Category Archives: In the garden

January is a busy month

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Janine and I have been kept very busy dealing with all the summer produce from the garden and orchards. Nothing new there. We’ve been doing it for almost 50 years. But this last few years/summers, have been hot and wet, so everything has grown it’s head off. It’s a lot to keep up with. Especially as we age and find it harder to drum up the energy. The intention and enthusiasm is still strong, so we need to find ways of working smarter.

I cooked up a few early hard pears from the orchard in some red wine with a spoon full of sugar and a fragment of cinnamon bark, then laid them into an almond flan. Pretty yummy for morning tea. This is one of the best reason why we garden! So that we can eat amazing, wholesome, natural, un-sprayed fruit flans.

We had the organic gardening group here last weekend to help is with several gardening jobs around the property.

I spent a few hours picking citrus stink bugs off the citrus trees with the assistance of our friend Helen from the group We half filled a bucket with the little buggers.

 A bucket half full of stink bugs in a solution of detergent and bleach.

There are 16 trees in the citrus grove, so it took a while. I also pruned off a lot of the taller branches from the bigger trees, to keep them within standing reach. I’m too old to climb ladders now – unless I really need to.

I picked all the prunes of the d’Agen tree and filled a 1/3 of a bucket. I cut them in half and semi-dried them in the oven. It took a couple of sessions. I made a cottage cheese and prune tart with some of them and bottled the rest in brandy for a similar use later in the year.

While climbing through the spiky branches of some of the citrus trees, looking for bugs and sniping off tall shoots. I managed to tear my ancient gardening straw hat and hanky combo to shreds. This hat and even older hanky (which was bright fire-engine red in its youth) was my ‘legionnaires’ head and neck shade when working outside The straw hat was 2nd hand about 7 yeas ago, so has earned its keep. I decided that it was past repair now, having seen so many summers of use, and it was 2nd hand to begin with, so I composted it!

I splurged and bought a brand new ‘ear-muffler-compatible’ work hat and added another one of my very old hankies as a neck shade. I recycled our son Geordie’s old nappy safety pins off the old hat. Re-purpose, re-use, and re-cycle. In fact, something old, something new, something repurposed, something blue. A true marriage of convenience. Those nappy pins have served us well, as our son is 40 years old now! If I keep them long enough, they can work just as hard on their last job, keeping my incontinence nappies in place in another 10 or 15 years when I become senile?

Our visiting organic gardener friends did some weeding and pruning in the veggie garden, and a few of them harvested all the fallen hazelnuts from under the trees so that we can get in there and mow the long grass. They also pruned off all the vigorous extraneous shoots from their bases. Hazels want to become dense hedges. It’s their nature. Up until the fire in 2019, we had cut them all back to just one main leading shoot and stem or trunk. But after the fire, they were burnt to ground level, so had to regrow from scratch. We were too busy rebuilding to worry about pruning the hazels. I was just glad to see them regrow. When I get the time??? – if ever, I’ll get stuck in there and cut them back to just one leader.

The petrol powered, ride-on mower, has broken two drive belts in two weeks. These modern belts seem to last only 8 to 9 years these days. It took several days to get them ordered in and fitted on each occasion, so the grass had grown very high and lush in its absence. 

We have just completed a further step in our drive to go completely solar electric. I bought an electric ride-on mower. I have only had it for one day so far, and it did some pretty heavy mowing through dense grass. I got 1 hr, 20 mins of mowing out of the battery, ( that’s enough on a hot day) and almost completed all the ‘tame’ flat lawn around the house. I’ll report back in a month or so and give a follow-up on its performance. We now have a solar electric ride-on, push mower, strimmer, and chainsaw.

I haven’t given any up-date on our plug-in electric hybrid car recently. Nothing to report. It has just had its 5th year service, and has exceeded our expectations. It works perfectly. It does everything that we need and ask of it. We occasionally have to put some petrol in the fuel tank. About $20 to $30 every quarter, as it is a plug-in hybrid. But for the most part, we drive 90/95% of the time on our own solar roof top electricity. It was a perfect choice for us. I’m so glad that we did it when we did. This model is no longer available. They are all fully electric now and cost twice as much! Our early adoption of solar electric driving has proved to be a good decision.

We have been having 30oC days recently, so in the heat of the day, when it is too hot to be outside in the garden.  I spend a few hours in the pottery, continuing with the sgraffito work that we started, inspired by Warren Hogden a couple of months ago. All the early work on tiles and square plates made at Warren and Janine’s weekend workshop, were all fired at cone 6, 1200 oC.

All the work that I have been making since then is all sericite porcelain, so I’m hoping that there will be a nice graphic interface with the light shining through the translucent porcelain body from the inside, creating a lovely glow, and vice versa.

I’m really enjoying it. It’s a lot of fun, and such a change for me.

Who’d have thought, ethical shopping was so difficult and gardening was so dangerous?

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I missed most of the free-for-all shit-fight that is Xmas shopping this year. 

The week before Xmas, Wednesday or Thursday  Janine and I were pruning some extravagant growth from the shiraz vines, to make it easier to weed the garden beds. Nothing happened!
3 days later, on Sunday morning, I woke with tightness across my chest, head ache and achy bones. We had been to the Village Xmas party the night before, so I thought ‘COVID’!

Rat test all clear, next day worse, 2nd RAT test, all clear again. Next day no better, so went into town to get a PCR test, as RAT tests aren’t all that reliable. The local duty doc says “probably flu!” The next day, PCR returns all clear, for Covid, RSV and Flu. So it’s something else? About this time the back of my arm began to ache, so I show’d Janine, and she said Ouch! That looks terrible. I’d been out driving and noticed that the sun on my driving arm made it hurt.


So then I’m thinking that it’s all about some sort of chemical burn from an unknown toxin of animal or vegetable origin? (I eliminated mineral.) First thoughts were venom, but spiders, scorpions, snakes all leave puncture marks and the initial strike is painful. I felt nothing.

So, my next thoughts were plant sap. I know that the thick white sap from figs and some weeds, like dandelion can cause skin burns, but these grape vine tendrils were 1.2  metres up off the ground, away from all weeds. 

The scratch pattern suggests scraping across something.
At first I was at a loss to think of ‘what’ and ‘how’, but pretty sure that it was some sort of contact dermatitis from a toxic plant sap?I’ve been pruning grape vines for 40 years and never experienced anything like this before.
Now 2 weeks on its settled down and is no longer so red and angry looking, and the clear pustules have gone. My GP comes back to work on the 2nd, so I have an appointment with him then. But it’s left me living with the symptoms of flu or COVID, even though it isn’t that. I have achy joints, electric blue razor sharp headache, and feeling pretty tired most of the time.

Of course, I googled it and the best match I could find was ‘Rhus tox tree’, but we don’t have one of those in our place. 

However, I think that I’ve finally got it sorted out.

As I read on, I discovered that some of our edible garden vegetables are capable of irritating skin and causing ‘phytophotodermatitis’. It’s a special combination of first getting in contact with the offending sap, then getting strong sun exposure after that. If the plants have any ‘furocoumarins’ then the skin becomes very sensitive to sunburn. Hence phyto-photo-dermatitis. Once burnt, there is no treatment, you just have to sit it out – in the shade!

The most common garden plants that contain furocoumarins are the ‘Apiaceae’ family represented by parsley, celery and parsnip. Who’d have thought? The other family is ‘Rutaceae’, containing rue and citrus plants. In fact, one of the names for this phytophotodermatitis is ‘Margarita burn’, from sucking on limes in the hot sun! I kid you not! Some people can get burnt from the lime juice on their skin in full sun.


Who could have imagined that my lovely vegetable garden, normally such a safe place of creativity and enjoyment, would turn out to be so toxic to me?
So it finally all fell into place. I was pruning the side of the vines alongside the veggie garden beds. Janine worked on the other, more open, north side. I got a few scratches on my arm from the short stubs of the pruned vines, just enough to rough up the skin a bit, but no pain. No reason to take any notice. I carried out the prunings up the row, then on the return trip down the row, in the opposite direction, to cut more, I had to walk past the seeding heads of a bed of parsnips and parsley, exactly at the same height as my shoulder and its receptive skin. No reason to take any notice. Apparently there is a wild parsnip that is known to be very toxic, but even domestic parsnips still carry some furocoumarins.

The perfect storm comes about when; It’s hot and I work in a singlet, arms and shoulders exposed, I get a few light scratches from dead vine stubs  Nothing worthy of noticing. Brush against garden parsnip flowering heads. No reaction then either. BUT!

Wait 2 days, then and go out driving in bright sunshine, in the middle of the day, exposing my right side driving arm to full sun. That is when my arm started to hurt for no apparent reason. None of the critical events were obviously linked, so few clues to go on. But now that I have educated my self on this issue, 

I’ll be wearing long sleeves when working near parsley, parsnips and celery in the future.

Having spent a week in bed, with the symptoms of what I first imagined were the same as covid, but with sun burn on one arm, it’s been a very quiet one for me. The big solstice day fell just at the end of the week, so I was able to take part in our beautiful family Xmas lunch of baked garden vegetables in a honey soy dressing, with a garden/orchard salad of red plums with cucumber, capsicum, tomato, red onion and parsley.  All really delicious, cooked on sunshine and no animals were hurt in this meal.

We’re trying hard to keep it all simple, but somehow, Xmas has morphed into a time of extravagant excess for so many. Loads of junk changes hands, some of it doesn’t even last the day and is destined to go straight to landfill. We don’t want to add to the miss-treatment/torture of caged animals, nor wrap/package things needlessly. I sound like a real killjoy, but I’m not. I want to give time and love and caring conversation instead of ‘things’. Stuff doesn’t really fill any emotional gap in any stocking. I’m not being mean spirited either. I give the equivalent amount of money to a charity instead. I just want to do as little damage to the earth as is possible while still living a ‘normal’ 1st world life style, although mine is a strange, green influenced, non-consumerist, carbon constrained, hybrid 1st world life style.

I’m sure we’ve all been at the supermarket and thought, well, I could just pop these last few things in the basket and be out of here. But I don’t want to buy my mushroom or meat in a shrink-wrapped plastic packet. It’s unnecessary, wasteful and environmentally damaging. The only option then is to to check out, go to the other shop in town and buy the meat un-packaged from the butcher, and the mushrooms un-packaged in a loose fill paper bag from the grocer. It’s easy enough to do, but takes loads of energy and is quite time consuming. It also means driving further and finding a parking space 3 times! If I were driving on petrol, it would be a waste of fuel. 

I am no saint. I often fail my own test. but when I am on my own, feeling OK and on top of things, I find myself doing the rounds of 3 supermarkets, the butcher and the green grocer.  I go with a list for each one. I don’t look left or right. If I can’t find the item or anyone to ask, I leave without it. They loose. I don’t really need all that much anyway. Most of what I buy is discretional/peripheral. However I do like to make a rendezvous with the fish truck that comes up from the coast each week. That is our main source of protein. Most of the rest of our food comes from our garden.

It’s not unusual for me to go to only 2 isles in a big supermarket. I make a ‘Bee-line’. Go for what I came for. I refuse to be distracted. I leave. I have no respect for the price gouging, profit-at-all-costs, main-street-wrecking, rip-off tactics of the big 2 supermarkets. I only go there for one or two products that I can’t find anywhere else. I’d be happy not to go there at all. However, I’m only human and essentially lazy, just like most people. I really have to push myself to shop as little and as ethically as possible. It’s just that I was brought up to think ‘green’ about all my life choices. Environmentalism is very deeply embedded in my psyche. I can’t help myself.

Trying to shop ethically is hard, time-consuming and ultimately very unrewarding. because no matter what you buy, there is that feeling that I could have done better, or, maybe I shouldn’t have bought it at all.

Life is strange, there are no instructions, no right answers (left answers may be less damaging?) and life is a constant source of learning by failure and experience! I’m doing the most that I can with the least that I have. It’s the journey. Who’d have thought that shopping was hard and gardening was dangerous!

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


Summer fruit harvest with pork and beans.

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December brings on the summer and the stone fruit harvest. We have all of the newly planted, now 4 years old. stone fruit trees in the new post fire orchard coming into fruit. We chose to plant all dwarf rootstock, low chill, hot weather tolerant, varieties. They are doing really well and everyone of them has fruit on them this year. Some of them set fruit from year one, but as this isn’t good for the health of the tree, I picked all the fruit off, bar one piece, just get a taste of what was to come. Fruit trees do better if they are left to grow on for a few years and put all their energies into developing a sound, strong branch structure and deep root system. As their first 3 years were all very wet here with the la nina event coinciding with their planting, They grew very well indeed and we hardly had to water them very often.

So now we have a surfeit of peaches and nectarines, on these pretty little bundles of red and green. All the fruit needs to be eaten now or very soon, so we have fruit salad for breakfast. 

BBQ’d peaches and or nectarines with dinner, and stewed fruit for desert. There is always a pressing problem with the fruit fly. I was a bit slow in getting all the fruit fly trap and lures re-charged with refreshed baits this year, so there is a bit of fly in the fruit. We cut this out and cook it up to kill the wrigglers. The rest of the otherwise undamaged fruit is stewed for breakfast or desert. 

This old fly trap has about 100 dead male fruit flies in the bottom from the early spring flourishing. I empty them out and replace the old bleached white bait with a new bright pink one. We have about 14 of these traps of various ages. I bought a few new ones each year, as the orchard grew. now I just buy refills for the bait.

You can tell their ages by the bleached out colour of their lids.

We picked the very last of the broad beans. I thought that I had picked them all last week, but I only had a boy-look. Janine went back through the crop and found another meal for us. I decided to cook that very old favourite of pork and beans. So called favourite of the cowboys on the trail in the old west. I first became aware of this combination watching old black and white western cow boy movies as a kid. I had no idea what it all meant, but it did cross my mind briefly – very briefly. Why were they eating pig when they were herding cattle?

Why weren’t they herding pigs if that is what they wanted to eat? Fortunately, my nascent and emerging tiny brain managed to accept and cope with this difficult dilemma, and moved on. 

Now fast forward to my early interest in cooking and coming across the wonderful Italian recipe of chorizo, beans and tomatoes, obviously with extra chilli and garlic, it goes without saying. It’s become one of our springtime/hungry gap favourites. The beans are usually all dried from last summer, as is the bottle of reduced tomato sugo or passata. As we don’t have our own pig, just chickens. I use what we have in the fridge. At this time, we only have some bacon, so that is what I use. With the shops being a good 50 km round trip away, we don’t drive there frivolously. So bacon it is.

Home grown beans, home grown sweet basil, home grown garlic and home made passata from home grown tomatoes. WARNING! A pig was harmed in the making of this meal.

Desert is fresh picked cling stone yellow fleshed peaches soused with a dash of amoretto half an hour before. Perfection!

These days I’m up in the early mornings from 5.30 and work outside until the sun gets too hot, possibly around 9.00am. Sometimes I am out in the garden working, or more recently. I have been updating our fire fighting capacity with extra sprinklers on the walls of the pottery, barn and big work shed. I have installed the ‘spare’ fire fighting pump that  I used to transfer water from dam to dam.

It is now more or less permanently in place to protect the pottery and barn with a high pressure water sprinkler system. This system used to be powered by an electric pump, I found out at my expense that electric pumps are useless in an emergency, even though I have solar power and a battery, when the fire came and burnt the pottery, it shorted out the power to the barn and only then did it catch fire.

So now everything is dual powered. We have electric pumps for hand watering the garden beds and running the roof cooling sprinkler on top of the roof. But for fighting is completely petrol driven and independent. Because you cant let petrol engines sit idle. They need to be started and run regularly. I have every thing in a dual system now, so that I can start up the fire pump when we are both want to water the garden and orchard trees at the same time. The fire pump handle that duel drain on its reserves of power with no problem, whereas the one horsepower electric pump struggles.

Inspired by all the talk of the Roselle spaghetti junction new motorway tunnel. I installed my own water fed spaghetti junction.

Situated directly behind, and close coupled to, the two 25,000 litre water tanks, it should be safe from fire there? Only time will tell. If you look hard at the image of the pottery shed, you will see the water misting out of the wall sprinklers along the verandah and up on the roof.

I’ve been spending the hottest part of the day inside working on the ongoing sgraffito project. I’ve finally run out of pre-slipped, press moulded dished and tiles. I’ll have to get on the wheel again soon and make more shapes to decorate.

Inspiration keeps on blossoming

And then the rains came.

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We have been going through a very dry time recently, with the onset of the summer heat and reports confirming that we are entering another el-nino period.

All a bit glum really, but then the rains finally came. We had about 150mm. that’s about 6 inches in the old money. I had recently spent a few days pumping water from one almost empty dam up to another, slowly accumulating what was left of our water in the 4 dams, all eventually up to the one small dam near the house, where we have both a high pressure, petrol driven, fire fighting pump, and a small electric pump that is mostly used for watering the garden.

I managed to get that little dam about 1/4 to 1/3rd full. not a bad effort. That would have been just enough to see us through the first half of summer.

Before the rains.

After the rain.

But now, since the down pour, we have 4 dams all about 3/4 full. The little house dam that started from 1/3rd full, over flowed down into the next dam in the series. A lot of that water I pushed up hill 2 weeks ago flowed back. A waste of a couple of gallons of petrol. I still buy petrol for the pumps, the chain saws, the mowers and diesel for the tractor. So we are not fully weaned off the dirty oil economy. I worked out recently that I spend a little bit more money on the fuel for the mowers and chain saws, than I do putting petrol in our Plug-in hybrid car, simply because we make sure that we keep the car fully charged off our solar panels, so we rarely ever need to put petrol in it. About $30 every 3 months, where as I spend about $100 twice a year filling up the fuel drums for the garden appliances.

We have recently bought a solar charged electric push mower, plus a whipper-snipper thingy, and a solar charged electric chain saw. So I expect that my visits to the petrol station will decrease accordingly. I still need diesel for the tractor and petrol for the ride on mower.

Since the weekend workshops of the last two weekends, Janine and I have spent a good part of each day during the week in the pottery consolidating our sgraffito skills and developing a few new designs, to include in our next batch of work. I would have liked to spend more time in the pottery, being creative and self absorbed. Once you start to draw and decorate the surface, the time just flashes past and it gets late so early. We  have to stop to do the watering. There will be more time tomorrow to get a bit more done. There is always enough time for everything. We just have to learn to allocate out time and and as we age to allocate our limited energy. 

There is so much to do around the garden and orchards. We have had to start watering by hand again since the rains stopped and the temperature has been going up – just touching on 40 degrees today. Even hotter in the west. Hand watering all the gardens and orchard trees. It takes us both over an hour to do a quick once-over, just to keep everything alive. It takes a lot longer to give specific beds a really good soak while we are at it.

We could probably buy vegetables much cheaper from one of the rip-off, price gouging supermarkets. But they wouldn’t so clean, fresh, healthy, organic and immediately delivered straight from the garden and onto the plate. There is something so very, even intensely, powerful in growing your own food. Not just the self reliance of it, but the intimate nature of the activity. It grounds me here in this place. I’m intimately here and now on this ground. This has become my little all-encompassing environment. My statement of belonging. I’ve sculptured this place into being as what is is now. It’s peaceful, abundant, pretty, and very functional as a home art space and garden.

We are just coming to the end of ‘the hungry gap’. That time of the year when most of the winter food in the garden is coming to an end, but the new spring planted summer crops haven’t started producing yet. We have been eating the last of our carrots, beetroots and cabbages, and have just picked the last of the broad beans along with the first of the new season zucchinis. Tomatoes have set on the bushes, but are still very green. It is always a challenge to get one ripe red tomato before Xmas. 

maybe not this year, due to our being away and not getting that head start early on at the end of winter, or the first weeks of spring.

One very nice treat for this time of the year is the summer fruit crop. We are harvesting strawberries, blue berries, peaches, nectarines and plums. That equals fruit salad for breakfast for the next month.

I love the summer garden, but I don’t like the 40 degree days, or the potential for bush fires that are always in the realm of possibility when the wind picks up from the west.

Everything is relative

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We are having a short break from the pottery studio for a week to work around the garden, before the next few weeks of weekend workshops. It’s the last week of spring and we are only now getting the time and energy to plant out the summer garden. It will be a smaller garden this summer, as we are forecast to be heading into a long dry ‘el nino’ period. The previous one lasted some years and culminated in a severe drought with bush fires.

We spent the last summer of el nino drought watering our vegetables and garden plants from our rain water tanks, as all the dams had dried up. Luckily for us, we had invested in two huge storage tanks 20 years ago, when I was working and had the money to invest in our future water security. People mocked us, but we have never had to buy water in our life. We are attempting to be self reliant in as much as we can. Rain water and solar electricity are at the top of the list.

Last drought, we emptied one of the very large 125,000 litre water tanks and were half way through the other when the rains returned. Luckily, we didn’t have to buy water. Some people that we used to know years ago, had planted out an extravagant and sophisticated English garden told us that they were spending $300 per week back then, buying water to keep their garden alive and thriving. Three large truck loads of water were delivered and pumped into their tanks each weekend. It was the wrong kind of garden for this area, at this time. They also got a 100 metre deep bore drilled to get access to some underground water, but it dried up, and had to be evacuated, all the pumps and piping had to be hauled out with a crane and hole re-drilled down another 20 metres, to find a more permanent source of water, which then turned out to be iron bearing and needed to be oxidised and treated before it could be used on plants.

We learnt from this and decided to live a more simple and frugal existence, more in keeping with the natural environment. Every part of modern life does damage to the environment. Our aim is to keep that damage to a minimum where we can.

We have been enjoying the very early fruits from the garden as our breakfast fruit salad, Cherries, blue berries and strawberries. They are all growing under cover in the vegetable garden enclosure, safe from birds, so we get them all. Except for what the snails eat.

We had a good crop of mulberries this year and I was able to get my share despite the birds taking everything that they could. It’s the first fruit to come on out there in the orchard, so the birds are very hungry after the winter. They are also looking to feed their new babies hatching out in the spring time. This year we shared the crop. I was able to make 3 mulberry pies over the couple of weeks while the crop lasted. Being a huge tree, we have no way of netting it, so we share. The youngberries come on next and because they are a bunch of canes , and not too high we can net them to get most of the fruit. The birds are resourceful and learn how to land on the netting, pushing it down and then pecking the fruit through the net.

We also netted the apricot tree, as it has a reasonable crop of fruit coming on. Who knows how the rains will turn out? If there is no natural water from the sky, the dams won’t be enough. We have netted it just in case anyway. You never know what might happen. What we do know is, no net = no fruit. So we net.

We have finished the last of the globe artichokes. The purple variety are the last to mature. They are a lovely seasonal treat. This year we have been having them on pasta for a slow lunch.

Spring also brings a return of the wood ducks. This season so far, we have had 3 hatchings. They start of with a dozen littlies and day by day the number decline. I assume that they are taken by bigger birds, although I haven’t seem one taken. They are very timid and wary by nature, so we keep out of their way while they have young. Choosing to walk the long way around if we encounter them in the garden or orchards. I think that they are probably lucky to get 2 or 3 to maturity by the end of spring. We have learnt from experience that if you don’t make eye contact, they are less likely to run or fly away. They will stay and keep a very close eye on you but not move. As soon as you turn your head to look at them, then they take off.

I’m still baking my bread each week. It’s a 50/50 blend of wholemeal and rye. It works out well for me, the way that I have developed it. To save time and make it an easy proposition, I sort of cheat. Sort of! But not really. I use a bread making machine to mix the dough on the ‘dough-only’ setting. It takes 1 1/2 hours to mix, prove, knock down and rise the dough. Then it switches off. I turn up and knock it down one last time and pop it in a cast iron, ‘Dutch-oven’ baking pan and bake it in the oven for 20 mins at 240oC with the lid on, then another 20 mins with the lid off. It works for me.  I can be outside working while the dough is being nurtured and pampered in the machine. We are on to our 3rd bread machine. They last about 10 to 12 years before they burn out, or wear out the bearing. At one loaf a week for 10 years, that’s a 500 loaf life span.

We picked the last of the spinach. Just tiny leaves from the spinach trees, as they bolt skywards heading to seed. I made the last spinach pie for a while. I will need to plant some more. I should have them in the ground by now, but life was too busy to do it all. I have just put in the seed this weekend.

Janine has found the time to plait this years small garlic crop, just half a dozen plaits and a big bowl full of tiny knobs that are too much trouble to plait. Those small garlic knobs sit in their bowl on the kitchen work bench are used first. The biggest and best are kept for replanting in March. Its a very small crop and wont last us through the year. But can’t complain, at least we have some.

I catch myself thinking that things could be better. More or better sized garlic, more regular rain. But things are really pretty perfect for us. I have to remind myself that I’m not in Palestine or Ukraine being bombed. Be happy with what you have.

Open Studio Sale This Weekend

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The shelves have been re-stocked. The Pan Forte cake is mixed and is ready to bake. The coffee is freshly ground. 

We are ready for the 2nd Open Studio Sale Weekend starting tomorrow. What could possibly go wrong? Hopefully nothing, as we had 22mm of rain yesterday which has freshened up the garden and topped up the water tanks. 

Today started with a heavy mist from yesterdays rain. Regrettably, the rain wasn’t strong enough to flood the gutters and pour down the dirt road and flow into our dam. Most of it soaked in, but that is also very good for the garden and all our fruit trees, some of which had started to drop fruit in the prolonged dry spell. The lawn had turned brown and started to ’crunch’ underfoot it was so dry. However, it is amazing what a little rain will do. What was left of the burnt off grass has turned to a flush of green again over night. One blessing is that as it is only millimetres high, it doesn’t need mowing. There is always a bright side. The welcome rain has watered the english cottage garden flowers along the front of the pottery, so everything is looking bright and perky.

All the shelves are full and the gallery is looking good.

Call in and see us over the weekend if you are in the area. Stop for some cake and coffee if you have time, we’d love to catch up.

The veggie garden has been woefully neglected recently. It still feeds us well from our previous plantings, but because we were away for a lot of August and September. It was pointless planting any seeds in such dry weather, and then not being here to water and nurture them. So we missed out on our spring planting this year. I would normally have started seeds off in mid to late August, and then planted out in late September while keeping an eye on the frosts and possibly using our portable home made closh system of wire and shrink-wrap frames. However, as we have been so busy since our return, I have only just found time to work in the garden again. i found time in-between pumping water uphill to weed out and replant a few beds. 

I have had to resort to buying seedlings in punnets this year, so as to get some advanced tomatoes in the ground, along with zucchini, egg plants and lettuce. I also planted out seeds of the same for a follow up planting in December. It will be a smaller vegetable garden this summer. But you can’t do everything.

Buying punnets is a bit of a come-down, but I’m only human and needs as needs must. My own home grown seedlings are on their way.

Nothing is ever finished, nothing is perfect, and nothing lasts. Enjoy the moment.

November Open Studio Sale on soon

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November is fast approaching. We will be opening our workshop for the first two weekends in November for the Arts Trail – Open Studios event here in the Southern Highlands. We have been getting ready for this open Studio sale since the end of the last Open Studio sale in July.

Straight after the last sale, we had our 1st throwing workshop weekend in the pottery and then got stuck in straight away making new batches of clay, so as to make the new work for this show. I wrote about it here on the blog in August. < Pugging ClayPosted on   >

We spent September throwing, turning that new clay into pots. We had to be strict with our selves, as there is always so much to do here throughout the year dealing with seasonal events like pruning and making marmalade, before we left, but we got the pots made. We knew that we would be away for a lot of October doing a geological survey of potters materials in New Caledonia, so all the work needed to be made and bisqued before we left. 

As soon as we returned we were solidly back at work in the pottery glazing and decorating those pots. Again on a tight schedule, as I was asked to give the 10th. Ian Currie Memorial Lecture to the Ceramic Arts Queensland ceramic group. I gave the first lecture in the series a decade ago, and they asked me back to give another lecture, this time with a theme of sustainability, but also to give a weekend workshop on making glazes from local raw materials. We had decided to drive up and back, so as to call in and visit all our relatives along the way. Folks that we hadn’t seen since before the fire, COVID and the lockdown, so we had to allow a couple of weeks for the trip. 

We have planned the 2nd half of this year pretty well. So now we are back home again and doing the last few glaze and gold lustre firings ready for next weekends sale.

We came home to find a wealth of lovely things that had matured while we were away. The flower garden is still in bloom, the strawberries, cherries, mulberries are ripe and ready to pick. We got out of the car, unloaded the boot, put the washing on, then started watering the garden, picking fruit and lifting the garlic. No time to waste. Everything needs to be done now, so we have to schedule our time and energy appropriately.

  

  The garlic is ready to lift.

We lay it out on a metal rack to dry for a week or two before platting and hanging ready for use.

We have about 150 mature knobs this year. A small harvest compared to previous years. We have lifted up to 300 knobs in a good year, but I’m not complaining, any garlic is good garlic when it’s home grown.

By the time we take out the best 20 knobs for replanting, there will only be enough to last half a year.

Winters End – The Last Truffle of the Season

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Today we finished off the last truffle of the season. It was romantic, mysterious, fragrant, exotic and delectable. It really elevates the humble scrambled egg into something special without taking anything away, just adding loads of romance and aroma. The warmth of the freshly cooked eggs releases so many aromatic oils and esters from the tiny black fungus. It fills my nostrils as I bend over doing the shaving. It’s a good thing that we only get to eat these delicious little morsels in the winter months, otherwise we may become somewhat blasé about it all. As it is, they are still a very special seasonal treat, If somewhat expensive. We can only afford to live this decadent gourmet lifestyle on our frugal budget because we have a son in the industry.

We are also probably making our last batch of marmalade too, as we have picked most of the Seville oranges now and eaten nearly all of the other citrus fruit. Although this is the beginning of spring, it is also the end of winter in another way, so it’s the end of the winter crops like citrus. We try and live with the seasons, so that’s it for the big citrus splurge in our diet. 

It is one of the blessings of living in the Southern Highlands, that we have 4 distinct seasons. For instance, this morning we had another frost. This might possibly be our last really cold morning, but you never know with the climate emergency developing as it is, anything could happen.

I peel off the thin yellow layer of the skin without taking too much of the pith. I want the pith off!  With my pile of curly peels, I end up with what can only be called ‘bitter and twisted’ .

Janine removes the pith and cuts up the juicy centre to add to the pan. The first pan is on for 30 mins. before we get the 2nd pan on the stove and the difference in colour is dramatic, it  gets richer and deeper as it cooks. We try to use as little sugar as possible, while not making it too bitter and acidic, we also need enough sugar to make it ’set’. It takes about an hour of steady simmer to get it to thicken sufficiently. It’s worth all the effort, it tastes delicious, with just the right consistency. Seville oranges aren’t all that nice on their own. They are OK, but they really come into their own when it comes to making marmalade.

The stone fruit orchard is growing up well. This is its 3rd year and the trees are starting to look a lot more settled and established, with thicker trunks. I have been pruning them into open vase shapes where possible, but some of them have a very narrow vertical habit. They are all grafted onto ‘dwarf’ rootstocks, so they are keeping to a compact size. Most of them are now about 1.5 to 1.8 metres high, with an expected total height of 2.5 metres eventually. But I am well aware that plants can’t read their own labels! So there are bound to be variations.

We had a really great 1st Weekend workshop in the new pottery. It worked very well. The new studio is a great space to teach in. The light is good and the layout works ergonomically for 10 people, 8 students and 2 teachers. After everyone left I got stuck in and started making more pots for myself. The Open Studios, Arts Trail is coming up at the end of the year, so I need to get back to work making pots for that. I started back at it by making 30 straight sided mugs.

I spent a few days since the recent weekend workshop, in the afternoons, in my spare time, splitting and dressing sandstone blocks, to make some garden bed edging along the recently finished slate capping on the big sandstone retaining wall around the new pottery. It’s just another one of those jobs that has been in the offing and waiting for the ‘right’ time. I chose this ‘right’ time from what is left of my other time! Once the little wall was in place I shoveled in a load of top soil and planted seeds and a few seedlings to make the edging look a bit more settled and finished. I sprinkled in a packet of English Cottage Garden seed mix for good measure and 30 caper seeds, one every 600mm. Capers need an elevated, well drained, sun baked, dry, harsh environment to thrive. They take 2 years to establish, then persist for many more as long as they are cut back and pruned hard in the winter to stimulate good growth in the spring and summer, as flowers and fruit are produced on the new years growth. The elevated and exposed wall seemed like a pretty good place to try them out. I have read in a few books that they thrive on top of stone walls in the Med’s dry summers. I have no expectations, but if something comes of it, I’ll be pleased. If not, then I’ll chalk it down to another one of life’s enriching experiences. The stones look nice anyway, regardless of whether the plants grow or not!

After the soil was shoveled into the new beds, Edna the chicken, who had been helping me all day, came along and decided to help me some more by scratching a lot of it out again. I had to make some impromptu wire covers to protect the small seedlings from being excavated!

I’m happy with the result. 3 days work and $50 bucks goes a long way. I’m hoping that it will look greener in time for the November Arts Trail, Open Studios event.

Spring has sprung

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Right on schedule, it’s the beginning of September and therefore Spring, and sure enough the orchard trees are breaking into blossom.

Someone recently said, “spring has come, I’m so excited that I wet my plants”. I liked it, it made me smile, so I’ve stolen it.

Right on cue, everything has burst into bloom.

 Blueberries 

Nectarines

  Peaches 

Apricots

  Almonds

  Cherries

Even the hazelnuts are flowering. However, they are almost invisible, unless you get right up close, very close indeed.

Their tiny red flowers are only a couple of millimetres across. Obviously, being so small, they are not relying on bee pollination, like the showy stone fruits. Those floozies are big, brash, colourful and full of rewards for bees. Hazelnuts on the other hand are fully wind pollinated, so don’t need to expend any energy of showing off.

  Hazelnuts

The weather is predicted to be hotter and dryer in the coming years as we slip back into El Nino again. We have had 3 wet years of La Nina, that ended the drought and the bush fires, but now we are heading back into the old hot and dry years again.

It hasn’t rained properly for months. The dams are already down to below half and we haven’t even started the summer. I can see that we will be relying on our tank water storage for the garden and everything else as well.

Fortunately, Janine and I invested heavily in large water tank storage over the past decade of our working life. It was that water that I used to save the house and whatever else I could during the fires. 

Every roof that can catch water has a water tank attached. We have about 1/3 of a million litres of storage capacity in hand now. Since we have rebuilt the pottery and other sheds after the fire, they are all now connected back into the water storage system with independent, petrol powered, high pressure, fire fighting pumps. They haven’t been used in anger since the fire, so will need to be serviced and tested before the real heat sets in. I feel that we are in the best place possible to deal with the coming dry. 

Now the garden needs some TLC and water. I’m so excited, I wet my plants.

Winter, Everything is dormant – except us

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We have had our new chickens for 5 days now, so this afternoon I let them out for a little wander around the garden for an hour before bed time.

They had no hesitation in running straight out onto the lawn and practised running very fast and flapping their wings. First in one direction and then back again. 

I’m thinking that it is the first time in their life that they have been outside, with unlimited space to run and flap about.

They stayed close to their house all the time. They only had a passing interest in watching me load compost into a wheel barrow and wheel it into the garden to mulch fruit trees.

At 4.30, they put them selves to bed. 

Each day, I’ll let them wander a little bit further and for a little bit longer.

Since the fire we haven’t had any cherries from the burnt out Chekov orchard. I think that most of the tiny, tender fruiting spurs on the cherry trees got roasted in the fire. They don’t regenerate, it seems. The trees can grow new fruiting spurs on mature 2nd year wood, but they haven’t so far. So I only pruned them very lightly last year and not at all this winter. That should produce the possibility of 2nd year mature wood for new spurs next year? 

But all the new wood is right up very high reaching for the sky. These are old trees now so the new shoots start up at 3 metres+  and go straight up. That means ladder work to pick the fruit. Not good. It’ll all go to the birds I suspect?

Just in case, I ordered 7 new, dry rooted, cherry trees for this winter. They are all grafted onto dwarf rootstocks and also bred for low chill warmer climate conditions. Perfect for me to maintain into my older age without needing ladder work. All transplanting of deciduous trees is always done in the winter months while they are dormant.

I mowed, then weeded and dug over a suitable strip along the back fence of the netted veggie garden. This reduces the area under cultivation, making the garden smaller and better suited to my diminishing capacity to maintain the larger space of intensively cultivated plots.

We should start to have some more cherries in a couple of years from now.

I noticed that the first early peach has started bud burst in the stone fruit orchard. So I dropped everything and got stuck into the pruning. I should have done it at the end of June, but time slipped by. In the past it took both me and Warren 2 days to prune the old established 40 year old fruit trees in the previous orchard. This time, with all the new dwarf trees. I got it all done in one 3 hour session on my own. That’s so much better.

The first of the early blueberry bushes has also broken into flower. It’s almost as if its spring already and we are only half way through winter.

While I was at it, I made a full weekend of it and also pruned the almond grove. It has not flourished since the fire and I had to prune a lot of dead wood from the trees. I’m not too sure if they will survive? They don’t look very vigorous. We have had quite a number of very big eucalypt trees die this past year. They survived the fire and shot out new branches and were looking OK, but 3 years on, they just turned up their toes and are now dead. They’ll need to be felled at some stage to make the garden safe, otherwise they will start to drop branches.

I was doing a bit of a clean up, mowing and weeding in the veggie patch, while prepping for the new cherry trees, suddenly a glint of red, I discovered yet one more self seeded stray tomato bush. So this must be one of the latest harvests of ripe, free range tomatoes that I have ever done!  The seasons seem to be coming around faster and faster, or am I just getting older?

While I was doing all this tidying up I also took the time to pick a red lettice, some red radiccio, chicory and the last of the endive. This mixed with a green onion and some chervil. I made a lovely little bitter salad for lunch.