Greenbackyard

My first assignment

How fantastic to stroll down to the letterbox yesterday and find my first beekeeping assignment, returned, and marked. I got most of my questions right! But more gratifying were the multiple hand written comments from my teacher, and the encouragement. I was delighted that someone really took the time to go through my assignment. I’m going to write to my teacher and ask him the multiple questions I have about bees, since he seems so engaged. Yay!

A garden bench and a cup of tea

I’ve only just started rebuilding this old, run down garden and already it’s time to take a break. I think it’s imperative to have a cup of tea and a good sit down and a bit of a think about what comes next. In fact, as I’ve been working a bit of a space has opened up by the garden gate. That’s where my awesome garden trolley does it’s turning circle, where I can dump straw, where I can leave my tools. It’s such a useful space I think I’ll keep it and add a bench to sit on. Then I’ll make a cup of tea, and stare at the garden in progress.

The other two thirds of my garden shall stay, for now, in a forlorn, weed choked state. By getting a garden seat, and creating a space just for sitting, watching and dreaming I think I’m paying respect to the principle of considered organic design. A chair in this case isn’t a final cherry on the cake, it’s not the ornament that celebrates a finished project.
It’s about building a spot to reflect as you go.
Very often in my profesional life as a web designer, my team and I don’t get this luxury. Because of time commitments we bang out designs to a brief as fast as we can. It’s often the client that does the reflecting, gets back to us and asks us to make changes.
I believe that gardens can teach us so much, and perhaps one fertile area I could reflect on might be how organic design might influence collaborative design for the better.

An Epicurun garden

Marble bust of Epicurus.

There once was a fellow called Epicurus. He was a Greek philosopher. He had a simple recipe for happiness. These days if you were to say that someone is living “the Epicurian” ideal, the implication would be that they are a debauched, avaricious existence devoted to pure pleasure. Oddly, this has nothing to do with what he said (or rather it’s an interpretation of what he said.) Other interpretations reveal a simpler, neater value system.

According to his surviving writings, the way to be happy is to do these things:

* Own a garden
* Be self-sufficient, in that you don’t depend on someone else for your livelihood
* Live modestly
* Eat fresh food, preferably home grown
* Have good friends with whom you can have long conversations
* Drink modestly
* Don’t be afraid of death

In fact Epicurus was supposed to have founded a school around his own garden, that was open to all sorts, including women and slaves, (exceedingly rare in those days.) Apparently, he was quite fond of a ‘pot’ of fresh cheese, a ripe tomato and a hunk of bread for dinner, and some friends to share it with.

All this got me thinking about planting an Epicurun Garden. Imagine this with me… White gravel paths, tomato plants of all sorts up trellis’s and sprawled over whitewashed walls. The drift of basil on the wind, thyme underfoot, the faint hum of bees working nearby. I have baked a loaf of bread, and made a little tub of cheese from locally sourced organic milk, and there’s one of my honey varieties open on nearby rustic table. Friends are due for lunch, and they are bringing a bottle of olive oil and a chilled glass of something delicious. That right there, that sounds quite heavenly wouldn’t you agree? Think old Epicurus would agree…

One last thing I think has to be said, and that is Epicurus really was very cool, you should read more about Epicurus here. Apparently he coined this phrase, which was later adopted by the humanists as a common tombstone epitaph:

“I was not; I was; I am not, and I’m fine with that.”

The ultimate survivor

New tank

A few days ago we stood in front of our aquaponics system, looking dubiously into the stinky water. It was like looking into a tank of raw green sludge. The bottom was hidden under a depth of brack-ish green water. Mosquito larvae wriggled in the still, scum laden rainwater tank. No food had been dropped into the tank in months. Our plant beds were like little deserts – with a few weedy herbs clawing at the sky. Surely nothing could survive in such a toxic environment?

My brother made it clear he wanted the tank of water to go. Since the tank was right next to his room, he had a point. We knew that 10 of the 11 eleven original fish had perished. But what if that last fish was still alive? Surviving like a fishy Chuck Norris, deep in the tank? Tenaciously clinging to life like a Rambo – how could we get rid of the tank (or at least clean it out and reuse it) if, somewhere down there, it lived! We looked into the tank and our doubts were almost palpable. Surely, it had to be dead?

We started to drain the tank. Long hair like strands of green filaments coated the sides of the tank – I could only compare it to seaweed. The water didn’t get any clearer, but odd things emerged, like half sunken wrecks. As we got down to the last third, we stopped emptying the tank and got a big stick and had a bit of a poke around – juuuuuuusssssst in case…..

Suddenly, like a black shadow, out he darted!! I let out an excited yell. It made my day to find he was still there, incredibly, still fighting fit and swift as a flash of light. What a stayer! As my brother Stephen said (after whom we named every fish) – what a Highlander he is. “There can be… only one!” So we refilled the tank a bit and then had a good chat about what to do next.

The thing is, we need to transport the Highlander Fish to our new house and eventually build it a new aquaponics system – but our new house is 8 hours away. That’s a hard thing to do… Get it out of the swamp (er… current tank), get it into some in-between-time tank and then get it up to our new house and THEN get it into it’s long term accommodation. I sure will not be able to eat Highlander after this, he’s almost like family now, (and about as much trouble. And probably about as crazy.)

Anyway, we went out and bought a new fish tank for him. You can see the photo here. We need to leave it a week with a pump in it to settle down, before we transfer him into it, and finally clean the big tank. More on this saga later. I really hope that after living for so long in a toxic pool he doesn’t cark it the moment we introduce him to properly oxygenated water.

What to do with a small block of land full of fruit trees?

What would you do if you moved to a small block of land, smaller than a normal farm, full of established fruit trees? Well you might consider erecting a pot stil to make your own liquors and spirits. That’s just what the owners of the Tambourine Mountain Distillery did, in 1992, after they moved from Tasmania to the Glass House Mountains in Queensland.

“As we did not want to use chemical sprays on our fruit, we discovered that our products did not meet with market requirements’, their website says. “For a four person family, we had too much fruit, so we needed to ‘convert’ it into something which would make this small property productive.” See more of their story here.

What a wonderful idea! You should check out their site – it’s a delightfully personal and warm website, complete with pictures of their hand painted bottles, glowing stills, and caskets of maturing liquors. They’ve won numerous awards, and every bottle is hand-painted… and be sure to take a look at the peacock named Claude displaying his huge magnificent tail outside their show rooms. I can’t wait to visit in person.

Setting up a distillery in Australia is not easy at all, (which perhaps explains why there are so few of them.) Where-as in France and many European cultures, making alcohol at home is centuries old practice, that is still very much part of the tradition of cooking and food preparation, it is very uncommon in Australia, because the Government makes it very hard to own a Still. Owning a still even to make your own home made liquors, which you don’t intend to sell, without the proper license is illegal. You can’t own the still, make the liquor, store it, sell it, or move it, without a license.

When you get a license, the Government imposes what is called an excise duty on your goods. So for every litre of 40% proof alcohol you make, you need to pay the Government $65. A 750 ml bottle (think of a wine bottle) with 40% alcohol will have an excise duty of $18. Which you have to pay upfront, regardless of whether you sell this bottle or drink it yourself at home. If you sell it, you pay taxes and GST on the earnings after that. And just imagine the record keeping this all takes?!

And don’t even get me started on all the other licenses that you need to make your fruit into a tasty liquor. You need a license to store your alcohol, and to move it. I’m not yet sure how much each license costs… I assume the licenses themselves cost nothing, since the excise duty and the taxes on top would be a huge chunk of change for our dear Government anyway!

Which only goes to add an extra bravo to the family of the Tambourine Mountain Distillery, who have overcome these hurdles! Personally, I’m going to make my first batches of limonchello and orangechello with Vodka. I’m going to buy premade spirits and I’m going to think very fuzzy fuzzy thoughts about distilleries until one day when I finally have the gumption to face all the red tape. By which time , my next batch of Limonchello should b ready…

New tanks, new plans, new idea?

We’ve been thinking about a new aquaponics system – a phase 2 set-up. Ofcourse we only have a sketch on a back of a napkin at the moment, (so many good plans start like that!) but we’re thinking of a bigger system than our initial prototype we set up in the backyard in our last house.

A bigger set up will give us the chance to learn about medium size set-ups work. For instance, we can get an idea about how to scale up the technical stuff, such as the sort of the pumps we’ll need, how the beds full of vegetables will respond to the Bellingen climate, and what sort of problems a medium size rig will create (not that we are anticipating any, but its good to allow for the unforeseen.)

In the winter, it gets cold around where we are. Well, by cold I mean about 0 or just below – that’s centigrade. Not so cold by the standards of many of our friends, but that’s cold for a beach girl. It will be cold for our plants too – and our fish. Dealing with that cold will be new for us.

Perhaps one piece of the puzzle will be to use a marquee-tent that I found on on ebay. It might act as a makeshift housing for the tanks, (and possibly some beds), and by crikey we’d have to stake it down properly. But it might also act as a greenhouse within the tent, raising the temperature and stopping frost. I wonder if this will work?

Marquee from KMATE - look for it on Ebay

What to plant, when!

I just found this fantastic resource for gardeners:

http://www.gardenate.com/

I put in my growing climate (subtropical) and Gardenate tells you what to plant right now, and what to prepare for, for next month. How handy for those of us who just can’t remember what to get into the ground in time. Currently it works for residents of Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.

Becoming a beekeeper

I’ve been fascinated by bees ever since I was a kid. I remember sitting there reading everything I could about bees in the big old books my parents had in the 70′s, studying the close-up photos of the beehive. I was enchanted with how bee colonies worked – with multiple roles; Queen, workers, drones, young brood. I described at dinner when I was about 11 how bees found sources of pollen and told other bees about it by dancing special dances inside their hives, and how they us the pollen sacs on their legs as ballast when they fly. When I was 12, a friend and I were pretending to be wildlife reporters for National Geographic, and we ‘snuck up’ on a colony of wild bees to take photos of them – and I was immensely surprised when several flew out in an angry swarm and tried to sting me, while my friend almost peed herself laughing. Even with this experience, I’ve always liked bees.

So this year, I’m going to do a course on how to become a beekeeper. It has a two day practical session in September 2009, and I’m planning, nay… scheming, to get some friends to do this with me so it can be extra fun. And the great bit is that the course is run over the internet. Perfect for someone living in the country.

I certainly hope this interview between Rowan Atkinson and John Cleese about beekeeping is part of the course

Herdshare – what a great idea

So I’m in Buenos Aires, and it’s a weekend, and I can hear Bruno’s father playing the violin softly in the next room. I’ve got a small window to post something about an excellent initiative back in NSW Australia that has be all a jitter with exitamento. It’s called Herdshare.

I'd like to buy some raw milk please, so I can make cheese!

A simple cheese press from http//:cheesepressexcellence.com/

After reading this power point slide from the Weston A. Price Foundation, who helped establish a non-profit organization dedicated to protecting the rights of farmers to provide meat, eggs, raw dairy products, vegetables and other foods directly to consumers in the United States, I’ve personally decided that providing certain hygienic standards in the dairy are met, and providing the cows are allowed to graze in pasture, we should be able to buy and sell raw milk. I’m not convinced that the pasteurization process is the only option.

So, along comes Herdshare! A brilliant new idea in Australia. To quote directly from the brochure “A herdshare is a co-operative of people who, together, buy a herd of animals and pay a farmer to care for their herd, milk their animals and deliver their product via their local farmer’s market. ” So the farmers don’t own the cows – they just manage them for the owners. The owners are people like me, who pay a little bit to become an owner up front, and a little bit per month for ongoing herd maintenance done by the farmer. Herdshare connects people like me who are interested in buying raw milk (or fresh butter, or real cream) with herdshare collectives. Then I get some milk every week – I don’t pay for it, because I own the cows, and the farmer doesn’t sell it, because he just manages the cows. No one breaks any laws, and I can make cheese!

Impressions of Buenos Aires: our home

I’ve been here about 2 weeks now and I still feel like everything is so new. But I can’t let it go too long without posting something, or the early wonder will be replaced by new things that amaze me.

A house near where I am staying. An interesting mix of the modern and the historic.

Grapes ripening in the sun in Buenos Aires

And babies. My son loves it here. And why not, he has three adoring women to play with everyday. The house is child friendly with lots of toys and lego blocks in the main room. He has already explored all the buttons, drawers and pots in the kitchen, and still finds them fascinating day after day. This morning he came in a pushed a button on his Grandfathers computer here, which ejected the cd holder. In terror, he ran into my arms crying about the monster thing. And he still wants his mother during his day – despite all the playtime, he still comes in to check I’m here every so often, and to get a cuddle, for a few moments. At this moment Bruno is in Barcelona – and I think Zeek misses him. Every time someone leaves via the front door, Zeek cries hard. I conjecture that he understands loss. His understanding of consequence is developing. He understands that his hat means he is going outside. Sometimes he’ll go and grab his hat and put it on, ready to be taken to the park. He understands that doors open and close, but need to tested for this functionality every day. He understands that things go inside the washing machine, so he puts things in there when it isn’t being used. Shoes. Pegs. Half eaten biscuits. He understands that giving kisses is a good thing. Once he gives one person a kiss, all the people in the room must also be given a kiss. It’s only fair.