in my mouth thinking of all the people waiting with the fires bearing down on them.

So many heartbreaking stories already. And heart-salving ones too.

God bless them and keep them, everyone who is frightened and everyone who is fighting the fires.

Unexpected delight

2009-02-05T15:31:00.000+11:00

Sitting breastfeeding today – sat down quickly because Ro was crying, and forgot my cup of tea. Looked up from deep in the sofa with Ro now quietly feeding to see it on the table top, gently steaming.

Rising up in slow, graceful curls.

A beautiful and unexpected moment of meditation in my ordinary everyday:
sitting with my boy,
steam rising upward,
room still, and alight with sun.

The spice of life, via worms

2009-02-03T14:57:00.000+11:00

Cam is reading Frank Herbert’s Dune and methinks he is picturing his little harvester worms as miniature Makers, turning lettuce scraps into spice for the garden…

He has just made an industrial-sized worm farm out the front, from salvaged hardwood doors and some nifty concreting. Now you can drive up through the pines and round the parking circle, tip a load of horse poo off your trailer directly to the worms, and carry on to your next appointments.

He uncovered the existing worm farm to let in the light and waited for 10 minutes while all the worms fled deeper to get away from it:

Then he scraped off a 10cm layer full of baby worms and put it into a separate container, and again and again until we now have seven little worm hatcheries hatching worms under wet newspaper. We are collecting vegetable scraps from the two fruit and veg grocers in our strip of shops and the worms are voraciously munching their way through it and fattening up in preparation for their big move out to the front.

Prehistoric mama

2009-02-01T14:55:00.000+11:00

I feel like a mother lion, a cavewoman, when I look at this little boy today, his bright eyes and his trusting.

I want to wrap him in furs and bat him around between my paws, rolling across the dirt growling and laughing.

I feel my instincts whistling back through all the women who have given birth to me, my mother and her mother and hers and hers, back to caves with coals glowing low and fierce women giving birth in the wild of the first forests.

This knowing how absolutely important he is.

They would love this little boy.

Hot air

2009-01-29T18:47:00.000+11:00

I shall be glad to see the back of this north wind! As shall some wilting but nevertheless enduring vegetables.

The sunflowers are turning up their toes but luckily have already set their seeds to feed to the chookies. Meanwhile they have been a bright beautifulness out the window!

But the afternoon sun and the hot north wind set Cam wandering the beds with his laser level and pencil….

This evening he has a new plan:

to re-jig the vegie-growing area into three main terraced beds, two sleepers high at the front edge and with key hole paths leading in from the back edge.

We can grow a lot more food in the same area this way – less path and more actual growing space. And to shade the paths and grow even more food – vertically! – he will build a trellis over the two main paths and let the kiwis at it. They’ll give the garden a little shade in summer, but lose their leaves in winter and let the sun in.

It would be good to plant a big, loose-limbed tree in that bottom corner too, to disperse the wind a bit. Not a tight windbreak tree – that would lift the wind up and over and dump in straight onto the vegies – but just a nice big blowy tree the wind can move through and slow down in, and tickle the vegies thereafter.

Wildflower nappy garden

2009-01-27T14:36:00.000+11:00

This tickled my fancy: the nappies blowing in the breeze above the blooms.

I go out in my bare feet and have to be careful not to step on any of the lovely bees buzzing from flower to flower intent on their honey making.

Me arties!

2009-01-23T15:16:00.000+11:00

With the moral support of the fair Claire – queen of beekeepers and sewer of sweet things – I plucked up the courage to tackle the artichokes. You see here the result, from this:

to this, one lovely wee jar of pickled hearts:

via Maggie Beer's beautiful book Maggie's Harvest.

Apparently the little ones that sprout sideways from the main stem are the best for pickling; I confess that by evening the effort of cooking the big ones with my little man at my skirts was beyond me and they dried with the heat of the dying day and retired to the compost, thence to the worms…

But I shall enjoy me little pickled arts!

Salad days

2009-01-21T14:28:00.001+11:00

Salad days...

or zucchini days anyway! We are in a seasonal harvest of zucchini abundance:

So far I’ve made zucchini soup, zucchini pizza, zucchini quiche and stuffed zucchini… How fortunate to have inherited a house with good cookbooks!

Next up are the artichokes and beetroots, and the corn comes on apace…

2009-01-19T13:22:00.000+11:00

The time has come the walrus said: today is The Big Move!

Well… this week is the big move, toodling over a uteful at a time, cleaning up the Outlaw’s house in our wake (they are still up at the Murray rebuilding the floating-construction-site/houseboat which was burned down last year).

Kim & Clive have left us a garden full of luscious food:

And we are making our acquaintance with the chooks,
two of which inspire thoughts of 1920s art deco wallpaper:

They are all such lovely plumpy things.

Holidays

2009-01-16T15:32:00.000+11:00

It is definitely so lovely to be back among family and friends with the little man while he is still little.

We had Christmas at Jervis Bay in NSW with the Price clan:

Ro enjoying splashing in the ocean,
unlike his first attempts in Samoa,
where despite the tropical water he found it too cold!

And then New Year’s on the Murray in Robinvale with the Wilson clan:

Ro (and me and Byerly-dog) in the boat
watching his Dad on the wakeboard:

Introducing Yarrow

2009-01-12T12:35:00.000+11:00

This is yarrow:

a.k.a. Achillea millefolium

Good for:
Staunching wounds
Casting the I Ching
Sending its roots down deep and drawing up nutrients for all the plants around it

This is my very own Yarrow:

a.k.a. Little Yarrow Boy, Jumping Jack Sparrow, Barrow Boy

Good for:
Tickling, chuckling and snuggling
Smiles of bright light
Delighting fellow passengers on trains, planes and automobiles

Splashing the bath out of the bath
Sitting up all by himself!

Backyard nomad

2009-01-11T12:04:00.001+11:00

I have been a mama five months, and thus far a nomad mama:

Our home in Samoa,

where Yarrow was born in the middle of the wide blue Pacific,

with two local midwives.

Home of me madre, brother, belle seour and deux nephews in Canberra.

Home of the outlaws in Melbourne.

Our roving home.

Christmas home, hired with Price clan on NSW south coast.

Floating home.

New Year's on the Murray, building the houseboat.

But now this nomad mama will be putting down roots, potting up seedlings & tilling the soil:

Kim and Clive’s home.

They are off to

Uganda

to do good permaculture things and grow an abundance of food at the Sabine Home orphanage.

So I shall hunt and gather at the back steps! A nomad mama learning to be a farmer mama…