Category Archives: In the garden

Metric Marmalade

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July means that it’s time to get to work in the orchards. There is pruning to do. I usually wait until most of the trees loose their leaves before pruning as a rule, but with such a range of trees in this family orchard of mixed fruits, there are some that have lost their leaves a month ago and others that are still in leaf. 

In a perfect world, I’d treat each tree as an individual and consider its best needs, one by one. 

But this is reality, and I have a lot to do everyday through the seasons. Winter is also wood kiln firing season. I want to fire my wood kiln at least once each month to get through all the pots that I’ve been making since my return from the work that I did in Korea. So the orchard pruning/spraying/fertilising is all compressed into one day, as needs must. I have my friend Andy coming tomorrow to help me do some of the last outstanding jobs to finish off the pottery shed. It needs flashing installed over the windows. Something the shed builders didn’t bother to do. Slack arses! So I’m finally getting around to it 5 years later.

I choose a day at the beginning of July and get stuck in to the orchard jobs. Every tree gets pruned for shape and strength, removing any dead wood, crossed branches and water-shoots, I also open up the centre to let light and air in and allow good ventilation. I prune to an outward pointing bud, and hope for the best. I’m not so interested in maximising the crop of fruit. In fact we have more than enough fruit set each season, as we give a lot away. 

Yesterday during pruning, I noticed that I was pruning off branches from an apple tree with full vigorous growth of leaves still on, and then followed by a peach that was so advanced in its dormancy, that it had bud swell. I really need to give the trees a good saturating spray with lime sulphur before bud burst to suppress mildew, fungus and leaf-curl on the various trees. Lime sulphur spray stinks of rotten egg gas smell, and is best kept off your skin and clothes, so I wear a face shield, hat, rain coat and gloves, just in case.

One of the apples gets white powdery mildew, a couple of the peaches get leaf curl. It’s a mixed bag. After lime sulphur spray, I go around and spread composted chicken manure for its nitrogen, dolomite powder for its mixed, subtle calcium/magnesium content, and some wood ashes for the potassium that encourages healthy fruiting. 

The chickens have the stone-fruit orchard all to them selves everyday to roam and scratch around in. Always finding something interesting to chase and squabble over. They are forever dropping their pooh and enriching the soil as they go about scratching, so a little extra lime every now and then to sweeten the soil is a good plan.

In a few weeks time, I’ll also start the first of the Bordeaux sprays, to suppress the leaf curl fungus, through into spring. Peaches and nectarines are particularly vulnerable to this fungus. Bordeaux spray (copper sulphate mixed with lime) helps to control this. Both Bordeaux and Lime sulphur are registered organic sprays.So I can feel safe using them on our food. However, I like to use the minimum amount, as copper can build up in the soil over time.

Out of the garden and into the kitchen. Winter is also peak season for citrus fruits. We have been making batches of marmalade since the season started back at the beginning of June. This week I have been trying out an old recipe that I got out of Mrs Beaton’s cook book. I have the paperback facsimile edition from the mid seventies. I was encouraged to try it out by my friend Bill who makes lovely marmalade. I occasionally post him a box of Seville oranges and he later returns a jar of his latest batch of marmalade. A good arrangement. 

This year I’m giving one of Mrs Beaton’s recipes a try. There are a few in the book. This is No.2 as recommended by Bill. I doubled the quantities, to make it worthwhile spending the time on it. However. I couldn’t bring myself to use 3 lbs (2.7kgs) of sugar. So I reduced it to 1 kg and added 25 grams of pectin to make up for the reduced sugar. After converting it to metic and doubling all the quantities, it still tastes great!

It’s a good recipe and in this slightly altered form, with much less sugar. I still find it very sweet. I’m glad that I didn’t bother trying it in the original. I wouldn’t have enjoyed eating it at all. Boiling the whole fruit for 2 hrs and letting it sit overnight to cool gives it a very old fashioned sour flavour from the peel that we don’t get by just boiling the peel and juice for a short time.

This recipe gave me 3.5 litres of marmalade = 6 medium sized jars. Worth the effort. We had visitors while I was cooking it up. They all walked into the kitchen and each remarked on how wonderful the smell was as they entered. We were able to give them a large box of mixed citrus to take with them.

Out of the kitchen and onto more pressing practical matters, I made my own new flashing for the pottery shed windows from two sheets of  2440 x 1220 x 0.9mm sheets of galvanised steel, that I cut and folded on the guillotine and pan break, custom fitted for my windows. The lengths of flashing have to be marked and then cut out to perfectly fit into the curves of the corrugated iron sheeting on the walls. In a perfect world. The shed builders should have fitted flashing above the windows before they installed the outer wall sheeting. But they didn’t bother to do anything at all, so the window seals around the edges leaked. But not any more.

Andy and I marked out, hand cut and fitted the curves exactly to match the variations in the mixed 2nd hand gal sheets. A slow, but rewarding job. We couldn’t use a template, as almost every sheet is different across the wall. Until I collected all this mixed corrugated iron roofing fro mall around Sydney and the Highlands. I didn’t realise how many different profiles of corrugated iron there were. I just thought that it was all the same. But every company has their own individual variation of the profile.

We spend a day going around the building and fitting the new flashing above all the openings. We can’t take off all the cladding to do it properly. As it should have been done. So we add the flashing onto the wall sheeting and cut it into the profile and seal it with silicon. It’s quicker, but still takes us all day to do 5 double windows and 3 garage sized roller doors.

Bit by bit I’m getting the shed finished. It’s only taken 6 years to get this job finally complete.

All the flashings acting as mini-awnings above every opening.

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

Back home from Korea

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I’m back home from my work in Korea. I managed to drop a firebrick on my foot on the 3rd day. I couldn’t wear a shoe after that, as the big toe had swollen up so much, such that I had to wear a plastic ‘flip-flop’ thong to keep working. I went to the local convenience store in the village and bought alcohol disinfectant spray for cleaning the toe, over-sized bandaids, gauze bandage and medical tape. I was amazed that such a tiny village shop had everything that I needed.  
The next day, the local government health clinic was open and my friends took me to the clinic to see the doctor. I needed them to translate for me. The doctor told me that I had kept it very clean and to try and keep it elevated, not to walk on it too much and that if it started to throb or get red. I should come back ASAP. As a precaution, he prescribed and also issued me with 2 different antibiotics, for 3 times a day, enough for 10 days. I don’t like to take any antibiotics if I don’t absolutely need to, but I certainly didn’t want to end up with medical complications while in a foreign country, so I took them.  I didn’t want to risk getting toe-main poisoning and it spreading up my leg to Knee-monia and possibly even dick-theria.The doctor offered me an X-ray, but I assured him that I could still bend the toe. I had to demonstrate that for him, so that he was satisfied. 

My friend got out his credit card to pay, but there was no charge!!!! I’m a foreigner here. I don’t pay taxes here. I should pay for such a terrific service. Korea is an amazing place!

My foot was still swollen, and I was still wearing a plastic flip-flop thong on my foot right up until I left Korea. I even had to attend the official opening of the exhibition in my formal black thong. The nail has since died and come off. I’m so lucky that I have such good friends and that it wasn’t worse.
The garden has grown such a lot while I was away, and badly needs a lot of weeding. Apparently there was a lot of rain and the temperature was quite mild. So plenty of late autumn growth. I got stuck into the weeding straight away, just an hour at a time each day. Weeding always involves such a lot of bending. I’m of an age where this is not so comfortable any more. So I space out my efforts, I didn’t want to over do it. 
The second day, I decided to wear knee pads so that I could get closer to the weeds, to minimise the bending. I also wore light gloves to save my fingers. So I am learning to change my old habits to make living here the way that I have so far, and want to continue to do into the future, a more achievable prospect. This is a really hands-on life style, doing almost everything the old fashioned way, by hand, honouring local gardening lore and organic traditions with green environmental knowhow/theories.  A permanent garden/orchard/vegetable patch, including chickens, all inter-woven and based on sustainable living principals, but with a nod to modern conveniences where necessary, like a cultivator and a mower. 
We can still pick all of our salad lunches and our nightly dinner from the garden each evening, it’s just that the flavours have changed to winter forage now. We have all the usual winter greens, broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, beetroot, cabbage, pumpkin and kohlrabi. We cook a lot of vegetable stir fry, tofu, okonomiyaki, Japanese style cabbage pan cake, baked mixed vegetables, and cauliflower au gratin etc. We have also just celebrated the start of the cold winter season with an old fashioned baked dinner. Our first red meat meal since last winter.

  Other than weeding the garden, there is also a lot of mowing, so an hour or so of that each day too. The garden work fills half the day. I’m using the electric ride-on mower for the bigger areas that have become deep in luscious growth. But I also use the electric strimmer for all the edges where the ride on can’t get to. It’s a good feeling to know that all the work is being achieved powered by sunshine these days instead of fossil fuels. Janine fills in the gaps with the electric push mower, to get in under the branches of the fruit trees and other similarly appropriate places for that mower.


We have worked hard at planning and finally becoming a fully solar electric household. We started back in 2007, when the cost of solar panels finally became affordable for us. When I was a teenager, the only solar panels were to be found on space craft and satellites. We’ve come a long way and Australia can be proud of the world famous, ground breaking research into refining solar panel technology done by Professor Green at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. We have slowly increased our solar PV over the years, until now we have 17kW of PV panels and two 15 kWh batteries. Sufficient to charge 2 electric cars, run the house and pottery workshop, Fire our electric kilns and if carefully managed, also selling the excess back to the grid. Although we try to minimise our exports, as we only get paid 5 cents per kWh. It’s better to use it all ourselves. We haven’t paid a power bill since 2007, and spend more money on petrol for things like the chain saw and fire fighting pumps than we do on our Plug-In Hybrid car.
Now that the garden and grounds are back under control, I’m also back in the pottery, making pots again, for the other half of each day, making again is fun and half of my existence. My start back on the potters wheel was delayed by a day, as the pug mill had seized up from being left for too long without use. I had to hand scrape the clay from the barrel nozzle and take out the vacuum screens to remove hardened clay from the mesh.  Quicker and easier than a complete strip down, but still time consuming. It somehow feels like a bit of a waste of time, but any other option is far worse, I’m so grateful to my friends who passed on their old pug mills to me after the fire. You know who you are. Thank You! I’m very grateful to be so lucky to own my very old, re-furbished, Venco pug mills. 

The next day I’m back on the wheel throwing perfectly de-aired and beautifully mixed plastic clay. My old wrists are too worn out to hand wedge all my clay any more. I did manage a lot of hand wedging for the first year back at work here, during lock down. I couldn’t buy a new Venco as they were out of production, and the large 100mm. model is still un-available! I don’t know where I get the energy and enthusiasm to keep on working like this into my older years, other friends and colleagues have retired, but I was determined not to let the 3rd bush fire in 50 years and loss of another pottery workshop stop me. I’m still here and still creating the things that I love. So out of desperation and necessity, I hand wedged my clay to my lasting detriment. My ageing wrists have never really recovered. Even throwing slowly on the kick wheel, causes just a little bit of a twinge, so I have to modify my hand position slightly to cope. We have a few Shimpo electric potters wheels, mostly used for our weekend workshops, that run on our solar power, but I really prefer the old ‘Leach’ treadle style kick wheel for all the smaller domestic pots.

Winter brings on the citrus crop, so we start the season by making 2 batches of marmalade, lemon, lemonade and lime marmalade and then tangelo and navel orange marmalade. The Seville oranges aren’t ready yet. They come on later in the season. They make the very best marmalade.

It’s hard to believe, but today, in winter, at the end of the first week of June, I picked a ripe red tomato. We still have self sown tomato plants flowering. We have had ripe tomatoes in June before. It all depends on the severity of the frosts. At this stage we have had a frost during the week, but because the vegetable garden is fully netted to keep out the birds, that netting seems to just take the edge off the frosts, allowing us to still harvest tomatoes so late in the season.

It’s so good to be home again! We have a quotidian flock of wild wood ducks, that have decided to take up residence on the front lawn, sometimes up to 30 or so of them. They seem to like it here. Plenty of grass to eat and 4 dams to explore. Why wouldn’t they? They were probably all born and raised here over the years. They do pooh all over the lawn, so we have to watch where we step and wipe our feet at lot. We have a shoes-off household, so no problem about the house, but a lot of pooh gets tramped into the pottery workshop when we have weekend workshops and open days.

If this is my biggest problem in life. I’m so, so lucky!

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

Autumns rewards

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Exactly 8 weeks ago today, Janine and I harvested all of our apples and pears. We juiced them and used ‘Moet and Chandon’ champagne yeast to ferment them all into cider.

Now, 8 weeks on, the ferment has completely died down and used up all the available sugary nutrient in the juice. Now that it is completely still, it is safe to bottle it. We must make sure that it is fully fermented out, so that it wont keep on fermenting and explode the bottles.

I remember back in my childhood in the 60’s, stories of exploding ginger beer bottles that had too much sugar in them.

We have been making our own cider here for almost 50 years now, ever since we planted our first orchard and got a reasonable crop of apples. 

This is our first vintage of cider in ten years now, because the orchard was burnt out in the big bush fires of 2019, but before that, there was a ten year draught that made it very hard to keep the fruit tress alive , never mind getting a good crop off any of them.

So this is our first really good cropping year from the newly planted fruit trees in the new orchard five years on.See; It’s almost autumn, Time to make cider.Posted on 

I have just spent two days hand weeding and digging over the pottery verandah garden bed. It had gone completely feral and needed a good sorting out. All of the spring and summer flower display was mostly over and I’m hoping that all those flowers dropped a load of seeds down into the bed, so that now, given a bit of free space and sunlight, they will germinate and grow a new generation of flowers to welcome visitors along the driveway past the new pottery. I spent a long time on my hands and knees, making sure that I got the majority of the couch grass and kikuyu runners out of the soil. 

To prevent the grass runners from returning and growing back into the freshly weeded soil. I needed to make a border edging along the beds. In the vegetable garden, I made galvanised iron sheeting edging strips from off-cuts of galvanised flat plate that were left over from kiln jobs in the past. A very productive re-use of what was waste material. 

These days I don’t have off-cuts any more, but Janine reminded me that I had stacked up half a dozen lengths of old recycled roofing iron ridge capping that might be usable.

I got stuck in and flattened it all, split it in two long lengths, and then folded a strengthening right angle edge on one side so that i could bury it half way into the soil to delineate the garden bed, but most importantly to cut off access to the grass runners from growing back into the beds. I dug in a ute load of compost, watered it well in, so now will wait to see what germinates.

Re-use, re-cycle, re-purpose!

One of our cherry trees has decided to flower again in autumn. I think that it had a few cold nights, followed now with some warm weather,  and that was sufficient to reset the biological clock thinking that winter is over and time for the spring flowering. We have had this sort of thing happen in the past. Particularly with the ‘low-chill’ cultivars.

Winter hasn’t arrived yet, so I wonder if this tree will still flower as normal in 4 months time when spring does actually arrive?

In the pottery, I have retested the rock glaze tests that i started exploring a few weeks back. This time, I have made larger sized samples to see the quality of the glazes better. All 3 have potential, but still need further testing to get them ‘right’.

After washing and sterilising all the glass bottles for the cider bottling this morning. I had and hour to wait for the sterilising process to complete, and could hear the birds in the lillypilly tree next to the house. I asked Janine if she wanted to make some lillypilly jelly, so got out the 3 metre step ladder and climbed up into the canopy to fill a bucket with fruit. The fruit only starts 4 to 5 .metres off the ground. The tree is much taller then the house.

After we had bottled all the cider, Janine boiled up the berries and started the process of making the jelly. It takes two days. Tomorrow to sieve out the skins and stones from this batch, then re-boil it and set it up in a cheese cloth to drip out to clear jelly.

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

First cabbage of the cool season.

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We have just harvested the first cabbage and first broccoli of the autumn. I planted a range of brassica seeds on boxing day. The first batch were all dug out by the blackbirds, so when I re-planted the 2nd sowing, some time later. I also covered the bed with bird netting to stop a repeat of the blackbirds scratching out the seeds. Blackbirds don’t want the seeds, they just like to scratch into freshly worked and composted soil looking for worms. This little hiccup set me back a few weeks, so our first cabbage is a bit late arriving.

I have now repaired all the melted sections of the plastic netting over the vegetable garden. Almost total replacement at both ends that were worst hit by the fire, then applying patches to the large holes in the other walls, and finally stitching together the small 50mm to 100mm holes that are scattered all over the enclosure walls and roof. I purchased a commercial size roll of 100metres by 10 metres of netting over 30 years ago to cover the vineyard at harvest time. The netting that is over the veggie garden now is all that is left over from that time. It had a 10 years warranty against going brittle with the ultra violet light. So I’m very pleased that it has lasted so long. However, it is getting very brittle and the galvanised steel netting is all rusted through in places. So a total rebuild is in order, but I’m not too sure that I can manage that big a job these days, or if it would even be wise to attempt it at my age, having just turned 73, I shouldn’t be up and down ladders for days on end.

I made an Australian version of oka-nomiyaki pancake. Of course it is not really an okonomiyaki, as I don’t have mountain-potato starch, or almost any other authentic Japanese ingredients, but I do the best that I can with what I have. The super-fresh garden ripe cabbage makes it really fresh, crisp and delicious. The broccoli goes into a veggie stir fry along with all the other garden delights of the current season and some tofu for protein. Vegetable gardening, which mostly involves a lot of weeding, mowing and watering, suddenly becomes so worthwhile when you are harvesting such beautiful produce each afternoon, freshly picked ready for dinner. Our food has carbon metres, not miles!

I have also planted another 4 different varieties of seed garlic in the garden, just to see if any of therm are well adapted to grow here in the future.

In the pottery, I have been throwing some sericite porcelain stone bodies. This stuff is so short that I have to make the wall bases thick to hold the form up. That then means a lot of turning to get the pot thinner again. This weird stuff tears and rips as the turning tool cuts into it – unless it is turned quite firm and almost dry. But then there is the dust to contend with, so I like to do it while it is still a bit damp, but then it chips a lot. It becomes a two stage process. Roughing out the mass of extra thickness, drying some more, then final turning. I get to do a lot of slaking and re-cycling of turnings.

I have built an extra-large tray for my shimpo, but with this porcelain, I still fill it very quickly. This image is of the trimmings from just 15 small 150mm. bowls.

It all goes into the mixer pug and is recycled, ready for throwing again the next day, although leaving it to age a little bit and ‘recover’ would be even better, but because I use a dozen different mixtures and recipes, it is easy to loose track, with too many small packs of different clays hanging around. So I prefer to use up each batch all in one go as soon as possible.

The tyre on the old wheel barrow went flat last week. I took it to the tyre place to get a patch or a new inner tube, but they told me that the tyre wasn’t worth working on and I’d need a new tyre and a new inner tube – at a cost of $78! As the old metal rim is quite rusty, I decided that I might just as well buy a whole new wheel unit from the big hardware chain for $32! But then I remembered that I had a complete wheel off a buggered trolly that I picked up off the side of the road on council clean-up day. It is 25mm smaller in dia. but still holds air pressure well, so I had to change the shaft size and make some new brackets to hold it on, out of scrap tin plate. 20 mins later we are all back in business and good to go. It’s not perfect, but it works. Recycle, reuse, repurpose!

The Japanese have a word ‘Mottainai’ – too good to waste!

A botched up job that will keep all of this useful material out of the waste stream and land fill for another decade. I actually picked this whole wheel barrow up off the side of the road in the village some years ago on Council clean-up day, when the owner decided that it was just junk, because the tyre was flat. I took it home and just pumped it up. It worked! And has been working hard here for all those years of reprieve since then – and now still continues to be useful. Waste averted, Mottainai!

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

Autumn is here

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It’s March and autumn is supposed to be here, but it has been delayed by Global Heating! We are having some of the hottest recorded days for this time of year. We are used to the long ‘Indian Summer’ season transition, but this is the heat that we used to expect in the middle of summer.

The cherry trees have lost all their leaves. They are the first to bud-up in the spring and the first to drop their leaves in Autumn.

March is the month to plant garlic. The small cloves that we missed picking 6 months ago have shot up in the places where we left them invisibly underground. Their tender, slim, green aromatic shoots are a very good sign that it’s time for garlic to grow again. They have decided!  I planted 5 rows of our own, best-of-crop, home-grown garlic, the largest knobs from last year. 

I planted about 15 cloves to a row, that’s about 70 plants, if they all do well. I left a gap, for a place to stand while weeding the crop as will be necessary several times over the next 6 months. 

Then I planted 4 rows of commercially grown varieties of seed garlic. This year I’m growing ‘Rojo de Castro’ ‘Dynamite’ and ‘Spanish Roja’. Just to see if they will do well or even better than what we already have.

I left another walking gap for weeding and watering, then another 3 more rows of other bought seed garlic varieties. ‘Dunganski’, and ‘Festival’. Our very good friend Anne, organised a bulk purchase for a few of us in the ‘seed-savers’ group. I’m always interested in trying something new. Thank you Anne!

I always plant the best of last years harvest, whatever variety(ies) that is, very often a mix of what grows best here over the decades. All self selected, simply by growing well with large easy to peel large cloves. These new varieties all have a red, or pinkish hue, simply because I like the look of them when hung up in the kitchen drying and waiting to be used.

Whatever does well and grows best will be added to our localised crop for the following season. Life goes on. All the same as before, but with small changes and additions and hopefully improvements.

In the pottery I have been collecting, crushing and ball milling a few new local rocks for testing as glaze material.

As soon as the heat subsides, I’ll be firing the small portable wood fired kiln, filled with test bodies and glazes, to prepare for the firing of the big wood kiln over the winter months.

After the ‘big-pot’ throwing Summer Schools that we held here over January and February. I had about 80 kgs of the special course grained/textured clay left over. So I decided, rather than store it away somewhere, I would be better off to use it up making a few big jars for myself. I have always liked the traditional Korean ‘Moon Jars’, so I decided to have a go at making a few Korean inspired big round jars. They are NOT Moon jars, but my interpretation of the big, round, pale glazed form.

Janine decorated some of them for me using her carved/sgraffito through slip technique.

I have continued planting brassicas since Xmas day, when I planted the first seeds. I have planted 8 to 10 plants of mixed types each month to ensure a continuing crop of cauliflowers, broccoli, cabbage, Brussel sprouts and kohlrabi through out the autumn/winter.

I noticed today that the first broccoli head is forming on one of the first plantings.

I have to grow them under protective netting for the first few weeks to a month, to stop the black birds and bowerbirds from digging them out and eating the tops off them. The vegetable garden was completely covered in a mix of galvanised and plastic netting. But in the catastrophic bush fires of 2019 the heat of the fire melted the plastic netting on the west and east faces. All the birds were burnt in that fire, so there was no immediate need to repair the netting. EVERYTHING else was so much more important, like rebuilding. 

Now the birds are recovering and breeding up in numbers, coming back into our area. They have figured out that they can squeeze in through the gaps in the melted areas. So I have booked a friend to come and help me next week to get up on our tall step ladders and re-cover the burnt out sections with new netting. A big job that in the past I would have thought nothing of doing by myself with the occasional helping hand from Janine in the difficult areas, pushing up from underneath with a broom to get an even cover. Luckily, a very nice couple donated a huge amount of plastic bird netting from their farm, when they took down their orchard cover and moved into a smaller holding. We are very happy to use this re-cycled netting, both galvanised and plastic. Nothing wasted. Recycle, re-use, re-purpose.I may be old and stupid, but still just smart enough to know that I don’t want to do this job all by myself anymore. It’s just one of those endless series of jobs that we have to tackle everyday to keep on living here in this self-reliant, low-carbon, organic, minimal consumerist muddle.

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

It’s almost autumn, Time to make cider.

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Todays big job is to harvest all the remaining apples and pears, then juice them all and make a big batch of cider/perry. Then it will be back onto the tomatoes and passata.

There will be sure to be a lot of weeding needed after all this rain clears and the heat returns.

We haven’t been able to make cider for over a decade now, as there was the terrible drought culminating in the 2019 bush fires that took our pottery, yard, gardens, fences and orchard trees. We replanted a new orchard in 2020 and this is the first year that we have had sufficient fruit on the new young trees to be able to make a batch of cider. 

This morning, I managed to get out there into the orchard and strip the trees of all the remaining fruit and get it indoors before the rain started. I used the wheel barrow as my basket on wheels. a good measure of fruit volume. 

We are due for a whole week of rain – if the forecast can be believed. It usually rains less here than is forecast on most occasions, but it will still be a wet week by all accounts.

So today was excellent for inside jobs like washing and juicing apples and fermenting cider. It took us all day to process all the apples and juice them, then get the fermentation started.

We have a really big, heavy duty, industrial grade, juice extractor. The sort of machine that you need if you are going to be juicing apples for 8 hours straight. Before we bought this one many years ago, we burnt out 3 small domestic sized ones. 

While extracting the juice, we filled 30 litres of pulp into buckets for the worm farm and compost. The juice is now in the fermentor. We can leave it for a week at least now while we get on with other jobs around the garden and pottery.

We managed to slip in a small bisque firing in the solar fired electric kiln while we were making cider. That’s one very nice thing about electric kilns, they fire automatically on a pre-programmed schedule. This allows us to get on with other jobs, like making cider, recycling clay slip/slop/slurry, pugging recycled clay, doing a bit of kintsugi? Possibly even start throwing those new ‘test’ clay bodies that I have had ageing since November? 

And of course there is always weeding.

Summer jobs and cooking up some delicious fun

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Those first two big-pot throwing summer schools took all of our time and effort to start the year. Since we finished them, a couple of weeks ago, we have had time ‘off’, playing catch-up in the garden and orchards. 

We have been mowing, watering and harvesting, for the past two weeks. We have been dealing with that harvest since then, picking fruit, bottling tomatoes, making passata, roasting pumpkin cubes, bottling pears and making pear and apple juice, then picking and drying prunes. 

Diced pumpkin cubes, roasted with olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper.

Everything comes on in earnest in January. There is a lot to deal with all at once, so we are eating very well. I really look forward to that first ripe pear. Just like I do that first ripe tomato of the season. The kitchen is a busy place every day. We spaced out the gap between the two pairs of workshops to give us time to do all this ’self-sufficiency’ work. I had also booked in a couple of other jobs that were needing to be done. So our two  weeks off, has really been ‘full-on’!

Pears poached in a little white wine, cinnamon and sugar, served with fresh picked passionfruit and a little ice cream. These are the tangible benefits of self-reliant living and gardening. 50 years in the planning, execution and nurturing. 5 minutes in the eating.

I ordered some double glazed, argon filled, metal coated, low energy, toughened, window panes to replace the 3mm. plain glass that is in our big arch window in the house. That fancy energy efficient glass arrived just before Xmas. The big window has been working well, letting light in, but keeping the rain out for almost 40 years, since I built it, and glazed it myself all those years ago. At the time, I tried to find double glazed glass for it, but to no avail. I also tried to buy special ‘stick-on’ glass coating mentioned by Amery Lovins, when he was here giving a lecture tour back then. But no one seemed to be aware of any such product here in Australia, not even ‘3M’ who I was told made it.

So we just lived with it as it was, eventually adding a huge sheet of thin perspex to the inside to create a semi-sealed air gap, but although that did work to some extent. There was room for improvement, and the unsealed gap always fogged up in wet weather, causing the wooden sill to get very wet and start to rot on the surface, so something had to be done.

Luckily, there is now a factory in town, that makes these fancy window panes. There was a one month wait while they were made to order. Back in December, I spent time rebuilding the structure of the glazing bars to make them deeper in preparation. We have managed to install 7 of the new double glazed panes so far. 5 to go. Interestingly, I have spent over $200 just on special window glazing silicon and wooden glazing beading to complete the job.

I booked a few days of help from my friend Andy, who is a local architect and environmentally conscientious builder. A rare breed! He has been very kind in offering us loads of assistance since the fire. He also offers good council and advice on environmental/building matters. I asked Andy to help me install two louvre windows up  in the big pottery shed loft. I bought some louvre mechanisms and the ground glass panes online, then I built a couple of hard wood window frames to mount them in. I also made all the custom flashings to go around them. Andy did all the outside ladder work on the day, cutting the hole in the wall and we installed them without too much trouble. It gives plenty of ventilation up there to take the heat out of the loft, but also brings in so much light and the view is good too.

We haven’t quite finished setting it up again yet, but it has been transformed into a lovely, light and airy, comfortable place now.

I have to ‘fix’ a kiln for a friend, even though I am retired, this is a special favour, then it will be back into the workshop for the next two summer schools. I’m looking forward to getting back into making pots for myself again. I have a few batches of experimental clay bodies that have been ageing for some months now. I’m keen to try them out. Especially to see how they will look in the wood fired kiln.

January in the Garden, Orchards and Pottery

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We have been very busy with our summer schools since the beginning of January. I originally advertised one Summer School to teach the making of larger forms on the potters wheel by ‘top-hatting’ and ‘coil-&-throw’ techniques.  We got such a massive response to my add that we could program 4 summer schools of 3 days each, and lined them up with a few days in-between. Two in January and two more in February. We only have 8 potters wheels in our workshop, and we got over 30 replies so I had to run 4 schools and space them out.

Top-hatting is a technique of placing one thrown form on top of another to make a larger pot than you might otherwise be able to throw in one piece. It can involve the stacking of multiple forms to gain extra height. Coil and Throw technique involves throwing a substantial base for the pot and then adding a coil of clay to the top and throwing that coil up to become the wall of the pot, extending the height. This technique can be repeated several times to make a taller pot.

We got such a massive response to my add that we could program 4 summer schools of 3 days each, and lined them up with a few days in-between. 2 in January and 2 more in February. As we only have 8 potters wheels in our workshop, and we got over 30 replies, that meant staging 4 consecutive schools. 

I made up some clay specially designed for big pot throwing by joining techniques, slightly softer than usual and with added ‘tooth’ and ‘grit’ for structure and good drying and firing of the larger forms. I originally made 400kgs of clay, thinking that it would be sufficient for the 4 workshops, but I was way out in my estimations. The first two workshops used up nearly all of my stash, so I was back in the clay making shed the next day to make up another 400kgs for the next two in February. I like the clay to get a little age on it to improve its work-ability, 3 months would be good, 3 years even better, but needs as needs must. One month in this case will have to be enough.

Clay develops its plasticity by the intimate mixing of water molecules in-between the infinitesimally small clay particles. The best way to achieve this is to make a ‘slip’. A very watery mixture of clay and water, to get the water into, and in-between the clay crystals, which in their purest form are flat and hexagonal shapes. It takes a very long time for the water to penetrate the ‘pack of cards’ structure of the clay particles and individually flake off the crystals one at a time to get that intimate mixing of clay and water that is required to appreciate the very best potential of any particular clay.

I don’t have that luxury of time in this instance, so I am using powdered clay material that I bought in, in 25kg paper bags. I’m using a mixture of all Australian clays from Victoria, NSW and Qld. to get a good blend of the required properties that I need. It’s getting very difficult to buy Australian raw minerals and clays these days, as the multi-national mineral companies have bought up most of the clay mines and shut them down, forcing us to buy their imported products from overseas. We are not short of clay here, but we have been locked out of access to our own resources. Welcome to the future!

I mix the various minerals together in an old recycled bakery dough mixer. I have owned this machine for over 40 years. It has gone through 2 fires and been rebuilt each time. Luckily, it is very well made, mostly of cast iron frame, but the fabricated steel sheet bowl was very badly split and warped after the last fire and needed a lot of work to re build it, and get it back into action. see my blog post from 4/6/21  “Our Old Twice Burnt Dough Mixer Proves to be a ‘Phoenix’ mixer”.  I use a blend of recycled clay slip and the new powders to get the best outcome that I can from this compromise of speed, quality and efficiency. 

I use a few tricks of the trade to get the best possible result out of my available materials. I use water from the dam and rain water from the old pottery shed water tank that is full of gum leaves that creates a very useful tannic acid water that is ideal for making clay. It is a transparent pale grey and has a very low pH so that when mixed with white kaolin, it attaches to the clay particles and flocculates the clay mass, which settles tightly in the bucket leaving only crystal clear water on top. It is also ‘live’ as it has all sorts of microscopic organic matter and bacteria in there, which helps age the clay. City water that is full of chlorine is pretty much sterile and kills off any live matter that may help the clay mature and become more plastic and workable.

I have a ‘snorkel’ fitted to a fan in the wall that sucks all the fine dust out of the clay mixer room to keep me safe while I’m working in there, but I also wear protective gear as well. Afterwards, once the clay is all wetted, ‘plastic’ and ‘pugged’ into sausages. I cut all the ends off the stacked pugs and re-pug it all again to make sure that there is a consistent mix of all the 3 different batches of clay represented in each bag of finished clay body.

It is bagged and stacked to ‘age’ and the floor is wet mopped twice to collect all the clay dust off the floor and make the work space clean and safe again.

In the garden, we are picking the last of the blueberries, the first of the egg plants, and we are mid season for zucchinis. The tomatoes are coming on quite strong now and we have started to make our first batches of tomato passata for the summer. Every meal from now on will be some sort of variation of ratatouille in all its various forms. What else can we do when the garden is full to bursting with tomatoes, aubergines, zucchinis and basil? We try and give away as much as we can, but everyone in the village has an excess of tomatoes and zucchinis at this time of year.

Our breakfasts and deserts are mostly of fruit these days. November brings on the berries, December is the month of cherries and apricots, January for plums and peaches, February is all about apples and March for the last of the pears.

Summer is here

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Summer has arrived. and we are ready for all those lazy, hazy, long, hot, relaxing day and balmy evenings with a G&T on the lawn.

But first.

We have to deal with the fruit flies and possible bush fires, but dealing with them is interrupted by the rain.

We have had sudden down pours and thunderstorms, followed by a week of wet weather. It’s a bit like the 70’s, when we used to get sudden summer storms that only lasted an hour, but dropped an inch of rain. That’s 25mm these days! Then it would go back to being hot and humid again, but it gave us sufficient water in the dam to get through the summer with water for the garden, orchards and possibly for fire fighting.

Before this last week of wet, the little top dam had dropped down to just 600mm of water in a little puddle in the centre. Not Good! As we have been pumping water out of it every day for watering the vegetable garden and one day a week in rotation on each of the orchards. Luckily, there was still water in the bottom 2 of the 4 dams that we had built in a ‘key-line’ system across our land, so as to harvest and store as much of the rain fall as possible. 

I get a little bit edgy when the top dam is almost empty like this at the start of summer. We may need 50,000 litres of water in a hurry if a bush fire breaks out near us. I like to be prepared. So I have already gone around and started up and tested all the petrol fire fighting pumps to make sure that they are in good condition and working well. Particularly that they start on the first or second pull of the starter cord. There is no time to be messing around with an engine that won’t start in an emergency.

I use 1 of our 4 different petrol driven fire fighting pumps to pump the water up from the lower dam, up to the little top dam closest to the house. The pump is built in a carrying frame and is not too heavy, so I can lift it into the wheel barrow and walk it down to the dam bank, then drag the lengths of plastic piping into place. It’s all set up with the various fittings already attached to the ends of the pipe. I keep the pipes sealed at both ends with screw-on caps, so that small animals and ants don’t build nests in there during the long periods of non-usage over winter.

The little top dam is closest to the house and was the first dam that we got built back in 1976. It has the solar powered electric pump on it that we use for most of our watering and irrigation. I have kept the long lengths of 50mm dia polythene pipe that I bought after the fire to do this transfer. This is the 2nd time that I have used it.

This works well and gives us plenty of water for the next couple of months of summer. But then, before I can congratulate myself. I rains for 5 days and on one of those days, it rains hard enough for the water to flow down the street and into the culvert drain and into the dam, topping it up just a little bit more. It makes me feel more relaxed about our capacity to cope here when there is water in the dam.

With the heat of summer comes the fruit, and with the fruit comes the fruit fly. Nearly all the the new dwarf fruit trees in the stone-fruit orchard have a crop on them this year. We have gone around and tip pruned all the trees. This summer-pruning keeps the trees in good shape as they grow and develop. We also pick off a lot of the small developing crop to reduce the load on the branches, as a really heavy crop can snap the branches due to the weight of the fruit. There are only two of use here, so we don’t want or need a heavy crop. I fill two wheel barrow loads of small fruit and prunings. 

I have been spraying the trees every two weeks or so since October, – when it isn’t raining, with organic approved sprays for both fruit fly and codling moth. I missed a couple of months while I was away working in Korea, but got back to it when I returned. However, the recent rains have played havoc with my ability to spray, as these are all water based organic sprays, they simply wash off in the rain. They aren’t cheap either at $25 to $35 per packet, which yields 4 to 5 sprays.

I have also infected the apples, pears and quinces with parasitic wasps eggs of ’trichogramma’ wasps. These are bred to hatch out and predate the codling moth and other caterpillars. I haven’t used them before, so have no idea how effective they are.

I also built a few steel triangular housings for codling moth pheromone lures. These work by attracting the codling moths with the scent and then catching them on sticky paper inside the lure. These are working. I can see half a dozen little coding moths inside the lure stuck to the sticky paper. I’ve also been tying hessian bandages around the tree trunks, but so far I’m yet to find a caterpillar in there. This definitely hasn’t worked so far. I also added a ring of sticky bandage around the trunks as well. This also hasn’t yielded any results – so far. My last approach has been to hang empty milk bottles in the trees with cut-out windows, and spreading ‘Spinosad’ fruit fly attractant jelly inside. I use it inside the milk bottles to stop it being washed off in the rain.

Lastly, I re-filled the old ‘DakPot’ style female fruit fly lures with new hormone baits. When I emptied the old ones at the end of winter, there were 50 or so dead fruit flys in each of them. So this does work. It doesn’t stop the female fruit flys from stinging the fruit, but it reduces the numbers of flies by eliminating a lot of the males out of the system.

We still have fruit fly problems, but I presume that it has been significantly reduced by my efforts. Well, I have to tell myself that don’t I?

Otherwise, why am I wasting my time like this with all these organic techniques, when I could so easily just spray the whole orchard with dieldrin or some other horrific poison? All the fruit for sale in the big supermarkets is sprayed with chemicals. S what are my options? Buy poisoned fruit, or try and grow clean, organic fruit? We are trying to live a pesticide free, low-key, creative, organic, carbon constrained, Post-modern peasant lifestyle. Everything costs more and takes longer and needs constant attention, but we are committed to living it.

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

Arts Trail – Open Studio 2024

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We will be part of the Southern Highlands Arts Trail – Open Studios on the 2nd, 3rd and 4th weekends in November.

I’m back from my work in Korea and I hit the ground running. All the seeds and seedlings that I planted in late August, just before I left for Korea, were all burnt off in the severe frost event that swept through here in early September. However, all the over-wintering vegetables like peas, broad beans, asparagus and the brassicas are all thriving. So that is what we are eating at every meal these days. 



Because we only eat what we grow, our diet tends to go in long stretches of similar meals, we vary the actual mix for variety but I’ll be glad when the first of the summer crops comes on. That is always zucchini, they are so fast out of the starting blocks, along with radishes. 

However, I know that I’ll be glad to see the last of the ratatouille based summer meals and we can taste that first cauliflower again as the seasons come around. I think that it is a universal human failing to want what you don’t have. No matter how many cabbages I grow, I still hanker for a banana or a pine apple every now and then.

At the moment, I am just loving the smell of the tomato foliage as I brush past it when weeding. The smell of tomato leaves offers such promise of fresh salads and the long hot days of summer to come. 

The more established spring flowers in the flower beds around the pottery were not affected by the frost, and have gone on to bloom there little buds off. Its very cheerful and uplifting to look out the studio window and see a vista of spring blooms.

After the frost. Janine went out and bought some more early seedlings to get a bit of a head start for the summer garden, and now that I’m back, I spent all of my first few days planting seeds, weeding, mulching and mowing to get the place ready for the Open Studios Arts Trail, that is being held on ther last 3 weekwnds of November. But also to guarantee our summer food supply security.IMG_0869.jpegIMG_0871.jpegIMG_0872.jpeg

Janine transplanted some wild self-sown spinach seedlings, but they didn’t all take. I filled in the gaps inbetween with some extra seeds. The vegetable garden is looking good again with all the red poppies in flower now. The bees are going full speed ahead. Their little yellow saddle bags are full and bulgeing with pollen.

We already had a lot of pots made for the open studio sale before I left for Korea, but there was also a lot of bisque ware that I had prepared for a wood kiln firing, but I just couldn’t fit it in before I had to leave. So now that I’m back I have glazed all that work and packed the wood kiln.

13 hours to 1300. I think that I have finally found to best way to burn my pre-burnt and charred dead forest of kiln fuel timber.

The citrus grove is in full bloom and you can smell the fragrance of the citrus flowers from the pottery, if the wind is in the right direction. 

We will be open for three weekends in November, 9th/10th and 16th/17th. for the Southern Highlands Arts Trail then the ACA Open Studios, Ceramics Arts Trail that is happening Nationally on the 4th weekend of the 23rd and 24th of Nov. 

Keep us in mind and call in if you can. We have some lovely work to show you.