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Winter Solstice and the First Truffle of the Season

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We are well and truly in the months of winter now. We had a week of crackling frosts, then they were driven away by a week of freezing winds. That didn’t help me to get out and about in the garden at all, so I stayed inside working in the studio, out of the wind.

We celebrated the winter solstice with a dinner here in the big decorating room in the pottery, at the big work bench, converted for the day into a refrectory table. We can seat a dozen pretty comfortably in there. It is such a big, almost empty space, that it doubles up very well as our entertaining area. It is huge and uncluttered, as opposed to out house, which is small and compact, and none of the rooms in the house were designed to seat 12 people for a meal. We have however, had over 30 souls in there for a house concert, crammed in cheek and jowl. But that was only for listening to music, not a sit down meal.

On this occasion, I cooked pizzas for everyone, as it is cold outside, it was a good time to light up the old wood fired pizza oven and crank out a few pizzas. 

I try and stay clear of the usual suspects. My favorite this time was wilted spinach and oven roasted pumpkin from the garden, with a few olives. I prepared everything before hand, picking, washing and wilting the spinach before everyone arrived. I spent the morning in the kitchen prepping. The pumpkin was finely sliced, diced and roasted in the new solar electric oven, with olive oil salt and pepper and some finely diced garlic, also from the garden. These crunchy little gems melt in your mouth and smell and taste delicious.

We have been enjoying the first truffle of the season for our breakfasts this last week. We buy only one truffle each winter. It’s a special indulgence. They are hard to buy around here directly from the growers, who prefer to sell in larger amounts directly to restaurants. Luckily we have a son who is a chef and has access to the trade, so we order one each season through him. We take what ever comes. I only ask for something less than $100. At $1 a gram, it can quickly add up, but usually we get something around $30 to $50 worth. However, this year, the price has gone up to $1.50 per gram, and what turned up in our order is a beauty! 50 grams. That is about 50mm dia. and the biggest that we have had the privilege to enjoy so far. 

This is a 4 or 5 meal truffle!

We store the truffle in a container with the eggs for tomorrows breakfast and a cup of rice that will be the next nights risotto dinner.

The best way to enjoy truffle in my opinion is just simply grated over very soft scrambled eggs.

We spent the weekend cutting and splitting wood for the kiln and house. These are logs still sitting in the yard, left over from the bushfire clean-up.

Yes, We are still dealing with the aftermath of that horrible event. It’s still all around us, in the dead trees still standing, but on this occasion, we are cleaning up logs still sitting on the ground from burnt tress that were felled for safety reasons by the State Government clean Up squad that came through after the fire to ‘make-safe’ the area where people might be living and working around their houses.

Some of the logs were particularly straight grained, so were ideal for splitting very fine for the side stoking of the 2nd chamber of the new wood kiln.

Others were gnarled and knotty with many forked branches, so I cut these short for use in the house stove. You can see the new pottery up in the distance. We are clearing up further from the core area around the house now, So we are making some progress.

It was a full day and by the end of it I was conscious that I was very tired and needed to stop before I ended up hurting my self. I have damaged my hand in the splitter years ago, by working on into the gloom in the evening, just trying to get the job finished in one day. 

As the shadows lengthened. I called it quits. I will finish the job another day.

What started the day as a 3 big piles of twisted logs and butt ends, ended with several small er piles of split timber kiln fuel. 

49 years ago, when we started out together on this creative journey. All we had was a two metre long, ancient, two man cross-cut saw and a block buster hammer. My, how things have changed! I still have the big cross cut saw, it hangs up on the wall in the barn. I still have the block buster head too, however it has had countless wooden shafts, broken and replaced since then. My days of swinging the block buster are numbered, but it still gets some sporadic use for small jobs that are too small to be bothered getting out the tractor and hydraulic splitter. It’s a bit like kitchen gadgets that take more time to clean up than the time saved using them. I still admire and appreciate many old things and ways of being, but splitting wood with a hammer is not one of them.

Reducing our carbon footprint still further

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In our attempt to reduce our carbon footprint to as low as possible without having to reduce ourselves to living in a cave. We want to engage with the modern world, but only to the extent that we can cope with. For instance, we have virtually no presence on social media. 

As our latest attempt to get out of the fossil fuel industry web of complex energy solutions. We have recently purchased an electric stove, so the old LP gas stove has been retired to the pottery for the odd occasion when I have to cook for a lot of people over there.

The new stove now completes our conversion to a fully PV powered solar electric home. It’s a good feeling to cook on sunshine, either fresh off the roof during the day, or stored in our battery for use at night. The pottery kilns are either solar electric or wood fired using trees from our own forest. Our car is run almost exclusively on PV sunshine, and now the house is fully electric. However, we have retained the wood fired slow combustion kitchen range, as it heats the hot water for the house in winter when there is not so much less sunshine for the solar hot water panels. It cooks all the winter meals, and warms the house to boot. In summer when the temperature is too hot to want to light the fuel stove, that’s when the electric range comes into play.

The stove has a conventional electric oven, but it has a modern induction cook top, coupled with the right induction compatible metal based copper pans it is lightning quick to heat up and cooks beautifully. There will be a bit of a learning curve for us to digest the 50 pages of instructions.

Digital cooking is a new concept for us. We end up pressing a lot of buttons with our digits to make it work.

The new stove sits very comfortably alongside the very old steampunk wood stove that we bought 2nd hand 45 years ago.

So far I’ve experimented with baking a loaf of rye bread, couldn’t tell the difference. 

A pan forte cake, witch was just as delicious as it always was in the old stove, no change there, just cleaner air in the house and no fossil carbon released.

I also tried winter vegetable quiche. All good with no problems. I’m happy.

After the long weekend Open Studio Sale

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

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

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

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

Bummer! 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3 Things that I learnt today

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The first thing that I learnt was actually last night.

I tried roasting Brussel Sprouts in with the roast instead of steaming them first and then sautéing them in olive oil with a little garlic, salt and pepper.

They were sensational roasted. Soft and creamy inside, but a little bit crispy and crunchy-charred outside. So fantastic! It made my day! Maybe I need to get out more?

As winter is a time for roast dinners, I’ll be doing this again.. This months experience of roast beef was a very petite 250 gram roast. After cooking and cut in half we had just over 100 g each. Just the right amount to insure that we have some red meat, just in case it is good for us. But not too much just in case it isn’t!

The other thing is that I am really enjoying learning to decorate with colours and lustres.

I feel Like I’m a first year pottery student channeling Janna Ferris. Only without her talent, insight, skills and years of experience.

But I have to start somewhere. This is very ‘somewhere’ for me at this stage in my life.

I’m very happy with these tiny ‘shot’ glasses. 50mm dia x 75mm high.

The last thing is that native worrigal greens (native spinach) makes a wonderful spinach and 3 cheeses pie.

I already knew that but just thought that I’d throw it in.

They are so good I made 2. 

We will need some handy, ready-made lunches for the weekend Open Studio Arts Trail sale days.

So really, there was just one new thing that I learnt today. But it was so good, that it felt like three!

Arts Trail. Open Studio Sale

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As the Open Studio Sale Weekend draws closer, we have been working hard to get all the pots fired in time.

This past week we have done several firings in 4 different kilns, 2 solar fired electric kilns, and 2 of the wood kilns, big and small.

I have been following on with my inclination to develop a decorative image that illustrates the remarkable change in my state of mind.

One day, a few weeks ago, after completlng my EMDR therapy, I was busy at my decorating table, painting some of my bowls, when something remarkable happened.

I was painting the stylised bush fire flames motif that I had developed and have been working on for some time. The sort of gestural image that crops up in my dreams. When I suddenly realised that over the few recent pots that I had been working on. The image had subtilely changed from an improvised flame image, slowly but surely, to an image of garden flowers.

I had started painting an English cottage garden scene!

I was somewhat surprised to say the least. I was also very happy to see such beautiful and reassuring scenes becoming reality as I worked, in front of my eyes. Something in my head had changed irrevocably, and for the better.

I feel so much better these days. More relaxed, and I have a sudden burst of creative energy. I’m painting furiously and firing one or the other of the 2 solar PV fired electric kilns every day.

I’m so pleased to show these new pots and decorative images in the Open Studio weekend sale next weekend. 10, 11 & 12th of June.

The initial home-made cobalt goshu pigment and gold lustre design.

The beautiful floral image that developed out of the flames.

And then the English Cottage Garden design that emerged.

All these pots and others in a similar vein will be for sale in the studio this coming weekend, plus our usual wood fired kitchenware pots.

We will have tea, coffee and cake here on the day to share while we chat with you.

See you soon.

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

Last week of Autumn

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In this last week of autumn, the days are noticeably shorter the weather is so much cooler, and the frosts have started. The tomatoes are dead, but wait. What’s this? Still just a few green tomatoes in among the undergrowth and weeds. AND, 3 red ripe ones!

We are picking plenty of broccoli and cauliflowers. Winter is almost here.

There are just a few very small zucchinis still on the bushes. I need to pick them before they get frosted again and go mushy

All the apples are finished and we have just picked our last pear. We have started to pick the winter citrus. All of the citrus trees were badly burnt in the fire, as they were growing along side the pottery kiln shed wall. The closest ones were killed, those further away got badly scorched, but with a severe pruning away of the dead wood, fertilising and watering. Then planting new trees in the vacant spaces. We have a citrus grove once again. Because many of the trees are still very young, just two or three years old, We have a lot less fruit to look forward to. We are almost through the Japanese seedless mandarins. It was a small crop of 30 or so. The tree is still very young and this is only our 2nd crop, so not too bad. The Japanese yuzu has just two pieces of fruit on. This is its first crop. The kaffir lime trees out the front of the house got very badly burnt, but are making a come back with a lot of pruning and TLC. The stronger of the two trees had over 60 fruit on this year. We only grow it for the leaves, so the fruit is picked off to allow the tree to flourish.

I don’t like to see anything wasted, so I decided to juice 20 of the kaffir limes and make lime juice ice blocks for next summer drinks. I think that it might go well with tequila? It’s a quite sour and bitter form of lime juice perhaps best suited to cocktails?

We have also picked up a fallen grapefruit off the ground, our first, which was very tart and sour. Plenty of room for improvement there as the frosts and winter sunshine sweeten them up.

The other fruit that is plentiful at this time of year is Australian native lilli pilli. This tree survived the fire in behind the house, away from the heat and flames, but it’s a very tall tree and the top branches that extended above the roof got burnt off. It is doing well now with a good crop of pink berries. You can’t eat them, they are only used to make jam or cordial.

I got up on the tall step ladder and picked enough to fill a basket, once I sorted out all the leaves and twigs, there was sufficient to fill the big 10 litre (2 gal) boiler. Simmered for half an hour and then the fruit is discarded and the liquor left to simmer down to a concentrate of about 750 ml, a bit more than a pint. Quite a big reduction to concentrate the flavour. It needs half a cup of sugar to make it desirable.

We had to light the wood stove in the pottery for the first time this year. The pottery is so well insulated, that just keeping a small fire ticking over in the stove heats the throwing room area to a gentle comfy warmth. It’s a very nice place to work, great light, comfy warmth, plenty of space.

What more could you want?

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

Latest wood kiln firing.

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This weekend we did a wood firing, now that the weather is cooled and safer.

I could have fired anytime after March, but I was a bit too overwhelmed with everything, to be able manage to get it together straight away. However, since my effective experience of EMDR experience, I have regained my Executive Functioning capacity. So now I can make decisions, make plans and carry them out and get things done again.

I had to clean out the ash from the last firing. I had been a bit slack in not doing it earlier, but the last firing was just before the last Open Studio weekends. I was a bit rushed at the time. I cleaned the out, cleaned the mouse hole cover and washed the floor with alumina.

At the end of the summer, I had collected all the seeding heads off a row of celery plants. I collected the stalks and dried them in a sunny spot in front of the big glass doors in the pottery, then stripped them to use the celery seeds. I used the dried stalks as kindling. It works very well as a fire starter/kindling.

I did a Friday night pre-heat to dry everything out, then started proper, very early on Saturday morning, assisted by my firing friends Len Smith and Warren Hogden. It was a very easy firing. I learnt to use my pre-burnt logs a bit better this firing. I tried splitting the logs much finer this time and it worked so much better. This might be the solution to my bushfire fire wood issue. We fired in 12 hours, including one hour of side stoking the 2nd chamber.

For this firing, I have built and ‘After-burner/Spark-arrestor/Scrubber’, all in one chimney adaptation.

I didn’t work as well as I had hoped, but it did work. I had not attempted anything along these lines previously. I have built spark arrestors before for clients. I have built after-burners for people. I have built flame tubes previously and I have built scrubbers for potters who do salt firing, to strip out the chlorine fumes from the exhaust gasses in the chimney.

But I had not attempted to combine them all together in one unit previously. Unifying them seemed like the logical next step. I gave it a go with my best bet, but it needs extra work to become more effective. I was very pleased with how it performed as an experimental prototype. I used all stainless steel sheeting for heat resistance.

I decided to use plastic ‘polypipe’ hoses and fittings to save cost. I knew from my bush fire experiences that polypipe filled with fast flowing pumped water will not melt. They didn’t here either! I had used plastic polypipe and fittings on the fire protection sprinklers that I fitted to my out buildings, they didn’t melt, even as the building burnt. The sprinklers kept on working!

At a guess, I’d say that I managed to remove perhaps 1/2 the smoke from the chimney top during the side stoking, which can be a very dirty firing technique. Very effective, but very smoky.

The clear rain water in the 200 litre plastic drum reservoir, before the firing. You can clearly see the submersible pump sitting on the bottom of the tank.

The tank is filled with black sooty water after the firing. This is all the soot removed from the smoke at the chimney top. The submersible pump is completely obscured.

During the main part of the firing the scrubber removes most of the smoke. It’s less effective when the degree of smoke increases. Particularly when a load of butt ends drop from the hobs, there is a flurry of intense smoke and some flame.

At the peak of the side stoking part of the firing, the scrubber removes some, but not all of the pollution. You can see the intensity of the flame entering the afterburner at the base, but only 1/2 of the smoke is removed. If the afterburner/scrubber wasn’t there, there would be a tall pillar of black smoke going up above the kiln.

Still, it’s a great start. nowhere near perfect, but I have several ideas about what I can do to improve this first unit. Watch this space.

Terra Nova Ceramics Exhibition

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I will be having a few pots in the ’Terra-Nova’ Exhibition at Sturt Gallery opening on Sunday 28th of May.

It’s a big group show with loads of potters putting work in.

If you are going to be in the vicinity some time over the next couple of months, it will be worth seeing.

Should be a lot of very nice pots.

I will attach a few images of my work that will be in the Terra Nova show.

I have spent the past 3 years recovering as best I can from the catastrophic bush fires of 2019. This has been an ongoing process for both me and my immediate environment. Such a traumatic event for me has left me changed and somewhat self reflective about who I am and what I am doing. This new work is a response to those events.

The bowls in this show are all made from single stone, sericite porcelain and are pieces that I have been nurturing through the drying, firing, glazing process for the past few months. Today I unpacked the final lustre firing for the show.

I hope that you can find something in them of interest, and that you consider them beautiful. I do.