This weekend is the Australian Ceramics Association, Open Studios.
We will be open from 10 to 4 each day.
I have been continuing to work over the past few weeks. In particular, I have been doing some ‘kintsugi’ gold repair on a few of my pots with interesting cracks.
Some 23 carat gold really lifts a slightly damaged pot.
I have also found time to make the weekly loaf of rye bread, and a tray of rock cakes to share with our visitors over the weekend.
I have just unpacked my latest wood kiln firing, just in time for the next 3 Open Studio sales weekends.
There are mixed results, as to be expected, but less seconds than usual. So that’s good.
I’m finally getting the hang of this new kiln and its pre-burnt wood fuel.
I always want to do better, and I keep trying, but I’m happy with what I’ve got. No complaints.
Something about the journey being more important than the destination really..
I tried 10 new clay body recipes. Blending sericite with kaolin based bodies to improve workability. Also some darker bodies.
full moon through clouds
I’ve been experimenting with ash glazes
Ash ‘jun’ glaze, with a light sprinkling of natural ash deposit crystals from the wood firing.
All the pots are now cleaned and fettled, 3 days work in all that, and hopefully nothing to show for it – if I’ve done it well!
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.
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.
Here we are in the first week of spring and the hot weather was very welcome, but unseasonably hot for this time of year. Just more evidence of global heating and what’s in store for us in the future?
I have given the peaches, nectarines and almonds a 2nd spray of copper Bordeaux mix to try and minimise leaf curl and shot hole fungus spores. It needs to be done once a month during the growing season. Actually, the recommendation is for every 10 days, but who has the time? And too much copper spray drift can build up in the soil and become toxic over long periods of time. So I just do the minimum.
I don’t think that I can ever eliminate it here, just keep it under control to minimise the damage. The trees don’t seem to suffer from it too much later in the season. Perhaps it has a lot to do with the cold damp nights in early spring?
Because of the warm weather. I planted out tomatoes, zucchinis and cucumber seedlings. Plus peas, beans, sweet basil, lettuce and radish seeds. Then last night we had a cracking frost. The Weather Bureau only forecast 2 degrees for Bowral, our nearest town with a weather station, and we are usually one or two degrees warmer than that. But not so last night. However, I checked the seedlings and they are all OK in the protective cocoon of the plastic bird netting frames that cover both the orchard and vegetable garden. Lucky!
The Flanders poppies have now started to open and will be with us for the next few months. They need disturbed soil to germinate, so do best in the vegetable garden, because the soil is regularly turned over while weeding and planting. I established them in the new orchard and they did well for the first year, but as I haven’t cultivated in there since, only mown, all their seeds are lying dormant in the soil, with no new plants germinating in there.
The Cherry trees are in full bloom now as is the avocado tree. Every thing is responding to the warmth. There is so much optimism in the air now. Life is returning to all the formally dormant plants. I took a picture of the lawn behind the house. I use the term ‘lawn’ very loosely. It is actually a stretch of self sown wild grasses and weeds that we keep mown. This stretch of mown weeds has just erupted on a blue haze of tiny flowers in huge swathes. The flowers are microscopic, but there are millions of them. I tired to photograph it, but the effect on the light out there just doesn’t show up a clearly in the image. Janine tells me that it is called ’Speedwell’, but our neighbour, John Meredith used to call it ’The blue pimpernel’. What ever it is, it’s very pretty on mass.
We have just completed the last of 5 in a row, weekend workshops. Quite a busy time for us. It’s nice to have a bit of ’spare’ time now, so I’m back in the garden, just in time for spring. The asparagus is just starting to pop up, just a few at a time, here and there. The real season is still a couple of weeks off as yet, but I’m picking the biggest ones to have with our breakfast eggs.
Now that I have just a smidgen of spare time, I have mended the old wheel barrow. We bought this wheel barrow in 1976 or ’77? More or less the first year that we arrived here. We had worn out two 2nd hand ones previously. Purchasing this one was a real statement of ‘We have arrived, and we intend to cultivate this derelict place’. The bottom got rather scratched over the years and had started to rust out, becoming wafer thin and flimsy. I hate to see waste, so I stepped in and made a new base plate for the tray and fitted new bearings into the wheel hub. It’s all good for another couple of years till the next part wears out.
Repair, re-use, re-purpose.
The nights are getting slightly shorter every day. The dawn comes a little earlier each morning and its now just on light when I wake up.
It a very nice feeling to sense the return of the sun, even though it’s just a hint.
The trees in the stone fruit orchard are starting to bust into flower. This time last month there was only just the one very early peach, but now there are several trees in flower. The almonds, peaches, nectarines and the first plum tree.
We also are enjoying a very pleasant display from my floral border plantings around the pottery retaining wall.
Earlier this week, we ate the first of the new season asparagus. However, our main garden produce remains the brassicas, and will be for some time to come.
The peas have just started to climb the new twin wire trellis and have also opened their first flowers. So much to look forward to.
Last week we had a firing in the wood kiln with a bunch of amazing students. The weather held, and although it was crisp, it wasn’t too cold for the over night shifts.
After the unpacking, we all got stuck in and spent a couple of hours after lunch carting, stacking and splitting wood.
I had spent a couple of days during the cooling period, chainsawing fallen dead trees out in our forest. I had to do a bit of clearing to make a turning circle, and then snigging out the logs with chains into the clearing, to be cut up into ‘hob’ lengths for our bourry box fire box.
In the garden, I’m picking winter veggies, mostly brassicas and then dining on roasted vegetables.
In the pottery, I have been making some small batches of experimental new clay bodies based on my local weathered basaltic gravel that I make my Balmoral Blackware from. Just small 5 kg batches. I have no idea how they will turn out, but there is only one way to find out, and that is to make some pots out of them and fire them. I’m planning to fire them in the wood kiln before I go to Korea to work next month. If I can find the time to fit it all in in time. If not, then it will be when I get back.
Winter brings on the truffle season, so we are enjoying French Black truffles very thinly sliced over our beautiful chickens scrambled eggs. Just another black treat in this season.
We keep the truffles in a container of rice in the fridge, so that we can the full truffle flavour in the eggs and the rice. The infused rice is used for truffle flavoured risotto for dinner.
I think that I prefer soft scrambles eggs on toast with the truffle shaved on top, but as we have two good sized truffles this year, we also try dicing and micro planning the truffle into the egg mix. I think that we get slightly more flavour in the eggs this way, but I rather like bending over my breakfast and inhaling deeply to catch the delicate fragrance while I can see the round black slices on top of the deep yellow of the eggs. It’s a feast for both the eyes and the nose.
Roll on the seasons. Next stop is spring!
We have been having some good cleansing frosts this last week or so. White and crunchy, this is good to clean out any remnants of fruit fly in the orchard. It also helps to set the chemical clock in the stone fruit trees that need a few hours of very cold weather to make the next seasons flowers fertile. This is called their ‘low chill hours’.
Inside, it’s been a busy time, as usual here. Janine is back from her trip up north, and I have been cleaning out the loft area above the clay making and rock crusher rooms. There is a space up there that is sort of a loft, but it was never intended to be a useful space. Just a way of enclosing the noise and dust from clay making and rock crushing in the small ground floor rooms. The space above them just had ’stuff’ stored up there. Mostly left over insulation bats and silver paper sisalation. Plus half a dozen mixed sheets and off-cuts of thin bracing ply wood, that I had used for the ceilings of the throwing room and gallery.
The only access to this ‘loft’ area was, until recently, by bringing in a ladder. A while ago the idea crossed my mind that we could use it as a place where students could sleep over when they stayed to do wood firings.
In the past, before the fire, they used to pitch tents in the orchard, or stay in local bnbs. Sometimes, even sleeping in their cars.
We recently built a stair case to get up there safely. Using a lot of scrap timber, heavy duty ply, and our own home grown and milled pine boards that we had left over and stored. It turned out really well and cost next to nothing. I built it in two days with assistance of Janine’s brother John, a retired carpenter. I couldn’t have done it alone. John was the brains and I only assisted.
So while Janine was away I began cleaning it out and used the left over rockwool to insulate the ceiling/roof and then panel it with the ply wood. Amazingly, I didn’t have to buy anything to do the job. I was able to do it all by using what was already stacked up there! Even down to the box of ’TEK’ screws.
I started by building a safety railing/balustrade along the edge, using some off cuts of poly carbonate from the car port wall.
Stuffing the rockwool into the roof was a bit like easing a compliant orangutang into the roof cavity, all soft and fury.
I used old tomato stakes from the garden to act as the extra several pairs of hands needed to hold up the ply wood, while I got the first few roofing screws into the sheets to secure them in place.
We were gifted the tatami mats from a lovely friend who didn’t need them anymore. They work really well in our new loft space. Both as a tea room space and as a place where students can choose to sleep, if needed.
We have also installed 2 single beds up there as well, on the other side.
A couple of years ago, I bought an old Venco pug mill from my friend John Edye, who has retired from making now. I cleaned it of aluminium corrosion and painted the inside with metal primer. I have use it for 2 years now and this week, I pulled it down, and cleaned it out to change clay bodies, and inspect the lining.
I was so happy to see that the wire brushing and priming that I had done previously was holding very well indeed. Nothing needed doing. So I put it all back together again and made a new batch of wood firing clay body for an up-coming workshop.
Clay making is a dusty business. I wear some OH&S clothing to minimise the dust in my hair and on my clothes. There are probably expensive versions of this stuff, but I use a garbage bag with holes cut out for my head and arms, then a theatre hair net and a standard dust mask. I have an exhaust fan with a flexible ’snorkel’ that hovers over the mixer and sucks most of the airborne dust out of the room. It works
After all the clay has been twice pugged, bagged and stored. We move all the machines out of the way and mop the floor clean, before reinstating everything as it was before and ready to go again.
The pottery studio was all cleaned up and all the shelves were full for the recent Long Weekend Open Studio Arts Trail.
We are enjoying beautiful crisp and cold days here nowThe days are so much shorter and the nights correspondingly long. I light the fire in the lounge room almost every night. So that brings on the regular job of collecting, cutting, stacking and splitting fire wood. I use about one wheelbarrow of wood every two days. so I soon get through a pile. We are not short of wood. The catastrophic bush fire here 5 years ago killed hundreds of trees in our forest. The hard part is the dangerous job of felling them and then chain-sawing them up into suitable lengths. Fortunately, I have a good pile of sawn logs in hand and ready to split.
The overnight temperatures are getting down to 1 degree, tomorrow night is forecast to be zero oC but we are not getting regular hard frosts yet. In the 70’s when we came here, we used to get solid frosts starting in May and lasting 3 or 4 months. Those days are long gone, and with the crisis of global heating running rampant, I doubt that we shall see them again. It amazing to me that I still talk to a few die hards that seem to think that global heating is a media plot.
The disappearance of frosts here and the very early fruiting of our berry canes, up to 4 weeks earlier than they did in the 70’s are very obvious examples that we live with. The news that its the hottest year ever recorded. That record being broken year on year, the break-up of the ice sheets and the disappearance of the glaciers, yet one major party wants to withdraw from the Paris accord, presumably because they think that there are enough climate sceptic voters out there that will vote for the ‘fake news’ agenda? I wonder how bad it has to get before the penny drops?
I have done everything that I can think of, and can afford to do, to reduce my carbon footprint. It’s a huge undertaking to change your life around, but as I am a greenie, and always have been, I was brought up that way, long before the Greens were even thought of. I have been aware of the difficulty of addressing climate and environmental degradation for decades, so I started making the changes needed in my life slowly but surely over time. Replacing old worn out appliances one by one as they died. We started with a front loading washing machine that used much less water and power. I did my research and got one that didn’t need a heater, so we could use our own solar hot water. (most washing machines only have one cold water inlet hose.)
Next, in 1983 we replaced our 21 year old old VW beetle with a small 3 cylinder, 1 litre engine car. Very fuel efficient. We now have an electric car. In fact we have now replaced almost every petrol driven item in our life. Car, lawn mowers, chain saws, water pumps. The only petrol driven things that I can’t easily replace are the fire fighting pumps. They still need to be fuel driven to get the reliable independent high-power needed in an emergency. We have 17kW of Solar panels and 2 Tesla batteries. This is sufficient to run everything that we own including our 2 electric kilns and to charge the car.
It has taken 40 years to make these changes slowly, incrementally and painlessly. It would be wasteful to trash a functioning appliance with all its embedded energy while it still had life in it. If something isn’t completely worn out, it can at least be sold 2nd hand to someone who needs it, to keep it working and producing effectively until it is actually dead. One of the things that we have worn out is the hydraulic wood splitter. However, I took a chance and replaced the dead 5 HP petrol engine, after 10 years of hard work, with a single phase 3 HP electric motor – on a long extension cord. People said that it couldn’t be done. It wouldn’t have enough grunt. That was 20 years ago and that little single phase motor is still going strong, working well, and running on sunshine instead of petrol!
Where as a 4 stroke petrol engine has only one power stroke out of 4 revolutions. An electric motor has constant torque every revolution, so 3 Hp of electric motor is equal to 5 HP of petrol driven HP, or so it seems.
The garden is still feeding me with all the usual winter veggies.
I have even just picked, what may be the last harvest of tomatoes. But I’ve learnt to expect a few more ripe red tomatoes in amongst the thicket of weeds and herbs where self sown plants do well in the cold weather, avoiding the extreme chill. I don’t always see the fruit until it turns red, but they keep turning up, just as they have done in years past. I have also picked some of the last hot chillies and dried them to be cut up into fine fragments to add a pinch of heat to winter dishes in the coming months.
These cold short days remind me that is time to do the fruit tree pruning and spraying lime sulphur to deter leaf curl and shot hole fungus. some of the earliest fruit trees are already producing fruiting buds and the earliest blue berry bushes are already in flower, while others still have leaves on and are not yet deciduous.
Blueberry flowers in mid June.
Because I decided to live this ‘real’ hands-on life – as opposed to a virtual reality version of life. I am kept busy all the time with a series of activities that all need doing, one after the other, all through the year. Life has its cycles. I see them coming around ever quicker as I age. Tempus fujit indeed.
The garlic that I planted back in March is up and doing well, but is in need of its 3rd weeding session. Garlic doesn’t tolerate competition, so if I don’t keep the weeds under control, it wont prosper. I’m very fond of garlic. I eat a lot of it, so I need to grow a lot of it to keep up. I can’t bend down to do the weeding for hours at a time, so I just do the job in small bursts, a bit at a time, every few days.
I’ve just dug over another part of the vegetable garden and planted the 3rd batch of brassicas. I have to keep popping in a few more of each type of brassica every so often to ensure a steady supply of winter greens. I read recently that brassicas have a long cultivated history, going back to the Greeks and Romans.
I grow my own food, I built my own house, I learnt to repair my own laptop, washing machine, lawn mower, and other appliances. I have always serviced my vehicles. These are gentle but radical acts of rebellion and defiance of a wasteful system that is designed to keep us all in debt and is filling the world with polluting waste dumps of superseded consumer items, filthy air, polluted water and an overheating climate. We all need to do better.
On the Long Weekend I will be opening our Gallery for the ‘Pop-Up’ Open Studio Arts Trail.
I have been hard at it making new work for this show. I have been making some very fine and thinly potted bowls decorated with the motif of “From Flames to Flowers’. This is a motif that i developed without knowing last year after undergoing some remarkable EMDR trauma therapy.
One week I was painting flames on my pots, the sorts of images that had been haunting my dreams since the fire, then the next week, after just a few sessions of EMDR, the flames had morphed into flowers. To be truthful. I had made a concerted effort to plant patches and strips of English cottage garden beds around the garden and driveway since the fire to try and make the place a bit more cheery and less blackened. I really needed cheering up, having been burnt out 3 times in 50 years.
I really like the motif, so I am still using it. It still cheers me up. It’s optimistic and positive. I have added a little bit of gold lustre to give it a bit of ‘bling’ as well. I have been using some lovely translucent sericite porcelain, so that when I hold the pots up to the light, I can see the painting on the out side of the bowl from the inside, not just the outline of the image, but even the colours of the flowers. They are pretty special to me.
The other work that I have been doing is black and white sgraffito graphic decoration, again mostly on porcelain, but I have also made some stoneware mugs. They are still in the kiln as I type. They’ll still be warm on Saturday morning, coming straight from the kiln.
The motif for this series are the cherry trees in our Chekhov orchard, and the blue/black bowerbirds that come and steal our fruit. The Cherry Thief. The subject is as old as gardening itself. I remember that William Morris designed some wall paper back in the 1880’s called ‘the strawberry thief’. This new work of mine is totally unrelated in Character, and very different, but the subject is exactly the same.
I call the series, ‘Plant it and they will come’. And they do come.
When we came here 48 years ago. There were hardly any birds here, just a few kookaburras. As we developed the gardens and orchards, dug dams, made compost heaps and planted native shrubs, we created habitat, and they came! Suddenly we had to start thinking of how we might cover our fruit trees and vegetable beds from the marauders!
Within a few years, we had hundreds of birds living here, working the rich environment, with dams for water, open spaces to forage in, trees and shrubs for cover, and fruit to eat. We created this oasis and they occupied the territory. We planted it and they came!
I will be open from Saturday to Monday over the long weekend, from 9 to 5 each day. Please call in if you are in the area.
I have plenty of off-street parking, tea, coffee and cake, toilet facilities, and we are wheel chair friendly. There will even be a glass of wine in the afternoons.
We have just completed the 2nd of our sericite porcelain workshops. They both went well and everyone seemed to get something out of it.
We advertised it as intermediate to advanced level, and everyone was suitably skilled to be able to handle the slightly more complex and difficult advanced techniques.
We were aiming to teach those advanced techniques, and everyone was keen to extend their skills.
The weather has cooled down a lot recently, so we had to light the stove to get the air a bit warmer in the studio over night to speed up the drying process. At the end of the first days throwing. I lit the fire and kept it going until after 10pm with the ceiling fan running all night. With this combination of warm air and moving air , we managed to get nearly all the pots dry enough to start turning on Sunday morning.
As my contribution to our shared lunchtime meals. I cooked a couple of tarts to be shared for our lunches.
I made one savory home grown spinach and cheese tart from our garden with 3 cheeses. Ricotta, for the main filling with finely diced fetta for a little bit of texture, then some gorgonzola for a little of that tangy flavour that it imparts.
The other tart was sweet for after lunch, and made from our home grown and preserved quinces in an almond frangipane base.
Both made in blind baked puff pastry casings. They dissapeared pretty quickly. It’s a very good feeling to be able to share our preserved summer garden goodness and excess with others.
During the week inbetween the workshops, I continued to make and fire my sgraffito porcelain pieces that I have been working on for a while.
It’s good to see more of them coming out of the kiln now, all shiny and transparent with the images of the bowerbirds stealing our cherries from the Chekov orchard.
I will be taking part in the ‘Pop-Up’ Southern Highlands Arts Trail Open Studios sale on the long weekend of 8th, 9th and 10th of June. Save the date!.
We have completed the 2nd wheel throwing weekend workshop here in the new pottery.
We are recently returned from the Easter long weekend at the National Folk Festival in Canberra. Beautiful music, and a chance to catch up with old friends that we haven’t seem since last years festival.
Now it’s back to work in the pottery finishing off some sgraffito pots that I left unfinished in the pottery damp cupboard. It’s a great luxury to have a damp cupboard in the pottery. We managed to get by without one for the past 48 years here in Balmoral Village in all 3 of our previous potteries, where we lived and worked on earth floors. I am very grateful to my friend John Edye, who sold me his beautifully crafted wooden damp cupboard with a water bath in the floor. It looks good and works a treat. Thank you John.
I’m enjoying the sgraffito decorating technique that I learnt from my friend Warren Hogden a few months ago, when Warren and Janine taught a sgraffito slip decorating workshop here. I was the TA, assisting at that workshop. But I was really engaged and enthused, so have tried my hand at this lovely, gentle technique, and I’m really enjoying it.
Thank you Warren and Janine.
I’ve been engaged with the idea of the bower birds stealing cherries from the orchard.
Tonight my Fingers Smell of Garlic 
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