Category Archives: self-reliance

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.

And then the rains came.

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

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

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

Before the rains.

After the rain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everything is relative

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Open Studio Sale This Weekend

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bush Fire Water Management

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The first Open Studio Weekend is over. One more to go! 

We had a very slow day on the Saturday, as it was raining hard on both sides of us in Picton and Bowral. So visitors were reluctant to leave home, and few and far between. We had just a few brave people venture out. One visitor from Picton had gone to an Open Garden event, but it was so miserable in the pouring rain, that she gave up and decided to come and visit us for some indoor, dry and warm, entertainment.

The Sunday Open Studio was much better, quiet in the morning, but it picked up after lunch and we were almost busy dealing with a steady flow of visitors in the afternoon. We hope for better weather and more visitors next weekend. However, if it is going to rain, I’d prefer it to pour down, flood the gutters and stream down into the dam.

Of course, as usual, it didn’t rain here at all, just a few light passing showers throughout the day. Our top dam, the one closest to the house, that rely on for irrigation and fire fighting water is bone dry. The foot valve for the pump is sitting high and dry on top of the caked and cracked mud. This dam still had a very small amount of water in it when we left for our time away in New Caledonia and then Brisbane. However, we got a call from our lovely neighbour one day to tell us that she had tried to water the garden for us, but no water was coming out of the hose. I knew knew why. I expected it to run out and dry up at any moment. but there was nothing that I could do at a distance.

Starting on the Monday morning, with the news of so many houses burnt down in the north of the state in the terrible bush fire there. I wasted no time in preparing ourselves for the next bushfire – whenever it happens. Maybe sooner than later? With the bushfire season now upon us in earnest. I was straight into action working on all those jobs that I had put off during the recent three wet years.

We have 4 dams, built in a key-line system. I moved the high pressure, petrol driven, fire fighting pump, down into the bottom dam, which is nearly empty, but still has some water in it, right at the bottom. I built a jerry-rig, improvised system of poly pipe lines to convey the water from this little bottom dam, up to the larger, middle dam. A day of running the pump moved most of the water up the hill to the next dam. I left just 300 mm of water in the bottom of that dam for the yabbies, to keep them safe over summer. If it does dry out completely, they will bury them selves in the mud.

From the bottom dam, up to the middle dam. This larger middle dam also has next to nothing in it, just 300mm deep in the middle, but every drop counts in summer. Especially when a bush fire is in the offing.

Neither the bottom dam or the middle dam, has a functioning pump on them at the moment, so moving all the available water up to the top dam, where I have both petrol and electric pumps installed gives me access to whatever water is left to us over the hot dry summer for fire fighting. Also, concentrating all our water in one place minimises the losses from evaporation. 

Once the bottom dam was more or less empty. I carried the petrol pump up and into the middle dam, re-arranged all my Heath Robinson, improvised piping and began pumping from the middle up to the top dam. I’ve been on my very own personal, localised, ‘Snowy Hydo 2′ project here for two days now and all the water hasn’t been relocated yet. It’s a slow job, moving thousands of litres of water, up hill through a 40mm dia pipe. I hope to finish it off tomorrow.

From the middle dam up to the top dam.

The little top dam is now half full with all the accumulated water from the other dams, it will keep us safe into January. Then?

While all this was going on. I was also working on the new fire fighting sprinkler system along the verandah and roof of the new pottery building, and also rebuilding the burnt out sprinkler system on the barn. It worked perfectly during the fire, and saved the barn for burning, but when the power failed and the electric pump stopped, the plastic pipe system melted. I will be installing a petrol driven, high pressure, fire fighting pump in this system when I’ve finished pumping all the dam water uphill.

The roof and wall sprinklers all rebuilt and up and running again now.

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

However, I feel safer knowing that I have water in the system available to use to fight the next fire, 

and a reasonably functional system in place that I hope will be able to cope with whatever nature throws at us

I make sure that I use the fire pumps often over the summer months to irrigate the garden and orchards. 

In this way, I always know that the pumps are in reliable working order, then if one of them gives some trouble with the irrigation, I can step in and fix it well before there is any emergency, when there is no time for fixing things. Everything must work perfectly and immediately.

Since the last fire 4 years ago, I have installed 45,000 litres of tanks in front of the Barn, dedicated to the fire pump for the pottery and barn system. I have also installed 30,000 litres of new water storage tanks on the old Railway Station and car port with its own fire pump.

We are much better prepared now than we were 4 years ago. This is self reliance!

Faire Chabrot

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As the weather has been cold. We decided to have a baked dinner. This months meat meal is a very small piece of fillet steak.

Baked with a load of vegetables from the winter garden, and of course, a Yorkshire pudding in the old fashioned tradition of using all the meat juices from the baking pan. The proper way! After baking, the meat is placed in the warming oven to rest, while the baking dish is then reused to bake the ‘pudding’. 

Non of those shop bought, frozen, pissy little cup cake things, masquerading as Yorkshire pudding, to be microwaved to a perfection of stogy, doughy sog.

The batter for proper Yorkshire pudding has to be made up and hour or so at least before hand. It’s the first thing that you have to do before starting to get a baked dinner ready. Even before washing and prepping the veggies, or spiking the meat with cloves of garlic. It has to be mixed and left to rest, then stirred occasionally throughout the baking time, so as to get a light and fluffy pudding with a thin crispy top.

recipe;

2 table spoons full of plain flour

1/2 a cup of milk

2 eggs

(See previous blog post 17/08/2014. ‘Don’t get to know the farm animals too well’)

Janine learnt this method from my Yorkshire mother, who learnt it from her mother etc.

She was a good student and makes a very nice Yorkshire pudding. My mother would approve.

It ends up being a huge meal, but we have been working hard, cutting and splitting fire wood all day, so it’s very tasty and easy to eat.

I also made a lovely mussel soup this week. I used a lot of fresh herbs from the garden, some white wine and a bottle of our preserved tomato passata from last summer.

It was very good with the mussels, and with a lot left over in the pan, made a warming lunch time soup the next day.

After eating all of the mussels, there was a little soup left in the bowl, so I was inclined to engage in the ancient French tradition of ‘faire Chabrol’. 

By pouring a little of my red wine into the bowl and drinking the mixture straight from the bowl.

I’m warned that this is not a practice to engage in, in polite society. It’s strictly for peasants. Welcome to the home of the Post Modern Peasant.

It’s catching!

The next day at lunch, we had the same broth, sans mussels. But in another very old tradition, I added broken pieces of old bread into the soup to fill out the meal. And, in keeping with the tradition, I finished with a little red wine. Faire chabrot!

Itadakimasu!

Three Wood Kiln Firings in Two Weeks

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We fired the big wood kiln last weekend, then during the week, Janine packed and fired the little portable wood fired kiln.

We have put the Sturt ’Terra Nova’ show up and it is going well, with a big turn up at the opening. We got to catch up with loads of people that we only usually see at conferences, and as I don’t go to a lot of conferences, nor do I go to ‘openings’ to do ‘networking’. Well, I don’t get to catch up like this very often. It was really good.

Our next big event on the horizon is the ‘Pop-Up’ Artists Open Studios Arts Trail, that will be on the long weekend of the 10th, 11th, and 12th of June. Hence the flurry of firing activity now in preparation. We have been making all year, and firing in the smaller kilns, the solar PV fired electric kilns. We don’t fire the wood kilns over the hotter part of the year, and certainly not during the fire-ban season. So it’s all go now.

Using a combination of elm garden prunings and some thinly split eucalypt (many thanks to our friends, Susan and Dev, who helped split a lot of side stoking wood with us a month or so ago.) Janine was able to fire up to Stoneware in reduction in 4 1/2 hours. A perfect firing for a little portable kiln.

At the end of the firing, Edna the chicken came to check it out. Janine and Edna had a little chat, cooing and clucking together. The gist of it was probably around the matter of if there was anything for a chicken to eat?

I have been packing the big wood kiln again for another firing this coming weekend. The slowest part of packing the big wood kiln is rolling out all the thousand little clay balls of wadding. Each pot has to sit on a ring of little balls of refractory wadding to stop it sticking to the kiln shelf. Over time, and many, many, firings the kiln shelves get a coating of molten fly ash from the burning wood, and if the pots aren’t held up off the shelf, they will fuse together at high temperature becoming a monolithic whole.

First chamber finished and clammed up.

I think that I probably spend a quarter of my time rolling out these little balls, only to throw them away after the firing. Actually, Janine re-uses them as aggregate in the bottom of planter pots around the garden. However, when we first set out on this creative journey, back in the early ’70’s, because we had very little money and couldn’t afford to buy the very expensive kiln shelves that we needed to pack the big wood kiln. As a work-around solution, we decided to make our own. This was a very tricky bit of ceramic chemistry, and only one other husband and wife couple of potters, Harry and May Davis in New Zealand were doing it. We went to work with them to get some insights, and came back and made our own kiln shelves for next to nothing in terms of cash outlay, but a lot of time invested.

The cost of the high alumina grog used to make refractories was prohibitive, so we made our own. For every firing in the little test kiln that we had, I used very high quality, high alumina kaolin from Mudgee. Puggoon 157 kaolin, purchased directly from the mine not too far away, to make the wadding balls. After firing, instead of throwing them out. I put them through the rock crusher and turned them into high alumina crushed grog. All the failed experimental kiln shelves were also put back through the crusher, mixed with more kaolin 50/50 and used again. Eventually we had enough kiln furniture to fire the big 300 cu. Ft. wood kiln at next to no cost. They weren’t very good, but just good enough and this exercise in self reliance got us going. We still have them, but they are rarely used these days, because the new silicon carbide kiln shelves from China are both affordable and excellent quality.

Photos of me, as a much younger man, making kiln shelves, taken by Janine King

Collecting Ash for Glazes

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It’s a few days since the fire died down, I’ve been out there in the paddock collecting the ash for use in glazes. If I try to get there and dig up the ash before it is mostly cooled. I can get burnt, so I must be careful. I wear my oldest thick soled boots, as the ash and charcoal from the burn pile holds its heat in the ground for ages. I have melted the soles of my boots in the past, going in too soon.

If I wait for too long for it to cool, then there may be a strong wind, and that will simply blow away the finest particles of ash, scattering them all around the grassed area. Worse still, is rain, as that will dissolve and rinse away the solubles in the ash. Its the solubles that are the fluxes, and these are so important in ash. They are what makes ash melt and be so useful in glazes. It’s also important to me to be as self-reliant as possible, so I don’t want to waste this important potential resource. Doubly so in this case, as there are no more pine trees left on our land. The bush fire here was so hot and intense, that it killed every single one of them, and I haven’t seen any seedlings germinating out of the ashes in any of the paddocks. It’s the end of an era here.

In fact we did have a little shower of rain on the 2nd night after the fire was finished, so some of the usefulness of the exercise will have been lost. I won’t know how much was lost, until I get it all sieved, processed and tested to find out. I suspect that it will be too far gone to be useful to me as a glaze ingredient, but that wont stop me processing it to find out. We only have a burn pile like this once in a decade where we burn off stumps and big logs. It was the big pine logs that made this burn pile ash so attractive, as pine ash is very different to the hard wood eucalypt ash that we collect from the slow combustion kitchen wood fired stove every week. The slow combustion stove works best on hard wood fuel, and that is what we have plenty of here. Now especially since the fire leaving so many dead gum trees to deal with.

The ash from our Caribbean pine trees here is clearer, paler and more fluid than the ash from our local stringyback and bloodwood eucalypts. Their ash melts to a matt yellow/mustard colour, and is rather more firm, being lower in the alkalis than the pine. They are both good, just different.

I set about digging into the pile of still warm ash and charcoal and found it littered with calcined lumps of subsoil from the tree roots and stumps. Not a good sign. I was hoping for a deeper cover of fine white ash before hitting the heavier stuff. Pity!

I started by sieving the ash through the first 6mm screen to get rid of the big chunks of soil and charcoal, then down through the next 2.5mm screen.

I filled a large metal garbage bin with this first pass. I use a very old and slightly ruined bin for this, as if the ash turns out to be still a bit too hot, it will melt a plastic bin, or burn the zinc off a good bin.

As the burnt pile of ash decreases, the pile of discarded sievings increases.

The second pass is through a finer sieve. It can’t be too fine at this stage as ash is very sticky, and will clog up a very fine sieve. I use a 40# lawn or about half a millimetre, as the ash will pass through this fairly easily. It’s a stainless steel sieve that went through the fire in one of the sheds that burnt down, but not too hot, as the fine mesh didn’t crumble. All my other sieves that were burnt, were completely ruined.

I shovel the coarse ash out of the first bin and back through the fine mesh into the second bin. 1 1/4 bins of coarse ash becomes 3/4 of a bin of fine ash. The discard pile grows as the fine detritus mounts up on top.

Mission accomplished for the time being. The next step is to wash the ash with water to get it to pass through a 100# sieve. But that is for another day. At least this garbage can full of dry ash will keep indefinitely in the storage room, safe from the vagaries of the weather.

All packed up and ready to go. This much ash will last a few years of glaze making.

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

Bush Tucker, Safron and More Tomatoes

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This week we have been hard at it everywhere, in the garden, in the pottery In the kitchen.

We thought that we had harvested the last couple of wheel barrows of tomatoes, but then we looked again and there were more.

Janine made two seperate 1 gallon boilers of passata, which I put through the mouli sieve and then reduced down to 1 gallon, or 4 1/2 litres of fine liquid, which Janine then reduced down further on the wood stove each night progressing a bit at a time until we had just 2.5 litres of dense concentrate, down from 11 litres of initial pulp. It takes a couple of nights to get through it all. It’s better than trying to find the non-existant intellectual shows on the idiot box.

While the wood stove is hot after dinner is cooked, it’s a shame not to use up all that potential heat embedded in the stove. It not just cooks the dinner, it warms the house and heats the hot water tank. So to get an extra bit of benefit from it is very frugal and efficient. F@#k the gas companies and energy retailers, gouging excess profits from the misery of war and bad forward planning. We are very lucky here to have been through a terrible fire that has left us with thousands of dead trees in our forest that I couldn’t have ever brought myself to cut down in their prime. But now that they are dead from the bush fire they need to be cleaned up to make the place safe again. Fuel for the rest of our lives. As I said, very lucky. You have to look on the bright side.

We were a bit shocked when Janine had to re-arrange the pantry cupboard to fit these recent jars in. We discovered that we now have 79 jars of passata. We could easily go into business selling this stuff. It’s not as if we are not eating our fare share of tomato and egg for breakfast, tomato salad for lunch, tomatoes in ratatouille for dinner, as well as giving away tomatoes to everyone who calls in and visits

But still they come ripening, even now in this cooler weather. However, they must come to an end soon, as the night time temperature is dropping rapidly down to 3oC this week. Soon there will be frosts again and that should put an end to it.

I was so looking forward to the start of tomato season back in November/December. I could just brush the young leaves and smell the tomato fragrance that promised so much. Now I don’t want to touch the leaves so much any more. I’ve had my fill. This is the reality of living with the seasons. The promise, then the first taste — so good, then the glut, and now enough.

I’m sure that we will appreciate the bottled tomatoes over winter in all manner of cooked dishes, to add and extend flavour to almost anything. Passata is a useful and flexible as chicken stock. We have some of that in the freezer too.

We have already picked another few baskets full of prime ripe red produce to make the next batch. Anyone want any tomatoes?

In the pottery, I cleaned out the small Venco pugmill that I use for porcelain. It was starting to allow a few small bits of dryish crumbs through the screens and into the extruded pugs. It has been a year since I last cleaned it out. Unless you use it every day or at least every week. Bits dry out inside the barrel and eventually cause trouble. I hadn’t pugged any porcelain since last year. So now is the time to deal with it. Starting out fresh for the coming work load through till Xmas.

I have found that it is easiest as a two day job. Strip it down last thing in the afternoon, Scrape off all the easily accessible plastic clay. Leave it over night to dry out, then scrape off all the dry clay, and finally sponge it until it is all clean, then reassemble, first thing in the new day.

I have been throwing some gritty clay, making some rough textured bowls for the wood firing. 

I have also been making some porcelain dishes for the wood kiln as well.

Back in the vegetable garden we found a great surprise! Our first crocus flower. Janine picked out our first two saffron stamens. We ate one each, just to see if we could taste the fine flavour. We couldn’t. But we did get just a little hint of orange colour on our tongues. Hopefully there will be more to follow, as we have 20 crocus bulbs in the garden. We might double our harvest each year? We might eventually even get enough to be able to taste it.

I made a bush tucker pie for dinner from our massive crop of wild warrigal greens – native spinach. It turned out really well. Cooked with 3 cheeses and one egg to bind it. Not a tomato in sight!

Cheesy grins all round.

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.