Category Archives: maintenance

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.

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.

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.

Our re-built old wood splitter

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This last few of weeks, We have been teaching weekend workshops each weekend. Working in the garden and orchards in between time, but in particular, I have been re-building and restoring my formally beautiful hydraulic wood splitter. This machine was brand new and only used twice before the 2019 catastrophic bush fire. Our Lazarus wood splitter in the Phoenix Pottery Workshop. I need to get it going again, for our wood firing weekend workshop.

It used to look like this. All new and shiny.

Then after the inferno it looked like this!  Just the RSJ column of the splitter standing in a clearing in the burnt out forest, that used to be our kiln wood shed.

Today, with a lot of effort by my friend Ross, who rebuilt the hydraulic ram and other bits for me, it looked like this.

The 2nd hand tyres went flat every week and continually needed pumping up. I finally took them off and got inner tubes put in them. 

I replaced the burnt-out hydraulic control lever. This is the gadget that makes the ram move up and down. 

Then I turned up an adaptor unit on my metal lathe, made from some old aluminium irrigation pipe off cuts that I used for the new orchard netting frame. They were roughly cut to over-size with the angle grinder, then machined to exact tolerances. Finally I re-worked an old 3 HP electric motor that Ross gave me, making an improvised power adaptor/converter.

The last job was to give it a coat of zinc primer paint.

It is now functional again and running on sunshine, instead of petrol. So much better for everyone.

A damaged, but reliable, solid and still working, thing of beauty.

A self portrait! – without perhaps, so much beauty!

Repair, reuse, recycle.

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.

Winter, Everything is dormant – except us

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

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

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

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

At 4.30, they put them selves to bed. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After the long weekend Open Studio Sale

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As soon as the Pop-Up long weekend Open Studio sale was over, we got busy tackling the next big urgent job.

That job is dealing with the cracking and spalling of the big sandstone blocks that we used to make the retaining wall behind the pottery.

I knew when I bought them that they were rejects. I naively thought that they were cheap because they were split in an irregular way and not square, but tapered. That didn’t worry me, as I could arrange them so that they had a reasonably flat and square face outwards. I could hide the unevenness in behind the grave back-fill.

However, as it has transpired, the real problem with them, and the reason for them being very cheap, is that they are not hard sandstone, but rather soft and sugary.

Bummer! 

Over the past 3 years that they have been sitting there year in, year out, through the rain storms and winter frosts, they have begun to spall. Water soaks in to the porous stone and when the frosts come and the ice expands, bits of the face split off. Recently we noticed that the blocks were beginning to split down the centre, not just the face and edges. This is serious stuff. If not dealt with immediately, the stones will start to loose their stability.

I decided that the best approach would be to cap the stones with some sort of waterproofing system. We had a load of old roofing slates stacked away under the railway station. They came off the roof of my brothers house before it was demolished many years ago. We always intended to use them as floor tiles, but never did. So we have plenty of these old weathered slates. We needed to get them out from under the floor and give them a good scrape and clean, then a good scrub and a wash to get all the grunge of history off them, so that we could get the cement to stick securely. 

We spent 2 half days fettling and washing the slates. A cold, wet job for the first of winter after a cracking good frost.

I took the truck down to the sand and gravel yard each day to pick up half a tonne of sand and 7 bags of cement each day for the 3 days that it took us to get the job done. We employed a young, local guy to give us a hand, as we are getting too old for this kind of heavy work on our own these days.

Using our very old ‘wabi-sabi’ Steam-Punk cement mixer that we bought 2nd hand for $50, 35 years ago. We mixed 14 loads a day and got through 1  1/2 tonnes of sand and 20 bags of cement to render a 70mm thick bed of mortar over the stones to get a continuous straight level, thick enough to be water proof and strong enough to cap the stones and support the slate capping.

Time will tell if this has worked well enough to deter any further spalling. I did notice that there was enough embedded heat energy in the stones, such that after the frost melted in the morning, the slates were very soon dry, except where the edge extends over the stonewall to create a clear drip line. The extended slate stayed wet, frozen and cold.

We still have a lot of paving to do, but everything in its own time. This job was an absolute priority now that winter is here and the frosts are back.

Just when you thought that it was safe to go back out into the garden

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It was only last week that I thought that we had finally finished with the tomato crop, but surprise surprise. 2 more baskets full. and now all that remains are a few stragglers that will be fine over the next few weeks for salads or fried up for brekkie. The last 8 jars have taken us up towards 90 jars! A lifetime record for us.

This is definitely the last batch for this year. A new project will be to find extra ways of cooking with tomato passata that we haven’t tried yet. If you have a favourite recipe, please contact me.

The saffron crop keeps on coming, bit by bit. An extra crocus flower opens each day and we carefully pick the stamens out and dry them on a paper towel in the kitchen.

We wont be retiring on this new crop anytime soon, but we are looking forward to making one dish of saffron rice when we have the whole crop harvested.

Over the weekend we were busy in the garden and yard. Janine decided to burn off the pile of hardwood stumps that we generated from all the clearing along the new fence line. I’m pleased to report that we have had no more deer inside the garden since the fence went up. However, we have seen fresh scats outside, and along the fence line. So for the time being, the fence is working. Now to deal with the pile of stumps.

Janine worked very hard, all day, both days, patrolling along the fence line and taking out the small trees that had been pushed over and out of the way of the fence. Using her electric chain saw, she could move anywhere along the line and chop up the trees, then drag them back to the bonfire pile. In this way, she kept it going all day.

I helped out intermittently with the toy tractor, moving heavier pieces, but I was also busy.

I made two trips to the sand and gravel yard in Mittagong, a 50 km round trip, to buy a couple of cubic meters of mushroom compost. I ploughed over the English cottage garden and also along the front of the new pottery shed, spread the compost, chicken manure and lime, then re-tilled the mix into the soil with the cultivator. A few packets of English Cottage Garden seed mix, and a few punnets of seedlings later, and the new spring garden is underway.

It doesn’t look much just now, but in a couple of months it will come to life, once all the seeds germinate and come into flower. Below is how it used to look.

The strip along the driveway is a new venture, to try and give a bit of a colourful lift to the front of the pottery. I hope that there will be a bit of a splash of colour in time for the mid year ‘Pop-Up’ studio sale on 10, 11 and 12th of June. Save the date. Certainly it will be in full bloom for the December studio sale.

Once I got the gardening done. I was back to help Janine with the bonfire. There was a big pile of huge pine logs left over from the bush fire that burnt everything here. When we milled all the burnt pine trees into slabs and planks to line the pottery, there were a few difficult logs left over. I had thought that I might cut up these last few logs for kiln fuel. But as it has taken me 3 1/2 years to get my act together on this job, it is far too late, I’ve been sitting on my lazy arse too much and these pine logs have all started to go rotten. A shame, but what can you do? I tried splitting them, but they were mostly pithy and full of mush.

I sorted out the better ones and split those and got another half a stack of hob wood logs for the kiln. Better than nothing. But they won’t add many calories to the kiln firing, maybe just a little extra ash?

All the rest were just too big, too heavy, too rotten or too branched and knotty to do anything with. So as we had the fire still burning on the Sunday, I added them all to the bonfire and got rid of the ugly, difficult mess.

I’m getting old now, so I can’t man-handle those big, heavy rounds of pine like I used to. I don’t want to do myself so sort of damage wrestling with them. Those logs are 670 mm long and 600 mm dia. and probably the best part of 100kgs. Just too big for me now.

However the little tractor is the best investment that I have made in a long while. I bought it for myself when I turned 60. I traded up to a new model with a front-end 4 in 1 bucket. So much more useful than the old one, that was just a glorified mower and rotary hoe. I was able to push, roll and cajole those big logs onto the pile and keep them all up close together all day as they slowly burnt away. As the big logs burn, they get smaller and slowly move away from each other, then the fire can dawdle and start to go out. It is necessary to keep pushing the lumps closer together, to keep them burning fiercely.

The site looks so much better now and will be lovely after I get in there and scrape it all smooth, then keep it mowed and clear. That pile of huge lumps of wood were just too much work to chop up, so being able to burn them away was the right solution to get the site clean again. It’s taken me 3 1/2 years to getting around to dealing with them, but it is almost done now. Another job ticked off the list.

This is all that remains on Monday morning. it will be all gone by tonight.

Preparing for the first wood firing of the year.

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This week is the mid point of autumn, Half way between the equinox and the solstice.

The weather is certainly a lot cooler and we notice that the days are so much shorter. I really like this slightly cooler alternative the long days of summer. Our summer wasn’t so hot as it used to be during the decade of el-nino years. These last few summers have been so much nicer, cooler and wetter, everything has turned green and grown its head off. We have harvested more tomatoes then we have ever grown. It seems that all the planets aligned for the tomatoes. I haven’t counted the bottles, but there must be over 40 jars. Quite enough to last us well over 12 months, possibly even 2 years?

We went to Canberra over Easter for the National Folk Festival.

We caught up with people that we haven’t seen for over 4 years, as we were confined to home because of;

1.  The fire, 

2. The on-going clean-up,

3. The rebuilding,

4. Covid, followed by a year of lock down. 

It’s only now that we feel that we have the time, space and safety to go out again. Womad was on again this year, but we chose to stay home, save time and money and get on with some of the long list of jobs. However, we decided to go to Canberra for ‘The National’, as we can drive to Canberra in just 2 hours in our electric car. Travelling to Adelaide for Womad is looking more and more extravagant and carbon intensive, regardless of whether we drove or flew, we were responsible for burning loads of carbon each way. I just can’t justify it anymore.

The long weekend of music was wonderful, so many great acts, too many to list, but a few stood out.

The ‘We Mavericks’, Lindsay Martin and Virginia vigenser, were excellent. We have had them here in our home to perform for us in one of our house concerts a few years back. I believe that we were their second only performance together. They get better and better.

Billy Bragg was also really good. He was the best that I have ever seen him. Powerful voice, smack on key and few very powerful, short spoken interludes between songs, on why we should care about the state of things and the world. He also explained what he is doing to make a difference. Very inspiring. However, it crossed my mind that he must owe a tremendous carbon debt?

We also enjoyed Gleny Rae Virus, Leroy Johnson, (above) the Park Ranger from Mutawintji National Park out near Broken Hill, and Farhan Shah & SufiOz. singing Sufi devotional chants. + many more.

Back at home we have been Splitting wood for the kiln firing, and working in the garden. 

We met up with our friends Susan and Dev in Canberra, and they called in here on their way home to give us a hand with those jobs.

My friend Len Smith also called in and we had a little reunion. As Len, then Janine and finally myself, were Susans teachers at different times in her life, at different colleges.

Together, we ripped out 3 beds of waning tomatoes, that had reached the end of their productive life and added them to the compost heap.

Afterwards, I planted out lettuce and radish seeds as well as lettuce and spinach seedlings.

The garden suddenly looks a bit more loved again after a few weeks of minimal up-keep and absence.

My last job was to plant out 160 of our own self grown and stored garlic cloves. I should have been onto this a month ago, but better late than never.

I did two rows of 80, one of our purple garlic and the other of our white skinned variety. They have started to shoot from their skins. A very good sign that they are ready to be planted out now!

Everything takes time and time needs to be made or created by making decisions about what is most pressing and needs to be to be done NOW.

Tomorrow it is back into the pottery to unpack and repack the electric kiln for yet another bisque. Learning to Juggle my time and energy has been a life long exercise in developing this skill for me.

I want to do so much each day, Even summer days aren’t long enough. I need to triage my desires to fit my capacity to actually achieve outcomes. Added to this, I really don’t know what I’m doing most of the time.  I’m reasonably well trained in making pottery, and I have taught myself to grow vegetables and orchard fruit trees, but I have such a low basic understanding of building techniques and mechanical engineering, I just muddle through as best that I can. I rely on asking more knowledgeable friends for advice on what they would do, or where is the best place to buy the correct parts.

I’m so grateful to all of my friends for the advice and help that they have given so generously over the years.

When we built the new ‘kit-form’ tin shed for the new pottery. I paid a bunch of so called ‘expert’ tin shed builders to come onsite and erect the kit. They had experience and all the fancy gear to do the job. A bobcat loader, a scissor lift gantry and a truck load of power tools. They put the frame up OK. It is at least level and vertical. But when I asked them to screw on all the 2nd hand, grey re-cycled old rusty gal iron sheeting that I had collected to give the shed some character, they did the worst job that you could imagine. They chose to use roofing screws without any rubber ring to seal out the weather, and as a consequence, all the walls leaked in heavy weather. The windows weren’t ‘flashed-in’ correctly or at all, and leaked. The cement slab was cast with a definite hollow in the centre. The verandah wasn’t ’stepped-down’ 50 mm to stop water blowing in under the doors, so that when it rained hard, the building leaked, all the water ran to the centre of the building and pooled there. I’ve spent over a year discovering all these faults, omissions and bad workmanship and then correcting them as best that I can. If only I’d known something more about the building trades, I might have spotted these faults occurring and got them seen to at the time. But I trusted them. BIG mistake.

Our previous three potteries that burnt down were all home made on a shoe string budget mostly out of wood and other materials that we could scrounge off the side of the road on council clean-up day, or from the tip. They too had character, but a very different character. This last shed is so much better in all sorts of ways, but mostly it will be easier to defend against fire. Metal clad, metal frame with metal lining and the cavity stuffed full of insulation. All the previous buildings were made of wood and therefore were very flammable.

It seems that I have discovered all the problems with the poor workmanship in this shed now. I’ve discovered all these faults bit by bit over time and fixed them myself. The builders have shot through. There is something to be said for self-reliance.

Do it yourself, do it right the first time. I do it to the best of my ability. If it isn’t the most professional job, at least it is mine and any mistakes are honest ones. The stuff that I do has my character printed all over it. I own my mistakes, my lack of skill and my incompetence, but in the end I figure it all out and I can live with the result. At least I’m not upset with myself for ripping myself off. AND everything is done on a minuscule budget. We have never earned much money, so have learnt to live very frugally.Everyone seems to be obsessed with money these days, as if it solves everything. I heard on the news that the 3 richest Australians have more money than the bottom 10% of the nation. Pretty shocking! It’s a shame that there isn’t a way of making life a little bit more even and equitable for the disadvantaged. The Lovely and I have done very well for ourselves, being able to have built a simple, largely non-acquisitive, low carbon, organic lifestyle here, without ever having had a ‘real’ job. We’ve managed to ‘get away with it’ for all this time, living an engaged, creative, self-employed, part-time amalgam of a life. Without credit card debt or interest payments, doing almost everything ourselves. Living within our self-determined means. We’ve never been on the dole and never asked for handouts. Money may be essential in the modern world, but we don’t let it ruin our lives.

As an example of this frugal self-reliance I recently fixed up an old Chinese wood splitter. It needed a new/old/2nd hand starter and air cleaner to get the engine going again. That wasn’t too difficult. I just stole the parts off another old ruined motor that was in the barn. Best not to throw things out if they might have useful parts on them to keep another machine going for a few more years, There is a lot of embodied energy stored in those old bits of machinery. So it’s better to try to repair something old and get extra life out of it, than to give in and buy a new one. It’s also much, much, cheaper

Once I got the engine working, I decided to make it into a bigger splitter with a longer stroke. All cheap Chinese hydraulic splitters have a 600 mm. (2 ft.) hydraulic ram. That is the upper limit of their log capacity. My new kiln has a fire box length of 690/700 mm. (2’ ft, 4” inches). To give the splitter a longer stroke I decided to cut 75 mm. (3” ) off the cutting wedge to make it shorter ,and therefore add extra length to the logs that can be split.

I wasn’t sure that it would work, but it seemed a lot easier than cutting the end off the frame and welding a new section of RSJ onto the frame to make it a longer machine. 

By shortening the blade I achieved the same outcome with much less work. But an hour on the angle grinder was a bit of a chore, as 20mm thick steel plate doesn’t cut easily.

You can see in this image that the blade used to go all the way to the bottom of the backing plate. 

Scrooge’s technique of making a bigger splitter out of an old small one.

The old small engine managed the longer wood OK. I filled the truck with wood cut and split to 675mm long.  That is about enough to fire the kiln to stoneware in 14 hours.

2 1/2 stacks of Hob wood,  

A couple of piles of smaller kindling lumps for firing on the floor,

and then a couple of stacks of thinner side stoking wood for the 2nd chamber. Thanks to Dev and Susan.

I finish the day by servicing the chain saw. Best to do it when it’s fresh on my mind, even though I’m tired from all the work, fixing the splitter, then testing it out and finally stacking all the wood.

I hate it when I go to use the saw and find that it is blunt and needs servicing, So I do it straight away. Sharpen the chain, blow out the air filter, rotate the bar, fill with 2stroke and bar oil.

It doesn’t take so long and everything is ready to go again, — except me!  I need a rest.

Autumn is finally here

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We are almost half way through autumn now, the Indian summer is over and the weather has turned cooler. No more 30 degree days. This past week has been steadily in the 20’s and with rain or showers almost every day. However there are bright sunny patches in between. I’ve been working my way through the big pots that I threw to begin this throwing session, bisque firing them in the electric kiln using only pure sunshine. The recent addition of extra solar PV panels last year, bringing us up to 17 kW total and the addition of the 2nd battery, means that we are able to fire without any withdrawal from the grid. I can even fire both electric kilns to bisque at the same time, or just one kiln to stoneware. This is a great sense of independence.

With the price of gas having gone up from $1.75 a litre last year to $2.50 this year with no additional increase in the production cost. It’s just profit gouging and it’s a complete rip off. 

So I’m very proud to be able to fire my kilns with my own sunshine. And drive my car off it as well! It’s amazing that there is enough to go around, but we still export our excess on the days when we are not firing. We even manage to export a little in the early stages of the firing.

This is from our most recent electricity bill. Our daily usage is down to 0.76 kWh per day. Down from 1.64 kWh per day the previous year. When we were doing more firings.

The average Australian 2 person household like ours is using 17.6 kWh per day. So, it seems that all our efforts to tread gently in the world are paying off. We run a very efficient, low energy house hold. 

Some time later this year, or maybe next, We will be getting rid of our old LP gas kitchen stove. That is our last big investment in our conversion to fully solar electric living. I’m waiting for induction cookers to become more widely available and hopefully a lot cheaper. I have already installed a twin induction cooktop in the pottery. It was only $350. Very affordable.

A sign that autumn is well under way here is the change in the Cherry trees, as they shut down and prepare for winter. They are early to fruit in spring, and correspondingly, the first to loose their leaves in the autumn. Our bedroom looks out on to the Chekov orchard. We currently have a carpet of yellow leaves out side our window, that is slowly turning brown.

Janine has been collecting more hazel nuts. So far she has picked up 3 baskets full, and there are still more to come. First, she shells them, then checks them for nuts, by bouncing them on the table. If they bounce, they are empty and are discarded. Not worth the energy to crack them to find them empty. The full shells are then cracked open and the nuts are dried in the sunny window for a while. Later she roasts them in a pan on the stove to bring out that superb hazelnut flavour. It’s an ongoing job that is spread over a couple of months. Fitted in here and there whenever the time allows. Most often in front of the idiot box — if there is anything at all worth wasting time on, which is an increasingly rare event

The hazels have already started flowering again. The male ‘catkin’ flowers are out now. I often wonder why? As the female flowers don’t come out until the trees are dormant and have lost all their leaves. The female flowers are quite insignificant and very hard to see, just a pin head sized red dot. They don’t attract any pollinators at all and are wind pollinated, so we have planned out our hazel nuttery of a dozen trees, in such a way as all the best pollinator varieties are up-wind of the predominant winter gales that blow the male pollen down among all the waiting and fecund female flowers.

This is the Hazel nuttery and I am the Nutter. Two of these hazels were bought with an inoculation of French Black truffle spores. So we have some vague hope of truffles in the future — maybe? I planted a dozen different truffle inoculated trees of various types and they all got burnt to the ground in the fire. Only 3 trees re-shot from their root stocks. As truffles are a fungus that lives underground. I’m hopeful that the spores are still active and will one day produce a little surprise for us. But I’m not holding my breath.

In the pottery, I have been making smaller pots that are quicker to dry, so that they will all be ready for a wood kiln firing after Easter. I’m not sure if my skin is getting thinner and less robust with age, or these recent clay body experiments are just more aggressive, but I’ve found that I’m wearing away the skin on my finger tips so much more readily than I used to when I’m turning.

I used to only wear rubber ‘finger stalls’ when turning rather dryish hard stone porcelain bodies. Now I find that I have to wear them all the time when turning.

I’m really pleased with my home made larger format wheel trays that I built for the shimpo wheels. I can turn for an hour without filling them up. They hold 50 bowls worth of turnings.

I have also been throwing on my kick wheel as well. It has a decent sized tray. I made 50 bowls on it yesterday. I started with a dry tray and ended with an almost dry tray. I have learnt to throw with a minimal amount of water. Just a few drips and splashes make their way off the wheel head.

Our local council is offering a bulky rubbish clean-up day this week. So the village has been dragging out it’s unwanted lumpy rubbish on to the side of the road to be taken away. Furniture, mattresses, electrical appliances, etc., it’s all piled up in clumps out in the street.

We have nothing to put out, But I make a point of riding my bike along the street to get a good look at everything that there is out there for the taking.

I went back with my truck and picked up 3 wheel barrows. One had a flat tyre and ruined wheel bearings. I pumped up the tyre and it held air over night, that was good, so I bought a pair of wheel barrow bearings for $6 each and in 15 mins, I have a perfect wheel barrow ready for work.

The 2nd one had a broken tray, but everything else was good, so off with the tray and back on the clean-up pile. A new replacement tray is $59, so I ordered one. The 3rd one is old and has been used for concrete, but works well. No issues there. Good to go.

Three wheel barrows for $70.

Reuse, repair, re-purpose and re-cycle. I’m happy.