Category Archives: In the pottery

Spring is Here.

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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.

Blackware, Blossom, Black truffles and Brassicas

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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!

Clay making and tatami floor tea room

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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 solstice is almost here

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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.

Open Studio Sale this weekend

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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.

Two Sericite Porcelain Workshops completed

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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!.

2nd Throwing Weekend Workshop Completed

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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.

1st. Weekend Workshop Throwing Class completed

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We have just completed another weekend workshop. This time a throwing class. I advertised one and filled two weekends, so we will back in the studio again with the 2nd group next weekend for the 2nd one.

Everyone seemed to enjoy them selves and got something out of it. We had Len Smith here with us for the weekend to have 3 tutors for the 8 students. Len has so much teaching experience, it’s great for the students to have a third point of view. He’s also great company.

I spent the week pugging clay and prepping the throwing room, and during the time in-between, I kept on with my sgraffito decoration, and got a solar powered, stoneware glaze firing done.

These red and black cups are experiments in a combination of Sgraffito and inlay.

Just black slip inlay on these cups.

Just sgraffito on this bowl

In the evenings, I made another batch of tomato passata. I have now run out of our re-cycled ‘pop top’ jars and so I have started to use the old ‘Fowler’s’ vacuum jars with clip top lids. I made a 7 litre boiler full, and reduced it down to 5 litres, enough to fill 7 of our No.27 Fowler’s jars. I have no idea how Fowlers came up with their numbering system, but as they are so old, I suspect that it represents fluid ounces? 

I Googled it and 27 imperial fluid ounces = 770 mls. So that sounds like it ought to be right.

I also made this weeks loaf of rye bread.

For the workshop lunch, I made a flan or tart with a baked cottage cheese base and a ratatouille topping. That didn’t last very long.

The coming week will be more of the same as we repeat it all over again.

The workshop is all cleaned and mopped and ready to go.

The workshop looks beautiful tonight in the glow of the pink sunset.

This image of the workshop by Janine 

The End Of Summer

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It’s the end of summer, and all of the fruit is finished in the orchards, this month we have been busy with other jobs.

I have been going to build a new chicken run and chook house for a long time. The old one was very small, built in just one day straight after the fire by our good friends Cintia and Andy who came to volunteer their help at what ever was most needed. The old, very solid, and palatial chicken house was attached to the garden shed, which was part of the pottery extension. In the fire everything burnt to the ground.

Andy and Cintia knocked up the replacement house out of whatever we could find on site that wasn’t burnt. At 1.8 metres square, it wasn’t really very big, but was OK for just 2 surviving chooks.

This weeks new chicken mansion is built into the gap between the new orchard and the old mud brick garden shed. It has access through a small gate into the covered orchard, where the chickens can explore and scratch all day in safety, without being swooped on, or chased by local dogs or foxes.

Janine suggested to paint it pink, so I thought to name it ‘Gallus Hilton’. Then she thought it might be better pale mauve, So it might get called ‘The Gallus Palace’.

What ever we call it, the new chook shed and run is the best one of the 4 that I have built here over the 48 years here. It’s still rusty recycled iron colour. I re-used the old corrugated roofing iron that we took off the Old School roof when Andy helped me to re-roof it last year. 130 year old roofing iron still has a lot of life left in it yet, as well as so much embedded history on this site.

It did occur to me that it is a bit strange that a man over 60 might need 4 different ladders to build a simple chook shed

This new run is 6m x 4m. So plenty big enough to be comfortable if we are away and they are locked in. It is completely fabricated out of steel, so shouldn’t burn in the next fire.

When its too hot outside in the middle of the day or raining, then I divide my time between the kitchen preserving excess garden produce, or over in the pottery.

The sweet basil crop in peaking just now in the garden, so its time to make pesto.

In the pottery, I’ve been extending my sgraffito on sericite work to include the negative/positive slip inlay. I tried mixing the two techniques and introducing some underglaze colour as well. I don’t know how these will turn out, as I’m packing the glaze kiln tomorrow.

I’ve found that the sorts of sgraffito tools for sale here are somewhat limited, so I have been forging and hammering my own from rusty nails. They are rather nice, somewhat rustic and I can make them any size. 

Janine has been using our current excess of passion fruit to make passion fruit and cream flummery. It’s quite easy to make, just passion fruit and cream whipped up together and then frozen. Janine takes it out of the freezer every so often and re-whips it to keep it light and fluffy while it freezes.

It goes quite well with our excess of blueberries as a desert.

That was summer!

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.