Through Lemongrass Eyes

Adventures in urban agriculture

2011-11-27T18:10:00.001+11:00

How incredible are these public herb and fruit gardens? They're right on a busy riverfront path in the centre of Brisbane. Full of lemongrass, basil, chillies, thyme, papayas, and (a real novelty for a southerner) pineapples.

It's somewhat amusing that I'm up in Brisbane for a media conference, where there's been lots of discussion about using technology to report news, and I'm busy blogging herb gardens from my phone - hardly breaking stuff, but certainly what I felt compelled to share here! (As an aside, the state library here is incredible! Highly recommend a visit.)

Mushrooms can save the world

2011-11-20T17:22:00.004+11:00

I had thought that while I'm always learning about a gardening incrementally, I'm probably not likely to have any more blow my mind kind of lessons about the subject. I was so wrong.

A wee while ago I was at a compost workshop which was pretty interesting, but the most exciting thing I learned that day was after we'd finished the workshop and were talking about inner city community gardens, soil contamination and how to fix it. Apparently, a great way to clean up contaminated sites such as old petrol stations is by planting mushrooms.

The speaker said there are some groups in the US that decontaminate petrol stations by using human hair (which is very absorbent) to mop up any remaining oil and they impregante the hair with oyster mushrooms spores, as this is the type of mushroom which sucks up the most heavy metal contaminants. Once the mushrooms have grown everything is bundled off as hazardous waste.

The idea also came up in an amazing Ted talk, about a mushroom burial suit to speedily dispose of your body:

Wow.

It's a topic that some people are super into, and I haven't even touched on mycelium. (Which people get even more excited about!) There's an info-dense website called Radical Mycology for anyone who wants to read more about the idea.

The waiting game

2011-10-16T18:15:00.005+11:00

I am having a huge amount of fun at the new community garden. Lots of chatting to people, building ramps, scheming about the future, turning compost, all the good stuff. But I can't help feeling there's something missing.

Plants.

Because we're growing everything from seed it is taking a lot longer to really feel like things are progressing. I guess when you start from scratch all over again you suddenly notice it more than when you already have plants to hang out with in the garden and you're just adding to them. But things are getting going now, so fingers crossed it won't be long until we have a box bursting with vegies!

At least the communal salad box that I tend is starting to put on a show. Rocket and lettuce seedlings are getting going, and radishes are looking promising.

If you ever need a gardener pick-me-up, just grow radishes. They are so quick that you feel like you must be doing something right!

Act your age!

2011-09-28T20:39:00.005+10:00

Occasionally I feel like I live an overly sedate life for someone in their mid-twenties. For instance, last weekend there was the choice of bee keeping workshop or the offer of some tickets to Parklife.

I'm happy to say the bee keeping workshop was able to be put off for another weekend, and instead I wandered around a freezing cold festival site, still feeling older than my age because I had decided to opt for jeans and a jumper rather than hot pants and a crop top on a day with a top of 16 degrees. But at least I saw some awesome music! Lykke Li in particular was one to get excited about, but others I liked included Kimbra, Gossip, Santigold, and Example.

Photo by Karen Roe

Landscaping with Pallets

2011-09-14T21:44:00.006+10:00

I'm normally terrible at taking photos before I start a project, which is always somewhat disappointing because then I don't have a reminder of how far a garden or any other project has come since I started it. So this time I'm going to try to show the start as well, and while it might not be pretty, hopefully it will at least be interesting to watch a guerrilla community garden changing and taking shape.

So this is the view as it was on Saturday morning:

The closest garden box is ours, but I'll give more details on it another time.

We had decided to build a second entry point to the garden down at our end, and luckily someone pointed out that a ramp was far better for wheelbarrow access than the stairs I'd been happily plotting. So one friend did the major grunt work and dug out part of the bank to make a rough ramp.

But another friend and I were too excited to leave it at that, so we decided to build a retaining wall from pallets, which is the main building material at the site. So we cut a pallet into three sections of varying sizes and then dug a trench area for them.

We whacked them in place, chucked in some plastic lining and scoria, gravel and earth, and voila! The perfect start to our ramp and beautification of our end of the garden.

The same view, but with a ramp!

And the great thing about a community garden is that others continue to chip in. When I went to drop off our compost this evening I noticed that someone has driven in star pickets in front of the wall, and used some astro-turf that was lying around to cover it.

Snowballs

2011-09-07T22:00:00.004+10:00

On the weekend we headed up to CERES to buy a stack of seeds for our new garden bed. The walk home took us close to the railway garden which I abandoned after getting spooked about soil quality, and it looks like no one has been harvesting much there. I couldn't resist pulling these up, because I've never grown them before.

They're called snowball turnips, and it's a great name for them, isn't it?

Now I just have to weigh up just how worried I am about heavy metals possibly being present in my food...

A riddle for you all

2011-08-31T21:52:00.006+10:00

What's a gardening gal to do when she has spent a year getting an empty garden to a point of overflowing abundance...

...only for the landlord to insist that every single sliver of green be removed from the property upon departure? (And we are talking bare concrete and dust here.)

A) Be heartbroken for a little while and instead spend time in Ikea kitting out the one bedroom flat she now calls home, trying to fill the silverbeet-shaped hole in her heart with meaningless consumerism/pretty birch veneer products.

B) Cultivate a ridiculous houseplant per square metre ratio.

C) Look after a friend's railway-side guerrilla garden patch through most of its growing season but then freak out about heavy metals in the soil just as the winter harvest rolls around due to concerned words from friends who test soil for a living.

D) After despair and despondency find another guerrilla garden closer to home which has abundant community and potential, talk about it non-stop for weeks and then plunge headlong into it, forcing her poor boyfriend to spend entire weekends dawn to dusk helping her knock together garden beds, source soil, etc.

E) All of the above.

I think you folks know the answer. Which also means I feel excited about blogging again! (Not that it's just a garden blog, but let's face it, gardening is the backbone.)

Looking forward to chatting with you all again.

Here's a shot of the railway-side garden before we broke up. It was fun while it lasted!

Don't you hate it when the bath feels too small?

2010-11-29T21:12:00.003+11:00

Or when it feels like someone's rushing you out of the bathroom?

Chooks love having dust baths, and because our clay soil was staying too wet for them to have a dust bath during winter we put our largest pots full of soil in their pen with them, hoping that they would dry out more quickly and be able to serve as something of a bathtub for them. Turns out they might have preferred a few more, and something a little bigger!

Bucket of Broccoli

2010-11-25T10:01:00.000+11:00

During our Weekends o' Weddings month our broccoli went bonkers! We were able to pick a bucket just about every night. It tasted much more floral than shop bought broccoli.

After some heartbreak at the jaws of aphids last year, this year we went for sprouting broccoli so that we could chop off any infestations without losing the whole crop. But then this year we had almost no aphids and those that did arrive were promptly eaten by ladybirds, which I think were around because we have so much parsley.

The only downside was that it went to seed very quickly, I'm not sure if it went quicker than normal broccoli or if it was just due to the wacky weather at the time.

Some updating to do

2010-11-24T20:51:00.006+11:00

Due to popular demand (Hi Mum) I'm not going to let this blog just fade away entirely as it was threatening to do.

The past month has been an absolutely crazy month of weddings, I've spent my weekends in Newcastle, South Africa (that was work rather than wedding),the Huon Valley of Tasmania and Ballarat.

It's been wonderful to watch friends and family make such an incredible commitment to each other, each wedding has been amazing for its own reason. The Newcastle wedding had the most heartfelt, beautiful vows I can possibly imagine, the Tasmanian wedding was such a celebration of the entire lifestyle the couple have embraced together, and the Ballarat wedding was a completely accurate reflection of the couple's sense of humour - they had a giant novelty wedding certificate and their vows were hilarious.

So look for some updates starting now on our chooks, vegie garden and more.

These photos are from the Stellenbosch Botanical Gardens in Cape Town. I spent three hours there on the day when I was leaving South Africa and I took a huge number of photos. And then forced Tom and my parents to sit through a slideshow of every shot when I got home - lucky them!

Sowing seeds pays off

2010-08-15T22:09:00.005+10:00

These carrots were a pleasant surprise. They'd been chugging along in the backyard, doing their thing, and it was only on a rainy evening when I was getting ready to make soup and kicking myself for forgetting to buy carrots that I thought it might be time to check their progress.

That large one was seriously huge! They're also not a bad metaphor for what's been going on in my life and taking me away from the blogosphere: finally, after years of study, interning, volunteering and freelancing, I've got a paid full-time job as a journalist. I'm really enjoying it, and it's nice to have some stability and routine in my life.

Meet the girls!

2010-06-30T12:11:00.006+10:00

I'm pleased to introduce Joyce, Maud and Betty - the newest members of our sharehouse, which is living up to its nickname of The Fitzroy Farmhouse more and more each day! See their little bums sticking up in the air amongst the silverbeet?

This is Joyce, who rules the roost:

This is Maud:

And Betty refused to stay still for a photo, so she can be introduced at a later date.

It's lovely to have little companions clucking around the garden, although they do wreak havoc at times and they're not really laying very many eggs. Luckily we got them for free from a friend, and we got seven tons (!) of barley for free so it hasn't exacty been a difficult equation in terms of money spent vs eggs gained. They love banana, silverbeet, warrigal greens and porridge, but turn up their noses at silverbeet stems and pears. Definitely fussy urban chooks. We still like them though!

Weekend away

2010-06-12T09:02:00.001+10:00

We had a really lovely weekend down at the beach recently. Isn't this pattern on seaweed amazing?

My friend Mat came down with Tom and me. He's always fantastic to hang out with because he's wonderfully friendly and positive, and he's made some inspiring choices. He and his partner Kim recently moved to Tasmania to try and live more sustainably. I really admire their choice to get out of the rat-race and work in jobs they find inspiring as part of their lifestyle. Mat does beautiful work shaping surfboards and taking photographs, you can check out some of his work at his website, Flow State.

When I'm not living my life...

2010-06-06T09:08:00.001+10:00

...I'm pretending to live one of these ones:

My Scandinavian Retreat - which has beautiful photos of all things Scandinavian cabin-ish, I think my favourite posts are the one where you get to see their deck cut perfectly to fit the surrounding rocks, and the one where you get a sense of how beautiful the view from their place is, even the one right from their bed!

bigBANG studio - which just makes me want to move to the desert and meet amazing people, attend parties in off-the-grid houses, get diggity-down desert style, and live in beautiful scenery. And Lily's moving to India later this year - I'm looking forward to it!

I think one of my favourite things about blogs is that you can have such an insight into someone else's life, and you can find someone, somewhere doing something you'd love to do. These blogs were each recommendations from two of my favourite other blogs, which I also wish I were living in!

The first was a recommendation from Pia Jane Bijkerk, an Australian living on a houseboat in Amsterdam, the second came from Kate of for me, for you, of New York.

New music

2010-06-05T22:15:00.008+10:00

One pretty nifty thing about having my radio show has been that it has forced me to find half an hour of music to play each week. Yeah, that doesn't sound so hard, does it? But I'm one of those people who never remembers the names of bands and can't sing to save their life, so whenever I try to choose music to buy it involves a conversation of random words that may or may not be related to the band's name, and then a horrendously out-of-tune rendition missing almost all the words of the song I'm trying to remember the name of. Pretty painful for everyone involved. But I've been very diligent and have really enjoyed actually buying music for the first time in a long time, as well as taking recommendations from friends. The show has a bit of a rootsy, folksy, alternative country feel to it, which has been a fun genre to explore. Lots of Calexico, Sime Nugent, The Waifs, and the fantastic Dirt Music soundtrack created by Tim Winton to match the mood of his novel of the same title - cool concept eh?

One band in this genre that I'm loving at the moment is Power and Greig. A good friend is the slide guitarist extraordinaire in this band, but friendliness aside, I'm really digging their stuff! I think my favourite song (this week) is one called Dancer, but I also love De-burg Days.

I also find their 'sounds like' description from their myspace page a pretty humourously accurate description of our backyard at times (although perhaps minus the band-inspired epiphany!):
"Drinking boutique beers (or more likely cheap longnecks) in your friends backyard in the northern suburbs on a sunny afternoon. Still wearing the clothes you had on last night, talking about how you'd like to move to the country...again. You hear sunday drivers, a bird twittering, a banjo in the distance. Suddenly you realise that power & greig somehow encapsulate your prosaically humble yet poetically fascinating day to day existence in a three minute s(ingal)ong. What wonder! What beauty!"

On your bike!

2010-06-05T21:52:00.000+10:00

I love my bike, so I couldn't resist this pendant made from recycled timber. Bought at the Rose St Artists' market. The artist is Neil Thomas.

A week or two ago I saw someone wearing a badge version of this on their jacket lapel, and I thought it would make a great gift for my brother. So that's now winging its way to Boston, and my one's staying here!

On the wireless

2010-05-04T14:08:00.002+10:00

G'day folks, sorry for a slight absence of late. I've been very busy taking on a fun new project - my own gardening radio show on community radio!

Get Growing is on at 9am every Saturday on the Student Youth Network (90.7FM in Melbourne and Geelong or at syn.org.au). And hopefully I'll soon have podcasts of the show up on show's page on the SYN website as well. The show is aimed at the station's 12-25 year old audience, with an emphasis on growing vegies and making a garden when you're not a home-owner and you have a tight budget.

It's been a bit of a stressful, steep learning curve, because I only completed my four week radio training course the week before I applied for the show, and then I only had another week or so before the first episode went to air. To add to that, I'm my own producer, panellist, everything, so I push all the buttons and sit alone in a studio with no one to ask questions of when things go wrong! But there haven't been too many long pauses so far, I've had some great guests to interview, and I've had a lot of fun chattering away about what to plant and harvest, budget tips and indigenous food plants.

To answer a couple of questions left in previous comments:

EcoMILF, we planted our beetroots as seedlings in the second week of January.

Katiecrackernuts, after a bit of warrigal greens tasting experimentation I would have to say no, they don't taste like spinach. They are probably closer to silverbeet but a bit less minerally tasting. They actually almost remind me of the taste of potato, but in leafy form. Odd, I know.

Building Green

2010-04-15T11:34:00.003+10:00

I come from a family that has more than its fair share of over-achievers. One of the most notable over-achievers is my cousin Catherine who initially trained as a solar engineer and worked on solar cars and planes for awhile before deciding she really wanted to study medicine instead. So she went to Stanford and studied medicine, then surgery. (She also had her daughter in her second year of med because, you know, it had the lightest work load). She now works in robotic surgery. I'm very proud to be related to her.

But from my point of view, her coolest project is underway at the moment. She and her husband (who is equally as smart and geeky) are building a 'green' house. But for them, throwing on a few solar panels and making sure they used insulation was never going to cut it. Oh no. They calculated the 'embodied energy' - the water and energy used to create something - of absolutely everything they built with to make sure they used the lowest energy materials. Catherine and Paul blog about their progress, but be warned it is super sciency. If you're interested but just want the summary, here's Catherine's TED talk on the topic, which has some very interesting comparisons of building materials, retrofitting compared to starting fresh, and even whether a paper towel or cloth is better to use when wiping up a spill:

For those not familiar with TED, it's an amazing resource. A regular meeting of minds, it started as a conference in the fields of Technology, Entertainment and Design. Now it extends far beyond that. It is meant to promote interesting ideas and new thinking, and thinking beyond your own field. Many of the talks are available to watch on their website. As they term it 'Riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world'.

A Problem and Solution Side by Side

2010-04-14T10:14:00.003+10:00

Our pak choi is getting absolutely savaged by fat little caterpillars at the moment, despite being picked over each morning.

But while this type of green is getting stripped to its very skeleton, right in front of it another is thriving and bug-free:

Warrigal greens.

I was intending to plant these in the front yard and let them slowly replace the lawn, but I chickened out, which is just as well because at our first rental inspection last week the property manage told us the owner is incredibly attached to his garden and wouldn't take kindly to the lawn being torn up. So instead these were plonked down on the edge for easy access and they seem to be loving life! They're an indigenous plant that is used just like spinach.

Working from home...

2010-04-07T15:59:00.001+10:00

...is sometimes wonderful. Like when your lunch is silverbeet fresh from the garden with mushrooms, olives, cannellini beans and a squeeze of lemon juice on sourdough toast:

mmmmm.

... sometimes messes with your head. I spent so long staring at our lettuces during my morning coffee that I started to see ballet dancers.
This:

Started to look a bit like this:

(except my lettuces have their arms folded around their shoulders, not stretched out in front)

This:

Started to look a bit like the male lead here:

(except my lettuce is being more dramatic and yearning and is bending at the waist)

...and it sometimes leaves you to be the person left at home to discover that the two mysteries of our household

- where has the brush for the dust pan gone?

- why does our weird laundry/annexe room smell so disgusting?

can be answered in one fell swoop:

Because the brush fell down some odd, until-now-unknown open drain hole behind a cupboard and caught anything from any of our household sinks in the last month or two in its bristles. It was foul.

Ballet photographs by Andrew Bossi.

Beautiful Beets

2010-03-31T08:31:00.000+11:00

We pulled the first of our beetroot this week. Glorious ruby red and bright pink globes, destined for greatness in a starring role in Stephanie Alexander's Kitchen Garden Companion recipe for beetroot, avocado, walnut and pink grapefruit (and lettuce) salad.

It was one of the dishes served up last week at a big dinner for friends that made me so proud of our garden. We all sat around on those (previously posted) benches drinking mojitos with lots of fresh mint from the garden before eating a tasty meal which used garden produce in every course. Far too much was eaten and drunk and a merry time was had by all.

Elspeth Thompson

2010-03-29T17:23:00.002+11:00

It's an odd thing this blogging. You make connections with some people, with others you just feel involved in their lives because you read about them daily, others may be involved in your life without you knowing it. And so it's a confusing emotion when a blogger whose work you always read is no longer going to be there. I loved reading Elspeth Thompson's blog. It took my breath away to have her husband Frank's post announcing her death appear in my reader. And yet we'd never met, I'd never even commented on her blog despite reading it so avidly. Any death is hard to categorise emotionally, but it's even harder when you feel grief but also that you have no right to that grief. It's all so very strange. Because part of blogging makes you feel so much closer to people around the world, and then another part of it makes you feel so very far away.

Elspeth Thompson's obituary in the Telegraph.

She will no doubt be missed by those who knew her, but she will also be missed by those like me, who didn't.

Flower and Garden Show

2010-03-29T12:21:00.003+11:00

I've never been to the Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show (or MIFGS, as the cool kids call it) because it costs a lot of money to go and I suspected that it wasn't really my type of gardening. But suspecting and knowing are two different things, and I always consider going, and this year the landscape design company my housemate works for had an entry, so last weekend I figured now was as good a time as any to see what it's all about.

Money. That's what it's all about. Apart from the part that was about almost all the gardens looking pretty much the same, the use of the same plants over and over and most notably the same colours over and over. I did get to look at lots of pretty succulents, which I loved. But I couldn't understand why people were paying a few dollars just for a cutting when you can get them for free from friends, parks, the bits that fall off onto the pavement outside people's houses, etc. It all seemed so soulless, and even when I did see a really cool plant I found I wanted to buy it from one of the three local nurseries I frequent and support them instead of a vendor I'll never see again.

So now I know. That's not my type of gardening. But it was interesting to see I suppose, if only to be grateful that my garden is built with a lot more love and a lot less steel blue paint, lime green cushioning, and that particular brown that popped up in every single design. And of course, a lot less money.

This weekend should be an entirely different experience as we're heading off rockclimbing at the Grampians - should be fun!

Coming soon

2010-03-29T12:19:00.000+11:00

I've just started seeing previews for The Pacific on Channel 7. Which I imagine is exciting if you loved Band of Brothers, the previous series by Steven Spieldberg. I, however, never saw it.

But it's also exciting if your house was filmed for it! Much of the filming of one story thread took place in our old neighbourhood and in particular in the house next door. In one exterior shot a soldier suitor plucks a rose from the garden next door to the house he is visiting. From this (gorgeously set-dressed) front garden, in fact.

They tore up all the weeds in our front patch and put pots of box hedges around the edges, fake mondo grass along the front, and pots and pots of roses.

To make such a dense screen of roses in the front they took tall standard roses and leaned them up against the fence in between shorter pots of roses. There was also plenty of fake ivy woven around the place - even though we've moved house it still haunts me, I found what I hope is a final plastic leaf when repotting something the other day.

It was a week of mayhem in our neighbourhood.

And when it was all done, and the front garden was left bare and empty of weeds...
I started a vegie patch.

Cold frame

2010-03-27T19:43:00.001+11:00

And further to our bench-building carpentry efforts:
A cold frame.

Not wanting to waste the last scraps of floorboards or an old window found in an alcove full of junk at the last place, we built a cold frame for raising seedlings. While we don't need to keep our seedling safe from frost very often, we do struggle to keep them moist enough in baking heat, and this has helped with that. Currently it has marigold and bok choi seedlings to replace the ones that kept getting savaged by bugs when planted directly, and nasturtiums.

The construction of this was full of confused conversation about why the other person kept holding it upside down until we realised we were visualising very different interpretations of our verbally agreed upon plan. So it has an odd tilt in one part, but it still works a-okay.

Serendipitous Bench-building

2010-03-23T10:53:00.000+11:00

For years a bench mouldered in the garden at our last house. It had gross cushions which sat on some dodgy chipboard that rested precariously on the frame and occasionally someone fell through. So Tom and I decided to use the frame to make a proper bench with a seat of old fence palings we had lying around. But then, the day before our chosen bench-building day, someone ripped up their floorboards and put them in a skip a few doors down from our place. Excellent! Nice, more solid wood for the seat. Things were looking good. And then they got even better. As Tom cycled home from uni, he spotted a bench frame out on the street for a hard rubbish collection.

And that's how we came to have two lovely, so-close-to-matching benches for our backyard.
I'll just sit back and wait for the requests to come flooding in from home magazines wanting to photograph our outdoor setting. Maybe they'll also want to know about my sculptural choice of watering cans spread around the garden in the photo on the left.

Pot o' potatoes

2010-03-19T13:27:00.004+11:00

I have always been skeptical about claims by gardening book authors that potatoes are so easy, you can just plant them in a pot and almost forget about them until it's time to harvest. Often these authors are based in the northern hemisphere, and as our pot of potatoes baked on concrete through an Australian summer, I couldn't help doubting their claims. Finally I was sick of wondering, so this week (perhaps a little too early) I tipped out the pot to see if anything had happened.

Hoorah!

We got nearly a kilo of potatoes from one big pot. I'm not sure it's enough to really bother doing again in our garden, but interesting and satisfying nonetheless.

Quite a suitable post for around St Patrick's day really.

Foula

2010-03-19T12:39:00.004+11:00

This week I received my degree at a graduation ceremony, and while that piece of paper is a pretty swell piece of paper to have, I'm also excited about my Nanna's graduation gift.

My father's family is from the Shetland Islands, a tiny cluster of islands to the far north of Scotland. Plenty of fine things come from this part of the world: Shetland ponies, Shetland sheepdogs, Fair Isle Knitting, my family. Off the coast of the Shetland mainland is Foula.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/neil_roger/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

In 1914, the Oceanic was wrecked just off Foula. It had at one time been the biggest ship in the world and was made in the same shipyard as the Titanic with similarly luxurious fittings. The dangerous waters that had been the Oceanic's downfall also hampered any salvage efforts until 1973, when advances in equipment made diving feasible.

At that time two divers, Alec Crawford and Simon Martin, managed to recover some of the valuable metals used in the engine rooms, including copper from the generators. Shetland Silvercraft (now known as Shetland Jewellery) crafted the metal into pieces linked to the story.

(See the island's silhouette?)

Sustainable meal

2010-03-11T13:32:00.000+11:00

It was pretty nifty to be able to look at our dinner the other night and realise how much of it was from the garden.

Lots of salad leaves, some of our cucumber bounty and tomatoes. And then the piece de resistance - silverbeet tart from Stephanie Alexander's Kitchen Garden Companion, which I was given for Christmas.

(It looks better when she photographs it!)
I've already used this book so many times; it's brilliant to be able to look up whatever you have a glut of in the garden and make something different and I'm enjoying browsing as I'm choosing what to plant.

And to accompany it, a bottle of Re-Wine, which I wrote about last year!

Kooky Cuces

2010-03-10T15:55:00.005+11:00

Is Cuces how you would spell a cucumber abbreviation? But quite seriously, our cucumbers are amazing. I've never grown them before, and they keep surprising us. You just think there are a whole heap of leaves covering some ugly trellis and fence,

but then, whammo! A huge cucumber.

Sometimes they're so good at hiding that they get a bit out of hand. And now they're starting to try and make a break for it.

One of them even tried to peer around the corner of the barbecue this morning.

With one of those every day or two and a salad bed that looks like this:

we're eating plenty of garden food right now!

The Prom

2010-03-04T13:45:00.003+11:00

It's funny how such a short word, prom, can have so many different connotations around the world. In the states you'd be talking about a high school dance if you said 'I went to the prom'; in England, someone might think you had mispoken and meant The Proms. In Victoria, you mean Wilson's Promontory, the national park on the southern tip of mainland Australia.

I hadn't visited in years, but we recently spent a few days walking there with friends, and it really is beautiful. Rich orange lichens grow on pink-toned granite, thick temperate rainforest edges the walking track, and when the sun is out the sea is a brilliant blue.

These were taken at Sealer's Cove just before dusk. Post walking and swimming, pre boulder scrambling and dinner on a boulder on the beach.

And I'm Back in the Game!

2010-02-18T15:42:00.002+11:00

(Every time I say that phrase in my head, which is actually surprisingly often, I imagine Joseph Gordon Levitt in 10 Things I Hate About You saying it. So now that you're inside my head, let's begin.)

Sorry for the long absence, full-time work + full-time study makes you really busy, and things don't get to calm down much when you then have two weeks in which to do all of your assessment for the semester and then - because your landlords' son wants to move into your home - pack up all of your stuff (and your boyfriend's stuff because he's still studying for an exam that will make or break his postgrad studies) and move it to your parents' house in about one million trips across town in a car the size of a roller skate. Things don't really get any calmer when you have to co-ordinate the final parts of your move and signing a new lease from across the Tasman.

But it's all over now, and WE HAVE A HUGE NEW VEGIE PATCH!!!! It faces north, it doesn't have a dense mat of tree roots that regrows as fast as it can be dug out, it doesn't have a big shady tree covering it for most of the day. Sure, there's still plenty of that landlord favourite wall-to-wall concrete, but there's also plenty of lovely rich soil bursting with worms, and I'm absolutely loving having things actually grow for once.

I'll get onto garden and life related things in the next post, but for now, let me re-introduce myself by way of a quiz which I completed months and months ago but never posted: (I've updated some of the answers though)

I was tagged a few weeks ago (now many months ago) by Pepper Stitches, who has a great crafty blog with lots of fun links and stories - you should go and check it out!
I was meant to answer some questions, the original list can be found over at Seeds and Stitches, but like most others I've just answered a few from the list. I'm meant to tag others but I'm a bit shy when it comes to things like that so I don't think I will this time.

What is your current obsession?
Planting vegies that might actually grow, and the furniture, painting and pottery in the Mad Men offices.

Image via Shelterrific

What would you eat for your last meal?
Too much. I'd then probably vomit out my nose as I infamously did in a friend's front garden when her lovely Lebanese mother fed me lovely Lebanese food until I pretty much did burst. Spaghetti bolognaise, lentil and hamhock soup, chocolate and wonderful fresh fruit and vegies would undoubtedly feature on the menu of a last meal.

What was the last thing you bought?
Some radish seeds, a bunch of terracotta pots and some potting mix. I actually went out shopping for clothes, which I hate doing, got depressed by my own lack of trendiness and style, so retreated to the nursery instead, where I figure I get far better bang for my buck in terms of money outlay-happiness experienced.

What are you listening to right now?
My housemate playing guitar in the next room. When I'm listening to my choice of music, it's Teddy Thompson's latest album for brisk strolling, The Beach Boys for doing the dishes, The McGarrigle Sisters for rainy afternoons in the kitchen, Catatonia when I'm at my desk.

What is your favorite ice cream flavor?
Always chocolate.

What is your favorite colour?
Green. It's beyond ridiculous how much green is in my wardrobe!

What is your dream job?
A journalist. Which is what I already do. But a proper, full-time journalist. Who gets more money.

What are you going to do after this?
Finish some job applications, plant some rocket seeds and then see a friend's gig.

What is your favorite smell?
I really love the smell of wet tomato plants, daphne, jasmine, earl grey tea, and clean bedding dried on a sunny day.

What are you most proud of?
Changing to become more like the person I want to be. And changing who I choose to have around me as part of that journey.

How many times do you press the snooze button before you get up?
I have been known to press it for up to two hours. I understand that this is both shameful and foolish. It probably won't stop me from doing it again though.

It's good to be back folks. I'm probably meant to tag some people, but I'm a bit shy about stuff like that. Although I was incredibly stoked to be tagged, so it seems mean to not tag anyone. I'll definitely tag someone next time I'm tagged for something and I'm back in the swing of blogging and commenting (although I've absolutely been reading plenty of blogs, I've just been very quiet for awhile)

Oh my giddy aunt.

2009-09-06T19:04:00.004+10:00

What a stupidly busy few weeks. And it's not really likely to calm down anytime soon, so I really don't know if I should bother getting back into posting when I'm quite liable to disappear again, but I guess I just want to.

I've been so busy with a newspaper internship which was meant to go for the first two weeks of August but which is still going and has now been extended to November. That's full-time and then uni and other work slot in around it, and so far so good, but it doesn't leave large swathes of time for things like gardening and blogging. But I did have a couple of things I wanted to share, so I'll at least keep plugging away at getting those posted.

I feel bad for not commenting on all the posts I've enjoyed reading, but it has at least been nice to still have a constant feed of exciting things other people are doing to read about.

I think maybe this blog needs to change a little as well. I think I was so inspired by reading other people's creative blogs or blogs about their fabulous garden that I forgot that I don't live a particularly creative life, nor is my garden fabulous. (Well, I think it's kind of fabulous but that's because I remember when it was all concrete and weeds and mouldy newspapers and broken glass, but I didn't take any of photos of it back then, so I can't even prove how far it has come.) Anyway, what I'm trying to tell you is that perhaps my first angle was a little flawed, so maybe I need to branch out and find other things to also talk about that are just as satisfying for me and interesting for you.

So forgive the explanatory post, hopefully I'll return soon with something a little more noteworthy.

Wait! Here's something noteworthy:

This is the most important thing I learnt last year. When I learnt it I told lots of my other incredibly busy, driven, perhaps slightly over-achieving friends, and then we all sat back and sighed and felt a little bit better. And sometimes now we still tell it to each other when we're stressing ourselves out with our own actions. So here it is folks.

Detach your sense of self from your achievements.

That's not to say you can't be proud of them and take joy in them, but just don't get so caught up in them that they drown out your other ideas of who you are and what makes you a good person. So with that little gem I'm off to bed. Hopefully I'll see you all soon, and will get back into the swing of posting and commenting.

7 kgs saved!

2009-07-22T14:58:00.003+10:00

Just thought I'd quickly mention the One Million Women website/project. It's a project that aims to get one million Australian women to each save one tonne (1,000kgs) of carbon emissions through changes to their lifestyle over the next year. Obviously, the aim is to cut Australia's total carbon emissions by one million tonnes this year and this group decided to take matters into their own hands.

So far nearly 5,000 women have signed up and it probably won't reach one million, but it's still an inspiring idea that I encourage all women to get involved in. (I do think it's crap that it's just targeted at women, but so be it.) I've been signed up for about a week and have already saved 7 kilos of carbon emissions, although that's just the tip of the iceberg as more changes are coming. I was unsure about signing up because not a lot of info is provided upfront about what lifestyle changes you would actually have to make. I already lead a pretty green-conscious life and am a renter so can't change my home much, but I was definitely able to make enough changes to save a tonne and then some.

Of course it's disheartening to think that all it takes is one business person or politician flying Melbourne to Sydney or Canberra regularly to wipe out all my savings, but it's also important to look at an action like this as a political statement. The more people who sign up to something like this or who make lifestyle choices like installing solar power or buying wind power, the less governments can argue that people aren't willing to make sacrifices to help the environment and the more likely they are to take the big picture action that is really needed.

Just a couple of the ways you can save, and how much carbon this would save annually:
Washing clothes on cold cycle and sun/air-drying - 400kg
Installing water-saving shower heads and having 4 minute showers - 875kg
Switching off appliances on standby at the powerpoint - 150kg
Walk or cycle 5km more a week instead of driving solo - 52kg

Sorry if this is a little earnest for some, posts on all the things we've been building in our back yard to follow soon!

Something to keep in mind

2009-07-14T13:39:00.003+10:00

Sums it up well doesn't it?
Painted on a garden bench down at Veg Out.
I think I might need this on a plaque in my garden for those moments when I wonder why I bother.

Veg Out and a week that was far from a vegging out week

2009-07-14T13:07:00.004+10:00

Wow, what a whirlwind of a week. Last week was the Students of Sustainability conference and it was an incredible experience. So many passionate speakers and interesting ideas (along with a depressing reality-check about climate change and the world's responses to it). I had intended to post daily with something that blew my socks off each day (and there always was something) but unfortunately we spent the week rushing home to interview for new housemates in a desperate rush, which was pretty exhausting and time-consuming. So I think I will try to do a few posts about it, starting with my favourite activity: an excursion to Veg Out community garden down in St Kilda.

I so enjoyed seeing what people were growing (all far more successfully than me), but it was also such an interesting story about how the garden had come about and then become an indispensable part of the St Kilda community. Some community gardens I've visited are really just a patch of personal backyard for a large number of people but they aren't a truly community-oriented garden. This garden is open to the public, numerous groups (like the war veterans who live in a hostel closeby) have a plot, and what I found most striking was that it had no high fences within the garden - it all felt open and welcoming.

The garden used to be a bowling green, so it has some quirks like the original lights and bunkers.

It's positioned in the shadow of Luna Park which makes for an odd juxtaposition as the sound of rollercoasters and screaming children is quite loud, but the garden still feels peaceful.

It was great to see flowers, succulents and vegies all planted together.

We spent the day digging up vegies that had been grown to help feed the conference-goers and I had fun chatting to others about their vegie patches or plans for one. One of the best personal things to come out of the week was a reinvigoration of my gardening enthusiasm. My friends suggested I get a t-shirt printed with my most succint explanation of why my enthusiasm had been dropping: 'Aphids ate my mojo'. But hopefully I'll have some new garden projects to show you soon as well as some more environmental posts about the conference.

Down Shakespeare St

2009-07-01T12:11:00.003+10:00

Yesterday I wandered down

I made an effort to look up, as I recently learnt, and was duly rewarded

But what was below was even more important

The entrance to

And inside? Well, inside there were plenty of lovely people spinning and chatting and doing other wool-related activities. And I got to choose from this wall

for more wool for the scarves I've been knitting. It's all gloriously lush handwoven wool which is so soft and has such lovely colours.

If you're ever around go check them out:
Handweavers and Spinner Guild of Victoria
12-20 Shakespeare St
Carlton North

Signs from another time

2009-06-30T16:44:00.003+10:00

The other day I was wandering around the area near my house and for the first time I noticed this sign.

Crazy what you see when you stop looking at the footpath! Isn't that name fantastic? It conjures up a whole different era doesn't it?

So I made an effort to look up more around the neighbourhood, and was rewarded with this gem.

I love the irony of a peeling painted sign advertising long-lasting paint. Mind you, I'm sure it's been up there for decades! Also, how wonderful is that red nextdoor to the sign?

Backcountry escape

2009-06-22T16:03:00.005+10:00

Last weekend a friend suggested that we go skiing for the week. I explained that I had essays due, deadlines approaching, etc. and that it probably wasn't a great idea. Then I did what I normally do when confronted with such a situation, and decided to work myself ten times as hard in the few days on either side of the trip and do it all. Last Monday involved crazy amounts of rushing around all over town handing in 10,500 words of assessment and hiring skis, but it was definitely worth it. We set out late, arriving in Mansfield after midnight, and then the next day drove up to the mountains for some backcountry skiing.

Mark skiing.

We didn't see a single other person until we returned to Mansfield on Friday. We skied on wonderful snow along tracks used by four wheel drivers in summer. We camped on summits with beautiful views. We talked about the world, the environment, what we plan to do with our lives, moments that have changed us, why we only ever eat alfalfa when we're hiking - you know, all the important stuff.

One of our campsites.

I love the similarity between the lines of the trees and clouds.

My mum's favourite tree - snowgums.

You can just see Mt Buller in the background to the right of the tree.

For some reason my shins got really sore and swollen, so we camped in one spot for two of the nights so I could rest and ice them. This is how I spent the day:

Making cups of tea.

The morning's teabag, ready for re-use.

Reading old favourites.

The perfect week to counteract being locked in a study for weeks finishing essays!

Between the passing showers

2009-06-09T14:09:00.004+10:00

I snuck out to take some quick snaps in the demi-second of rain-free weather so that I could show you the evolution of my funny little coconut pot:

Some string, knots, and I've got a funny little hanging coconut pot.
It's quite nifty, they hang off odd little nails along the fence where I can admire them. A word of warning though, they dry out very quickly, so I've only managed succulents in them, everything else has carked it too quickly.

Another great ideas for quirky pots are Claerwen's op-shopped wooden bowls over at Home Girl, I definitely want to give that project a shot!

My housemate recently gave me this book:

The Thrifty Gardener, by Alys Fowler

It has some fantastic ideas that are right up my alley, even if I have doubts about whether I'll manage to find such glamourous boxes to recycle.

Lovely photography as well, sorry the re-photographed photos aren't quite as impressive!

Alys also had a blog over at the BBC Gardeners' World, she's wrapped it up now, but to be honest, I think the book's better! There's a few other projects in it that I want to try, if I do I'll put some shots of them up.

And finally, I just thought I'd include a shot of what I'm looking at this week.

I read somewhere that having fresh flowers nearby had been proved to help creativity, and I thought my essays would benefit from some creativity. Instead, I think my procrastination methods may have got a little more creative! Not sure about the actual essays though. Hmmm.

You think you know someone, but then

2009-06-05T13:27:00.006+10:00

Take my nice succulent here:

Nice, squat little succulent.
And then one day it suddenly hits something like adolescence.
It gets all leggy.

And starts brandishing brightly coloured make-up around.

Next thing I know I'll be driving it home from parties in a car that smells like a brewery while it tries to enunciate each word very clearly as proof that it's not under the influence.

Elsewhere in the garden, suddenly the Spoon Lilies decided to flower this year, and now have bright red fruit too. (Their leaves are the ones in the header - they're one of the only things that reliably grows in our garden other than weeds. Seems a strange choice on their behalf given that they're native to warm, tropical areas, which is so far from Melbourne right now!)

And my vegie patch is putting in a valiant effort at growth.

Poor plants barely stand a chance against the aphid infestation, crap soil which the plane tree in front of our house constantly sends fibrous roots up into, and wan sunlight.

A passerby said to me the other day 'I always admire your garden, it's so fantastic what you're doing'
'Are you kidding me?' I asked, 'It's totally infested with caterpillars and aphids!'
'But at least you're trying' she answered.
And even if it's not as produce-filled as all the gardens of so many other bloggers, at least I know many more people in my local community now because they stop for a chat while I'm out the front gardening and ask about my vegie patch, and talk about their vegie patch, or the vegie patch they're thinking of starting. (One guy told me that they'd converted an unused laneway into a vegie garden, but I've looked high and low for it, almost to the point of trespass, and I can't find it.) So if nothing else, maybe it's inspiration for others to consider planting vegies in their front garden. I think they probably look at mine and think 'No matter how bad mine is, it's at least going to be better than that!'

Welkam to the Solomon Islands

2009-05-27T12:17:00.006+10:00

Sorry folks, I didn't mean to drop off for a week, but was out contact with the world for a week, thanks to a last-minute opportunity to go to the Solomon Islands on a media famil thanks to the Solomon Islands Visitors' Bureau. I have just had such an amazing, relaxing, exciting week checking out Honiara and some of the small islands nearby.
The islands felt so welcoming, it was a real novelty to travel somewhere and feel so safe and unhassled. Which is a little ironic, considering they had a coup a few years ago and Australian RAMSI peacekeeping forces are still in the area, although that's probably partly to thank for the mood, but mostly it was just that the locals were friendly and everyone would say hello to you as you walked through the town or around a small village.
It reminded me a little of Ecuador, one of my favourite countries to travel in, as they both share that friendliness, but also because there was so much to see and you don't have to cover great distances to see something entirely different. They also have both managed to avoid being overrun with tourists, instead it feels much more like the locals are still in control and gaining some benefits from tourism without having it change their way of life. Like any country it has its problems, mainly race tensions, but it was an incredible place to visit. I've never been to any Pacific islands before, so it was also a novel to travel such a short distance but be somewhere so different from home.

The bustling market in Honiara. Everything is laid out very neatly because of council rules, but it's quite stunning visually to see such artistically arranged bright fruits, cloths, seafood and more. (Apologies for a not great quality photo, I don't have as many of people as I'd like, so I need to hold the decent ones I have back for the story in the mag.)

A lei to welcome us to Maravagi Resort, about two hours boat ride from the capital, Honiara.

The beach hut we stayed in for a couple of nights at Maravagi. You could snorkel just a couple of metres off shore and be swimming with rainbow, angel, and other tropical fish over coral.

The view back to our little hut and beach.

Stunning bright foliage. The islands were so lush and green - it's always such a treat to see such a verdant place after years of drought in Australia.

And what would a trip to a tropical island be without sipping from a coconut on the beach.

All up, I felt so lucky to have this opportunity, even if now I'm coming down with a thump to the real world of the end of semester essays being due!

The pain of rainy days

2009-05-10T21:44:00.003+10:00

When I first saw the rainy days theme over on Meet me at Mike's, my thoughts immediately turned to the kind of descriptive writing about my surrounds that I so love creating. But I thought about the theme a little more, and thought that maybe I would instead tell you about why I find rainy days somewhat bittersweet.

For a couple of years rainy days meant dropping everything. Checking the Bureau of Meteorology website to gauge every river in the state, watching the rain maps become peppered with turquoise dots, then royal blue dots, then green, as the rain continued to fall. Phones would be buzzing, emails would be flying, and then the culmination would be a station wagon packed full of people and gear with four whitewater kayaks strapped firmly to the roof racks, heading out to whichever river seemed the best pick. Driving for hours, either into the dark of night or early in the morning watching dawn break over a nearly-empty freeway.

As we neared the river we'd peer over every bridge in anticipation, trying to work out if the river really had risen enough. We'd pull up to a clearing, usually with no marking but one that had been handed down by word of mouth or internet forums. Pile out of the car, check the river level, work out a car shuttle to have a car waiting for us at the end of the day, and start pulling on layers of thermals, tight homemade fleece vests, wetsuit booties, and waterproof pants and tops with tight latex gaskets that don't allow water in at your ankles, neck or wrists. As we put on our helmets, spray decks and life jackets we'd make sure everyone used the same river signals and was feeling okay about the river we were about to paddle.

Depending on how hard the river was, your heart might start beating a little faster as you dragged your boat down to the river. If there was only a small eddy of smooth water before entering the flow of the river, you'd ease yourself into your boat carefully before pulling out to make way for the next person. Even in your first few paddle strokes you would feel the power of the river flowing beneath you. But you would also feel the comfort of your boat responding to the moves you had done so many times. A slight lift of the knee, twist of the stomach, a touch of your paddle on the water. The feeling not of being in control, but of being in sync with the river.

Of course the rest of the day had plenty of stories, but I think it's that first feeling of working with the river that I think of when it rains. And now? Now the thought just makes me sad. In a state like Victoria with such enduring drought, now when it rains for days you're lucky if one river comes up. And because it's so rare, you're no longer confident you can tackle that harder river, so you don't go. And because you're out of the habit, you don't drop everything to seek out the river, now when you've made plans with people you keep them rather than apologising with 'Sorry, but an amazing river came up'.

But I find it so sad to have lost it. To have lost that pure feeling of joy coursing through my body as I pulled exactly the move the river demanded of me. To not float through gum tree lined stretches with just a few close friends. To no longer be able to identify myself as an adventurer, an outdoors person. So for me, rainy days can be a pleasant, cosy day in Melbourne, but they can also be such a strong reminder of a person I was, a person I liked being, a person I quite possibly will never get the chance to be again for whom I'm still grieving.

These are some photos from a kayaking trip to New Zealand, not long before my kayaking habit died away a bit. (I couldn't seem to find any on my computer that captured the feeling of rainy Victorian kayaking.)

Part way through an hour-long walk to the start of the Lower Toaroha River

Putting in a move on the Lower Hokitika

Heading off the Maruia Falls

Contemplating

2009-05-10T21:39:00.002+10:00

So it feels like awhile since I last posted. I keep writing posts in my head but then not getting them down quickly enough, and then they just seem to stagnate and by the time I come to write them they've lost their gleam, and it doesn't feel worth it. I wonder if others struggle with this when blogging. And I'm constantly realising that I should have taken a photo because without it there's no post. But I still enjoy the writing in my head, and hopefully I'll just get better at pulling it all together. So next I think I'll write one of the posts I've been mulling over for quite some time, and hopefully I didn't lose the shine by waiting.

Open Studio

2009-04-28T07:25:00.005+10:00

Apologies to non-Melburnians for the second Melbourne post this week, but I had to share this place with you.

Friday night was a friend's 30th birthday party, which was held at her friends' bar Open Studio in Northcote. Such an amazing night! The theme was along the lines of Orientalism and Egypt at the Berlin Cabaret, and there was a positively Bacchanalian atmosphere. Dim lights, exotic costumes with a bohemian edge, Serbian plum brandy to welcome you, trays of champagne and a live band which included cello, accordion, double bass, trombone, trumpet and violin all in one joyous cacophony. Numerous languages could be heard between songs, which ranged from wild gypsy-like music to cabaret classics. The mood was exultant and leaving was like stumbling out of another world back onto the streets of Northcote. You could imagine returning the following week and finding only a deserted shell, and having imagined the whole affair.

Check out someone else's review here. I was lucky to experience it in such an intimate way, with all of those who created the place and love it, but I'm assured that our night wasn't anything particularly out of the ordinary for this bar.
Also, the myspace profile for the band Vardos, which formed part of the large band playing can be found here. I don't know who else was playing, but I think they were all regulars.

(And apologies for the poor photo taken with a phone, I never remember to take a camera when I'm out on the town. I'll have to try and remember next time.)

Straight Lines

2009-04-27T12:59:00.003+10:00

When you visit other cities you invariably compare them to your own, and I always find this even more the case when I'm in Sydney. Perhaps this is due to the famed Sydney/Melbourne rivalry, or more likely because Tom was nice enough to leave his family and friends behind and move to Melbourne not long after we met, so I've always sort of felt that some time living up there is on the cards. (Plus there are so many magazines based in Sydney, which is another draw-card for me.)

I know that for some of the things I love about Melbourne I could learn to love the opposite in Sydney, but right now, here's one of the things I love about Melbourne.

Straight lines. I understand that behind a curve in the road lies mystery and surprise, but I love that you look all the way down Swanston Street and see the Shrine of Remembrance, and pictured below is another favourite.

The view down Brunswick Street towards a church in East Melbourne.

That's right, just back away slowly

2009-04-21T16:09:00.003+10:00

Having arrived in Sydney at 3:30am on Friday morning after driving through the night, an 11am family get together was probably a big ask. It involved meeting all of Tom's aunts and uncles and cousins and anyone else vaguely related to him (or so it felt) and given that I really only function on a minimum of eight hours sleep (I know, it's pretty decadent) my performance that morning was probably always going to be sub-optimal.

Add to this the fact that one of my jobs involves writing for a mothers magazine. This alone is enough to make people a little nervous, because I'm not to their knowledge a mother. (Nor to my knowledge for that matter, and I would probably know.) They ask me polite questions about what I write about, and when inevitably the word birth is mentioned (or sometimes I'll just say 'vaginas' if I want to shut down the conversation super-quickly) they usually offer up some attempt at conversation about the topic, such as 'I read an article about how dangerous home-birth is, I heard women are dying because of their foolish attempts at this' (or words to that effect). I'm not really a strong advocate for a particular way of birthing because although I have my own views I feel it's something that's pretty personal, but it is something I now know quite a lot about. So I inform them of the differences between home-birthing with a medical professional and free-birthing without one, and that it's usually free-birthing that's dangerous and the media should make this distinction. We then have some chit-chat where I say I think the state of birthing in Australia kind of sucks, I give examples of why, they back slowly away making nervous pointing gestures to outdoors and saying things like 'I'll just...' 'I might go and..' 'Aaah...' etc.

After scaring Tom's uncle away like this I retired to a chair in the sun and only spoke to other people sitting in chairs in the sun. This generally involved the elderly and hungover. This suited me just fine.

Tasks for the holiday: impress the family? Tick.

While I was gone...

2009-04-17T14:32:00.005+10:00

I went on another long drive. Not as bad a long drive as the one I wrote about below, but a drive from Melbourne to Sydney via Mt Buller for a spot of mountain biking.
In Sydney there was plenty of hanging out with Tom's relatives and friends (he's from there), lots of reading, sometimes in lovely spots like Balmoral beach, below (by the way, like the foot I'm growing out of my nose?)

some posing with landmarks

the odd bit of walking (Blue Mountains, below)

and a train ride up to Newcastle.
Then, thank goodness, no more driving or training, a flight home.
Home sweet home, where you could be forgiven for thinking I had chosen a handmade rug in the sophisticated shade of 'dirty clothes', where aphids and caterpillars took advantage of my absence to ravage the cabbages, something else damaged the flowers in the backyard, and where I now have to actually look at a calendar and realise there are some deadlines creeping closer than might be comfortable.

A Long Drive

2009-04-01T15:14:00.004+11:00

I decided to play along with the Meet Me At Mike's Words and Pictures after reading a very evocative entry on Megan's blog. This week's theme is A Long Drive. My mind immediately turned to some of the horrendously long bus rides I've taken as a traveller; this was one of them that happened last year. (It should be noted, the country wasn't as bad as this welcoming drive might have indicated.)

It was already four in the afternoon, and we had no idea where we were going to sleep that night. We'd been in a different town every night for the past week, and had just got off yet another all-day stint on a bus. The border crossing had been horrible as we were heckled, jostled and scammed at every turn. Taxi drivers, people trying to guide us through the process, market stall holders, small children, they all crowded in at us, each trying to negotiate something. As we started to waver, and considered accepting the taxi driver's ridiculously high price, a security guard at the bank caught my eye and gave a barely noticeable shake of his head. It was the jolt I needed, and we fought our way through the crowd until we got to the police station to ask directions.

The taxi driver we finally settled on whisked us off to the official border entry point further along the road, and then took us to the next town, from where we could catch the bus to Lima. He bargained with us the entire time, and even as we paid him more than we'd agreed on, he fixed us with puppydog eyes. As soon as he'd left we bought food, pointing to each item without knowing the price. Tom tried to bargain, naming a price that seemed cheap to us. The storeholder looked at us oddly, and named a sum that was half of what we had offered. We immediately realised how much we'd given our taxi driver in real terms.

We had made it just in time to catch the last overnight bus, and half an hour later we were cooped back up and on the move again. Dusk fell, and the barren landscape became just potholes and small towns that rushed by in the headlights. As a Spanish film started on the television screens the stewardess came around with a small meal. The night wore on, and I'd pulled an eye mask on to try and sleep.

Half an hour later I still couldn't sleep. 'Tom, I don't think I feel very well' I whispered, prodding my half-asleep boyfriend and getting a grunt in return. I writhed in my chair, struggling to overcome rising nausea that worsened with every bump in the road. When I felt the bus slow I leapt from my seat and dashed down the stairs to the door, pushing past the stewardess and policeman checking the bus's papers and only just missing his shoes as I vomited into the dust. They looked down at me as I vomited again, before turning away to finish their paper check. 'Time to go!' the stewardess said chirply as I leaned my head on my knees, crouching barefoot on the roadside.

Soon after dawn broke it became obvious that this was going to be a proper bout of food poisoning. I headed down to the toilet, only to discover a sign reading 'Solo urinario'. I asked the stewardess if I could go to the toilet in the next town. Despite much overuse on my part of the word 'emergencia', we passed through one small town, then another, then another as I grew more and more uncomfortable. Finally I couldn't wait anymore, and used the bus toilet. Half an hour later the bus stopped in the middle of nowhere. Cries of 'Where's the gringa?' rose up from downstairs. I headed down to see what was going on. 'Okay, here you go' the stewardess said, gesturing to the open door. Outside there was nothing. We were in a desert with not a single shrub to squat behind in sight. 'Where's the toilet?' I asked the driver. 'This is Peru!' he replied, 'The whole country's a toilet!'

By the time we reached Lima that evening I became glad of the design of bus bathrooms: I was able to vomit into the sink without leaving the toilet. The bus had only stopped three times in 24 hours - the two paper checks and five minutes at a service station. We finally reached a hostel in Lima and I crawled into bed feeling weak and exhausted. Half an hour later I pulled back the sheets, only to find myself covered in bedbug bites. Welcome to Peru.

Dear Nasturtium,

2009-04-01T15:04:00.004+11:00

Sorry for pulling you out the other day. I looked at you for awhile before deciding you might be a weed, because I couldn't remember planting anything where you came up. I grabbed you with my thumb and forefinger and as I broke your stem I realised what you were, just a moment too late. I'm not very good at taking the blame for things, so I would like to point out that you took a really long time to come up. (The fact that three other nasturtiums came up just days after you did does kind of excuse you though.) Anyway, thanks for coming back and giving me another shot.

Love,
Jen

P.S. Sorry about the birds. I don't know why they're so hellbent on digging up your little patch of garden. I think there might be some bugs they like there. Or maybe they just copied my wanton destruction - if that's the case, sorry for fostering a culture of nasturtium destruction, will try hard to correct it.

Not a domestic goddess, just a girl with a plan and a garden

2009-03-29T16:22:00.006+11:00

Mia Freedman is a columnist I often end up reading because she sometimes comments on issues that interest me, but for some reason I find her incredibly grating. Yesterday's column in the Age was all about young women whose 'ultimate goal is to take up life long positions in the home raising children'. 'Who knew there were so many 23-year-olds out there baking, crocheting, gardening, marrying, procreating, making their own pasta and having Tupperware parties?' Freedman asks. I'm not quite sure how we leapt from women in their twenties knowing they wanted children at some point to this summary, but as a 22-year-old who happily bakes and gardens, who knows she wants children at some later date and who seriously considers being a stay at home parent I resent her derision.

I hate that somehow acknowledging that I want a career and then children is seen as lessening my commitment to my career until that point (and after that point), and the fact that I enjoy some elements of domesticity is seen as tantamount to disempowering myself. The sneer of Freedman's 'These women consider themselves empowered underneath their pink gingham aprons' is so palpable, even if she is attempting to give the article some sense of balance at that point.

I think it's a good thing that I know I want a career and then quite probably children as it drives me to make the most of the decade I consider to be for me alone. I understand that if I choose to have children my needs will often no longer come first, and I want to give everything my best shot before that point so that I don't have regrets or resentment about my career being cut short. I'm not going to box myself into saying that I will definitely have children or that if I do I will give up full-time work, I just see it as an insurance plan in case I do want to. I know I'm not alone in this; I have other incredibly driven friends who know what they want from life and see planning ahead as the best way to take advantage of all the facets of life they want to experience. Don't worry, I understand that things don't necessarily go to plan, but I get so sick of people judging women who acknowledge the realities of what they want from life.

And don't even get me started on her claim that Kate Middleton may epitomise this trend. Somehow an upper class woman without a job and with none of the domestic trappings Freedman's so critical of is meant to reflect women who want a career and children but also enjoy gardening? (I also think that if there's a trend for domesticity, it's not necessarily confined to women - plenty of my male friends are also right into all those terrible disempowering activities like making pasta, baking and gardening.)

I actually wrote this post yesterday but decided to wait a day and see if I still felt incensed about the issue. Yep, I do. But interestingly, by waiting I was able to see more comments on Mia's blog about the issue. One of the comments I most liked came from someone called Alice. 'I wonder if she has a blog?' I thought, so clicked on the link - turns out I already follow it!

Plum Concrete

2009-03-25T16:02:00.007+11:00

I remember loving Margaret Mahy's Jam: A True Story, a picture book all about a family who make masses of plum jam - so much that they use it for everything, including reattaching tiles in the bathroom.

If they had wanted a recipe specifically for concreting with plums, I probably could have helped. Last night I attempted to make jam but managed to over-reduce the mixture to a point where it's more like solid plum/sugar mix. Not quite sure what to do about that just yet. I even took pictures in anticipation of a blog post, and in my head had already held a tea party where people complimented the jam and I was able to tell them I'd made it myself. Pride certainly comes before a fall.

A Bright Spot in My Week

2009-03-20T13:01:00.005+11:00

My garden seems to be so colourful at the moment. These are just some of the bright spots. In fact, there are so many bright spots that I may have to break the party up. Let's start with warm reds and oranges.

Ornamental Pomegranate:

Geranium:

Another geranium (we have a lot of them because they're so easy to cultivate from cuttings, so they're both cheap and cheery, both of which are important for our garden):

Zucchini flower - I love the way these curl as they leave the stage, a bit like a bow or curtsy:

P.S. Jealous of the fabulous backdrop to my garden? If you're lucky you too may one day have the pleasure of a grey metal fence and almost fence to fence concrete. I'll keep my fingers crossed for you.

Jen, This Shelf is Your Life

2009-03-20T11:15:00.004+11:00

As I procrastinated away this morning I found myself thinking that I probably needed a little more greenery in my study, so I brought in a pot from the backyard for an indoors holiday. After I'd settled it in place I realised that the tableau I had created pretty much summed up a lot of my life.

Greenery, writing tools and mementos of travel and family.

Any Australian writer will recognise the dictionary and style manual.

The poster I bought when I was about 14 and Mum and I went to France together. It was meant to be a family holiday but my brother ended up having to stay in Australia and Dad had to stay with him, so it was just the two of us. It was a pretty incredible holiday, although I can't believe Mum bothered to take a moody teenager with her. We were both learning French at the time, and she had to put up with me thinking it was mortifying that she was trying to practice her French on the locals: 'I can't believe you Mum, you are SO embarrassing, you keep speaking FRENCH' (said as though speaking French were comparable to picking one's nose or something). Not only did she put up with such brattiness, she also did all the driving (and on the wrong side of the road) which is why this poster in particular brings back memories. She drove the nine hour roundtrip to the lavender fields in Provence twice, because the first day hadn't been particularly sunny, so the lavender looked pretty grey. The second time was incredible though, and we have the most beautiful photos of bright purple fields.

The gourd I bought in Peru from a woman probably my own age. She told me she carves them during the low tourist season, and then brings them into town when us gringos are around. She cut the lid off it for me when I bought it and finished hollowing it out, and all the while her young daughter who was tied to her back, baby-chattering away. Definitely a different way of being a working mother.

And then the turtle belonged to my grandmother. It's something I really strongly remember from her house, so i always like to keep it somewhere where it can watch over me as I sleep or study.

Going Loco, Finding Choko

2009-03-18T14:15:00.004+11:00

I'm not going too loco, but it has been a little crazy with work deadlines and the return to uni. I've been swept up with excitement about the research project I'm doing, which is about how men's and women's magazines differ in their coverage of environmental issues. I'm pleased as punch that I thought of the topic, as it covers quite a few areas that interest me. Now if only I didn't actually have to get through a knee-high pile of books about media theory and gender studies.

But in other exciting developments, I found I was accidentally growing another type of vegie!

I think I did know somewhere in the back of my mind that I thought this was edible, and that's why I didn't pull it out when it started to get going. But I'm now fairly sure it's Choko (if anyone knows otherwise, stop me before I poison myself). Choko apparently fell out of favour with Australians during the Great Depression because it was what poor people ate (plus most people aren't too fond of its blandness), so it seems quite suiting that it turned up as we go into recession. It also has quite pretty flowers that are attracting plenty of bees.

Grey Day Consolation*

2009-03-05T11:49:00.006+11:00

Maybe consolation is the wrong word. In fact it felt like I was luxuriating in the cool weather as I sat with my latte and pain au chocolat, listening to the patter of downpipes dripping on pavement and the hiss of cars speeding past on the wet road. Now I'm watching rain slide down my study window, blurring and distorting the world outside, and trying to remember the last time it rained like this.

And maybe consolation is the right word, because part of the joy of weather like this is being consoled by comforts like a hot drink steaming in the damp, cold air or being wrapped in a woollen jumper with a good book as the rain on the roof lulls you into a languorous cocoon.

*Given how often I find myself tempted by this little French bakery on a nearby corner, this post could also be correctly titled 'There's No Milk Left And I Can't Be Arsed Shopping', 'I Can't Stand The Thought of Another Sandwich', 'It's Sunny! Let's Sit Outside', 'Surely Spinach Slice Counts As My Daily Iron Intake' or 'My Jeans Feel Loose, Must Be Time to Reward Myself'.

Confused Plants

2009-03-02T18:24:00.005+11:00

Last month in Melbourne all the leaves fell from the trees in extreme heat, but now it appears they weren't the only confused plants in this neck of the woods. I'm pretty sure Clivias only flower once a year, usually in spring. I guess one of my Clivias just thought such a dramatic rise in temperature could only be explained by springtime.

Who knows, but I'll happily enjoy its beautiful mistake.

Weird pots

2009-03-01T15:27:00.003+11:00

One thing you may notice from the photo of zucchinis in the last post is that they're not growing in a garden bed. We live in a rental property with an almost entirely concrete backyard, so a lot of the garden is in pots. I like finding ways to create pots from other things, or scavenging pots for free (the nursery at CERES often throws up some fantastic free pots). That zucchini plant grows in a styrofoam box that I painted terracotta colour. It was interesting to note how much better the plants in styrofoam boxes fared in the extreme heat of the last few months, the insulation must have helped keep the roots from frying! Coconut shells also make funny little pots.

They already have a weak point where it's easy to make drainage holes, they're something you would otherwise throw away, and they look quite cute perched around the garden with succulents in them. I think the next step to try would be making hanging coconut pots!

Proud of my produce

2009-02-27T17:07:00.004+11:00

I'm pretty chuffed that I've grown something of a pretty respectable size!

We'll be eating these tonight!

Growing zucchinis has been quite amusing because my French housemate had to go and do some seasonal work to be allowed to extend his visa, so he's now an expert on zucchinis after spending more time than he would have liked picking them all day, everyday. He kind of hates the sight of them, but he's been very helpful about plant maintenance and harvest techniques.

Casseroo

2009-02-25T12:02:00.003+11:00

No, not a typo, just one of the many ways of cooking kangaroo. For some reason it's more fun when the dishes have roo names like Vindaroo, Rooritos, Roogan Josh, Kanga Bangas, etc. We don't really eat much meat other than kangaroo because it's better for the environment (kangaroos have paws rather than hooves, so they tend not to degrade the land as much, their feed doesn't need watering, and they produce less methane than cows) and it's cheap and healthy. I thoroughly enjoy serving Roo Bolognaise to guests and trying to change their minds about the idea of eating kangaroo, it's particularly funny to ask friends visiting from overseas whether they would mind if I served them the national emblem for dinner.

Last night we tried a version of the Beef and Guiness Casserole with Dumplings recipe that appears in my favourite cookbook, 'Everyday Cooking' by Michele Curtis and Allan Campion. Turned out brilliantly. Roo can be chewy if you cook it wrong, but with slow cooking like this it was great, plus the meat has a rich flavour, which worked well with the heartiness of the recipe.

Dice roo steaks. We used about 800 grams, which was two packets.
Coat in seasoned flour (flour mixed with salt and pepper)
Cook in a heavy bottomed pan over medium heat with a touch of oil until golden brown.
Add a 400ml can of Guiness, a chopped onion and a couple of chopped garlic cloves, and 2 cups of beef stock. (Or vegie if you'd prefer - they don't make roo stock in cubes yet!)
Bring to the boil, then simmer for an hour.
At this point add dumplings, then simmer for another hour.

Dumplings:
To make the dumplings, combine a cup of bread crumbs and a cup of self-raising flour.
Rub 75 grams of diced soft butter through.
Add salt, pepper, and some herbs. The recipe calls for a tablespoon of chopped parsley, but we used oregano because it's in the garden.
Add an egg and enough milk to bind the mixture.
Knead to form a dough, then roll into 3 cm balls.

I think this would also make a great pie filling (without the dumplings). It was such a perfectly cosy dish for the first cool evening in a long time!

Belated Valentines Thoughts

2009-02-18T16:41:00.003+11:00

As I read so many posts about Valentines Day, I decided to share my most memorable Valentines Day with you folks. It's not the one where I was spoilt with the classic dozen long-stemmed red roses, although that had a bit of wow factor. It's one which was much more about starting friendships than romantic love.

When I was in primary school my family moved to Pensylvania for a year. And my first day of school was February 14th. My older brother and I hopped on the big yellow school bus that stopped a block from our house, and headed off to our first day. Only ten minutes into the ride, the bus became stuck in snow, where we sat for an hour and a half. (This was of course quite a novelty. Our only experience with snow until that point had been pristine Victorian Alps cross country skiing. Which may explain why I didn't think it weird to pick up a handful of the first snow I saw when we got to the States and cram it in my mouth. Too bad this was on the airport runway and it was full of fuel. Whoops.)

When we finally reached the school I was so stressed out about things not going to plan that I forgot all the directions I'd been given on our tour the day before. By the time a teacher found me and took me to class, I was bawling my eyes out. Of course because I'd got lost I was even later and had to walk in on my own, and the teacher made me stand up in front of the class to introduce myself. As soon as three words were out of my mouth the entire class, including my teacher, fell about laughing, literally rolling on the floor, because of my Australian accent. (It was a small town.)

But once they'd got over the hilarity of it all, they sat me down and presented me with a little letterbox. And in it was a valentine from every kid in the class. We then (in what turned out to be a pretty common event at the school, repeated on St Patricks Day, Presidents Day, Thanksgiving Day, Everyone Gets a Trophy Day, etc) had a party that revolved entirely around consuming large amounts of sugar. Such large amounts that we had a bag of 'candy' to take home with us. Which probably confirmed all of my healthy mother's worst fears about moving to America. But I did feel like I'd been welcomed, and as though it all wasn't going to be too terrible after all.

Garden Inspiration

2009-02-17T17:15:00.008+11:00

We were all booked in to go hiking at Wilson's Promontory this past weekend but the fires put a stop to those plans, so we rethought and instead spent the weekend down at Phillip Island.

We did all the touristy things like seeing the penguin parade, and we had some lovely time on the beach. We stayed in a fantastic hostel, The Chill House, which had a beautiful vegie garden.
But for me, the highlight of the weekend was probably an impromptu stop at the Australian Garden at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Cranbourne on our way to the island.

I had so much fun here, and found it very inspirational. I was particularly enamoured with their collection of kangaroo paws and grevilleas.

Kangaroo Paws:

Grevilleas:

So enamoured that we now have one grevillea and two pots of kangaroo paws. And a protea for good measure, seeing as I was going down a drought resistant garden route. Now I just have to try not to become as obsessed with grevilleas as a couple I saw profiled on Gardening Australia, who had a massive property devoted solely to cultivating grevilleas. (But I can kind of understand it - there are so many colours and shapes and sizes!)

These are a few of my favourite things

2009-02-17T16:59:00.004+11:00

Forget whiskers on kittens and girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes, I'm talking about PROPER favourite things. Like Sauvignon Blanc, and getting a greenie kick out of re-using and buying local. Which is why I was pretty excited by one of my purchases from the market this morning.

ReWine sell good cheap cleanskins, and if you bring back the bottle, they will refill it - and even charge you $2 less than the first bottle cost! Sure, I was meant to be fruit and veg shopping, but at $11 a bottle who am I to resist such a temptation? (Plus they have a generous hand with the tasting glasses.)
I'm all for recycling, but it often feels like people forget the idea of re-using. Travelling in South America it was the norm to trade an empty glass bottle in when you bought a new full one, and it brought home to me how easy it really would be to re-use glass bottles many, many times before recycling them. So an exciting find!

Bounty

2009-02-17T16:46:00.003+11:00

I'm frequently thankful for having great friends. Fun people who are excellent listeners, thinkers, talkers, doers and carers. And then on top of all that they sometimes pop by with extra little surprises to make me appreciate them even more. Like a mix cd of music they think I might like, complete with a handmade cover.

My favourite track is #4 - Streets of Your Town by the Go-betweens. Or the Langley Schools Music Project singing Mandy. Or really any of the others - M has fantastic taste in music and is far more on top of the scene than I ever will be.

And yesterday G popped by for a cup of tea on the way home from work and surprised me with lovely flowers.

How lucky am I?

Taking comfort from...

2009-02-16T14:51:00.003+11:00

1. Regrowth.

Even as my plants fry again, it's good to see them sending out shoots and refusing to go down without a fight. It's also a particularly pertinent reminder that one day the burnt areas of Victoria will regrow. It's scant consolation given how many lives have been lost, but I find it helps. I've hiked through areas that were burnt out in the fires a couple of years ago, and although the snow gums will take a long time to recover, it's amazing how much has grown in a few short years.

2. Cyclists.

I cycle everywhere, and so I always get a buzz from the peak hour cyclist rush in inner Melbourne. This picture is in Canning St, which is pretty much a cyclist highway at peak hour thanks to low car traffic flow and good traffic lights. Somehow seeing this makes me feel like maybe one day more people will get the fact that it's really not that hard to cut their car use. In other exciting bike news, it was wonderful to see creation of bike lanes slip onto the government's economic stimulus package. Score one for the cyclists!

3. Our water bill.
Which totalled to 70 litres per person per day. We've been using a laundromat for the past year, so our water use is actually a bit higher, but still, with the government urging us all to cut our water use to 155 litres per day, it did make me feel good.

what to say, what to do...

2009-02-13T13:14:00.006+11:00

It's hard to know what to say or do when tragedy like the Victorian bushfires hit. I've started writing a post numerous times since the fires took hold last weekend, but what can we say in the face of something of such enormity? Not much more than that we sympathise so deeply with those affected, mourn for those lost, and are thankful for how lucky we have been.

One of the best round-ups of ways to help is over at Pea Soup of the Day, and an up to date list of ways to help is at the Handmade Help site. Poppalina's link to Our Community was another good one.

If donating money outright is a bit of a stretch, here are some of the best ways to help:

Shop at Coles this Friday and Safeway or Woolworths next Friday, as all profits go to the Bushfire Appeal. Stock up on all those pantry staples.

Buy birthday and Christmas presents well in advance from Handmade Help or the Etsy Bushfire Appeal shop set up to help raise money.

Register to donate blood. Even if they don't need it yet, they will eventually - my nursing friends tell me that burns victims need a lot of blood over a long period of time, so the more people the Red Cross has to call on in coming months, the better.

Take in animals. Domestic animals who don't have homes, or native animals whose habitats have been destroyed.

Shop at Salvation Army, Wildlife Victoria, Red Cross, etc. op-shops.

the cool

2009-02-09T14:01:00.003+11:00

Saturday was the hottest day I've ever experienced, although thankfully I was working in airconditioning, so didn't have to experience too much of it. When I rode to work at 9:30 it was already in the high thirties. Occasionally we'd step outside just to subject ourselves to what felt like an other-worldly heat. A hot wind roared through almost empty city streets, burning our eyes within seconds of feeling it. The sky had turned a weird grey, as though the colour had been scorched out of it. It wasn't even wide-open-plains-white coloured, but a scary grey. Almost all my workmates also cycle to work, so we all decided to wait the heat out in the city with some cool beers and ride home once it was bearable.

Thankfully a cooler wind had crept in by the time we finished, but we still retired to Section 8 for a cool beer. Section 8 is one of those laneway bars Melbourne is so famous for, but is one of the few that is so open to the sky. The courtyard in front of the shipping container bar is shaded by stone fruit trees, comic strips decorate the plywood bathroom walls and a giant, fading crosstitch takes up part of the fence. Plus it's located next to the best dumpling house in town. As we sat drinking longnecks of Coopers Pale Ale the heat of the day subsided. Drifts of cool air would pass down the laneway, and wooden seats creaked as they returned to their normal size rather than buckling with heat expansion.

When rain finally fell we relished the cool on our bare arms. It was only later that we realised how much dirt had been washed down from that grey sky, speckling my shoulders with dirty freckles.

Tasty new dinner recipe

2009-02-03T17:08:00.003+11:00

Tried making this lasagna last night - it's a slightly changed version of one my brother cooked for me, and it's so delicious. We ate far more of it than we should have!

Saute and onion and garlic (and chilli if you like)
Add lots of chopped pumpkin and a bit of water.
Bit of nutmeg and black pepper.
Simmer until soft.
Mash.
Place alternating layers of this pumpkin mix, ready to bake lasagna pasta sheets, mozarella and parmesan, lasagna sheets.
Top with mozarella and parmesan.
Cook in oven for 40 minutes.
I have no idea what temperature the oven should be - to keep our oven on you jam a wooden utensil down the side of the on/off knob, so we can't cook anything that requires a specific temperature or any finesse.

No photos, as I was too hungry to think of stopping and shooting the tasty dish!

One month on

2009-02-03T16:57:00.004+11:00

So, a month or so since resolution time. How are mine faring?

Get back to full health: blood tests revealed a B12 deficiency which I've started taking tablets to rectify.

Blog: errr, I'm trying to get into the swing of it, but still find myself having identity crises about which blogs might want to be friends with my blog, and whether anything I say is going to matter to anyone out there.

Make a more productive garden: we'll see, the heat killed half of it, but I've still got high hopes for the zucchini plants and the next lot of planting.

Think more positively: I'm working hard on re-framing negative thoughts, but a lot of bad stuff has happened this month. I'm not sure where the line between excessively negative thoughts and permissible grief lies.

Take more advantage of opportunities I already have: I've started writing again for a website where I already had contacts, have booked in a weekend of mountain biking with friends who can show me the ropes, and got back in touch with a mag I used to work for.

Make more of an effort to expand my friendship circle and do fun social activities: I've been to a couple of parties where I knew barely anyone and not said no to invitations quite as often. It's a good start.

Exercise more, take better care of my teeth, see more of Australia, try some new activities: whoops, next month.

And they all fall down

2009-02-03T16:54:00.005+11:00

Not only has my garden not been faring too well in the heat, but the trees in our street have all been sunburnt.

It looks like autumn, but the banks of leaves don't have that crispness to them, they're just limp and burnt.

It's a bit depressing, almost like a leaf mass-suicide.

A Little Late Christmas Spirit

2009-02-03T16:19:00.007+11:00

My Aunt gave me this fantastic book for Christmas.

And part of the wisdom I have already gleaned from it is that strawberries and blueberries benefit from an acidic soil, so using pine needles as mulch is a good idea. But where to get copious amounts of pine needles from in January? Christmas trees that are getting thrown out of course!

Our Christmas tree looked like this:

so no joy there.

I've been on the lookout for trees put out for rubbish collection, but I'm a procrastinator, so until now each time I've returned to pick up a tree it's already gone. (This isn't helped by the fact that I return periodically to check on the tree to make sure it's there - not taking it home or anything sensible like that - until of course one day I'm disappointed. I procrastinate A LOT.) But this weekend I finally made it my mission to find a dead Christmas tree.

Unfortunately the one I'd been intending to pick up had gone (what a surprise, it had only been there a week) so I stalked the streets for rogue pines. I located one next to someone's bins in their front yard, clocked that they had a compost heap and therefore a garden, and kept walking so I could think over this find. Were they so into their garden that they'd want it? Would they think I was a freak for asking? Could I pluck up the courage to knock on someone's door and ask to go through their rubbish? I did manage to pluck up the courage, they didn't want the tree, they looked at me like they thought I was a freak, but I got the tree, so it doesn't matter. They weren't the only ones giving me a wide berth. As I manhandled my tree a few blocks home people shied away from making eye contact, and one guy looked scared even when I smiled nicely at him. I later realised I'd been holding the tree in a manner that may have looked like I was about to whack him over the head with it, so fair enough if he didn't want to encourage my advances. But the tree and I made it home.

Where I stripped it, and put it all over my little berry patch.

Almost like another little Christmas present. Now if I only I could convince the blueberry bush that its time to die hasn't come.

Lucky I'm not really a doctor

2009-02-03T15:13:00.001+11:00

Because if I were I'd have a lot of dead patients. Instead I just have a worm farm that smells like the dead animal pit on a farm.

Doctor, Doctor, we have a case of extreme heat!

2009-01-29T20:36:00.002+11:00

Melbourne has been too hot to do anything but flake out in front of the fan today. For the past two days I've felt like an Emergency Room doctor sprinting round dealing with garden crises.
'Nurse, this blueberry bush looks critical! We need to mainline some fluids, STAT!'
So now many more of my plants have empty milk cartons with small irrigation holes dug in next to them, hopefully providing enough water at a slow steady pace to keep them alive. We spent a morning at the Brotherhood of St Laurence on Sunday, where we bought a washing machine, wardrobe and dining room table. I've been very grateful for the washing machine already, not just because I don't have to lug a few kilos of clothes to the laundromat, but because I can pour the rinse water all over the garden and watch it spring back to life.

Yesterday was slightly cooler, so I spent the day trying to fit all of our new furniture into the house. The old men who delivered it nearly had a heart attack bringing the wardrobe upstairs, so I had to shove that around to where I wanted it, I moved all the couches in the living room to make way for the table and just generally did painful lifting, pushing and pulling movements. I also cleared out a number of cupboards that had been hidden behind couches for years. I live in one of those glorious old houses which has been used as a student share house for decades, so digging around in cupboards always yields some finds. Our bathroom and my study now have hideous bright blue and purple curtains that look like a runaway circus tent, but at least they help keep the heat out. I also found useful bowls and cooking pots, and about 20 more tupperware lids (just to complement our already extensive range of lids without containers.) But at least I managed to feel productive while staying inside our comparatively cool house.

Quick Summer Meal

2009-01-20T15:21:00.004+11:00

There's something very satisfying about creating a pasta sauce fresh from your garden in the time it takes pasta to cook. Last night was too hot for proper cooking, so I picked all the full-sized Basil leaves from the garden.

Grind them in the mortar and pestle (or use a food processor) with about 35g of pine nuts and a couple of cloves of garlic. Add a bit of olive oil, stir it all through the pasta and sprinkle with some toasted pine nuts and parmesan. Voila! Proper fresh pesto. Hardly groundbreaking, but the process made me quite content.

(Sorry that the final photo is a little dim, in my excitement about impending consumption I didn't think to try a little bit harder to find some decent lighting in our house.)

Beach Art

2009-01-20T13:17:00.005+11:00

On a recent trip to the beach I visited a pottery that for years I've just driven straight past. Of course it took visiting friends to point it out, and to also point out that just because we were At The Beach didn’t mean we couldn’t do some fun cultural outings near the beach. (The cellar door visit was another good idea.)
I bought this beautiful bowl; its blues reminded me of the rockpools in the area, and the colour around the edge is so like the seaweed that rims each pool.

I prefer owning art and jewellery which reminds me of a specific place, I find it more fulfilling when an object is memory-filled as well as attractive.

And the blues go very well with summer berries!