Second-hand Shopping

The week has just flown by and now it is Sunday and I have to get ready for the next week. Where does time go? You certainly can’t catch it and store it in a jar for later when you need it :)

I spent Friday with a friend at one of our local towns and had a wonderful day. We scoured the second-hand shops and purchased some lovely biodynamic veges to take home.

I found some old knitting and crochet patterns for 10cents and 20cents each which made me very happy. These old patterns are a little bit of an obsession, I always keep my eye open for them. I find that they are patterns that never date, generally quite easy (which works for me very well) and are useful, not some doodad that has no purpose (seen plenty of those).

Another book I picked up is about another subject I like (well, I suppose I wouldn’t get a book about something I wasn’t interested in) is about the weather. I paid 50cents for this one, and it is not just any old book about the weather, it is about reading the weather by watching animals and plant life, fascinating :)

It is even better that it is an Australian book, so the animals are of course Australian, talking about emus, black cockatoos and brush turkeys. So if an emu only has a small amount of eggs (they can have up to 20 eggs though usually 9 to 12 eggs) this could indicate a long dry spell. Crocodile nests have been found a lot higher up the bank than usual before flooding (I need to take note of this one).

This book also has a chapter on weather rhymes and lore, like this one – Ring around the moon; rain before noon. Ring around the sun; rain before night is done. Apparently cirrostratus clouds can produce halos around the moon and the sun and this often indicates unstable weather. Who knew?

I also picked up some chokos (for 10cents each)for planting, two green and two white, had never seen white ones before. I killed my last lot so this time they are going in raised beds. I have a lot of choko recipes I really want to try so hopefully these ones will take.

When we got our biodynamic veges I got some potatoes which they had on special. They were on special as they were soft and sprouting so I am going to plant them and see if they are any different to the other potatoes I have planted (which are going very well by the way).

So today I had better go and get so more garden soil to plant the chokos, I also have some other seedlings which really must be planted out.

Yesterday my partner in crime and life chopped up a tree that had fallen, it was waterlogged and must have gotten top heavy and so over it went. We thought we might have been able to save it, however, despite looking skinny, it was tall and heavy and we couldn’t shift it. So now it is firewood.

I have to say a big thank you to African Aussie as we exchanged seeds this week. I hope the rosellas go well and I have some research to do on gem squash and jicama.

ON OTHER MATTERS

At the Australian Conservation Foundation there is an article about why we should be nuclear free, especially in light of the disaster in Japan. I have come across other articles about this same issue and I guess we will be hearing about this for a long while.

Save money and cut carbon is the heading of this article at New Dream. We certainly do need to cut carbon and we always want to save money, but we don’t want to change our lifestyle too much (also known as having our cake and eating it too). So there are more of these articles popping up to help us out.

Seeing my current interest is about peak oil, here is another article about it titled Peak Oil Stage.