Garden Organisation

I have to actually water the gardens now as the wet season comes to an end and there hasn’t been much rain to speak of.

I have realised over the year that I have spread my gardens out too much and it has required way too much work to water everything, so I am in the process of gathering the gardens together. I am nearly there, and putting in irrigations plays a huge part in it.

I think I got a bit carried away with having so much space to play with that it was too exciting :D I did have things together but some of the early stuff was put in bad places and I now have to dig these things up to move them with the rest. If I don’t, these things just don’t get watered often as they are away from the main garden area.

I have planted out the louffa’s and choko’s with the passionfruit, and plan to put in another row with passionfruit, so having four rows total beside the containers. I am unsure if I will put irrigations on these or just water these by hand, I am thinking a good soaking twice a week might be enough with enough mulch on top.

The garden around the edge of the driving circle that goes around the main garden rows is another one that doesn’t require watering every day, but I will put irrigation in this one. I have the potatoes, pigeon peas, galangal, ginger, turmeric, rosellas and bananas in it.

The main garden has all the high maintenance stuff that needs looking after all the time, tomatoes, beans, cucumbers etc and so I put the water on it most days. Thank goodness for bore water otherwise we would be screwed, but we wouldn’t live here if there wasn’t bore water, you have to have water :)

I did have a plan for the gardens at the beginning, and I have mostly stuck with it as it was a good plan, however I did stray a little on occasion and it now have to work to fix it. I am sorting out the stuff that I won’t bother with, finding the stuff that works, and meeting people who are doing the same as us and swapping seeds and ideas.

Like a lot of things in life, it is a life long journey and there is always more to learn, just because you have done something for years doesn’t mean you know it all. Sometimes you repeat the same things, the same way, without ever expanding your knowledge or learning to do things better, more efficiently. Live and learn :D

ON OTHER MATTERS

I am a chocolate addict, can’t help myself, you can keep me very happy by giving me chocolate, I have a friend who doesn’t like chocolate and I find it amazing, how could you not, though I probably eat her share in this world. Now, onto the point, “Only 3 per cent of the world's global chocolate supply is ethically certified to have been harvested without the use of forced, child, or trafficked labour.” I try and buy fair trade chocolate most of the time, don’t always and I feel guilty for it, but will from now on it really doesn’t cost much. However, we are so used to buying things so cheap that we don’t’ think about the high cost to others just so we can have a cheap chocolate bar or a $3 t-shirt.

I liked this post about plastics at The Non-Consumer Advocate, I like reading peoples thought on stuff like this.

There is also this old post at Living on a Dime about how many clothes do we need. I think we (as in we as a society) have too many clothes, too many cheap clothes (that is whole other issue) and not enough quality clothes that last the distance. Also, when do we have the time, or the occasion, to wear a room full of clothes? We have been carting around an old wardrobe that gives us about 2foot of hanging space each (we never seem to live anywhere with built-in’s), we have some drawers each and that’s it, we seem to have an adequate amount of clothes for our needs and wants.

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.

Brigadoon

This morning I feel like I just stepped into Brigadoon, it is so misty and I had to squint to see the chook pen across the paddock.

I don’t have a lot to say today but I feel like writing and being school holidays I have time. I am up early as usual but don’t have to do anything as our number one and only son won’t stumble out till much later and my partner in crime and life wont’ be up until nearly lunchtime. So I am enjoying the peace of the early morning.

Though, I am listening to a CD that was a gift from one of my gorgeous Tai Chi friends, it is called “music as medicine” and it so suits this peaceful early morning. It is Nawang Khechog with R. Carlos Nakor and has chants, Native American flute songs, and Tibetan flute songs and is truly a lovely album. I can’t thank my friend enough for thinking of me and I will be using it a lot in our Tai Chi classes and at home.

My other current favourite album is Robert Plant and Allison Krauss called Raising Sand, it is easy to listen to and has some great songs on it, which is why I am listening to it so often, obviously :)

I found a fresh egg for my breakfast this morning, there is still only one chook laying about every other day on average, but can’t be long until the others catch up. They certainly do things in their own time :P

My seedlings are coming along well, I have cow peas and pigeon peas, one winged bean (the ones I really want to grow and am having trouble with but have managed to get a couple growing in the garden but I now no longer have any seeds and probably can’t get any more according to my source). I have a few little paw paws popped up, the seeds were given to us and have come from the best ever red paw paw, so we shall see.

Winged beans are a tropical legume from New Guinea and so of course does best in the tropics where there is a lot of rain fall. It is apparently called the”one species supermarket” as most of the plant is edible. You eat the bean, I won’t say obviously because sometimes you can’t eat the beans of plants, but also the flower, leaves and tuberous roots. So you can see why I really, really want to grow this bean, I just need to get some more seeds which I should get as my plants seem to be growing. They are currently living in a jungle of wild tomatoes and gigantic cucumbers.

ON OTHER MATTERS

Did you know that it is fifty years today since the first man went into space? It was the Russians who went into space and safely came back in a short trip that lasted 108 minutes, how amazing would that have felt? Personally, I would love to go into space but believe I would be happier going there with Star Trek technology than randomly floating around like it looks like we currently do.

Over a Scathing Weekly was a hilarious book review that I just loved, there was serious bits too, but now I have images in my head, probably set in for the day :P

Here is an article I found interesting, “Energy crisis leaves Nepal in the dark”. I never knew.

I really have to include these articles here, here and here on the decline of the bee population. We can’t survive without bees so this is a huge concern. I am happy to report that we have wild bees here on our property and regular bees have been seen in my garden.

Bacon Hock and Vege Soup

School holidays have started for us and so it is time to come up with some stuff to do that isn’t too boring. One rule that we are continuing with though is no TV, computer or Xbox between 10am and 5.15pm (when my partner in crime and life goes to work for the night). We start at 10 am as it gives me time to write a blog post if I have anything to say that day, check world news and pop into everyone’s blogs for a quick read.

Yesterday we lit a fire in our fire pit and cooked some sausages for a bit of afternoon tea, nothing like food cooked over an open fire :)

We had an old bacon hock in the freezer that really needed using so my partner in crime and life made up a bacon hock and vegetable soup in the camp oven and popped it on the fire. It was so yum.

That is the one of the many advantages of living out of town, we can light a fire and have a BBQ and nobody cares. It also costs us nothing to cook except some dead branches that we collected from around the property, which is good when you have to cook something for a few hours.

We have decided that we need to collect the recipes that we like into a folder. We have lots of camp oven recipes but we forget which ones we like as we don’t actually cook often enough in it, so we are going to collect the recipes and cook more outside. It also means that we can toast marshmallows, YUM :D

ON OTHER MATTERS

I have read a few blogs recently on what people keep in their bags, for some reason I find this very interesting, maybe because I cart a fair bit around with me. The latest blog about this is at The Apartment Prepper’s, one thing on her list which I hadn’t thought of (but should have) is a solar watch, I need to look out for one of those. My partner in crime and life had one once, good watch until it died.

There have been some disturbing articles recently about how we are going to have to live without antibiotics, as we have overused them and bugs are becoming resistant to them. There is this one at ABC news from last week, this one from the UK from last year and some more info here. However I found articles going back much further warning of this, and of course there has been other talk for quite a while, but it is now back in the mainstream news. We should all be concerned.

Here is another blog that I like that isn't in one of my side lists but is in my favourites, it is called Vintage Foodie, check it out, it is a good one.

Our First Egg

We have finally had our first egg. It is a little thing compared to regular eggs, but I guess they will get bigger. Self sufficiency is now one step closer, YAY :))

We are not sure which of the girls laid it, but it is only one of them as the next day there was another little egg, and I expect another one today. We are hoping the others will follow her lead, whoever she is.

You can see the size difference between the eggs, the cute little white one is about two thirds the size of the other.

We haven’t eaten them yet, we are just looking at them, however when we do I expect them to be great. Even though I am too scared to free range them at the moment (and I have to fence the garden) they get plenty of greens. Once or twice a week we go and cut grass and weed the garden and take them a barrow load for their pen, they pick over that for ages.

It is raining and windy here at the moment and we are not spending a lot of time outside, so this morning I just ran out and cut them the leaves of some snake beans, kang kong, sweet potato and pigeon peas along with some grass before the rain hit again. I will do that again tomorrow, it only takes five minutes and they get their daily greens.

The paw paws that I planted down at the creek so I can give the chooks lots fruit are coming along really well. In the mean time the other paw paw still has green fruit which just seem to be getting bigger and bigger, I guess they will eventually ripen.

Talking about sweet potato, I went to see if there was some ready to go the other day and pulled out this large red sweet potato. I decided to stop at one :P

ON OTHER MATTERS

On this dreary day I popped over to African Aussie and discovered this fantastic photo of a heleconia to put some colour into my day. There are some other great photos too :)

Despite the fact that the cost of fuel is on the rise we seem to be putting more cars on the road, building more roads to accomodate these cars and taking away public transport. At treehugger there is this article about freeway air pollution, now I know this is not new, we all know that air pollution affects our health, but doesn't hurt to have it put back into the front off our minds so we think about what we are doing.

Global food security and shortages seem to be talked about all over at the moment as people are becoming more concerned about it. Especially with all the current world events on the news every day, it is in our face making us think about it (though there are still people out there who are blissfully unaware and some who don't care). Anyway, at Pat Veretto's Frugal Living Blog, is a post about "why we will experience a food shortage".