visiting

We took a trip to Melbourne to pick up a chair purchased on ebay, which didn't look quite as fabulous in the flesh as on the screen and in my imagination, but they never do, do they? We had a hour to fill and did so with lunch at a little Malvern cafe. Martha was trying her best to be inner city cool and aloof, so was of course mortified when I tried to take her photo in front of the other patrons. Had a moment to drop by bes62 which, unlike the chair, was every bit as lovely as I thought it would be, jammed to the rafters with that wonderful old furniture in painted huon pine and red cedar. Much as I am seduced by Danish modern with all its fancy designer credentials, when I go to a place like that I realise that that is the kind of furniture that I'd most love to rest my elbows on - straightforward, solid, utilitarian, homey...furniture for kneading dough on. Got home to find the new Diggers catalogue (Winter issue) in the letterbox. Citrus! Potatoes! Berries! Self pollinating almonds! Yeah, Melbourne was great and all that, but really, I'm a country girl at heart.

seeing the light

Martha's solution for low hanging early winter sun.

chook food and cinos

Took a trip to town for more chook food and library books. The cook book section is a bit hit and miss but today we found a whole volume of pudding recipes by Phil Vickery. Lucky the hens are laying again! We managed to sneak in a 'cino as well.

funny old day

A funny up and down day. Got dressed up to go out and have a great day at the Antiques Fair, only to realise, when we got there, that it was yesterday. Ate ice-cream, came home, felt cold and sad. Caught up with neighbours in the afternoon, drank tea from fine china and admired Cheryl's splendid chooks, roses, recipe books and veges. In between we grew wings.

slowness

I am slow. Too little sleep (thanks to Medium ending with 'to be continued') and too much french toast. Still, we managed to make it to the 'tunnel' this morning and not even any piggybacking.
Some strangely coloured wool (dyed with acorns) is waiting to be spun, but not sure if my mind is steady enough for four hands and feet at the wheel. Plus the house is full of autumn flies. I don't feel inspired with flies in my ears. Maybe we'll plant snowpeas instead.

lying about

We were meant to have visitors today but mysteriously they never arrived.
We didn't mind - we were happy to talk less and instead rest and read the paper after our week of coughing and wasp stings to the head.

A proud man and his compost bin

We love compost around here, but we've never had much success with producing our own. We have a mulch heap, but it's also our repository for green waste from the garden and the chooks love to scratch around in there too. The end result is a scattered heap of passionfruit prunings adorned with old Twinings teabags. Neither have we ever really taken the time to learn about the science of composting. The idea of there being a 'right' way to dispose of last night's dinner scraps has never really sat well with me. However after glimpsing the world's most perfect compost bin ever (or so we surmised) on an episode of that new backyards show on Sunday nights, Mark was inspired to create...this.
Two compartments, on stilts above the ground and with lids (to foil the rats), with wire on the bottom, which will allow the compost as it's formed to fall into a neat and elegant pile on a platform underneath the bins, from where it can be easily shoveled into a waiting wheelbarrow. In theory. We know there are no certainties when it comes to the dark art of composting, especially if you're as slapdash as we are. But we're hopeful. If nothing else, we have finally managed to engage Martha with the world of decomposing organic matter (isn't this every parent's dream?). We're not sure yet whether this will prove to be a good or bad thing. I guess this will only become obvious in a month or two...once she has learnt how to clamber up those slats.

PS No, Martha did not retrieve that piece of cake from the slops!

Brown baby

Her parents are pale and slow to tan, but this one has inherited her maternal grandfather's olive skin.

Obi one

In the last seventeen years I have used my sewing machine exactly five times. Four of these times have been during the last fortnight*. Sitting down and sewing...it's a good feeling. But why now? I think it's a combination of having the machine now permanently set up, having at my fingertips a whole bunch of lovely bits and pieces of fabric that I emancipated from Mum's sewing room, reaching some kind of peak in my long held desire to make my (our) own clothes, and seeing this, which of all the beautiful things I see in my travels around the blogosphere, somehow managed to trigger something in me that said, yes, I could have a go at something like that.
So, this is my second attempt at a 'scarf'. Actually, it's kind of weighty, so maybe it's more of an obi, or even a turban if you're feeling adventurous. (Whatever it is, it needs a good iron). It was fun to make, and I learned a lot. Such as sometimes when you think you're sewing in a straight line, you're really not, and that there is a really good reason that you can use different thread colours for your spool and bobbin.

*Mark's response on reading this: 'And all this time we've been carting that damn thing all over the country?!'

Buzzy

Check out these gorgeous fabrics! I love them all, but especially the bitey looking bees from the Japanese Echino range and these startled owls hand printed in Sydney by Kristen Doran. They do not charge shipping within Australia, they are having a sale, they sell in 25 cm increments and I just (finally) got paid. As Martha would say, 'uh oh! UH oh!'

Bag lady

For the last few days Martha has been (literally) dragging around a tatty old plastic shopping bag filled with 'very important' scavenged items - nuts, squashed sultanas, broken pens, hair clips, a mobile phone - from which she will not be parted (like a Womble, makin' a use for the things that she finds, things that the everyday folk leave behind). I've been wanting to make a little bag for her for ages, but just haven't had (or made) the time to sit down and do it. But today, I could bear that horrible plastic no longer. In a forty minute gap between two work interviews I madly cut and sewed at express speed to produce this. It's not my finest moment in handcrafting, but it was one of the most satisfying. As I was ironing it she was standing beside me going 'woof! woof! arf! arf!' (she likes to mix up her dog barks) and when I handed it over, she squealed with delight and ran off to fill it with...stuff.
Er...yes, that is a pair of my undies around her neck. Apparently she feels naked without them.

When we finally unhooked the bag from her arm so that she could have her bath, I had a little peek at what was inside. That's right girls, never head out without a disembodied action man face. You never know when you might need it.

As the crow flies...

...from here to Mackay QLD it is 1918 kilometres.

It's official. After weeks of thinking, deciding, interviewing, updating qualifications and finally accepting, Mark is taking up a new job as an electrician...in Queensland. Actually, it's not so bad. It is a fly in/fly out position, with nine days on (in QLD), followed by five days off (back here), looking after a giant machine that runs on the coal rail lines and somehow 'cleans' them by lifting the tracks and ballast up, shaking them, and laying it all back down again. To me it sounds like it violates a law or two of physics, but I'm assured that this is what it does. It can't be easy though - apparently this machine is high maintenance and quite temperamental - and from what I can gather Mark's new role will include giving it regular pep talks and soothing pats.

We're both looking forward to it, no doubt for different reasons. For me, there is relief that Mark has found something interesting and challenging to do that is also financially rewarding, plus a perverse kind of excitement at flying solo as a parent (I know, I'm sure this will pass) and (re) learning how to spend productive time on my own (I know, I'm sure this will pass too!).

Mark's start date coincides with the annual big machine clean-a-thon (or something) so he will be doing a regular nine day stint, followed by a special five day stint, to be followed by another nine day stint. Yes, this means that his first trip away will be 22 days. After this, I'm sure nine days will seem like a piece of cake.

String

Doesn't it always come back to sticks and string? We're hoping that this will be the last in a long series of so far ineffectual dog and toddler barriers around our poor downtrodden salads and brassicas.

A hand made house

The building of houses has, in our culture at least, been well and truly handed over to the 'experts'. Most of us would see it as a project too big, too technical and with too many opportunities for spectacular failure to tackle ourselves. So we direct our desire, or instinct even, to create a comfortable shelter, shaped around the needs of ourselves and our families, to the interiors of our houses. But it's interesting to think about what kind of house we would build if we had to, if it was down to us to make good use of the materials that we could scrounge, buy or barter in the few miles around us. What kinds of shapes and structures would we use? Would size be as important as facing the winter sun, good ventilation in summer, a human scale, easy to paint?

When I was a teenager I was fascinated by the architecture of Hundertwasser, who allowed the very human and very particular needs of the ultimate occupants to guide his design, rather than fashion, or the technical constraints of modern building materials. His buildings sought to reconnect people with their natural surroundings, as that was, for Hundertwasser, a essential condition of human flourishing. He also believed that structures, not just the decorated interior, should be idiosyncratic, personal, moulded from and around its inhabitants. I absolutely agree with him. I know from personal experience that the structures around us can shape our mood, our attitudes towards ourselves and others, our actions and even our aspirations. After living in the heart of Sydney for eleven years, it was the realisation of this that made it impossible to stay, and that indirectly led to my new home on this farm.

When I walk around here and see the myriad little shelters that the creatures around us have created - the wombat condominiums in the back dam wall, the swallows' elegant little mud nests, the cosy little rat bush rat tunnels lined with our passionfruit leaves - I do wonder about our stark and square little house on the prow of the hill, buffeted by winds from every direction and visible for miles around. Much of our garden planning has been trying to mitigate the effects its construction and siting - we freeze in winter and cook in summer. This house was a quick rebuild, after a disastrous house fire in the 1940's, started by a rogue coal after the ashes from the stove were emptied under the house, so I understand that speed no doubt governed all decisions here. But perhaps if Hundertwasser had wandered into town he would have retained the hilltop site, as resting the gaze on a distant horizon is the perfect mode of contemplation, but dug us into the ground for warmth, covered our roof with grass and spring flowers for good cheer, and built us a front step that caught the winter sun and of just the right height to have our bum in the kitchen but our feet firmly planted on the ground. Maybe it would look a little like this amazing 'low impact woodland home' - built in three months by two people with no previous building experience, out of local materials, for the princely sum of three thousand pounds. Check out the link for their wonderful and inspiring story (all photos in this post are of this house, images used with permission). If we ever find ourselves in need of shelter one day, perhaps we'll try and see what we can do with our own hands, and our own Hobbit-y aspirations.

Eight things about me

The lovely Kris has tagged me to do this 8 things meme. I have to admit that I have never before memed nor am I sure that I can think of eight random things about me that are sufficiently interesting to recount. It's also taken me an embarrassingly long time to get around to this. Sorry Kris! Anyway, these are the rules.

A. Each player lists 8 facts/habits about themselves.

B. The rules of the game are posted at the beginning before those facts/habits are listed.

C. At the end of the post, the player then tags 8 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know that they have been tagged and asking them to read your blog.

Here goes:

1. I'm very judgmental when it comes to coffee. I remember being completely appalled when I first moved to Brisbane. Not only was the coffee terrible but it was nearly always served in a glass chalice with a great big long swizzle stick of a spoon. But for all the times I've hated a coffee, and resented the lack of care and attention that went into making it, I've never once sent one back.

2. I have a completely hopeless memory when it comes to day to day stuff. I can barely remember things from one day to the next. I am one of those people who needs to write everything down or else it will not be done or remembered. And it's not just trivial house or work stuff that I forget - whole decades of my life are nothing but a haze. But if you're after the names of the planets, the colours of the rainbow, the periodic table, a perfect recital of one of a fairly large number of poems, the scientific names of plants, the world's longest palindrome, well...I'm your girl. I've always wondered if this a sign of true left-handedness or just some form of degenerative brain disease. Apparently you can only tell if you have a brain scan.

3. I am a very, very tidy person, but only in spurts. In between I am very, very messy. The one place that is consistently tidy and clean is the chook shed. I get the most extraordinary pleasure from sweeping out the old bedding and floor coverings, digging it into one or another fallow vege garden bed and bringing in armfuls of fresh, clean hay. If I were a chook I would love hanging out in that cosy little house.

4. I have a hard time being decisive. I do so much thinking but I really can't bear to commit to an outcome just in case there is a better one I just haven't thought of yet. This is currently driving me nuts in the garden. I plan and think and sketch and draw and pace and plan. Then I plant. Then I think and pace and draw. Then I move whatever I planted to its new 'better' location. Then move it again. What if my pursuit of the perfect garden means I'll never have a real one?

5. I have always wanted to live on a farm, with chooks, dogs, kids, a vege patch, a big rambling garden and a friendly herbivore or two. It seemed like it would be the perfect life - full of life, and the beginnings and endings of things. Now I do, and it is wonderful. I am grateful every day for the opportunity to live like this in such a beautiful place. But every day I also think of my friends and my family, and wish that we could all find a way to be fewer miles apart. When I was younger it was all about the places. The older I get the more I understand that it is really about the people.

6. I am a big fan of the uniform. I have often contemplated making myself a uniform that I could wear every day. It would, one hopes, be stylish, sophisticated and interesting, but would take all the work out of it.

7. When Martha was littler than she is now, and we were both up for much of the night, Mark started bringing me a cup of tea in bed in the morning, and minding Martha while I sipped it...very slowly. Martha sleeps a lot better these days, only waking once or twice at most, but I'm still getting my cup of tea. It's one of my favourite times - sitting up in bed, by myself, looking out over the ranges to the distant horizon and imagining the many possible paths to the other end of the day. I guess it's only a matter of time before Martha starts to sleep through. I wonder what will happen to my cup of tea then? I think about this every morning, and often find myself, as Amber once said, 'nostalgic for now'.

8. I am absolutely appalling at opening food or drygoods packaging of any kind. It's a strange kind of selective impatience, because I will spend ten minutes prising apart sticky tape if I want to save wrapping paper. I think it's also because I'm not very good at following rules, including all those little dotted lines and scissor clipart and directives to 'open on the other side' so beloved of food manufacturers. My paternal grandmother Ena was the same. I can remember sitting, horrified, across the kitchen bench from her while she opened a carton of milk - by hacking the whole top off, in great jagged strokes, with a carving knife.

Okay, that's eight. As for tagging others, well, I'm only going to tag two - Amber and Tabitha. Maybe they can tag 16 each to make up for me!

The best bread ever...almost

I've been mucking about with bread for quite a few years now. It's taken a lot of trial and error (and, I admit, a bit of reading up on the glamourous world of 'bread chemistry') but I've discovered that making really good bread is not nearly as complicated or time consuming as you probably think.

There are a few things that I believe are vitally important - your flour (I use Laucke Mills 'Wallaby'), using as little commercial yeast as you can (preferably none), the length of time that the dough is left to prove, or rise, your kneading method (as little as possible) and the baking method. I'm sure there are bakers out there who might disagree, but for me, these are really the key things.

Of all these, the baking method is the most troublesome, frustrating and often disappointing for the home baker. Producing a good loaf of the kind that I like to make requires relatively high temperature and moisture levels, and ideally, heat that is transferred via conduction, convection and radiation. This is why masonry bread ovens are so great and home ovens generally so inadeqate (they are mainly designed as convection ovens). Not having access to a masonry oven, I've tried lots of things to 'soup up' my modest little Westinghouse, some more successful than others, some more annoying and incovenient than others. At one stage I even had a tray in the bottom of the oven full of rocks collected from the garden to try and raise the radiant heat levels (it didn't, as far as I could tell but the house was full of acrid smoke for hours). The most successful thing I've tried so far is using a cast iron casserole (as recommended by the legendary New York Times no knead bread recipe among others). It gives a more than acceptable result, and is my standard approach these days. But every time I go to preheat my poor beaten up cast iron pot it only reminds me that my bread is, at best, only a rough approximation of what it could, and should, be.

Not any more.

For months our friends down the road have been labouring over a masonry oven. Hand built and home designed with a bit of input from the Internet and a friendly brickie, the oven has slowly emerged, in all its statuesque glory, from an unpromising pile of rubble and wheelbarrow loads of firebricks, sand, cement and vermiculite.
Yesterday was cold and wet and windy, but we were toasty warm as we huddled around the oven waiting for the coals to burn down and the oven to even out in temperature. This took quite a few hours - this was your genuine 'slow food' - but fortunately Phil has a well stocked cellar.

The baking itself was full of drama. As soon as the loaves hit the hearth they sprung up into little dough balloons before the crust started to form and get brown. Quite brown. Very quickly. While 'oven spring' and a crisp, variably coloured crust are the true hallmarks of a good hearth bread, I'm not sure that balloons and brown-verging-on-blackness are in the handbook. But hey, this was our own bread, in a real oven, and dammit, it smelt good!
Yes, we have to work on the temperature - all the loaves had to be rescued within 20 minutes (normal home oven cooking time is 40 to 50 minutes) - but there was nothing like tearing open the loaves to see a lovely, steaming, glossy crumb, smothering it in butter and eating while still hot. Absolutely wonderful. And though wildly imperfect, it was the most perfect imperfect bread I've ever had.

Green

Martha's 'feature wall' in the subdued light of a rainy day. I love this colour (Porter's Paints Green Papaya). Green is meant to be the relaxing colour isn't it, and this certainly exudes tranquility and calm. We bought a four litre tin, and have three litres left. I think the spare room will be the next one to get the green treatment.

De-cluttering

The weather being what it was, we spent a lot of time inside this week. Kids and dogs being what they are, I also spent a lot of time trying to keep things from falling into complete chaos. Engaged in this futile task, I realised that many things in this house were strangers to me. I couldn't really recall how they came to be here and I had absolutely no idea how to put them away. Worse, it seemed these things rarely travelled solo. Rather, we had collectives, packs, tribes, communities of clutter, living out their aimless days in poorly constructed stacks, piles and sheafs. I found myself walking from room to room, looking for suitable accomodation for boxes of batteries that may or may not have any life in them, what seemed like hundreds of envelopes stuffed with 'important' papers, hand me down clothes that Martha never quite fitted into, two fit balls for that Pilates we are always intending to do, articles ripped out of newspapers and magazines for unspecified future reference, endless roughly drawn schematics of kitchens and gardens that someone, at some time, imagined had captured one or another golden idea, brochures, instruction books for items that I was not even sure we owned, warranties, strange pieces of miscellaneous giftware accrued over many birthdays and Christmases, seed packets, plastic containers that had long ago parted company with their lids, extraneous lids that no longer matched any containers or jars, endless bunny rugs...the list goes on. What to do with it? What if I threw it all out then one day needed a spare battery? What if one of my sisters has a/another baby? Won't they need all these baby clothes?

The longer we were stuck indoors the more I longed for the spartan clarity of a Danish cabin where everything was either essential or beautiful, where everything had its place. Or at least an appropriate storage solution. I flicked through an old Ikea catalogue, unearthed in one of our ancient piles, and dreamed of Pax's and Traby's and Expedit's. I contemplated lock up storage. Perhaps I could work a few more hours to offset the cost? Then, out of desperation (or perhaps it was just procrastination), I googled 'clutter'. And this is what I found. I had a clutter epiphany. 'Organisational giant' Peter Walsh pointed out something so perfectly obvious I'm embarassed that I had to learn it from Unclutterer.com: 'respect the limits that your physical space places on you. There is only so much stuff that can come into your home before it is a place that you don't want to be, regardless of how fabulous your storage solutions may be. Figure out what kind of environment you want, figure out those physical limits and that's it - don't ever allow stuff to exceed those limits' (I'm paraphrasing here). Aah.

I want our house to feel calm and contemplative. I want it to encourage ease of movement and action (doing one thing shouldn't involve the cleaning up or relocation of another). I want it to be simple, yet full of meaning to those who live here, I want there to be care in the details. I want everyone to know where everything is. I want to wake up in the morning and pad out to the kitchen to drink my tea and feel the sun on my face without having to clear a space at the kitchen table. We filled boxes, and boxes, and boxes. We emptied drawers, and bins, and folders. We cleared under beds , on tops of cupboards, behind doors, and most importantly, surfaces. We drove it to St Vinnies, we burned and we recycled. Now that we had arrived at our 'limit', a kind of clutter detente, I extracted commitments from every member of the household: from now on, nothing extra comes into the house without something else going out (that includes you, Bessie). I woke up this morning, and even though it was rainy and grey, it felt good. Very good. Thank you, Mr Walsh. You are an organisational giant.

The start of something?

The tension between Bessie and Rhumba has begun to ease. We think they even played together for a bit today (well, there didn't seem to be any growling or cowering). Maybe they will be friends after all.

Whipping on by

Today seemed to end before it had even really started. Which, I think, is more good than bad given that some days seem to start and start and start, and never seem to get close to ending without the aid of alcohol. Let's hope there aren't too many of those days ahead, now that our last bottle of red wine has been regretfully, but most enjoyably, consumed. I started with a long and exceedingly optimistic list as I always do. Burdening myself with unrealistic expectations is my personal equivalent of a nicotine habit, just as hard to kick, but probably just as perversely pleasurable. Look, this long, long list, so full of anticipation and energy. So much energy! SO much energy. Oh, yeah, did I say...energy? The list has got a lot longer since we've commenced our frugality drive (can you drive towards frugality?). And needless to say quite a few of the items make it onto the next day's list. I don't mind about that. I need to start the day with a long list! But today, I did get my work done before lunchtime, I did wash the nappies and I did bake bread, for the sixth day in a row. Good, huh! (There is, unfortunately, an inverse law of bread consumption when it comes to the home baked stuff. The more you bake it, the more they eat it, great big thick hunks of it. Which means by 3pm, we are usually out of bread. I now absolutely understand why sliced bread would have seemed like the best thing since, well... )


This afternoon was spent moseying around nurseries and pretending not to know Martha while she assiduously excavated the sawdust from the rootballs of the bare rooted fruit trees. I absolutely love the bare root fruit tree season. I find a similar pleasure in looking through all those burnished bare twigs, fruiting spurs, colourful swing tags and tangles of roots as reading through a good recipe book. The anticipation and promise of nourishment and all manner of sensory pleasures, where key ingredients are never forgotten and codling moth flies overhead to next door's trees. The nurseryman predicted rain for tonight, and confidently declared 'kernels' to be a particular variety of almond tree. We walked away with a bundle of autumn fruiting raspberry canes, twenty strawberry runners, a Smyrna quince and a lot of sawdust in our shoes. We will try and plant them tomorrow. After that rain, of course.

On the way home, we could see from back up the road that Rob's cows had staged a mass breakout...into our front paddock. I remembered that walking past them yesterday, I had noticed a covetous gleam in their eye as they mooed at me over the fence. So, we continued up to Ross's (he is looking after the cows while Rob and Cathy are overseas) to let him know. Mark walked off to find him, and I tried to show Martha Ross's pigs. They were proper storybook pigs, white with black spots and big rings in their noses, having a great old time in the leafmould under an old, old oak tree. I admit they were rather loud pigs, and quite large as well, but I have never seen Martha so terrified. Every time the pigs snorted or snuffled she absolutely shrieked and couldn't even bring herself to look at them. Risk averse, like her mother.

By the time cows were sorted and chooks and dogs fed, it had become one of those nights where dinner must be conjured rather than cooked. So... pasta with anchovies and freshly picked broccolini from the garden and absolutely delicious it was.

Eleven minute pasta with broccolini and anchovies

Put pasta water on to boil. In a pan, saute three or four cloves of garlic and three or four anchovies in a generous slosh of olive oil until anchovies have 'melted'. Add some pine nuts.
Slice broccolini lengthways into thin florets and cook for a minute in the boiling pasta water (i.e. with the cooking pasta) then scoop out and stir into the anchovy mixture. Drain pasta, toss through the anchovy mixture. Serve with parmesan. Yum.