Make Clay While the Sun Shines

Posted on 10/01/2015 by hotnsticky

Warning! This post could be very boring if you are not a potter – and maybe even if you are?

Contains technical terms and traces of nuts.

Making clay while the sun shines is a very good idea and ought to be possible in summer, but not this summer.

This has been the most amazing summer that we have had for many, many years. It’s hot, just like every year, but this year it has rained more than we can remember for a long time. We are having a great time. The rain combined with the warmth has made everything grow its head off. We have plenty of water in the dams and drinking water tanks, plus lots of food coming from the garden. We only have to water the garden every few days, as it usually rains in between at some point. Sometimes it rains hard enough to wet the soil sufficiently that we don’t need to water for a few days.

Earlier in the summer it was raining very hard and very often, but now that pattern has changed to occasional showers. So it is now dry enough under cover to get my milled porcelain stone slip to dry on the drying beds and in plaster basins. I’m aware that it is not wet like this everywhere. There are bush fires raging down south, while I’m clearing ditches to guide the excess water away from the pottery. When it is this wet, the humidity is so high that it is very hard to dry liquid clay slip. It just tends to sit there and go mouldy while rotting the fabric membrane underneath that separates the clay from the brick bed.

After 40 years of pursuing my project of self-reliance, I have decided to modify slightly my fundamentalist, hard-line approach of ‘total commitment to maximum achievable’ self reliance, to a more relaxed and flexible approach of ‘substantially committed to’ self-reliance.

In this regard I have recently decided to allow myself some slack and buy in more processed product to allow for an easier life as I age. For example, When I returned from my studies in Japan, late last spring, it was getting a bit late to put in seeds and start a summer garden from scratch, so I decided to compromise and buy some punnets of vegetable seedlings to get the garden up and growing, while I planted my seeds and waited for this second planting to come along as a second, follow-up crop. This worked well and I’m very pleased with the serried plantings and how they are growing and providing a steady flow of tomatoes, sweet corn and zucchini etc.

It’s a small compromise, but once compromised, why not go with it?

Blanched French beans served with fresh, home-made basil pesto.

I have decided now to addapt this freer approach to my ceramic materials and my creative work. I have previously only used the rocks, shales and clays of my own local shire and I am still completely committed to this ‘local’ concept. I had found during this long extended period of research that although I tried very hard to locate everything that I needed to make my ceramics from only the materials that I discovered around me. I could not find any pale plastic throwable clay in a quantity that was useable. However, what I did find, was plenty of hard igneous rocks to make glazes and in the end I managed to make two really special, unique and very interesting stoneware clay bodies from self-processed, local rock dusts. To achieve this, I realised that I would need to add some bentonite (a very sticky clay) to bind and slightly plasticise these powdered rock bodies to make them useable. These rocks are so hard, that they need to be crushed first in a large jaw crusher, then a small laboratory jaw crusher and following that I put the grit through a disc mill and finally in the ball mill for 16 hours to get it really fine. Using this rather slow, convoluted and old-fashioned technology, that I obtained as industrial cast-off, from auctions and junk yards, I can process my finds from large rocks down to 200# powder in about 24 hours. It’s the drying out of the liquid clay slip from the ball mill that is taking the longest time and slowing the process down. Not helped by the continuing wet weather.

I never thought that I’d find myself complaining about rain!

Warning, there are traces of nuts showing in this image!

I pass the thin liquid slip through 100# sieve before settling out the solids.

So, bentonite was my first compromise. It may not be local, but it is Australian. I have bought 3 x 25 kg bags of bentonite during my career. I also found that I needed to buy in alumina powder to use as shelf wash. This wasn’t absolutely essential, it was just very much better than all the alternatives, so another compromise. I’m still using this original 25 kg. bag of Al203. I use it sparingly, so It will last a very long time.

Recently, I decided to get some kaolin to add some slight increase in plasticity to my ground up local native porcelain stone bodies. This is not a local material either, as it comes from 300 kms away, but it’s closer than the bentonite. There must be something closer, I just haven’t found it yet. Proceeding on from my initial tests. I have decided to add 15% of this plastic kaolin to my ground porcelain stone body, it makes an enormous difference to it’s workability very quickly. I completed the first small batch tests of 5 kg each last year, before I went to Japan. So now I am making the larger 100 kg batches to see how they work on a larger scale. The tests were very promising, so I am eager to see them perform and feel them on the wheel. I was encouraged to follow on with this blending idea when I saw them making their porcelain body in Arita in Japan recently, using imported New Zealand kaolin. But I’m not prepared to go that far for some kaolin.

I have been told that the most famous porcelain body in Australia, which is exported all over the world, is made from Chinese kaolin, Indian felspar and American bentonite. At least the water is Australian!

To aid the drying process of my ball milled (bai tunze) porcelain stone slip, to a stiff plastic, usable porcelain body, I make two batches. One of 30 kg in the big ball mill as a liquid slip. This slip has to be thin enough to allow the grinding down of the very hard rock granules from the crushers. After milling I allow the thin liquid to sit and settle for a day or so, to allow the very fine ceramic fragments to flocculate. I drain off the free water from the top of the settled clay material. At the same time I make a second 5 kg. batch in the smaller ball mill which is dry milled. I then add this dry material to the wet batch and mix them together. This significantly stiffens up the slip. I can then put it out on the drying bed or plaster tubs to firm up.

I drag my finger through the stiff slip to make it dry into usable square plastic blocks that are easier to pick up and store for pugging.

However, because of the very wet summer continuing on like it has, I’m finding that the clay just won’t dry as usual. The humidity is just too high. I’m having to lift the very soft plastic mass off the sodden brick drying beds and place it in the open air to get a little air movement over it to finish it off to a stiff plastic condition. Perhaps the extra 15% of kaolin content is slowing the drying a little as well?

I have been using my new ‘VENCO’ stainless steel mini pug mill to pug the small batches of clay. It’s fantastic, quiet, fast for it’s size and ideal for small batches of porcelain body like the stuff that I’m making. And so much easier on my wrists than hand wedging.

As part of this sudden loss of intellectual rigour and convenient relaxation of my philosophical standards, I hope to make my life a little easier in my latter years. However, I can’t help somehow feeling a bit like the philosopher Bertie Russell reneging on his death-bed. I am fully aware that this is where the similarity ends. I am no philosopher, and hopefully I am not on my death-bed either – just yet. I just feel like I need to extend my range and have the ability to work with an extended palette of interesting materials for my creative work. 15% of non-local kaolin isn’t going to change the fabric of my work in any noticeable way, but it will make the act of throwing a lot more pleasurable for me and extend what I can make.

So I have decided to start using materials that I have discovered that are outside of my shire and my previous 50 km radius of interest. Over the last 20 years I have experimented with my immediately available local materials, non of which are mentioned in McMeekin’ s book. I have worked on them to the point that I couldn’t think of any more variations that I could make to gain any further insight into these materials. Only extreme ageing could improve their plasticity, I’m too old to wait for that solution to work for me. I’d taken these materials as far as I could imagine. Another potter would certainly find new things to do with these materials, but I feel that I have lived and worked on this restricted palette for long enough. I want to experiment with some ‘new’, and therefore interesting materials that I don’t know anything about.

To this end, I just went to collect some felspar from a site that I came across a few years ago, near my friend’s house, it’s 150 kms away. I only sampled it at that time, because it wasn’t within my target area, but it looked very interesting all the same and I can’t pass an interesting bit of soil by without at least looking at it and taking a preliminary sample. The initial testing proved that it was felspar and although quite weathered, it still has quite a bit of alkali, so it might turn out be very useful. I’m extending my range, making more flexible choices and hopefully making my life a little more interesting and a little easier.

I have a few different projects in mind for the future.

Best wishes

from the potter making many a slip twixt the mill and the lip

Perfect Timing

Posted on 30/11/2014 by hotnsticky

I’m only just home and we have hit the ground running.

It’s the end of spring, almost the beginning of summer and the garden is bearing fruit. Well, the orchards are. The vegetables are a little way behind, as all the small seedlings are annual and need time to grow on. Whereas all the orchard trees, being perennial, are well established. All those years of preparation; fertilising, mulching, pruning and irrigating have been worth it. It was mostly dry while we were away and has been very dry since our return, with only 8 mm. of rain in the last month. Not enough to swell up the fruit very much, but ideal warm to hot weather for ripening and no sign of mould or fungus anywhere. The Sherman peaches are small, but the crop is quite heavy.

The early peaches have started, as have the cherries. There was a time back in the seventies, when cherries were the earliest fruit, but now it is the earliest peaches. We have always chosen the very earliest varieties of each type of fruit tree variety for our orchards. However, over the decades, new and earlier varieties have become available, so when a tree fades away or dies of old age we replace it with another one. The earliest variety available at that time. This has moved the fruit harvest forward a month or two, especially when you consider the extra push from global warming.

We used to pick the very earliest young-berries just in time for Xmas day. Going around and picking the very earliest and ripest berry off each cane. Now, the full harvest is all over before Xmas. These are the same canes. We haven’t replaced them with new varieties. It just the effect that the increase in global temperatures are having on the fruit trees, vines and canes. So now we are picking the earliest peaches as well as mulberries, cherries and youngberries. It all has to be dealt with and it takes time. We can’t eat it all now. So we preserve most of it for later in the year. We don’t have any preserved peaches left from last year, so we can’t wait to taste that beautiful mix of sweetness and acid that the fresh fruit delivers.

Janine makes cherry jelly by boiling the fruit just covered with water and simmer for 10 mins. The fruit is mashed to extract flavour and colour, then sieved into a setting bowl and a table spoon of gelatine is stirred through and dissolved. You can add a little sugar if you have a sweet tooth. Lastly she adds a squeeze of lemon and allows it to set. Once cool, it goes into the fridge to chill for dinner.

We get stuck in and eat a lot of the cherry crop each day for breakfast, just standing under the tress, chewing and spitting, but there comes a time when the yield exceeds our appetite, so the The Lovely Garden Goddess, Miss King of the Kitchen, steps in and starts to cook up a treat or two. She starts by making a cherry jelly, followed by berry pie and berry pudding. I make a couple of jars of cherry brandy. We pick, peel and stew peaches for freezing and also pick and bottle youngberries. It’s all full-on busy. We picked over 3 kgs of youngberries this morning. Last year we picked 20kgs of berries in the season and bottled about 20 jars of them. There are just 2 jars left in the larder now. Perfect timing.

The Kitchen King up-dates her garden diary and preserving log.

I have a couple of kilns to build. So after the mornings fruit picking, I left Janine in the kitchen, making pies and went down to the kiln shed to finish work on a stainless steel kiln frame. This one has to be delivered before Xmas and another kiln frame has to be got off to the galvanisers as early as possible, so that it will be galvanised before the factory takes their Xmas/New Year maintenance shut down over January. I need to be working on that kiln early next year. Everything needs to be planned and given a suitable space within the framework of our self-reliant life choices. It is quite a full time job, just working in the gardens and orchards, but we also need to earn a living as well. Something has to pay for the up-keep of all this effort. Regrettably, sales of pots isn’t going to cover it. We live a fantasy life with-in the real world economy. But every now and then I have to do something that will earn enough money to pay the Council Rates, the insurance and car registration etc. etc. It’s a juggling act, keeping it all together.

I come back up to the house and the sweet, tangy smell of berry fruit sponge pudding wafts into my nostrils. I can’t wait for dinner!

Later in the evening I put on a couple of batches of beer, as we have almost run out of last summers bottling, with only half a dozen bottles left in the cellar. Perfect timing.

We can’t do everything, but we do what we can.

I love this time of year. I don’t get time to make any pots, because I’m making the time to preserve a lot of food for the rest of the year. This is a precious opportunity just too good to miss.

It’s how we have chosen to live our self-reliant life.

Best wishes from the perfectly timed, self-reliant King of the Kitchen and her juggler .

Welcome Home

Posted on 27/11/2014 by hotnsticky

After The Lovely Saint Nina (Betty/Buffy/Katherine) left me in Taiwan. She arrived back in Australia and was collected from the airport by our very good friend Len. It was a dark and stormy day. Huge thunder storms were raging and trees were down and many roads were blocked or closed by the intense down pours. The tunnel was flooded, so they took the longer, alternative route. This also had many problems and was detoured in parts by flooding or downed trees. As they approached our home in the storm on a narrow stretch of road, through the bush, a kangaroo jumped out onto the road directly in front of them and wrote off Len’s car. So Len the Unlucky and Betty, Buffy, Katherine the Forgetful, had to make their way home the last few kms in the rain to collect our car to get The Lovely’s luggage.

Len borrowed our car to get home and for the next two weeks while his car was being fixed. So Len now collects me from the airport, in my turn, in my car, so that I can drive myself home.

I’m home and its hot. Too hot for this time of year. I suddenly realise that although it was hot a lot of the time in Asia, the one thing that was missing was the smell of eucalypt oil.

I step out of the car and crunch into the dry gum leaf detritus/compost in the gutter, blown there by the strong westerly winds. I know that I’m home. The air is baking and the eucalypt oil smell welcomes me.

Annabelle Sloujetté has done a wonderful job of looking after our house and pottery. She is gone when I return, but I can see from the two tyre scorch marks in the lawn that she hasn’t been gone very long. The pottery is full to bursting with her new work and it’s very lively and an inspiration to walk into another persons studio, full of such exciting forms and decorations — even though it’s really my studio. It looks so different. Her work is so exuberant and joyful. The Blessed Saint Nina the Forgetful, Buffy/Betty/Katherine, has returned home before me a few weeks ago. But she isn’t here either. She is working up the hill, manning our display for the Southern Highlands Arts Festival ‘Open Studio’ Weekend at our friend Elizabeth’s studio.

I wander around in my ‘new again’ old home and garden. The cherries have flowered, set fruit, and the fruit is just now turning red. Almost ready to pick, they will be ready to pick in a couple of days. All this has happened in the time that I’ve been away. The air is hot and dry and it is perfect weather to ripen fruit. I walk around the garden and the stone fruit orchard. Everything was still pretty dormant when I left 10 weeks ago. It was really just the end of winter. Now, however, it is late spring and there is plenty to see. The single red poppies are out in force for the 11th of November and the nasturtiums are also adding a burst of colour in little clusters all around the garden. We don’t plant them any more, they just come up nowadays. We did plant a few seeds, many years ago, and since then they just keep on coming up everywhere. I don’t know how they migrate like they do, but they just seem to manage it somehow.

I planted a small area, down in the Pantry Field Garden, to English cottage garden flowers a couple of years ago. It was a surprise for The Lovely One. She loves flowers, so after I ploughed up the area for potatoes, I left half of the ground for English flowers as a present for her. I broadcast 2 packets of ‘English-Country-Garden’ flower seeds into the freshly dug ground and watered them and waited. Sure enough, there was a small show of some annuals that year, but there were also a lot of bi-annuals setting their roots down for a great show for this spring. After looking at all the other parts of the orchards and gardens, I make my way all the way down to the Pantry Field. I can see a burst of local colour. It worked and it looks good. A small gesture, but a pretty one. It only survives the predation of all the local herbivores by being enclosed in a wire mesh fence. Not too pretty, but essential in these circumstances, if the plants are to survive long enough to flower and set seed. I’d like to see this little patch of English country garden flowers self-sow and regenerate on its own in future.

There are mulberries ready to pick, plus strawberries, and the very early Sherman peaches have turned red. I taste one, Yes, they are already ready to eat, soft, sweet and deliciously warm in the sunshine. The juice squirts out and dribbles down my chin. I slobber and slurp the delicious sweet warm fruit and its juices. One isn’t enough. I take a second and then a third. My fingers are sticky with the juice. My lips and chin are warm and sticky. I need to go into the house and wash myself. Such are the simple natural pleasures of the fruiting season.

The Divine Saint Nina – The Forgetful turns up. She has been out visiting other studios. It’s lovely to see her again. I missed her. We have always traveled together up until this time. We planned to, but circumstances intervened.

We settle back into our natural routine. Janine opens a new jar of marmalade, it’s sensational. I’ve really missed that taste for some months now. I’m sure that there is some factor of absence at work here, making the taste buds grow fonder, but this jar is really nice, so flavoursome. That lovely tang of the sweetened citrus flavours, but there is something else too. I pick up the jar and examine the small hand-written label. It’s my writing, so it’s one of my batches. It tells me that on the 22nd of July, I used Seville orange, Chinnotto, Meyer lemon, — and the secret ingredient in this batch, which may be why it tastes so extra good, is the addition of prune brandy stirred through the mix, just before bottling. I’d forgotten about that.

We had made some prune brandy a couple of years before, just as I make cherry brandy most years. It’s a simple operation of pouring brandy over the fruit in a sterilised glass jar and screwing down the lid. You forget about it for a year or two in the back of the pantry cupboard and just leave it to sit and develop. I always include the pips, because the best part of the flavour comes from the tiny amount of cyanide that is in the pips. This is slowly dissolved in the alcohol and gives the brandy a fruit + almond flavour. Yes, almond flavour is the flavour of cyanide. Just in case you didn’t know. And it’s fantastic, as anyone who loves amaretto will attest. So what made this marmalade so good was that last-minute addition of that rich flavoursome brandy stirred through just before capping off. Wow. So good!

I struggle through the fruit-box-full of letters, parcels, junk mail and other postage that has accumulated over the couple of months. Then I start to deal with the hundreds and hundreds of emails, all queued up and waiting to be sorted, some answered, but mostly trashed. Still, they have to be looked at, so that I can decide which button to press. It’s late when I head off to bed. The Divine Miss N is long gone. I slide quietly under the covers, when suddenly, Buffy springs her trap. She flicks the sheet over my head. I know that resistance is futile and surrender to my fate.

Fond regards from Buffy and her fresh meat.

13 Years of Hard Work Up in Smoke

Posted on 08/08/2014 by hotnsticky

Winter Delights.

It’s the middle of winter and it’s time for pruning. I spend the morning pruning the dozen or so almond trees and then go on to prune the shiraz grape vines, as they are close together. These young almond trees are just coming into their 13th year now, we have other, older almonds that are 38 years old as well, but they are in another part of the garden, in with the original stone fruit orchard and are quite established.
Once you get into it, it’s an easy, mindless job. The sun is warm on my back, as there is no wind this morning. It’s a nice job, so much better than cleaning out the kiln firebox. My only difficulty is when I’m working around the trees and have to prune into the sun, which is low in the sky and makes me squint with it’s brightness. If this is the only thing that I can find to whinge about, then I am a happy man.
While I’m at it, I can’t help but recall Peter Mayle’s fictional neighbour ‘Massot” who he encounters while ‘Massot’ is pruning his vineyard. He has been pushing a wheel barrow along the rows depositing all the prunings into the wheel barrow. There is a small fire glowing in the bottom of the metal barrow and as each new collection of cuttings is deposited, it is ignited from the coals and ashes of the previous vine. As it is described, I can visualise that it’s a beautiful system of ancient ancestry. It removes the dead wood from the vineyard. It doesn’t require any cartage. It sterilizes the woody plant material that might otherwise spread infected material from vine to vine and as there is a hole in the bottom of the barrow, all the ash from the fire is slowly drained out along the rows of vines as soluble fertilizer for when it rains. A pretty perfect system. Beautiful in it’s simplicity. I’ve thought about burning my prunings in one of our metal barrows. Sending 13 years of hard work up in smoke.

Mayle takes great pleasure in humiliating his hard-working peasant neighbour for his earthy roots by pointing out that he has seen small bundles of vine cuttings for sale in posh English department stores, sold as kindling – selling for 10 Euros per bundle. Massot looks back along the long rows of vine trellises and can visualise hundreds of Euros of kindling gone up in smoke. It’s meant to be funny, but maybe it can be read in a different way. Perhaps it illustrates that Mayle feels inferior to the local French man in his natural environment. Mayle can’t see the beauty of the system, only the money and we know that the peasant isn’t getting the money, he has a life deeply embedded in the terroir. Mayle will never be part of this environment, never really comfortable, never naturalised into it, always the expat, his clean hands will always tell that he is from somewhere else.

I bundle my prunings, not for sale, but for kindling in our own fire place. Often used to start the kiln. I like the symmetry of the closed loop. Use what you’ve got. The prunings have to be removed from the orchard and vineyard. The best way to deal with the issues of disease is the burn them, but rather than burn them for no beneficial outcome, using them to start the kiln is a positive use, appropriate for a post-modern peasant-potter.

I water the big potato patch down in the Pantry Field and find that they are still growing wonderfully well, as are the field mushrooms in among them. The tall tree cover has worked wonderfully well to keep the frost off. I wasn’t fully aware up until now just how warm it was down there in that secluded little clearing. I collect a dozen big mushrooms for dinner from in amongst the spuds. We’ll have mushroom soup tonight. A few bunches of herbs and an onion browned in olive oil till soft, then the diced mushroom added and sautéed, some marrowbone and garden mirepoix stock added in and all left to simmer down and reduce, lastly a little flour and oil Roux to thicken it up a little, some pepper, a lovely warming and filling garden delight on a winters night.

We have a huge pile of stumps, old logs too big for the chain saw and too heavy for the tractor to move around, These massive sections of pine tree trunk were given to us to burn in the kiln by my friend’s Mother, when a hundred year old pine snapped off in a severe storm, crashing down in her garden narrowly missing her house. The tree was 1.8 metres across and each section weighed more than a tonne. It was delivered by bobcat and tip truck, 20 tonnes of it over three trips. I cut up what I could manage by myself, the section up to 1.2 metres, but some of the larger base sections were just too big. Now, after 3 or 4 years, the white ants and wood rot have set in, so I have to deal with it. I get the bobcat back and get what’s left pushed up into a pile. We add some nasty weeds that we don’t want to seed around the garden and woody garden waste too thick for the shredder, but too small for hob wood. It’s all piled up on the spare block, where we stock pile our kiln wood.

As the weather is clear and fine with no wind, it’s winter and there are no fire bans, we decide to burn off all this otherwise difficult to deal with herbage. In the evening we light it and it goes up like a Guy Fawkes’ night celebration. We have the long fire hoses ready and the high pressure fire pump going. It’s a good chance to give it a run and check that everything is in working order, ready for the summer.

We crack a bottle of home-brew beer, congratulate ourselves for a long day of hard work and watch it burn, The flare of light tinder is all over in half an hour, but the massive stumps and log sections remain glowing and smouldering into and through the night. Janine is up at 1.00 am to check it and I’m out there again at 6am.
In the early morning light there are three separate collections of smouldering lumps. I get the tractor out and push them all together, back into one big pile and they burst back into flames and continue to burn throughout the day. I hate to waste wood like this, but without the machinery to deal with such big lumps, there doesn’t seem to be any other option for me. I can’t afford to pay the bob cat driver to come and work here regularly, while I work my way through the pile, I don’t want to have a massive termite nest on my door step and now that it has spent a few years in the weather, what’s left of this spongy pine has all gone quite ‘manky’, and lost most of it’s calorific value. A fire seems to be the best way.

We spend all of the next day tending and supervising the fire. Cleaning up a lot of small rubbish, rotten wood and weeds. Someone has to stay with it all of the time, just to be safe. There might be some good ash to be collected, if there isn’t any wind or rain before it all cools down, so that I can get to it.
I cook tofu in sesame oil for lunch with garden vegetables, broccolini and coriander. A little bit of fish sauce makes it sing.

Day 3 of our fire sees very little left of the pile. Just one big block that started off as a 1.8 x 1.8 metre stump, weighing several tonnes, is now mostly gone. We have to drag in other pieces of wood to keep it alight. It’s a chance to clean up the back block and the little lane that wanders through the centre of our land. This pretty little wandering bushy lane was once the main east west road through the village. It was never legally gazetted, but just used by the locals as the shortest route between A and B. There were 3 attempt to make an access path through to the east ridge and 2 of them went through our place. They were both abandoned because the land there is so low-lying and boggy in wet weather. Parts of the lane were paved with stones to try to overcome this, but never satisfactorily. Eventually a legally gazetted road was built in the right place, but it meant a lot of very expensive earthworks.

Our small lane is almost completely over grown now. We’ve seen to that by blocking it off at both ends to stop weekend 4 wheel drivers winching their way through our land without asking on long weekends. It’s a very pretty place to go now, and as it isn’t used anymore, except by us to get to the back of our land to collect firewood, it has soon become over-grown. I decide to take the tractor down there, mow it and clean out all the dead wood, and while I’m at it, I cut up a few dead trees that have fallen down along the track and up on the dam bank of the ‘Max Lake’ out biggest dam, The one that we had built in order to collect and store water for irrigating our vineyard.

Janine has a stroke of genius in getting onto the hot smoldering coals and hot ashes to poke at the fire and shift logs with her rake without melting her shoes. She places thick sheets of stringybark bark down on the ashes first then steps onto them to do the work. She then retrieves them before they burst into flames. I have ruined one pair of old boots by working in the hot ashes and melting the soles.

As it’s Friday and the end of the week, we celebrate by not eating any mushrooms. We have lightly fried tofu again with more garden greens.

So that’s what ‘s been happening this week with the hot-footed, self-reliant Guy and Girl Fawkes, who are lighting the blue touch-paper and standing back to wait and see what happens.

With fond regards from his Naked Flame and her Rake

Old Slag and a Tosser

Posted on 05/08/2014 by hotnsticky

We have another weekend wood firing workshop. Another amazing group of wonderful people. Everyone so engaged and enthusiastic. I have to cut split and stack more wood. Prepare the kiln and its furniture, kiln shelves and props. Check out all the fittings and structural elements to make sure that it all goes smoothly. The fire box lid lining is on its last legs, but will last a few more firings. It takes a few hits from our enthusiastic new stokers, with well-meaning, but miss-placed logs at high temperature.

Before we can fire the kiln again, There is maintenance to do. I have to get inside the fire box of the kiln to chip out the molten ash glaze slag from the last firing. This has to be done after every firing. The ash from the firing collects in the base of the firebox and accumulates to the point that it melts into a molten slag at the high temperatures at the end of the firing. It forms flows of liquid natural ash glaze that pool into the floor bricks. This is the same natural ash glaze that decorates our pots during the wood firing and gives them their distinctive wood-fired look.

There is alway some minor repair work required after each firing . Sweeping out the dusty ash and charcoal, chipping out the slag that threatens to block off the air holes. This is normal maintenance. However, when I get inside the firebox this time I see that the last firing had such fluid ash glaze formed at the end of the firing that it has run and pooled into the very important mouse hole in the base of the ash pit. This hole is most important to keep the ember level under control during the firing. It has to work properly, otherwise I can’t control the fire as easily and everything could go pear-shaped.

On close inspection I find that the ash glaze slag has completely filled the air hole and sealed it off completely. To avoid this occurrence, I place a special little kiln shelf ‘lid’ over the hole to deflect most of the ash to the periphery of the hole and this usually works. But the combination of wood that I have used this last time has created a very fluid slag and every thing had disappeared into a grey/brown puddle of lava. I can’t even see the ‘lid’ or the hole beneath it. I work on the principal that I know that it is under there. I have to climb into the firebox base armed with a 2 kg hammer and cold chisel, a crow bar and a skutch hammer. I have protective goggles over my glasses and a dust mask as I set to work in this cramped space, hammering and chiselling as best I can without being fully able to swing the hammer properly. I bash, chip hammer and prize my way through the glassy, lava-like slag. It is brittle and smashes into jagged, conchoidal, shattered spalls. Bits fly everywhere. It’s in my hair and all through my clothes. I have to be careful not to cut my fingers trolling through the pieces, tossing them back into a bucket in the kiln chamber. I finish by sweeping up the small fragments and dust. It’s a crap job, stuffed into this small space with all the dust and sharp edges, but it has to be done and no-one else, including the kiln fairy, is likely to volunteer. I keep putting it off, hoping that the kiln fairy will do it, but no such luck there. It’s all part of being self-reliant. I often put it off till the last minute, because I just don’t enjoy it, other times I get stuck into it first thing. It all depends on my energy levels and state of mind. There is no avoiding it. It just has to be done.

Although it doesn’t look it, it’s actually all cleaned out and ready for more work.

I’m lucky and very grateful that this is the worst job that I have to put up with. It’s certainly the least glamorous job in the pottery. It’s all very well, sitting in the sun being creative and making lovely things that are visually engaging and wonderfully tactile. Unpacking the kiln is like Xmas, but no-one daydreams of all the hard graft that goes into ‘creativity’. Don’t give up your day job!

We have a -2 oC frost overnight, during the firing. It keeps us sitting up close to the kiln during the midnight to dawn shift. Our European friends will call us pathetic wimps. That isn’t cold! Minus 40 is cold. I know that, but we are in Australia, the land of heat and sunshine, draughts and heat waves and not used to the severe European cold. Minus 2, certainly felt cold enough to me. If it got colder than this on a regular basis, I’d build a different shed. One that had walls!

A quick walk around the garden reveals that the last 2 rows of very late potatoes in the garden have now had it. The frosts are coming regularly now. Not severe, but light and regular. I think that this must put an end to these spuds, but they still have a few green leaves. I don’t need the space just now, so will leave them to their own devices, till spring. I can’t see anything coming of them. However the single red Flanders Poppies growing among them seem to love it.

There are lots of pretty images in the garden of leaves tinged with white frost and ice crystals. The ground crunches under foot as I walk about. There have been several frosts like this one now. It’s good. It will finish off a lot of bugs like the fruit fly, that can over winter in milder climates. This ‘chill’ will help all the old varieties of fruit that need their winter chill to become fertile in the spring.

I walk down to the Pantry Field garden. It’s situated down at the bottom of our land, in a clearing in among the tall eucalypts. the tree cover of the tall crowns gives a modicum of protection. I have a quick look around and see that the frost hasn’t penetrated here as yet. The big potato crop is still doing just fine, no frost damage. But on closer inspection I see that a lot of the tender tops of the plants aren’t burn’t off, but completely missing. Nibbled off by our resident Eastern grey kangaroos that wander through here attracted by the grass, tree cover, undergrowth protection and the availability of 4 dams to choose from for water. No wonder that they hang around. They treat the place like they own it, and they do! They were here first. We haven’t fenced our land at the boundaries at all. It is all open for them to pass through and enjoy. What we have decided to do is to fence off the various islands of garden and orchard, to keep some possibility of getting a crop to ripen. These plants haven’t been attacked till now, so now is the time to do something about it, If I don’t, they all be gone in a week or so.

I make it a priority to extend the fencing wire up to 1.5 metres. Up until now we had got by with only rabbit proofing fencing. Wire mesh that we could step over. Now I need to make a taller fence with a walk in gate, plus an openable end to allow the tractor to be able to get in and out for tilling once a year. While thinking all this through I see that there are another crop of mushrooms coming along. I can count about twenty or more. We’ll be changing our diet slightly now and for the next few weeks to include Mushroom soup, mushroom sauces, mushroom risotto, mushroom in white sauce and eggs and bacon for that leisurely late brunch. If we can find a day that we can declare to be leisurely?

Fond regards from the old fun-gi

Bitter and twisted

Posted on 27/07/2014 by hotnsticky

Making marmalade on a sunny winters morning.

I’ve found the time to make some more marmalade. The citrus trees have fruit to be picked, so I make the time and manage 4 batches throughout the day. I use mainly Seville oranges, but I also like to experiment, we have tangelos, lemons, ruby grapefruit, nagami cumquats and Italian bitter chinotto.

The Sweet One has already made the tangelo/seville mix. She does everything so properly, measuring out the ingredients to a recipe. Her marmalade always works. She is so sweet, she even adds the correct amount of sugar. I tend to make mine with a little bit less sugar, as I find some marmalade far too sweet for my taste. I have reduced the sugar to 300 grams to 1kg of whole fruit. I juice the fruit and add it into the pan, and that is the only licquid that I use. Then I scrape out all the pith from inside and discard it to the compost. i havent weighed this pulp, so Im not too sure what the final balance of sugar to peel ends up being, but it works. Next I slice the peel finely, add it to the pan and lastly weight out 300g of sugar and toss it on top. I bake it in the bread maker, set to ‘jam’ setting. I know that it doesn’t sound like the sort of thing that I’d normally do. I’m usually so hans-on. But it works so well. I don’t use the pips, nor do I soak the peel overnight. The machine does a perfect job of it in one hour, while I get on with other things.

This next batch, I decide to make a straight seville orange batch, then another one with seville orange, ruby grapefruit and lemon. Lastly I add some of the bitter Chinotto

The ruby grapefruits are on at the moment so we are having one each morning before breakfast to cleanse our pallets and freshen us up to start the day, beautiful glowing colour and sharp astringent sour/sweet pulp.

After we have had our ruby grapefruit for breakfast, which The Sweet One has peeled in one long twisted strip of peel. I see that it looks so great. I don’t want to waste it, so I decide to add it to the next batch of marmalade. I will mix it with Seville orange and Myer lemon, with the addition of the finely sliced up twisted grapefruit skin from breakfast and a bitter Italian chinotto.

In this way I can call this batch of marmalade ‘bitter and twisted’.

I like it.

With best wishes from The Sweet One and her bitter and twisted marmalade maker

	New pots for the Ope… on More rain and tasting cid…
	The Old Wood Heater… on Zen and the Art of Maintenance…
	Jan 25, 2019: Progre… on Solar PV Fired Pottery Ki…
	Jan 25, 2019: Progre… on Driving on Sunshine
	Okawachiyama: The Se… on Okawachiyama, The Secret Villa…

Tonight my Fingers Smell of Garlic

Steve Harrison and Janine King's other Hot and Sticky web site

Category Archives: self-reliance