Monthly Archives: December 2025

Preparing for the new Year

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Well, Xmas is over, we survived the shopping madness by staying home and escaped the last minute rush to purchase more food than anyone could possibly consume. Janine and I stayed well out of it. We watered the garden and picked fresh vegetables made salads and tofu stir-frys. A very nice quiet time in all. I had no intension of going into town to check out the Boxing Day sales. I fact, instead, we had a lovely, small, family meal with our son and daughter-in-law, and took it very quietly. We shared a very nice bottle of wine with lunch. I cooked a somewhat rich potato dauphinois incorporating our potato and fennel, plus a tub of sour cream and garden herbs, which turned out very well.

I simmered the herbs in a little bit of milk to draw out the flavours, then layered the finely sliced fennel and potatoes with sour cream and poured the strained milk over and through it all. I finished the dish with a camembert cheese placed on top to melt through the dish. As if the tub of sour cream wasn’t quite enough, and topped it off the some grated 36 month aged cheddar.  I was happy with it and no one complained.

On the subject of potatoes, we have had a visit from a new and unusual bug into the veggie garden. Some sort of elongated, grey, shield bug. They group in pairs around the tender top shoots and suck the living daylights out of the growing tips of the potato plants. I haven’t seen these little critters before, so I had to look them up. They turn out to be a South East Asian ‘sweet-potato’ bug. Also known to be found in the North of South America and the Southern parts of North America. How they got here I have no idea. I can only surmise that with global heating, they are able to colonise newly warming fresh territories? So hello and hopefully good bye!

I’m sure that the garden shop will have any number of toxic sprays for them. However, they are quite susceptible to being squashed by hand! No poisons required, it’s highly selective, and no toxic residue is left behind. This organic ‘natural’ treatment seems to be working. I have noticed quite a few lady bugs on the potato leaves at this time also. Possibly they ere eating the minuscule shied beetle eggs? That would be nice if there was a local predator that could breed up to counter the new pest? Could life be so simple?

Someone once said that every complex problem has at least a dozen simple solutions – and they are all wrong! There is nothing quite so effective, accurate and environmentally friendly as well trained fingers. Time consuming, but 100% effective.

We have ended the year by making clay to prepare ourselves for the coming year.  I even sat down and threw a pot straight away to test out the plasticity of this new mix. It was beautiful! It will be even better after a couple of months in the cool, dark, clay store to age a little.

As we are hosting a 4 day summer school in the coming week, I cleaned out the pottery and transformed it back from a sales room for the Xmas sale and back into a throwing room. I took the opportunity to really clean down the benches and wheel tops, then gave them a coat of tung oil to protect the wood for another year. All this wood was milled on-site here from trees that we grew ourselves. I want to honour this timber and look after it. It’s just one small, but integral part of our 50 year history/legacy of living and thriving here.

All the timber now looks rich and glorious! While I was in wood working mode, I made a pile of paddles and wooden ‘anvils’. To be used in the coming workshop for forming and securing the joints of large pots. I made everything from off-cuts and prunings of trees in the garden and orchards, including apple, pear, cedar, juniper, pine and banksia.

Making beautiful pottery tools from timber that you have grown yourself is a very rewarding activity. I suspect that this is a special privilege available only to older potters, as you need to plan for it at least 40 years in advance! The old saying comes to mind – When is the best time to plant a tree? Answer, 20 years ago! We have earned these beautiful tools in more ways than one.

Every morning I wake up, I am gifted another 24 hours to enjoy the sunshine, fresh air, the people round me, the garden and the chance to be engaged in creative activity I really value this opportunity, and strive to make the most of it. In contrast, every morning I don’t wake to find that I am gifted $$$. A lot of people who chase money all their life, find that they have no time. In some ways, I am fantastically wealthy. I have never chased money, instead I have time. Time to be engaged in my creative life. I really value this meaningful and fully engaged life.

We recently hosted a tool making weekend, and taught other potters this evocative and rewarding skill. Beautifully hand crafted tools that you have made yourself embody extra meaning into the work that you make, if for no other reason than just from the emotional energy that you generate from the enjoyment of the activity of the handling and making. However, there could be more to it. 

In the pacific islands, there is a potent energy that they call ‘mana’. Not the christian goodies (manna) that drop from heaven, but a highly potent spiritual energy that is embodied in special objects at the time of their making, by unique and powerful individuals, or bestowed into objects by force of will by that unique, potent and powerful individual. It may be an object like a club, or spear, but also in jewellery and other personal objects. Such objects are highly prized and valued. The ‘mana’ is embodied in the object, and once they are passed on, that special energy is perceived and valued by the subsequent owners. I can understand this numinous like feeling embodied in beautifully crafted objects. Perhaps they can pass on something of the spirit of the maker? I like to think so.

Have a safe, creative, fertile, prosperous and rewarding New Year!

Nothing is ever finished, nothing is ever perfect and nothing lasts.

Seasons Greetings

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Not being religious, I don’t wish people a Merry Christmas, most often I like to wish people a quiet, peaceful, none-commercial, family-oriented summer solstice holiday break – if you can get one!

Not everyone can get a day off on the 25th of December. Our son worked as a chef for 20 years. He was always at work cooking everybody else’s festive lunch and dinner, for them to have a time off with their family. So for those twenty-odd years, we never had a Christmas Day lunch together as a family. We always made up for it, by having a big family lunch the next day after the restaurant had closed for the long week between Xmas and New Year. 
However,  there was one big benefit, There was always some food left over in the kitchen that wouldn’t keep for the 10 day shut down over the new year break, so someone had to eat it. After he had spent so much time cooking it all. It made an easy Boxing Day lunch of luxurious leftovers. Over the years, we had prawns, oysters and even lobster added to our garden oriented veggie meal.

This year, our son purchased some new chickens for his wife for Xmas. So as to have them as a surprise for her on the day, he collected them during the week and brought them here to our house to keep in our chicken run with our girls until the big day. These chickens are bred for commercial use in big egg farms. By buying them for domestic use, we are rescuing them from a terrible life of confined servitude. 
Three of the new chickens are white like leghorns, and the other 3 are dark brown. The 3 white hens were the first to take the lead and suss out the run. One is quite talkative, clucking all the time. I call her ‘clucks’, One other is very ‘cluey’ and quickly discovered the water and feed bowls, then the first to venture out into the big orchard to scratch around. The third clung closely to her white sisters, forming a ‘clan’. Completely undaunted by their new surroundings, they took the lead in exploring this new situation. They have it all over the other hens – White Supremicists! 
I have named them the ‘clue’, ‘clucks’, ‘clan’!

It’s traditional at this time of year to send out cards with red and green images redolent of Northern Hemisphere holly. So I am adding a few red and green, organic, home grown, local images.
Have a quiet, peaceful, none-commercial, family-oriented, summer solstice holiday break!
Keep safe.

A Special Xmas Sale

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Janine and I will be open on Sunday the 14th of December for a A Special Xmas Sale!

Sunday 14th December. 9am – 5pm.

Steve Harrison and Janine King’s Pottery Studio, 

5 Railway Pde, Balmoral Village, 2571. 

hotnsticky@ozemail.com.au.  blog; tonightmyfingerssmellofgarlic.com

Half Price, Xmas Sale.

We are 1 1/2 hour drive south of Sydney. Please join us for our 1/2 price, Xmas sale, where everything in the gallery will be sold at 50% off! One day only. Sunday 14th December.

No tricks or gimmicks. Everything will be for sale at half of the usual marked price.

This is a definite once-off event.

We pride our selves on making highly sustainable ceramics, fired using PV sunshine or our own home grown timber. All our clay bodies and glazes are home made, on-site. We also offer tours of our workshop.

Please consider calling in and doing some discount priced Xmas Shopping.

We have never done this kind of thing before. It’s all new to us. Please come and take advantage of us!

We will also have a few of our friends with us;

Karen, who will be displaying her hand made jewellery. Roxanne, who will be showing some of her impressionistic paintings of my pots, and our son Geordie, who will be selling his hand made fruit cordials. Made from the organically grown fruit in our orchard and other fruit from local orchards.

Tours of the gardens and orchards will be available.

The Pottery studio and gardens.

Our son Geordie, making some of his ‘adult’ cordials.

Karen’s jewellery display.

Roxanne’s beautiful and expressionistic paintings of pots.

First Tomato of the Season

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We have picked the first red tomato of the summer, well before Xmas. Always an achievement, but not so special these recent years, as with accelerating global heating, we are so much hotter and everything in the garden is ripening earlier.

When we moved here to the highlands in 1976, we couldn’t get a ripe berry off our newly planted berry canes until January. These days the berry crop is all over and gone well before Xmas.

We are harvesting peaches, apricots, the last of the late sour cherries, as well as strawberries and blueberries. We don’t make any pots over December and January, as we are full time involved in managing the fruit from the orchards and the summer flush of vegetables.

The zucchinis are going mad, so we are having a few meals of stuffed zucchini flowers. It’s a lovely summer time light meal. It achieves 2 important outcomes, by picking the flowers off the plant with the nascent fruit attached behind, it makes a colourful and delicious meal, but it also takes the fruit off so early that they don’t get a chance to explode into marrows if you just glance away for a moment or loose concentration, zucchinis fill out so very fast!  Managing zucchinis means defusing them every morning early before they expand like The Big Bang!

The heat also means fruit fly problems, we get in early in October/November with ‘DAK’ pots, male fruit fly lures, and protein lures for the female flys. I also spray a ‘spinetoram’ soil bacteria and dipel bacteria for the codling moths. I also place codling moth lures in half a dozen of the various trees that are susceptible to codling moth, like apples, pears and quinces. Everything we do is approved for organic gardening. Still, with all this effort, we still get fruit fly strike. It’s important to pick the fruit early and cook it to preserve it either in the freezer or in ‘Vacola’ vacuum jars, and stored for later in the year.

Last weekend I ran a couple of pottery ’tool-making’ workshops. I take small groups of 5 or 6 potters through the steps in making their own tools specific to their particular needs and preferences. There are at least a dozen specific tools that anyone could choose to make but to be realistic, a novice tool maker can only realistically achieve 3 or 4 really nice and well crafted tools in a day, so you have to chose what is most appealing and useful ti you. I don’t expect everyone to finish every tool on the day, but if all the roughing out is done and only the fine finishing is left to do. It’s best to take it home and do all that time consuming fine sanding and oiling at a later time. Best to make use of my skills and my workshop equipment to get as much done here as is realistically achievable in the time.

Making your own tools gives you 2 important outcomes, firstly the tool will be exactly what you want and need, unlike some of the rubbish that is sold in the ‘basic’ pottery tool set sold in the cheap shops. The only good item in that plastic bag is the sponge! the rest all need work. The best thing to do with badly designed tools is to cut them up or down to make them more appropriate. Don’t be afraid, just cut it, grind it, file it or whatever until it does the job that you want. If you can’t make it work for you, just put it away and make a good one from scratch. 

This is the 2nd important outcome. It gives you the skills and insight to design and make the exact tool for you for that particular job. If it doesn’t work, then you know how to re-shape it until it does work how you want. Just because you bought it – possibly at great expense – from a reputable craft shop, doesn’t mean that it will be the best shape for you. If it doesn’t work, don’t hesitate. Don’t waste time struggling with it. Take the initiative, cut it up or grind some off it, or possibly just put it in the ‘Down-To-Experience-Bucket’ and make a proper one. 

There is also a 3rd benefit. Making your own tools can be virtually free by recycling scrap material. There is a huge sense of satisfaction in sitting back and admiring a beautifully crafted tool that you made yourself from a branch off a fruit tree growing in your garden. Home grown organic tools. AND, so rewarding and satisfying. Making your own things feeds your soul. Re-use, re-purpose, re-cycle.

I made a stir fry of garden veggies and tofu for dinner to feed my soul and my belly.

Nothing is perfect, nothing is ever finished and nothing lasts.

The Last Days of Spring

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It’s the last days of spring, and I have been very busy doing all sorts of little jobs that have been waiting for me to find some ‘spare’ time. We were so flat out busy working in the pottery leading up to the open Studios weekends. Now it’s time for other things.

Although it’s still spring, it seems like summer has been with us here in Balmoral Village for the past 6 weeks and more. The lush green spring growth is long gone. It’s been hot and dry, interspersed with cold, blustery, windy days. The net effect has been to dry everything out. The paddocks and lawn around the house have browned off. The soil in the vegetable garden has dried out to the point of shrinking, and starting to crack open in the places where we are not watering the nascent, emerging seedlings, destined to become our summer food source. We keep the soil moist around the seedlings and let the other areas stay dry – until I need that spot to plant more vegetables.

We have spent years nurturing the local soil here. Improving it with multiple applications of compost and manure, interspersed with additions of lime and dolomite. Over the decades, the depth of the fertile, friable topsoil has increased to over 300 mm.possibly more in places. I never seem to hit the hard iron stone and sandy loam layer anymore. The worms take the organic matter down deep and mix it well. I just keep adding compost to the top as a fertilising mulch. 

It was a real shock and learning experience to discover how effective worms are at disseminating organic matter down through soil to amazing depths, given time and repeated applications of organic matter/compost. After the bad fires here in 2019, our orchard trees got very badly burnt, so I decided to move the orchard up closer to the street and to build the new pottery on the old orchard site. When we started to dig out the stumps of the 45 year old fruit trees, I was amazed that the rick chocolate brown top soil when down half a metre or more. When I planted those trees in 1976, the holes I dug for each tree were dug through hard yellow stoney loam. What a change in the soil profile over those years. Thank you worms.

The zucchinis are starting to produce well now. They come on quite fast from seedlings to fruiting in a few weeks in this warm weather. I have been picking them small with the flower still on and stuffing the flowers with cottage cheese and herbs for a light fun dinner.

We also have plenty of silver beet/chard at the moment, although it is starting to bolt with the longer days. I have planted more seeds for a follow-on crop. I have been making spanakopita-like spinach and cheese triangles, or spanapotterka as I like to call them, or sometimes whole pies with a similar filling. It’s a great way to use up our excess of leafy greens, as they bolt away in the heat, and maximise our return from them before they are all gone. but it does need the ricotta, fetta, blue cheese and herbs mix to make it special. Plus a light touch of chilli.

I have also been making a few fruit tarts as well. Something for a more relaxed and comforting morning tea. Since the Open Studio sales are over and the 50% off Xmas sale hasn’t happened yet. Not until the 14th of December. The pottery is all cleaned out and set up for sales, I don’t want to mess it all up making more pots just now, as we still have plenty of stock. So I have time in the garden and kitchen catch up and do a lot of things that I like to do, but haven’t had the time to fit in, until now. 

We have picked the last of the artichokes and cauliflowers. I made a vegetable pasta with the artichoke hearts and as the cauliflower was so far gone. I mashed it up and used it as vegetable filling to bulk out the sauce with last summer’s tomato passata.

This week we picked the last of the cherries and the first of the apricots.

I like working in the garden, especially in the warmth of the season, before it gets too hot. Everything responds so well and so fast at this time of year. There is always some fragrance in the air and birdsong on the wind, often fighting over the last of the high fruit in the mulberry tree or some other treasured and favoured food source. They squabble and chatter and squark and carry on, endless entertainment.

While in the garden, I noticed that one of the ancient wooden barrels that I bought 3rd, or even 4th hand, some 30 years ago, have finally rotted away to the point of collapsing. The staves have rotted away from the inside with the constant wetting and drying as we water the blueberries that we are growing in them.

I hate to see waste, so I made one of the rotted staves into a textured pottery tool. A paddle for creating texture while changing the shape of a larger pot. I’m teaching a weekend workshop of tool making next weekend, so this can be one of the projects. i have lots of these old textured staves now. I had to shape and add and new wooden baton, to reinforced and strengthen the handle. A rewarding project that avoids waste and recycles some old timber into something useful and precious. I love the natural, organic texture of the old weathered wood.

Once that was done I set to and cut, folded and rolled a new galvanised steel sheet ring to slide over the old soil base to keep the bush alive. I slipped the ring up and over the bush, down around the soil base. I made the new ring to be just 50mm larger in diameter to make the job easy. It fitted perfectly! I filled the small gap around the edge with some light soil and compost mix, eventually watering it all in to settle it down. It cost me about $30 to make this new steel pot, and it was quick and easy, as I didn’t need to move the plant and all its soil. A new 1/2 wine barrel would cost a couple of hundred dollars these days. So out of our budget range. $30 seems cheap to me for a 750mm dia garden pot, 400 mm high.

This new steel pot isn’t as beautiful, rustic and weathered as the old wooden barrels. The wood has a certain ‘natural’ beauty that I love, but I ask myself. “Are they 6 times better?” Possibly? But then I think of trying to lift the 100kgs of soil and root ball up and into a new wooden pot. I couldn’t do it anymore. So I’m playing it safe. I’m happy with the new pot.

Of course work in the pottery is never completely over. We have a summer school and other throwing weekend workshops booked in for the new year, so It’s time to make more clay body to get it all laid down and ageing, ready for when it’s needed in the new year. Our pottery workshop is laid out in such a way that the creative side is quite seperate from the more dusty, noisey, messy side of the business where we crush and grind all our glaze materials and make our clay bodies.

Janine and I have processed over a tonne of clay this year through our equipment. Each batch that we make is unique. As we do everything ourselves, we can make each batch of clay slightly different in order to closely match the type of projects that we are planning to make. This latest batch is slightly coarser in texture to facilitate making larger forms. The added grit helps the clay to stand up better in larger forms. We also make fine stoneware as well as porcelain.

After all the clay is processed, pugged twice and then bagged and put to bed, everything is scrubbed down and the floor is mopped. 

I like to keep the workshop as dust free as is possible. After a change of water and a 2nd mopping, the big roller doors at each end of the workshop are opened up and the breeze flows through and drys the floor. 

We are good now for the next 3 months. We are very lucky to have such good equipment that allows us to make large amounts of clay like this in a couple of days. All this gear is very old and has had a difficult history. But I manage to keep it all going, maintaining it as best as I can, cobbling together disparate parts and spares from here and there and making up special bits where they aren’t available any more. Its a challenge, and rewarding when it all works.

Nothing is even finished, nothing is ever perfect,  and nothing lasts.