Old Shimpo RK1 potters wheel

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I recently bought an old Shimpo RK1 potters wheel from a friend.

It probably dates to the 70’s. These wheels were manufactured from 1958, probably up to the late 70’s or very early 80’s? 

The smaller RK2 wheel was released in 1967 and became the standard wheel from that time on. The RK2 was smaller, lighter, more portable and cheaper than the RK1. 

These larger and very much heavier RK1 wheels were built on a cast iron shell, making it quite stable, but very, very heavy. The RK1 has a kind of gearbox to increase torque when making very large pots, and the torque is finely adjustable using a handle on top of the casing to make the subtle changes needed, without stopping the wheel.

It’s a bit of a dinosaur. In fact I have only ever seen 3 of them in Australia. Les Blakeborough had one in the Sturt pottery workshop in Mittagong when I worked there in 1972. He had a special extra-large copper tray custom made for it. I’ve never seen anything else like it. My teacher Shigao Shiga had one in his studio when I was his apprentice in 1973, and Peter Rushforth had one in his later studio in Shipley. This one could possibly have been Shiga’s old one passed on to him, as they were close friends.

I missed out on getting my hands on all of these wheels when they changed hands, so I was pleased to see this one come up for sale recently.

I don’t think that it has had too much use, as it’s in good mechanical condition for such an old wheel. They were originally supplied with only a small splash guard in front of the wheel head, as were the original RK2 wheels in the 60’s. It was another 10 years before they started producing wheels with plastic trays – probably for the hobby market? All Japanese pottery studios in the early years had the wheel set down under the floor, and the potter sat cross-legged on the floor and bent forward to lean over the wheel head at floor level. Hence the arm bolted onto the foot pedal to reach up to floor level to control the speed. I had to learn to sit cross-legged just like this when I was an apprentice. As a 21 year old, it was a bit of a shock, and my legs went numb quite quickly. It took me months to get used to it. As I wasn’t accustomed to sitting cross legged on any floor, at any time. If I dangled my legs down into the wheel enclosure, they would get saturated with throwing water/slip. So I quickly learnt to throw with a minimal amount of water/slip. To this day, I still throw with almost no water.

The splash guard and it’s mountings were missing from this wheel when I bought it. This type of potters wheel is meant to be mounted in an enclosure to catch all the slip spray and turnings. I had two such enclosures in the old pottery, one for each of the smaller, more compact RK2 shimpo models that I owned back then. RK2 and RK2 super.

The good side was that you could work all week and the turnings would just pile up around the machine. Friday afternoon was the time to clean out the enclosure. The bad side was that you couldn’t change clays very easily. I use a lot of different clays/porcelain stone pastes these days and need to keep all the turnings and slip separate. So a full tray suits me better. Unfortunately, the plastic ones usually supplied with modern shimpo wheels a tediously small and so cramped that I can’t fit my fingers down into the gap to clean out the turnings. So I am forced to have to dismantle the tray to remove the turnings every few minutes, it’s so tedious. 

The marketing picture of the original RK1 from their website shows the wheel with its wheel head splash guard.

I have built new custom built trays for half of my Shimpos so far. It’s just one of those jobs that is on-going and a work in progress. I’ll get them all done in due course.

There was no easy way to fit a tray onto this old RK1 wheel with its sloping frame casting. So I had to weld up a support frame and drill and tap threaded holes into the cast iron casting to fix the new tray securely in place.

I siliconed all around the edges of the tray where the waterproof ply meets the stainless steel wall, and then glued on a strip of clear poly tubing all around the top of the steel edge to make it more comfortable for the user.  I also used the base of a plastic bucket to make a protective guard around the shaft to keep water and turnings  away from the bearings I screwed this down and siliconed it to the base as well. All good.

I made a wooden tool shelf for the end of the tray with an arc cut out to match the wheel head to allow for big batts when throwing platters.

The finished product in place and working. We now have 8 wheels up and running in time, ready for the first weekend throwing workshop, this coming weekend. This workshop was organised by invitation only, for those potters who came and helped us clean up after the fire. This one is free, as my thank you gift to those helpers. The next workshops will be advertised here to allow anyone who wants to, to apply. I’ve asked around and made a few enquiries. I’ve decided to charge a fee that is at the lower end of the current market price. I’ll be charging $125 per person per day. 

I see these proposed intermittent workshops, spread out throughout the year, as being my part-time job in retirement.

I’ll be teaching other workshops as well as throwing in the coming year; 

There will be throwing for wood firing, using my specially developed clay bodies.

Weekend wood kiln firings. Spread over two weekends, first weekend for packing and firing, then the following Sunday to unpack and debrief on the work.

One day geological field trip to collect samples followed by rock glaze testing and firing

Glaze theory and testing. + plus other topics as they appear appropriate or are requested.

Janine and I have acquired a lot of experience and skills over the years. We were trained in the 70’s when everything was done the old fashioned way and skills and theory were taught in greater detail than is done today. We are keen to pass on some of these skills before we expire.

The modern pottery workshop access classes, or potters wheel experience classes, don’t tend to teach much, if any, theory these days. We hope to fill part of that need.

Pugging Clay

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We’ve been busy in the clay making shed loading up the dough mixer with more clay mixtures for the coming throwing weekend workshops booked for the 26th and 27th of this month.  This time I made up a single batch each of vitreous white stoneware/porcelaneous body and a batch of coarse, wood firing, stoneware body using local rough crushed shale with both pale and brown kaolin powders.

We use the stainless steel twin auger Venco pug mill that I bought 2nd hand. It’s only small with a  3”, or 75mm dia, extrusion, but it is so quick, very quiet and self feeding. 

We started by recycling all the slaked and stiffened turnings from the last batch that had been sitting in the clay box ageing and waiting for the next pugging session.

Over the few months since I used it last, the clay had dried out a little in places in the barrel. Which was a little bit strange, as I had the pug mill pretty well sealed at both ends, but some of the clay dried out enough to be too firm to pass through the vacuum screen. It jammed in the screen mesh and slowed down the pugging significantly, so I had to pull the pug to bits and clean the screen. No problem! The beautiful feature of this pug mill, is that it only takes 60 seconds to rotate and un-clip the barrel, then lift it off to get to the screen. It’s so quick and easy with no bolts or spanners required. I scraped the screen clean and replaced it in 2 mins and back in business. Amazing!

The next batch of coarse textured wood firing clay was put through the dough mixer and the Venco 4” or 100 mm. dia. vacuum pug mill. This pug mill is fitted with coarse mesh vacuum screens, specifically for making clay bodies like this.

We start off by pugging all the recycled turnings from the last throwing session. These have been wet processed, bagged and then stored in the clay boxes waiting for the next pugging session with this mill. By having different pug mills for each different clay body. It saves so much time in not having to clean out the pug mill before changing clays. The recycled turnings also benefit by the time spent ageing in the clay box, increasing in plasticity over time. The new batch of clay is loaded onto the mobile clay table and wheeled out of the isolated and dust extracted mixer room, then wheeled out to the pug mill area. Janine can then start to pug the clay in a clean, dust free environment, while I return to the clay mixer room and start another batch.

The recycled clay and the new batch are then pugged together to get a good mix. But most importantly, all the pugged clay is stacked in a long stack on the pug mill bench and when full, all the ends of every pug of clay are all cut off and mixed together, and fed back through the pug mill, so that there is a little bit of every part of the new batch and all the turnings all aggregated in the new sausage of clay as it comes from the pug. This thrice pugged and well blended clay is then bagged and back into the clay store ready for use. This double processing and blending eliminates any variation between the first and last pugs of clay from that mix.

It doesn’t eliminate any mistakes in the weighing out or the dough mixing, but it minimizes the possibilities. Life is what it is.

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

All the machines are built on trollies or castors, so that once all the clay is bagged and stored away, I can then wheel all the machinery out of the way and mop the floor clean of any spilt fragments of clay, dropped while pugging. The whole area is opened up to a through breeze, and thoroughly wet cleaned and mopped, then allowed to dry, before the machinery is wheeled back into place.

It’s not perfect, nothing is, but it is very good and the best that I can do at the moment using the machines that I could get my hands on 2nd hand at the time, and others donated from friends. You know who you are! I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your support and thoughtful kindness!

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!

Fire and Ash Exhibition

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Janine and I have work in the ‘Fire and Ash’ exhibition at the ‘Lowe and Lee Gallery’ in Sydney. The show opened last Friday.

I have a few wood fired bowls that had minor damage during the firing, and I repaired them with gold. If I was Japanese, or working in Japan using traditional materials. This work would be called ‘kintsugi’.

However, as I’m in Australia and using very westernized hybrid techniques, methods and materials. I choose to call these bowls ‘gold repair’ pieces. The only common material is the 23 karat gold.

I did a course on kintsugi repair when I was in Japan, but the uniquely Japanese materials like the sap of the Rhus tree are not readily available here in Australia, or not that I know of.

Also, it is worth noting that the sap of the Rhus tree is highly toxic and not to be used without extreme caution PPE. It causes Toxicodendron dermatitis.

So I have invented my own hybrid methods that incorporates locally available materials, like 5 minute epoxy glue instead. I make up my own blend of high strength filler putty, and I also make my own grinding and polishing discs to buff the surfaces up to a fine finish.

After a bit of work, they are greatly improved and given a new life. By selecting them as special and showing them some respect by repairing them. They are made even more beautiful, even with their scars, chips and cracks.

My work in The Art Gallery of NSW

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Some of my work is now on show in the Art Gallery of NSW.

There is a new show of Ceramics called “Brick, Vase, Clay, Cup, Jug“ That has recently opened in the Art Gallery.

This show of ceramic related items from the Gallery’s collections, is curated by the highly esteemed ceramic artist/curator/writer, Glenn Barkley.

I’m very pleased and proud to be in the New South Wales Art Gallery collection in the first place and now ‘on show’ as part of this extensive exhibition.

My few pieces are a very small part of this extensive show. They were purchased with funds very generously donated by Vicki Grima AO, past CEO of the Australian Ceramics Association for the collection.

These 13 porcelain bowls on display were originally shown in my exhibition titled ‘5 Stones’, at Watters Gallery as part of a major show of over 100 pieces that took me15 years of research and travel to assemble. They are all made from various deposits of single stone porcelain (sericite). I researched and then traveled to every site that I could find around the globe. I studied, searched and collected samples in Japan, China, Korea, UK and of course Australia. I located 13 separate sites and collected samples of the various stones, then carried them back to Australia after each trip in my hand luggage, where I crushed, ground and finely milled them into porcelain bodies, before ageing them and finally firing them in my wood fired kiln.

Because the research and travel involved in creating these pieces was entirely self funded, it ended up taking about a quarter of my life to complete. So I’m pleased to see that it has just a little more exposure than the original 3 weeks on show at Watters Gallery.

I need to give thanks to Janine for putting up with me while I toiled away at this endeavor over the years, also Frank Watters for showing the work, plus Vicki Grima for funding the purchase for the collection, and finally Glenn Barkley for curating the show and selecting my pots to be part of the story.

Glenn Barkley has just released a major new book on Ceramics, titled ‘Ceramics – An Atlas of Forms’

Re-use, re-cycle, re-purpose!

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This last week, Janine and I almost finished off a lot of the paving around the pottery. It’s good to cover over most of the coarse gravel that is the left over remnants of the building site. Slowly slowly, we get the jobs done. We felt that we could face doing all the digging and shovelling on our own, so we hired a young local guy to help us with the digging and screeding. 

The week after the fire, we had a working bee here, when a few of our past students and other volunteers turned up and helped us clear away all the paving tiles that had been the floor of the old pottery. We avoided using much concrete in any of our buildings, because of the carbon debt that it involves, so all of our previous pottery buildings were earth floored and paved over a plastic membrane.

As each of the potteries that we built burnt down over the years, we dug up the pavers and stacked them to one side, then re-used them in the next building. We had to flip them over each time to get a clean fresh face upwards. Some of the pavers have melted plastic buckets fused into them, others have metal attached or even molten glass. It takes us a few days to get them all chipped, skutched, scraped and smooth.

This time there isn’t much choice, as both sides of the tiles have previously been through a fire. This is their third use. However, with persistence and a lot of chipping, scraping and washing we have an interesting new floor with a particular character. Fortunately, the crushed gravel substrate that we laid to build on is most suitable to lay pavers onto. AND it is easy to screed and level out to a smooth surface. So we don’t need to buy in anything to complete this job. Re-use, re-cycle, re-purpose!

This new paved area isn’t perfect, but just like me, it has its own peculiar character. Worn, trashed, recovered, reinvented and back in service again. A battered and aged look. Possibly a bit WabiSabi even? It isn’t stylish or pretty, but it functions on several levels.

These tiles used to be terra cotta orange and brown, but after two fires, they have been reduced to 50 shades of grey, charcoal black and creamy-grey-pink. It’s a very good match to the old re-cycled grey and rusty corrugated iron sheeting that we scrounged off old buildings to give the new pottery shed a weathered and worn-in, shibui look. Many of the tiles are broken or chipped, but we re-use them anyway, just as they are. This is real life, not Hollywood!

It has it’s own story embedded in its surface. It actually looks really appropriate as wrap-around paving, acting as an introduction to the next part of the story.

Welcome!

Winter, Everything is dormant – except us

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

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

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

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

At 4.30, they put them selves to bed. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3 New Chickens

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Our old singular surviving chicken, Edna, has been quite lonely recently, since the death of her sister chook, Gladis. She is getting quite old now for an Isa Brown chicken, she is about 4 years old and has been laying less eggs month by month this year. About one or two per week, which is normal for this breed at 4. If we had a rooster, she’d be a great grand chicken!

Recently she has gone off the lay entirely as she goes through the moult. She is putting so much energy into growing new feathers, that it takes all the protein that she can muster. Hence, no spare protein, no eggs. We have been feeding her extra tit-bits of meat in her diet to help her along, increasing the protein in her diet. She just sits in the corner of the courtyard all day. She has lost her inquisitiveness and desire to get out and scratch and forage. She looks a bit lonely and sad. But I could be overlaying that reading onto her. She’s probably perfectly happy? Who would know?

This shortage of eggs coming from the hen house has led me to enquire about another source of eggs. We have got a couple of dozen now and then from our neighbour Paul, who has more than he can eat just now. I have also investigated buying eggs from the various stores and supermarkets around town. But buying commercial eggs is fraught with difficulties. The big commercial producers who control the market have recently bribed the government in some way or other to change the law regarding the food labeling laws on eggs.

It seems that now with this change, the definition of ‘Free Range’ chickens is meaningless, with so many birds to the hectare (when allowed out). It looks like a concentration camp for chickens and not much better than being caged. Caged birds can be stocked at a rate up to 20 chicken to the sq. m. According to ‘Choice’ magazine.

I could never buy any caged eggs, in my mind it’s akin to torture. Even ‘Barn raised’ chickens at 4 chickens per square metre. That’s 50cm x 50cm of space per chicken. No free space at all. No way to be able to move around freely. They have debased terms like ‘Free-Range’ and ‘barn raised’, it sounds like it might be a nice environment. It’s not.

Having grown up with chicken in the back yard when I was a kid, they were always locked up at night to keep out dogs and foxes, but then let out every day to free range around the back yard all day. They would put themselves to bed at dusk. The big wire-netted yard allowed them to move around freely, but safely, until they were let out. We seemed to always have about a dozen or so. We shared the common back yard with my grand parents, who lived behind us in another street.

My grandfather managed the chickens for my Mom. He obtained fertilised eggs when we had a broody chook, as we didn’t have a rooster. It was his job to sort out the young roosters and dispatch them as needed, as half of the eggs would hatch out as males. I learnt from him the basics of chicken management, although I never saw him kill them. He kept that away from us.

So when Janine and I came to live here, it just seemed the most natural thing to build a chicken coop and get a few chooks. We’ve had them in our yard for most of our life. We got our first chickens from our neighbour John Meredith. He kept Old English Game Fowl. We learnt a lot from him, It was the first time that I had lived with a rooster. We were far enough from any neighbours, that it was legal to keep a rooster. The rooster was always so protective of his girls.

One evening we were ready to go out at dusk and tried to close the chicken coop door, but the rooster was stubbornly refusing to go inside, standing just a little bit away from the door and making a bit of a racket. We couldn’t coax him in. When suddenly one lone chook came running across the yard from some distance away, where she had lost track of time and didn’t realise that it was dusk. Once she was safely inside, he went in and we could close the door. He knew all his girls weren’t in yet, there was still one missing, so would not let us lock her out. I don’t think that chickens can count. I know that some birds can, but not up to 12. so he must have recognised her absence by look or personality?

In the mid ’80’s, we had the amazing Sally Seymour come and stay with us for some time. She taught us so much country ‘Lore’. A better, cleaner way to dispatch a chook, and she also taught us dry plucking, so much neater and cleaner. So many little tips and tricks, we owe her so much. You can check out Sally and John Seymours books at Sally’s web site in Wales. <https://www.pantryfields.com/sally-seymour&gt;

So, with Edna off the lay, I went looking for an ethical egg, or dozen. The best bet was from our neighbour paul. But after that it was to the shops. I started looking closely at egg boxes, reading the fine print. People can buy a dozen caged eggs for $4.50 per dozen, although I couldn’t. I love my chickens. I’d hate to think of them locked into a tiny wire cage box for 2 years then slaughtered, having never been able to run around in the grass or take a dust bath. it’s cruel.

Next comes the ‘Barn laid’ eggs from chickens crammed into industrial sheds. Read this as locked in a big tin shed, under artificial lights, 20 hours of light per day, with 30,000 other hens with hardly enough room to turn around. This is just as unacceptable to me.

Then there comes the BIG lie. The huge commercial/political con job called ‘free range’. These days it seems any crammed unpleasant space filled with chickens seems to be legally marketed as free range. I looked at a lot of egg boxes in the supermarket to see how many chickens they had per hectare.

‘Choice’ magazine had an article about the chicken industry. It was quite shocking to me. <https://www.choice.com.au/food-and-drink/meat-fish-and-eggs/meat/articles/free-range-chicken&gt; It’s worth a read.

Are ‘free range’ chickens really allowed to range around freely. Some ‘free range’ egg producers claim 25,000 hens to the hectare is free range. Some boxes also add the caveat of “when allowed out”, (see the Choice article above) so again, they spend their lives in crammed spaces. These aren’t really free range at all. This is just marketing double-speak and advertising mumbo-jumbo to try and trick you into thinking that the chickens are living a natural life. They are not. This is just linguistic promiscuity.

Real free range is where chickens are allowed to roam free on pasture all day. To scratch for bugs and worms, to dig holes and take dust baths. They should have enough space to form little clusters or flocks and move independently around the paddock at their will.

I started to look closely at the boxes of eggs available in the supermarket, grocery store and green grocers. I read all the blurb on the labels. I found various cartons of eggs in different shops around town, that seemed to fit my version of free range requirements.

This box claims to hold less than 2500 birds per hectare, which seems quite OK. But could be better.

Farmer Rod’s brand claimed 1250 hens per hectare and are labelled ‘pasture raised’. Great, that sounds good. I’d like to check it out a bit more and make sure that it is all it claims to be.,

but then I saw, Hunter Valley eggs.

Free Range hens stocked at 950 chooks per hectare. That’s even better. but is it true? I have no idea. I really hope so. The web site says a lot about being certified and hens raised to industry standards. Oops! that’s a bad sign! ‘Industry standards’ are very low and they are always lobbying for higher numbers and lower standards. Call me callous and cynical, but I don’t trust big business, their ‘Industry Standards’, along with industry ‘self-regulation’. It has proved over and over again to be worthless posturing.

I moved along to the next best box. Its packaging claims 750 chickens per hectare.

I googled the company and found out that it is an olive growing company. They run their chickens in amongst the rows of olive trees in big mobile trailers. Or so they say. It all looks credible, but I notice that on the label, it also states “when outdoors”! Oops, why would they not be out doors if they are free range? The images on their web site didn’t show any big sheds, just mobile trailer laying boxes! I refer you to the ‘Choice’ magazine article again. It could well mean that they never get to go outside at all according to Choice. Moving along.

Mulloon Creek eggs look to be very good. Their labeling ticked all my boxes. I was going to buy these eggs. But then I saw Kangaroo Valley eggs. Check out their web site, it is very impressive. It looks to be completely ethical. Or have I just been conned by sophisticated marketing and advertising goobaldygook!

The best that I could find was a local farm run by a husband and wife couple who appear to be both teachers. So it appears that they leave the chickens out to roam throughout the day while they are at work teaching, but they have 3 ‘maremma’ guard dogs in with the flock. They also employ casual staff to help guard the hens. it all sounds pretty reasonable and they are local to me.

They claim just 40 chooks per hectare, and from the images on the web site, it looks like that. No big sheds in sight in the aerial photographs.

So this was my choice. I didn’t worry about value for money comparisons. I am prepared to pay a proper price for a properly raised happy chicken. The most expensive eggs were the olive farm organic eggs at over $1 each. However, the local Kangaroo Valley eggs were higher mid range price. A good find. and will be our fall back position when we don’t have sufficient eggs from our own girls, but they are in limited supply, so the Mulloon Creek will be my next best choice.

We usually keep between 2 and 4 chickens here on our 2 hectares. That’s a stocking rate of 1 to 2 chooks per hectare! I think that because chickens are birds, they prefer to flock together, so a few more wouldn’t be a bad thing, even a good thing, but we just don’t need more than 2 eggs a day each, so we need to keep our flock small.

At the moment we only have our singular, lonely chicken, named Edna, but I have just bought 3 more ‘point-of-lay’ pullets. That should keep us in eggs for another 3 years or so. There will be a difficult week here while Edna turns nasty and beats up all the young pullets to establish the pecking order. We keep them all in the house all day to sort it out and to get the new girls used to where they now live, sleep, feed and drink. Once habitualised to this new norm, we will let them out all day confident that they will return to the chook house at night to be locked in and kept safe from the foxes.

I don’t like to see chickens fight and peck each other. I really feel for the littlest one who cops it from all the others, but it’s not up to me. It’s chickens own way of sorting things out and best to let them get on with it and don’t try and interfere. But i can’t hang around down there with them too much, it distresses me. So I keep away, just turning up to give them feed and clean water morning and evening.

Once we start to let them out, we will have to start training them to come when they are called and recognise their name. This is done with careful, slow and persistent food bribery. Giving them little tit-bits when they come. Once one of them get the idea in her head that it is worth her while coming. All the others start to realise that she is getting fed, so competition cuts in. They can’t stand to miss out, so they all start to come when called- just in case there is a food reward at the end. it works!

Yes Janine, I’m coming. Diner’s ready!

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.