Spring in the Garden

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The weather is suddenly very hot like summer, but will turn cool again tomorrow, or so we are told… It’s too soon to be this hot. We are having to water the garden every evening to keep things growing well. The heat has brought out all the pollinators, they are so busy in the garden. The newly hatched ducklings are busy exploring the lawn, the asparagus is shooting up, and the artichokes are heading-up and filling out in the veggie patch, the last of the Seville oranges are fully ripe in the orangerie, marmalade is being cooked in the kitchen, the first of the new season cherry flowers have set small nascent fruit, the rye bread is out of the oven and all is well in our very special, self-created, highly-curated, fantasy world. Where we live the life that we choose, We keep mostly to ourselves, without having to deal with the complexities of local politics. 

We grow all of our own vegetables, keep healthy, free-range, happy chickens, collect our own rain water, deal with our own sewage and feed ourselves organically, with wholesome food, grown, prepared and cooked respectfully and in tune with the cyclic nature of the natural world.

The bees and other pollinators are all out and being busy. I’m checking out the new avocado trees, half of these new, one year old trees, have decided to flower on their first anniversary of being planting out. Being grafted means that they have more mature wood, but producing flowers in their first year is pretty special. Our 50 year old Fuerte avocado tree is in full flower as well, so I’m hoping for a good, well pollinated crop. The old Fuerte tree has an understory of self germinated ‘wild’ borage plants that are also flowering now. Very pretty!

Close examination of the avocado flower heads reveals that there are no European honey bees interested in the avocado flowers, They are all working the borage flowers down below. The avocado flowers are being worked over by a few different pollinators. The main insect doing a majority of the work is the yellow and black striped hover fly. There are hundreds of them being very thoroughly busy. But there are also a number of other little hard working flighty characters, some so small that I can’t even really get a good glimpse of them. There is a wind blowing, so the flowers are moving about a lot. The smallest little critter is about 3mm long and blackish, so small that I can’t make out its features at all clearly. Small enough to be a native stingless bee, but I can’t be sure. We are probably too far south for that. Another pollinator is the ‘Delicate masked bee’, Very narrow in shape, with very long antennae. But there are also Leaf cutter bees, Blue banded bees, and an unidentified blue carapace small bee or beetle, too flighty to photograph clearly, plus some of what looks like blow flies.

Surprisingly, I have read somewhere that houseflies and blowflies are some the most significant pollinators of avocados according to one author. But it was all hover flies everywhere here today, even on the daisies and working the cherry tree blossom. Honey bees appear to be in decline around here now, but there are still a few. There was a time when there were so many working the bloodwood trees out on the road, that we could hear them clearly buzzing on mass from inside the house!

First thing in the morning, when I open the bedroom curtains and look out into the Chekov orchard of very large, 40 years old, mature, cherry trees, I see a collective noun of finches working the orchard. So Charming! They swarm past in a flutter of activity. Constantly on the move across the lawn and in under the trees. This manic behaviour is probably a survival mechanism, it’s hard to hit a moving target. The trees are full of blossom. It’s a wall of white/pink flowers. There are also a very happy and lively group of superb wrens, very flighty and very busy. I assume that they don’t want the nectar in the flowers. They have the wrong kind of beak for that, so they must be catching little bugs. They move so fast in a sweep of chirpy, whistely, twittering crishendo of life celebrating spring. I can’t see what it is that they are eating, but having spent the previous day looking very closely at the avocados and lots of other flowering plants in the garden, I can assume that they are eating tiny bugs. If those bugs are important pollinators? I hope that they don’t eat too many! But as it is spring and breeding season, they are probably after protein? It all passes so fast. In a moment they are all gone. Suddenly all quiet again.

Janine, Geordie and I spent half a day peeling and juicing 40 kilos of mandarins this week, for his seasonal, artisanal, pure fruit cordial business. He creates his adult cordials with what is in season locally. Mature, sophisticated flavours using a range of herbs and spices added into whatever fruit is in season to achieve an interesting and unique flavour profile. Some of the fruit comes from our orchards throughout the year, when we have enough for his needs. Our citrus grove is now almost completely harvested, but he also gets fruit donated to him by his customers. Whatever is in peak season at the time.

In the pottery, I have finished throwing more new work. I have bisqued all the previous work now, using the excess of recent sunshine. I used the big, newly refurbished, but very old, aluminium framed, electric kiln. It may be 30+ years old, but it is all new inside now, with new home-made, hand-extruded ceramic element rods and home-made electric heating element coils. It’s now the best kiln in the pottery.

I’ve started glazing, been at it for a few days now, so should be finished tomorrow. I am planning to do a wood kiln firing for the last time until after the summer heat has subsided. There is a forecast of 3 cooler and possibly rainy days next week, so that will be a perfect time to fire.

In the kitchen, I made another batch of chilli sauce. The last for this season, from the Korean chillis that I grew during the summer. This time, I decided to take the seeds out to make it quite mild, and then add some salt, sugar, garlic and vinegar, so it’s a sort of sweet chilli sauce. It’s super delicious – if I do say myself. Sweet, savoury, salty, tangy delicious. It’ll be great condement to go with cold meats like roast beef, but also useful to add to soups, sauces and stocks.

De-seed ther chillis until you get 250g of chilli, add 3 cups of vinegar, 2 cups of water, 2 cups of sugar, 2 tea spoons of salt and 6 cloves of garlic. This last item of garlic coud easily be doubled, as the garlic is hardly noticible in the finished sauce. Cook for 20 mins over moderate heat and bottle in sterilised jars.

Spring has sprung straight into summer heat

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We have been told that last northern summer was the hottest on record and our winter here in the southern hemisphere was also the hottest on record. There’s a pattern here. I need to take notice and prepare for what will most probably turn out to be a longer, hotter, drier summer. More drought and more fires?

We are pretty well prepared here for the very likely increased fire danger, having been there and done that in the past and learnt from it. However, who knows how and when it will come and under what conditions.

This week I started testing and running the various fire fighting pumps to make sure that we are all OK and prepared for any sudden and unexpected fire event. I need to know that everything is in working order after the long hiatus of non-use since last summer. Petrol goes ‘stale’ if kept too long, so I need to syphon out any old fuel from the engines and refill them with fresh petrol, then run them and switch off the fuel line while the engine is running to drain the carburettor of fuel before shutting down and leaving it ready to restart reliably in any emergency. It all takes time, but is absolutely necessary if you live in the bush like we do, situated between two densely forested National Parks

As we haven’t had the usual winter rain here, all the dams are almost empty. Not a good way to start a hot dry summer. We need the water for irrigation of the vegetable garden and the orchards, but obviously for fire fighting as well.

I use one of our 4 petrol powered fire pumps, that is not permanently installed in one position to run the wall and roof sprinklers on a specific building. One is for the house protection system. A second for the pottery and barn, and the third for the railway station and carport. All these buildings have wall mounted sprinkler systems installed and huge 30,000 or 40,000 litre water tanks connected. 

Using the portable fire pump unit, I can put it in the wheel barrow and take it down to the lowest dam to pump water uphill to the middle dam, accumulating all the water together, in that dam, and then from there, up to the top dam, where the big fire fighting pump is installed. This pump runs the underground system of buried polypipes, taking water to every part of our land, where I have installed metal stand pipes along the line to connect 20mm hoses for ground based sprinkler systems.

The bottom dam is pumped almost dry, leaving just  a small amount of residual water for the yabbies.

The pump is then moved up to the middle dam and repeated, pumping all of this water up to the top dam. It takes most of the day to empty each dam. approximately 6 solid hours of pumping. Refilling the fuel tank every 2 hours. It costs me $60 in fuel at these current elevated prices due to Trumps war on everyone. I’m a bit shocked at the price of fuel. I only go to the petrol station a couple of times a year these days, so it’s a shock. I’d rather run the fire pump on our own solar PV, but I’d need a very long and very thick, 3 phase, 5 core, extension lead. This would not only be extremely expensive, but too heavy to lift.

I do have a 30 metre, 5 core, 3 phase, cable to run the electric wood splitter that I rebuilt and converted from a petrol driven to electric after the fire. But this is impossible to lift. I have to drag it out bit by bit, to get the business end down to the closest wood pile next to the pottery. I wouldn’t want to have to manage anything 3 or 4 times longer and heavier. And, that wouldn’t be feasible in a fire situation.

By concentrating all our ground water reserves from 3 dams into one. It reduces the available surface area for evaporation to 1/3 , so making the stored water last longer into the summer.

Each of the individual dams had evaporated down to just half a metre depth of water. By concentrating all the dam water up into the small top dam, it is now a metre deep. This amount or water will probably last us til just after new year. After that, we will have to rely on our tank water storage.

We have two very large water tanks of 100,000 litres each, down in the bottom corner of our land at the lowest point. These collect the rain water off the roof of the barn and the pottery.  We started out with just the one tank, These are two very large roofs, so quite efficient at collecting rain water and storing it. However, if it doesn’t rain for long periods, we do manage to use most of this water, like we did in the last drought. We pumped the first concrete tank down to just 200mm depth remaining before it rained again. That was a warning to me that one large tank wasn’t enough, because there had been periods earlier on when it rained for a week and that first tank had over flowed for days. So I added a second tank to catch and store that overflow water. 

Over the years, under growth had built up and grown quite thick all around those two tanks. The newer 2nd tank is not concrete, but a tin tank lined with a plastic bag inside. This will be a bit vulnerable in a bush fire if there is a build-up of fuel load in front of it. So on my return from Korea. We set about clearing out all the accumulated vegetation. It was a big job over 3 days to get it all clear again. but will be safe now for a few more years. 

We managed to get all this undergrowth cleared away and piled up and burnt before the fire season started, so were able to burn it all in a pile safely.

Of course any sane, rational person with an interest in fire safety around their home, would keep it all mowed and spotless with regular maintenance all year using the whipper-snipper/strimmer, and digging out the tougher bits with a mattock!. But clearly, I’m too lazy to get off my fat idle butt! 

I tell myself that I will do it soon, maybe later, but just not today and then a year (or 2, or 5) passes by and there is suddenly a small forest to deal with. It’s just like cleaning out the kitchen grease trap. It doesn’t get done regularly enough, and then it’s a big issue. Welcome to being human.

The citrus season is coming to an end. I still have a few Seville oranges on the tree, so there will be at least one more batch. I have made 4 so far since my return, just enough to get us through the year ahead – almost.

For the past few years I have been using the ‘Mrs Beeton’ recipe for boiled whole fruit that was sent to me by our friends Bill and Anne. They get some of our fruit each season in return.

Of course, I can’t help my self, I have changed the recipe to remove 60% of the recommended sugar in the recipe, down from 2.7 kgs to just 1 kg. It’s sweet enough at this level. At least for me anyway. I find most jam and conserves way too sweet for my taste.  It’s the easiest and consistently reliable recipe I’ve adapted to. I have added just half a packet of pectin (25 g) to make up for the missing sugar. 

In the pottery, I have been making a range of domestic wares , getting ready for the end of year open studio sale. Most recently I have been making cups and saucers. So very old fashioned, but rather romantic and quaint. I make them every so often, as I really like them as a project. They require careful measurement and skill. So they are very rewarding when you get them right. I have also been making baking dishes and mixing bowls.

I have started glazing, getting ready for a wood kiln firing, before it gets too hot and late in the year. I should have got it done earlier, but was too tied-up playing catch-up on all the jobs around the orchard prior to spring and then getting the garden up to date, cleaned out, weeded and replanted with the summer crops. 3 Months away has put me behind schedule with regard to the seasons. But everything gets done eventually, usually a little bit late, but I don’t pretend to be perfect, just committed to this chaotic, wholesome, DIY, organic, post modern peasant’s, artist’s life.

In my ‘spare’ time I finally found time to finish the long awaited repair job on the disc-disintegrator rock crusher. I cleaned it and repaired it to almost going condition after the fire, but the rubber belts got melted in the fire, so it got almost finished, repainted and all greased up and ready to go – well almost, but for the missing twin drive belts. The problem was that the belts need to go around the drive shaft, but the shaft is fully enclosed in the mechanism. This means removing the shaft to slip them in. But to remove the shaft I have to push it out through the plain bronze bearings. Over the many long years of use. It’s about 100 years old. The shaft has been a bit worn into place with a slight ‘lip’ built-up, or rather worn-in, which stops its from moving laterally. So to get it moving, it needs to be hammered out. I tried this, but not wanting to break it…

I gave up at this point some time ago and thought that cleaning the grease trap sounded somewhat easier and a more attractive proposition, followed by scrub clearing and brick cleaning. I had just finished scrubbing the pavers on the south side of the pottery, all covered in slippery moss, using chlorine bleach, when I realised that I was just procrastinating. So I went back in (2 years later) and figured out how to remove that shaft. One thing leads to another, and I needed to remove the drive pulley first, but that necessitated removing the rusted on collar, which was held in place with corroded grub screws… which led to having to work out a way of releasing the embedded keyway spline, to slide the pulley off. It also required dis-assembling and removing the front metal casting of the mill to allow the space for the shaft to move outwards… The front casting bolts were rusted in place, so needed several applications of RP7 and light oil, plus some gentle heating and then tapping with a copper ‘drift’ to get them in an agreeable state of mind to start moving.

Days later, it’s all done and a going concern again. 

Now, I just need to confront the last burnt out rock crusher machine. The roller crusher, which Is so very useful, and sadly missed, as I used to use it a lot in the old pottery for softish materials, like shales and pumice. Maybe I’ll get round to fixing that one when the grease trap needs cleaning again?

🙂

Spring is on the way.

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I have satisfied myself now that I have ‘caught-up’ with the vegetable garden and orchard work for the time being. Of course, there is always on-going maintenance to deal with, especially with spring just around the corner. A garden is a perpetual source of pleasure and bounty, If you are that way inclined? But that reward requires a lot of work. Being able to have extensive vegetable gardens and orchards, growing all of our own organic food is the reason that we live here. It’s a choice that I made 55 years ago. I haven’t looked back. However, I’m incredibly lucky to have found a fantastic partner in Janine, who holds similar values and aspirations.

I’m back from my 3 months in Korea, just in time to get the late winter work done in preparation for spring. As spring is coming earlier and earlier each decade, as we, as a species, continue to cook the earth with our carbon pollution. I find it hard to accept that the collective ‘we’ are moving so slowly on this. Obviously there is incredible push back from the big carbon energy producers, amplified by their big media puppets, but I would imagine that it would be becoming clearer by the year and by each natural disaster; droughts, fires and floods. all made worse by the extreme heating. But NO. Everybody seems quite sanguine about it all.

The Trump followers say its all fake news, and one of the people that I happen to have to deal with, says that the exact opposite is happening. ie. its getting colder every year, flying in the face of obvious reality, but he is actually ill! While most people don’t seem to give a rats. What can you do? It’s a democracy! I accept the majority decision, but decline to follow the masses. Janine and I have instead, chosen our path of self reliance, minimal consumption and a low carbon lifestyle. I keep thinking of what else I can do, but we have covered all the obvious and achievable items like going fully solar starting back  almost 20 years ago, in 2007. Driving an electric car, starting back 8 years ago in 2018. Recently we changed all the window glass in our Kitchen to double glazed and vacuum sealed panes. We are net exporters of clean solar electricity to our neighbours.

On a brighter note. Various fruit tress in the orchards are flowering beautifully just now, and have been since I came back. The earliest of the plums is the most striking at the moment. It’s a red skinned and red fleshed variety, even the bark on the smaller upper branches is red. It’s called “O-Kay” plum and is really prolific. We bought it grafted onto dwarfing rootstock, so it won’t grow more than 2.5 metres high. That is, if it bothers to read its own label! And then agrees to comply! Not all trees comply with their labelling! We also have an early peach just starting to flower, as well as an early nectarine and a few almonds. They all think that it’s spring now, and are bursting into flower, even though it’s still winter.

Just a reminder to those who have fruit tress. Now (or even a month ago) is the time to spray lime sulphur, and do your pruning, before bud burst, 

The early maturing varieties that we have chosen will mature and ripen before the bugs and fruit flies breed up into large numbers and spoil the fruit. We only use organic methods here, so no toxic sprays. We use a range of methods to control and limit the numbers of bugs. Starting now, we use ’DAK’ pots to lure the male fruit flies before they can mate. We use a protein based female fruit fly lure to help limit their numbers as well. We also deploy a simulated fruit based lure, marketed as ‘ecolure’ along with ‘spinosad’ soil fungus as well as garlic spray in various forms. Be aware that garlic spray can only be used after flowering is finished. Bees won’t go near flowers that have garlic spray on them. I learnt this the hard way. Everything helps, but once the weather warms up into full-on summer. The fruit fly numbers build up to the point that these efforts aren’t enough. So this year, I’ll be experimenting with using fine while nylon netting to cover the late maturing fruit, such as pears and quinces. Always trying something new.

This week I finally finished spreading the last of the bonfire ashes and sooty charcoal dust from the orchard prunings burn pile. Burning the prunings eliminates any chance of spreading diseases, or overwintering pests. The ash has nutrients in it like potassium that are good for the trees as fertiliser,  the carbon enriches the soil, and the fine charcoal and helps to retain moisture. Win, win!

Only once the gardening work is done, can I get back to work in the pottery. Growing food comes first. 

I started with the basics, by cleaning out the pug mill that hasn’t been used for several months while I’ve been away in Korea. Even though I seal up the various orifices with plastic, air still seems to get in and dry out some parts, so these bits get too dry and stiff to go through the pug mill vacuum screens, and block it up. I spent a morning doing this maintenance cleaning and other jobs required to get the pottery back into a working studio again. Only then could I start throwing. Everything in its own time and place, and in order.

I started by throwing the rough stoneware body that I make for wood firing. It is designed to ‘flash’ to a warm orange/red colour in the wood firing kiln. As it is quite rough in texture, having a lot of coarse fireclay in the recipe, it is very suitable for use as oven proof cookware. So I started by making baking dishes, casserole dishes, large kitchen mixing bowls with pouring spouts and rough textured mortars and pestles.

Next I started throwing some of the fine textured wood firing clay body. I made 4 pot boards of cafe latte cups, short, wide and open in form. I am using one of the measuring pointer gadgets that I have been making for sale to potters wanting to improve their skills and accuracy. I will be offering a weekend workshop on throwing skills and accuracy in the coming months. The pointer has a rubber tip, so that it will not damage the soft, delicate rim of any pot that comes too close and touches the tip.

Before I left for Korea, I read ‘Enshitification’ by Cory Doctorow. A really good read, very informative about the abuse of power exercised by the big digital marketing corporations like Amazon and Apple, and how they start out doing good for their customers, but as they gain market share, soon become too powerful and turn against their customers and start to rip them off. A real education. I don’t use Amazon at all, as it is usually more expensive than other places that I support. But now that I know how corrupt, underhanded and devious bezos is. I feel somehow pleased by my past decision. Highly recommended.

The other book that I have just finished deals with the mining and supply of exotic elements like lithium and cobalt that make the new, powerful, light weight batteries possible. Batteries that are essential in the production of all the new portable devices like power tools, phones and laptops, but also electric cars. The Congo seems to be the epicentre of this mining, and the book goes into great detail examining the corruption of the series of governments there. The Congo is potentially one of the wealthiest countries on earth. But its people are some of the poorest, because of the corruption, bribery and straight out theft of the minerals industry.

Reading this book, I felt some guilt, as I own battery powered power tools, a phone, a laptop and 2 electric cars. However, my home storage battery and my car both use Lithium/iron/phosphate technology and so avoid the use of cobalt. There is some hope on the horizon in terms of avoiding the lithium/cobalt trap. Sodium battery technology has just reached mass production level of reliability in China, with the release of the first sodium powered storage batteries and electric car by CATL in China. CATL is the largest manufacturer of lithium batteries used in electric cars. So a sodium battery breakthrough is some sort of good news. As sodium is not expensive or rare, or hard to work with, or prone to burst into flames. Sodium is readily available everywhere, so is much cheaper and its extraction and processing are less polluting. It is heavier and less energy dense than lithium, so is better suited to stationary battery storage solutions, but will be OK for small suburban run about cars, for people who don’t need so much power. This first mass produced sodium battery can be recharged 10,000 cycles and can be recharged from 10% to 98% in 6 minutes. Sounds great. However Lithium will still be the battery of choice for light weight, power hungry applications for the foreseeable future.

In the kitchen we are eating a lot of winter vegetables. In particular, finding as many ways as possible to use up the huge flush of cauliflowers. Baked, fried, steamed and gratin’d, and in soups. We have probably eaten our last black French truffle for the year. and very lovely and flavoursome it was too. Can’t wait till next year now. As we live and grow with the seasons, we have a slow rotation of vegetables on our menu as the year progresses through the seasons. 

We will soon be approaching what the peasants used to call ’the hungry gap’. When the winter crops are coming to an end and the spring plantings of the summer crops is completed, but there was always a gap before the summer crops were mature. 

Over the next couple of months, we will be coming to the end of the carrots, beetroots and parsnips, as well as the cauliflowers, our diet will be narrowing down to leeks, cabbage and potatoes. Radishes, lettuce and onions. The spring peas are flowering, but haven’t set yet. We have plenty of bottled tomato passata along with loads of stewed fruit in the pantry from last summer, and dried mushrooms in jars. We are in peak citrus season just now, so no shortage of vitamin ‘C’. I’m making a batch of Seville orange marmalade each week for use later in the year and the there are the first asparagus shoots coming up. So we don’t go too hungry.

I’m planting tomato seeds now and in a few weeks time I’ll be planting them out under cover of a temporary closh, made by wrapping some clear plastic around a light weight wire frame. This will be just for the first month in case of late frosts. As last year, I didn’t bother, and I lost all my early plantings to a late frost and had to start again. A lesson well learnt.

I’m really glad to be back home and doing all this focused and meaningful self-reliant work again. People say to me that my life must be such hard work, and there is a little bit of that, but only to a certain extent. However, being the ‘Artist in Residence’ was a great honour, and also fun, and even though I grew a vegetable garden and built a wood fired oven at the studio, it lacked the completeness that I have come to consider normal here in this life. So I really appreciate being back in a complete meaningful and supportive life/growing cycle here with Janine, Geordie and the chickens! Happy to be home.

Home again

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I’m back home again now, after my 3 months in Korea as Artist in Residence at the Yanggu Porcelain Museum. I’m really glad to be home. I Missed Janine and Geordie, and the chickens and my gardens and orchards. Everything really. 3 months was too long for me at my stage of development. It was better suited to someone younger, who doesn’t already have a home and workshop, not to mention garden and orchards etc.

My first week back was spent in the orchards spraying lime sulphur over all the tress to inhibit fungal diseases. This has to be done early, before bud burst. I only just made it. The earliest trees are in flower now a week later. We are still in the middle of winter with good frosts each morning, but we have chosen all early ripening varieties for our situation here, on dwarf rootstocks, and with a low chill factor to allow for the effects of global heating into the future.

I pruned all the trees and piled up all the prunings to burn, so as to minimise any chance of disease from establishing or spreading.

After pruning there is fertilising and liming the soil around the drip line of every tree. I also spread all the ash from the burn pile as well, because ash has some potassium in it, which is an essential element, good for fruit set and development in fruit trees.

All these jobs are achieved with the assistance of the chickens. They love to be involved, and follow me around from tree to tree. Where ever I am working, then that tree is the most interesting tree in the entire orchard. Besides wood ashes, the trees also get a handful of composted chicken manure per sq. metre around the drip line, and a handful of dolomite/lime as well. 

Dolomite has the slight advantage of adding a little bit of magnesium as well as calcium into our ancient, depleted soils.

The final job is to spread a thin layer of well rotted compost around all the youngest trees to help them along and get a good grounding. I spend the first few years after the fire pruning these new trees quite hard, without sentimentality, to get a good strong open shape. I also pick off a lot of the small emerging fruit at the 1 cm. size, to allow the tree to put all its energy into growing strong roots and branches. I leave a few fruit on to get a taste of what sort of fruit it will have for us.

I built a netting fence around each of the newly planted avocado trees before I left for Korea, to protect them from the kangaroos and wallabies, who love to nibble anything that is new in the garden. Even to the point of completely denuding it of any greenery, quickly killing the new plant. I also added a top wrapping of clear plastic industrial ‘glad-wrap’ around the top half of the netting and them over 2/3 of the top, allowing for some rain to still fall through to water the plants. This mini green-house cover is to minimise the effects of the frosty nights over their first winter here, until they can acclimatise to our cold frosty winters. I’m back and they are coping well with the cold, with dark green leaves without any frost burn, and they are starting bud burst with new growth for the coming spring.

All 5 new trees are doing well, so I’m hoping for some good crops of avocados into the future as these new trees come into flowering and cross-pollinate each other and the big 50 year old Fuerte tree that is coming into old age now and has lost a lot of vigour. The fuerte variety is quite cold hardy, as our old tree can attest. handling the winter frosts here as well as a week of snow back in the 70’s. I also planted a ‘Bacon’ variety which is renown to be the most cold hardy of all the avocados. However, even the ‘Hass’, ‘Shepard’ and ‘Wertz’, are all doing well, even though they are not know for their cold hardiness. I’m particularly keen to see the Wertz and Hass varieties do well and flower, as they are the best cross-pollinators for our aging Fuerte tree.

In the weeks and months before I left for Korea, I planted out a load of small vegetable seedlings that I hoped would mature over the next few months to keep Janine in fresh veggies in my absence. On arriving home, Janine took me to the garden to see the last of the 350mm dia. cauliflower heads that had matured over the last few weeks. These had to be the biggest cauliflowers that I have ever grown.

There are others that aren’t as big. We will be eating a lot of varied cauliflower meals over the next month.

The other lovely culinary delight that we have enjoyed in the past week is a very nice French black truffle. Janine and Geordie had a small one while I was away, and thought it wise not to brag about it to me while I was too far away to share in it. She saved a small fragment for me packed in rice in the fridge, but it was pretty much dried out and lost most of its subtle aroma by the time I returned. However, hey presto, we have just one more to share together over a couple of breakfasts. 

We were out for dinner together before going on to a philosophy lecture in Bowral last week, and stopped in at the local French restaurant, where they had truffled egg on the menu. I had to order it!  However, I was somewhat underwhelmed when it arrived at our table. The micro-gram of truffle had been passed through a very fine sieve, so that when my plate arrived, I had to put my glasses on to see the fine black dust.

In my opinion, the only way to eat a truffle is to not think about the scarcity or value, but go for it like it’s your last meal. Be generous to yourself. I allow about 5 grams per person, generously shaved over soft scrambled eggs. We may only get a couple of breakfasts out of a small truffle, but every mouthful is rewarding.

Even though it’s winter, we are still getting 3 to 4 eggs a day out of our 6 chickens, so Janine made a delightful huge and airy savoury soufflé for dinner. luxurious! 4 eggs never looked so huge and luscious. or tasted better.

Now that the garden and orchards are mostly back in order and under control. I have started to prepare wood for the house and for a future wood kiln firing. I want to get at least one wood kiln firing in before the hot dry weather comes. I started by felling a couple of huge dead stringybark trees that died in the big fire. Luckily there is room to fell them safely into the back paddock where we used to have the vineyard. Dropping big trees is such a dangerous activity. I treat it with the utmost respect. I work completely alone, so that no one else can get injured. If I’m concerned, I use a ‘come-along’ steel rope winch to help make sure that it drops in the intended place. So far I’m still alive to tell the tale. In this case, there was plenty of room for error in the open paddock. However, as it turned out, there was no error. It was an almost perfect cut, within a few millimetres.

We spent a day cutting it up into useful lengths measured to suit the kiln firebox or house stove. Chain-sawing takes a lot out of me, so we had a day off to recover, then went back to it and split it all up into small cross-sections, working along the length of the log across the paddock, leaving small pyramids of logs as I went. Janine came along behind me and the splitter collecting the smaller billets and driving them up to the house wood shed for stacking out of the weather. As the tree was long dead, we don’t have to worry about seasoning it before use.

The last job was to rake up all the detritus, bark and tiny sticks for use as kindling. All cleaned up and back to normal, ready for obstruction free mowing in the spring/summer.

We’ll be doing this again, and again, for the next few months and even years, as we slowly work our way through the huge number of dead trees killed in the big fire. Standing dead trees are capable of falling, or dropping branches without warning at any time. So I want to reduce their numbers anywhere near the house, gardens and paddocks where we are likely to move about frequently.

Poetry and Madness 12, Looking for the grit in the oyster

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I have been working here as the Artist in Residence at the Craft Creation Centre, attached to the Yanggu, White Porcelain Museum.I am not Korean, or have any real insight into what it is to be Korean. So I’m staying well clear of any claim to insight, or knowledge of Korean culture. I love the rather unique, fully rounded, Moon Jars that are quintessentially Korean. However, I don’t want to make a copy, or worse still, some sort of cringe worthy, awful pastiche of this exquisite from.

I started my work on this trip, looking in from the outside, through the open window of this opportunity here, but with mixed results. I love what I see, hear, taste, smell and experience, but the window pane is frosted and the image is blurred. My early attempts to make something unique to me and interesting to Korean viewers were inadequate to describe my vision of living and ‘being’ here in this generous, creative, Artist-in-Residence opportunity.

I love the romance of the Moon Jar, but it ends there. What I make is not a moon jar, but an homage to the cultural artefact, and my viewing experience of enjoying them. It’s a very personal view. I have thought long and hard about how I might express my regard for these subtle objects. I had decided early on that it would be an insult to try and make a copy. No matter how close that replication might appear to be, it would always be a poor imitation, by an outsider, that would forever be seen as lacking. A clumsy attempt to impersonate, or worse still, to be a caricature.

I went back to basics. I decided to make something that encapsulates my ceramic interests, my total life experience, including my Korean sojourn. These jars are made with the greatest respect and reverence for this place that I am coming to consider as being a kind of 2nd home, as this is my 9th visit here in 10 years. I have dipped my toe into Joseon Dynasty history and the influences of Confucian philosophy, and find that I have so much in common with this ‘ideal’ form of proscribed behaviour. This way of thinking, of being and living. Interestingly, I was brought up in that milieu. I know it, as I live it, but by another name. I was brought up in a buddhist/quaker household, with similar values.

It’s a calm, quiet, respectful way of living within a society, while also respecting nature and the environment that supports it. This is what engages my attention. The emphasis on virtue, harmony, and responsibility with benevolence and propriety. It just seems to be the right way to live and create, or at least attempt to.  I have tried, and often failed, to live my life by most of these values, long before I learnt about Korean history.  I simply call it living ethically.  But I am no philosopher trained to think in those terms. I am just a simple potter who has chosen to live a sustainable life of minimal consumption, and all of the rest just followed. 

I endeavour to make sustainable, environmentally sensitive and socially responsible life choices and objects. From growing my own food, building my own home, growing my own forest, making my own furniture, and wood fired pots, as well as building my own truck from recycled materials. It’s a unique life, based on a complex set of choices and interrelated actions. I hope that the pots that I make here embody these principals to some extent.

I am making what I hope will be seen as a respectful attempt to create beauty in my own way, with my techniques, showing my sensibilities, but with a Korean flavour. I use a very personal technique based on my explicit needs. A technique of mixed hand-building and throwing, on the wheel. I have also limited my attempts at throwing large scale jars. In my most recent work here, I found a great deal of pleasure in making smaller scale forms in one piece, faster and more freely. It also transpires that these smaller scale works are much better suited to this local clay and the kiln that I built here, so there are fewer losses in the firing. The work has slowly and naturally evolved into an expression of my personality, aesthetic choices, physical abilities, quirks, needs and peccadillos.

This smaller scale has also opened up a lot of other opportunities to fire more creatively and use the kiln’s creative and aesthetic possibilities in more adventurous, artistic and flexible ways. I’m very pleased with these latest works and their variable and expressive surfaces. The ash glaze deposits, the purple/mauve flashing and carbon inclusion. These are surfaces that represent me and my aesthetic.

These surface qualities have become possible at this scale, in this kiln and with this clay, in this place! These pots belong here just like the plants that have self seeded, and grow wild along the edges of the roadside and fields.

So there is a story here. This is a story of muted ambition. Of managing expectations, and keeping a clear vision of what is possible in making an interesting jar. Working in an environmentally sensitive way. Firing my kiln without smoke, and with minimal carbon pollution, but also of testing myself, going further, and living a commitment to an ideal. A dance between poetry and madness. 

Was it some form of folly to decide to undertake this odyssey at my age? I could just as easily have made 50 porcelain jars at home, in my own studio, with more forgiving clay, much more conveniently and comfortably, in my well equiped studio, surrounded by my partner, friends, garden and chickens.  I could have fired those home made jars using my own solar power in a much more sustainable way. All reliable and well understood techniques, equipment, clay and studio. Totally safe, with little challenge, but where is the poetry in that? It helps, I think, to live a little bit closer to the edge, to experience new insights, motives and perhaps just a little bit of madness? In doing so, I think that I might have just discovered the grit in the oyster?

Below, A selection of jars that will be on show here in the Porcelain Museum Gallery from 16th of October to 31st of December.

Hardly a perfect, pure white, porcelain sphere in sight, rather a collection of grey, black, mauve and yellow ash glazed, wood fired jars that reflect my aesthetic choices. No one will accuse me of copying, or stealing National cultural property.

I did 3 firings. 14hrs, 19 hrs and 30 hrs, in my ‘Bourry box’ kiln. A satisfactory outcome I think. 

Funnily, Looking at this collection of jars with their naturally ash glazed surfaces, I see a lot of influence from my friend Svend Bayer. I hope that he is not offended by that comparison. I do know that he was quite influenced by his visit to Korea earlier in his career. Perhaps Korea is the flux that has brought our two very distinctly different approaches closer together.

I fly out in 3 days, just enough time to clean out my fridge and studio, mop and scrub everything into submission, have a farewell party, then hop on the bus.

Poetry and Madness 11. It takes a village.

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I fired my kiln again, and for the last time yesterday. Started at 3:45 by my mentee/assistant Riyeon, 30 minutes before I got there. She’s very keen! Firing number 3 on this visit and firing number 6 in total over 3 years. I’d like to think that Im getting the hang of it, but I’ll have to wait to see what it’s like after I unpack on Saturday. Technically, it went beautifully, climbing to temperature in reduction, without smoke, and without effort, an hour earlier than I estimated, at 9:00 pm.

Riyeon is the most enthusiastic student that I have taught wood firing to in some time. 

As this is my last firing, I organised with some of the other residents that we should fire up the pizza oven that I built last month. It has been sitting waiting for an opportunity to use it. I couldn’t fire it up last firing, as I was more or less firing on my own, with just one or two others intermittently, to allow me to get a nap. This time I have a shared firing with 4 constant helpers. So I can manage to cook pizzas for 10 residents for lunch.

Apart from a minor glitch at the start, the rain held off, and the oven heated up really well, seeing that it was soaking wet from the rain at the beginning, it did well. It’s been siting out in the open, all this time with just a shred of tattered blue plastic draped over it, like a refugee. It’s waiting for the promised roof, which has not as yet materialised. 

I made the dough yesterday and put it in the fridge overnight. I started by demonstrating to everyone the basics of constructing a pizza. A thin base, not too much bigger than the ‘peel’ so that it is easy to handle. A well floured surface, so it won’t stick. Not too much passata so it won’t go soggy, then cheese, just a bit of restraint is the best approach. Simple is usually best. 

My favourite is something vaguely influenced by the classic ‘Margarita’. I like a little passata sauce, then a hand full of basil leaves fresh from my garden spread over the sauce, a few little chopped tiny tomatoes and a sprinkle of cheese. Maybe an olive or two – optional?  The first pizza cooked in just 2 minutes, as the oven was quite hot. We all shared that one. It didn’t last long. It took less time to eat it than it took to cook it!

So for the next hour and a half, every one had a go at making their own version. We cooked some very delicious and good looking pizzas. So I’m now, not just a kiln firing mentor, but a creative pizza kitchen-hand as well. I couldn’t fire the kiln and make pizzas at the same time on my own. I‘m not a woman. I can only do one thing at a time. So I left Riyeon in charge of the kiln. Sooyeong and David have a car, so they were in charge of collecting all the equipment and ingredients from my studio and garden. YoungMi made a fresh salad from her garden, and it all came together nicely. Mr Choi the Residency manager and Mr Jung, the Museum Director both turned up. So that was good, a real gathering.

Cooking pizzas for 10 is a big deal that takes some concentration and coordination. It’s not a solo effort. It takes a village to raise a pizza!

 You can just see the pizza oven in the far background.

Poetry and Madness 10

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My kiln is out. It is unpacked and it started well, everything looked good from outside, but as I started to unpack the setting, one by one, the large jars came out with cracks, most very minor, others quite large and one jar completely collapsed. Interestingly, in the same spot in the kiln as the one that collapsed in the last firing. Only 2 of the large jars have survived completely intact.

Not what I was expecting, but what I was prepared for. There is definitely a show of work here, but it is a different show from the one I might have imagined. Some of the cracks are spectacular. When I saw this one, I said, “look, a crescent moon crack”, and Mr Jung the Director of the Museum, exclaimed that it was 2 moons! A moon jar with a full moon on the surface!

If I disregard the cracks, there are some really lovely pots here. Most of the smaller jars have survived intact, and with some astonishing ash developments on their surfaces. The most interesting thing to me is the purple/mauve/pink colour of the ash glaze development in this firing. This is redolent of the surfaces on some of the work of the Japanese National Treasure potter ‘Mitchio Furutani’. I’m very pleased with this association, as I’m a big fan of his work. I would have liked to have bought one of Furatani’s lesser pieces when I was studying in Japan, back in the early eighties, but he was too famous, and his prices, even back then, were somewhere between ‘effing’ and ‘eye-wateringly’ expensive. I did buy a small sake cup from his son, which was just plain ‘expensive’! Furutani, among many things, specialised in pink flashed ash glaze on his ‘Iga’ style pots. Even the inside of his anagama kiln was coated in a pink/mauve ash deposit. Very beautiful!

As I examine each of my pieces, I’m much happier with the overall result. In fact, it’s not too bad for a second firing of a new kiln with an unknown clay with a different wood. I always tell my students that it takes at least 6 firings for me to get to know a kiln well enough to get good results. Each kiln has a personality, and you have to get to know its strengths. That would mean a year spent here to do that. Out of the question! So I have to be satisfied with what I have here. And I am!

I also make a ‘note-to-self’ that it is a well known fact that trying to make large round jars in a small single chamber kiln is notoriously difficult. I have just proved the rule! Big jars are usually fired at the middle and back of anagamas, not in the front row. Or, they are fired in subsequent chambers of climbing kilns. Also, big-ware has a much better survival rate if made from grogged, or rough, open textured clay.  No body in their right mind would attempt to make big round jars from fine smooth porcelain clay and fire them in the front of a small, single chambered wood fired kiln. Yes! Muggins! That’s the madness part!

So I have broken all the rules. but managed to pull off some lovely, even very lovely surfaces on my jars. I took this picture above, outside Furutani’s studio, showing that even pots by the master, from the back of the anagama, and made from rough shigaraki clay, get cracked and broken. It’s par for the course.

These pieces below are quite lovely to my sense of aesthetics. I’d be happy to show these works anywhere. I’m particularly fond of the mauve/pink ash.

Of the largest jars these are very nice. The last one being tragically beautiful, and would have a place on my workshop verandah, if I were at home!

So there is poetry here. Nothing has met the hammer – yet! 

But it is not haiku, nor luckily, neither is it doggerel or iambic pentameter! My work has no meter, it doesn’t rhyme, or have an even flow of stanzas. I’m thinking somewhere along the rambling lines of Kerouac, or possibly the eco-sensitive thoughts from Snyder? Today It’s the madness I live with, the hill I climb. The pot I make. The kiln I fire. The result I accept. My kiln firing – the dharma burns. Elusive results, like looking for Rexroth’s daughter? “My life is like a plump ripe melon, so sweet, but such a mess!”

This newly minted show will now be about The Journey, The Hill, The Residency, The Experience. The highs and lows. The isolation and the camaraderie. The bad clay, the wet wood, the long nights, but most of all about the joy of almost accidentally creating something unexpectedly beautiful in a new way. Achieved by sticking my neck out and being prepared to take the fall. Although I’m very aware that 50 years of study doesn’t result in any accidents!

I take full responsibility for all my failures, and am fully willing to share the credit for any successes with my collaborators, who helped me get to here. That’s the essence of a shared residency. I’ve worked hard here and put in the effort. It’s a situation in this residency that is best suited to young emerging artists who don’t have a personal studio yet. They need to work somewhere like here. I don’t. My role has really been one of mentor to aspiring young wood firers, while exploring my own interest in Moon Jars. My jars are very different from the traditional ones that I visited in the Museums in Seoul on my first day here in Korea. Different but still very interesting and beautiful, or, at least I hope so. This is the poetry part! 

Purple poetry and mauve Moon Jars. Yes, there is alliteration in my poetry.

I don’t really belong here. I’m the out-layer. It was all laid out in the application form, “applicants should be under 40”. Being under 40 was such a long time ago for me. I can hardly remember being in my 30’s. However, even in my 30’s, I was already settled with a house, studio and kiln of my own. I was secure-ish, and on my way to being established. life was a lot different back then, we were still naive and filled with optimism. What Janine and I did wasn’t at all easy, but it was achievable. We made it difficult for ourselves, because of the choices that we made, to do everything by ourselves, sustainably and without borrowing any more money from corrupt banks. Refusing to take full-time jobs, to be part of The System! It isn’t like that here. No one thinks like that any more, if they ever did?

This whole exercise has been a great big experiment, tinged with failure, yes, sure. It was a difficult ask, But luckily elevated somewhat by my weird optimism. Where does it come from? The desire to make the difficult creative choices at every turn? Get knocked down and then get back up and do it again? It’s the hill I climb.

This art work will have to remain ‘unfinished’, as my time is almost up. Nothing is ever finished! Nothing is perfect and Nothing lasts!

I have metaphorically nailed my thesis to the pottery door and left my mark. I will return in October for the exhibition, and see what has transpired in my absence. In the mean time, there are a lot of pots to clean and grind. More wadding to make and the last of my jars to glaze and pack in the kiln.

I have just one more firing on Tuesday, then I leave. I have mentored one particular resident artist here, who I feel sure will go on to be a wood firer. I can  feel it. I sense her quiet enthusiasm and determination. She has stayed up through all the long hours and nights of each of the wood kiln firings. Carted and stacked the wood, volunteered to crawl inside the still-hot kiln to clean out the firebox ash. She is always taking notes and asking very thoughtful questions that show her thorough mental process. Impressive! She just might be the most successful, but intangible, result of my stay here?

Enthusiastic engagement, how can you show that?

phenomenological ecologist, or ecological phenomenologist?

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I am desperately trying to keep away from the kiln while it is cooling. I have recently been asked to give a lecture about my life’s work in ceramics to the students at Seoul University. The professor is interested in my unusual DIY, organic, self-reliant, ecological approach to ceramics. Apparently, it’s the road less travelled here, and I can see why. Having spoken to all of the recent and current residents here, plus staff members, it’s almost impossible to conceive of what Janine and I do. Almost everyone lives in high rise apartments. There is no ‘spare’ space to put a potters wheel or a hand-building table, never mind a pug mill or re-cycling bucket and plaster tub for drying. As for a kiln! ?

So I’m not too sure what I can offer these students, other than an exotic glimpse into an almost impossible to conceive foreign world. Will it be useful to them? Showing them something that they can probably never achieve? Maybe they wouldn’t even want to live like this? Perhaps I can inspire them to live as sustainably as possible, within their societal limits? I’ve been told that I’m a phenomenological ecologist. Wow! I can’t even spell that, never mind be it. It sounds difficult!

Apparently I’m someone who explores the meaning and significance of my lived experience without trying to explain it?

I looked it up, and am no more the wiser. I read that Martin Heidegger proposed that truths are contextually situated and dependent on the historical, cultural and social context in which they emerge. That seems fair enough to me. Why not? The only other thing I know about Martin Heidegger is that he was a boozy beggar who could think you under the table! That is according to Bruce from the University of Woolloomooloo (who was also in charge of the sheep dip). The Philosophers Song in Monty Python! if you have lived on another planet, and don’t know it. Try googling it. It’s very funny.

Am I a phenomenological ecologist, or ecological phenomenologist? And there was me thinking that I was just living an honest life with good intent, and minimal disruption to the natural rhythms of nature, using home grown and hand collected materials from my local environment, to make my creative living as gently as possible. I call it being a Potter and Post Modern Peasant!

I have in the past, described myself and what I’m interested in, as being a gardener, potter, artist, a conservationist, practicing minimal consumption. ie making everything that I can by myself using home grown, or found materials and recycled stuff. I try to live like this, quietly, and without being a nuisance or being obsessively annoying. 

For instance;

I built my own truck body, by myself, from recycled aluminium. It’s isn’t maybe the best truck body, but it is very strong and has proven durable over the past 22 years of use, and still going strong. I made it almost entirely from re-cycled aluminium off-cuts, that I had collected and stored for such a possibility. I think that it is an almost invisible triumph of creative re-cycling. No one thinks of a truck body as being sexy or even interesting, let alone being environmentally friendly. It all depends on its historical, cultural and social context. However, it exists and only Janine and I know its meaning and history. When I die, it will probably go to the wreckers, unsung!

I re-built our new pottery studio after the fire using steel rather than wood. A strange choice you might think for a conservationist? But as the last 3 workshops have burnt down in fires, which is a total waste of the world’s resources. I decided that steel, although energy intensive and polluting in its creation, will be longer lasting in the long run than wood and is also endlessly recyclable. In an effort to minimise my carbon foot print with this steel studio, I only used new steel in the frame, to comply with council and engineering regulations, and used all recycled steel roofing sheets to clad and line the building, taking a year to collect and sort all the steel. The excess that I had over after the building was completed, I gave to my friend Andy, so that he could build his wife’s studio, and so it goes around. All good outcomes. There is also an added benefit of using recycled iron. It can have a very beautiful patina of age about it. Something that the Japanese Zen Buddhists have words for, but which doesn’t translate easily into English. Words like ‘wabi sabi’.  ‘The beauty of imperfection’. or ‘the nostalgia of age’.

We also used the recycled bricks that we collected from demolishing the old Mittagong railway station, built in the 1880’s from hand made, local, sandstock bricks. We built our house from these and the left over bricks from that project were used to clad the West facing facade of the new pottery to make it even more fire resistant. It also had the effect of uniting the two buildings, the house and the pottery, aesthetically. That and the use of the big arched window in the facing facades.

I have made all my own kitchen chairs and tables from home grown trees from our land, and lined the new pottery studio room with timber boards that we grew and milled, on site. After seasoning for a year, Janine and I planed and sanded them smooth before making the lining boards and also all the cupboards and shelving in the gallery. These trees were burnt in the fire and would have been destroyed, if we hadn’t intervened and saved them for a new life as furniture and lining. It was an expensive exercise, but cheaper than buying plantation wood, which is environmentally destructive. So win win.

We spent some time, making and seasoning our own red hardwood floor boards for the house, as well as the windows, french doors. Also the ceramic tiles for the kitchen, laundry and bathroom, as well as all the roofing trusses. It took a few years, but cost very little and allowed us to have a mortgage free home at the end that was not just sustainably built, but aesthetically unique and very beautiful. 

One distinctive feature of our house is the big arch window in the kitchen. It would have cost an arm and a leg to have it custom made in the local window factory, but I made it myself over a few months for the cost of the wood and glass, still expensive to me, at the time, or so it seemed, until I met the window factory forewoman, who came to the pottery to buy some pots and enquired where the window was made. She was surprised that it was home made, and told me that it would have cost many thousands of dollars if she had made it. However, she hastily added that she wouldn’t have made such a good job of it, as to cut costs in the factory, she would have taken the fast track and routed the arch curve out of straight pieces of wood. Whereas I had steamed and bent each piece of the arch before glue-lamming it all together. The true craftsmanship way. That window is still working well after 40 years, and has recently just been given an up-grade when we installed double-glazed panes into the frame.

So in the end, a house like this would cost in the millions of dollars, but we did it on money saved from our part time job wages. ie, next to nothing, but with hundreds of hours of labour. I think that the house is the biggest artwork that we have created?

Phenomenological ecologist, or ecological phenomenologist? I don’t know! I’m far too busy being me and making a frugal living in a small, quiet, unimportant life, creating things that I think are both beautiful and meaningful, as well as growing my own food and creatively recycling.  What more is there?

Thinking about how I will present myself and what I do over a 2 hour lecture at Seoul University has kept me busy. I’m thinking  powerpoint with some add-libbed descriptions of my process? Even then, writing about all this stuff that I don’t really understand, that is to say that I haven’t planned my life, it has just happened in this way, but that is because of the very deliberate choices that I made at each turn and with each opportunity. Flexibly directing my life along this creative road less travelled. 

Anyway, It has successfully kept me away from the cooling kiln for another day. I did go up to the site, to cart and stack some dry pine from the wood store to the kiln site for the next firing. I made use of a break in the rain for a couple of hours, I’m glad that I did, as it is hammering down again now, and I needed the exercise.

So now, although I’m no wiser. Still just me. I am not at the kiln scratching at the door bricks to get an early peek. Tomorrow is make or brake day. Will there be any work worth showing? I’m hoping for poetry – as long as it isn’t doggerel! 

Please not doggerel. I’m hoping for something more akin to haiku. Deeply meaningful whilst also being elegant and restrained.

However, elegance and restraint are contextually situated and dependent on the historical, cultural and social context in which they emerge from the kiln?

Poetry and Madness 8.

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I have spent the last two days firing my kiln here in the Porcelain Residency. 30 hours of my life that was hopefully well spent? Starting at 4:00 am on Tuesday and finishing at 9:00 am on the following day – Wednesday.

I put a bit of time and effort preparing, splitting and stacking wood, so that everything would go as smoothly as possible. But, as always, the best laid plans…

One of the things that I have no control over is the weather. It rained heavily for a lot of the time. The monsoon has arrived! ‘Uji’ in Korean. Luckily, the kiln shed is well built and water proof, as far as it goes, but it’s an open, well ventilated shed. The kiln is situated on the edge of the building and the heavy rain can blow in sideways. There has been some discussion of adding a verandah to this side of the building. It will probably happen in due course, but I dare say that I won’t see it in my lifetime. It will have to be presented into next year’s forward estimates, be considered by the city governors. Proceed through the various stages of process, eventually approved for quotes to be sent out in 2028, then contractors selected, contracts developed and then reconsidered, re-drafted, re-estimated, re-quoted, new contractors selected. Approval granted for fiscal year 2030! 

Delays, holdups, bankruptcies, heritage listing investigations, archaeological contingencies. All this just for an awning!

You may laugh. But I was first asked to come here and build this little kiln 8 years ago. Later, I was even sent progress shots of the foundations being dug. But the catastrophic bush fires in 2019, then covid in ’20/’21, and various other events intervened and the kiln was eventually built in 2024.  Such is life.

Anyway. I’m here now, in the here and now! Good thing that I began this project in 2016! 

Like climbing ladders, it’s the sort of thing that it is not recommended that old, fat, balding, grey haired guys over 60 should be doing. They should know better and get it out of their system in their mid-life-crisis years! However, at 74 I’m still climbing ladders as well as building wood kilns in foreign climes and doing 30 hour wood firings, well past my use-by date. What went wrong?

I have a friend, who I admire enormously, who has only recently given up doing 100 hour wood firings in his mid 70’s, but he did have helpers!  

Janine and I usually fire more or less alone, with Janine’s assistance coming and going through the day. We have developed a firing schedule where I start the kiln off at 4:00 am and Janine comes down with some toast and coffee at 8 or 9. We fire through the day and into the evening, through into the night. I have found that I can do a 15 to 18 hour firing this way without missing a nights sleep. Working from early till late, and going to bed on the same day as I woke up, so that I don’t feel ‘wreaked’ the next day. With luck, I can see myself being able to continue potting and wood firing in this way for a long time.

Because these 14 to 18 hr firings are relatively short, compared to what some other well known potters do, there isn’t the kind of ash buildup with the glossy, runny ash glaze, that some people attribute to wood fired pots. So I have developed a range of clay bodies and glazes that look their best in these shorter, and more manageable wood firings. Ideally suited to domestic wares, with colour variation and flashing on the surface. Interestingly, even some of the pots from my friends 100 hour firings, the ones at the very back of the kiln, come out with surfaces not too dissimilar to my 15 hour pots. Only a very well educated eye can tell.  Having said all that, the pots at the front of the setting in my short firings do get a lot of ash on them, but that space in the kiln is relatively small in my kiln, so there are not too many of them in my repertoire.

This is a pot from the front of the setting that was in my last firing here of just 14 hrs. This is as much ash as I need to see and deal with in the cleaning of the foot and rim.

I tried 30 and 50 hour firings in my youth, but decided that the returns aesthetically for my kind of domestic pots weren’t worth the bodily wear and tear on me – even then! So this firing is a major effort for me. I can only do it here in this kiln with assistance from some of the other residents. I really need someone to keep me awake through the night. I was fortunate to have a two helpers to look after the kiln for a couple of hours between midnight and 2:00 am. Hours 20 to 22,  so that I could have a nap to get me through the night. Thank you!

Luckily, the truck load of oak wood turned up just in time. One arrived the day before and another during the firing. It is very fresh! to the point of still have birds sitting on its branches 🙂

I say luckily, because we ended up using about 2/3 of it. Along with some well seasoned old pine. Blending about 1 to 4 pine to oak. When I tried burning just the oak, it was too slow to burn well. It needed the very flammable pine to keep it burning fiercely. After 1150oC, wet wood isn’t a problem, in fact it is even better for reduced firings. 

The chemistry is too complex to deal with here, but in essence, Water dissociates to a hydrogen ion and an OH radical. These both eventually reform, back to water, along the way having cleaned up the atmosphere a little. The energy required to crack the water is such that the fire needs to be above 1100 degrees Centigrade to get a positive return. The chemical action still takes place below this temperature, down to about 800 C, but there is a negative energy return.

Using water vapour to create an energy rich and highly desirable hydrogen gas from carbon monoxide is called the water-gas shift. It takes energy to do the shift, but the return is equal to or greater than the input. from 134 btu per cu. ft.  of gas to  156 btu per cu. ft.  of gas produced under ideal conditions. Enough!   I don’t want to loose readers by boring you with too much reality. One person I spoke to was amazed. Having been told that wood needed to be seasoned and very well dried for up to 5 years before burning in a kiln. And that is true for some wood in some kilns, but it is clearly not universal.

So this truck load of wood was very freshly felled and full of sap, This made it slow to combust until we got it up to 1000oC. Which we did by using a bit of dry pine mixed in. No problem, because I had sorted, split and stacked enough dry pine – just in case – a couple of days before. I was very pleased that the air temperature dropped down with the rain over night and made the conditions more comfortable, although it was quite humid, it was also quite cool. As we only need to stoke the kiln every half hour. There is a lot of sitting around doing very little. I’ve heard it described as ‘Laid Back Wood Firing! in French as ‘Le gran feu au bois sans effort’. and Korean as ‘ Pyeon-anhan jangjagbul piugi’ – relaxed wood firing!

I spent the ‘dull’ time teaching my helpers some chemistry and physics – in disguise of course! I made it invisible and more palatable by dressing it up as anecdotes about growing a forest and my choice of fuel, stoking, identifying atmosphere, pitfalls of temperature measurement and glaze colour development. I don’t think that they noticed. Notes were taken, kiln logs recorded, references ‘googled’, images examined and techniques demonstrated. The time passed quicker and I stayed awake. Everyone wins.

The kiln at full fire in reduction. No one can tell!  I’m very pleased about that. Silent and clean.

We fired through the night with the rain until 10 am. Then amazingly, it cleared up for us, just in time to get back down to the residence for a well earned shower and some desperately needed sleep. 

Poetry and Madness 7

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I finished throwing all of my left over re-claimed trimmings into smaller jars, just to use up the clay. I forced dried them out in the sun and wind, thrown one day turned the next and into the kiln on the 4th day. This other batch of sericite is very forgiving!

I bisque fired all my jars last week and loaded them into the Museum’s truck for the slow drive up to the wood kiln area, a few hundred metres up the hill from the residency. I can walk there direct, cross country, a much shorter route, but the truck has to take the gentle road more traveled.

Everything arrived intact, with me sitting in the back cuddling the rear row, to stop them rolling out the back. I glazed them all in one day and then packed the kiln over 2 days. It was very nice to be there on my own, taking my time, thinking it through as I go. I stopped and unpacked parts of it twice to get it right, or at least better – hopefully?

I didn’t get everything in, but about 2/3 of the big jars and half of the smaller ones. I have booked the kiln for another firing for next Tuesday. I won’t have enough to fill the kiln, but about half. I will share the space with the other resident artists.

I bricked the door up in the evening and got it all sealed and slurried over ready to fire yesterday. Today I spent time splitting pine into some quite fine sticks. The size usually associated with side stoking. For the non-potters reading, that means split into very thin sticks about 50mm sq. I will need this small size of wood to start the fire gently, eventually building up to using larger pieces and then logs.

I went out early this morning to water my garden and do a bit of weeding, as it wasn’t raining. I picked my green leaves, chilli, tomato and red radish for my salad lunch. When I gazed down the road, I saw a truck parked in the village driveway with what looked like a load of oak firewood. I was hoping that it was for me, as I was promised it in time for tomorrow’s firing. Later on in the day it disappeared?  I was hoping that it was moved up to the kiln area and tipped off into the kiln shed. I had to walk up there this afternoon in the rain to check, and, Yes, it is all in there. So everything is ready for the 2nd firing tomorrow. I will have a couple of the other residents calling in on me to keep me awake through the graveyard shift.

I spent the middle of the day cooking 3 meals to pack away into plastic food containers for the firing, as it will go all day and over night, I’ll need food, as it’s my firing. I’m not at home now. So can’t just slip into the house to make a cuppa and make a sandwich.

I’ll need to be here with the kiln most, if not all of the time. No time to go back down to the studio to make a meal. I made chick peas in tomatoes sauce, brown rice with tuna, and stir-fried veggies with brown rice and tofu. I also have 2 bananas, an apple and an orange. That should see me through. People who drop in the watch the firing often bring stuff. last firing, Uhkwan dropped in with a box full of ice creams for us all to share. Most welcome on a hot afternoon in front of the kiln.

I’m always so surprised, when I cycle into town along the road through the valley. to see just how economical and thrifty the local farmers are here. No useful space is wasted. They go to the trouble of hand cultivating the small gap of soil along the curb and guttering, to squeeze in just a few more plants. This is all hand weeded, as there is no room for a cultivator in these narrow beds.

They all have bigger crops of rice and soy beans in the big paddocks and paddies, but can’t bear to see a good piece of dirt go un-cultivated. These are nearly all grandmas and grandpas doing all this work. The average age of the Korean farmer is almost 70 years old. As it is in Japan. That compares to 58 in Australia and the USA and 59 in the UK. Whereas it is 45 in China.

It seems that with the Korean economy doing well, all the kids want professions in the city? Not too many young couples are staying on the farm and even less are having children. The population is shrinking. They just aren’t that many children about. For instance, the school at the bottom of the hill that I cycle past on my way to the shops has only 10 students this year. I can’t see it staying open for much longer with those numbers?