The six year, five minute flower.

When we fisrt purchased our farm I discovered some bulbs growing off our back veranda.
I weeded around them and showed Peace where they were so he wouldn't run over them with the lawn mower.
For five years I watered and weeded around my bulbs, waiting to see what they would look like when they flowered. I thought they might be a  type crocus but wasn't sure what colour flower they would have.

Every Spring just as they were about to flower they were run over by the lawn mower!

I weeded around them and marked them with rocks but Peace seemed to often forget they were there.

So I moved out from the farm without ever finding out what they looked like.

BUT before he left Peace dug up some of the bulbs and brought them to me in a pot.

Spring has sprung and at last after six years I have seen my flower.
I hadn't even been paying attention to them and walked around the corner the other day to find this...

After excitedly showing everyone I walked away and five minutes later Tui picked the flower and brought it to me with a beautiful shy smile on her face... "I picked this for you Mummy"

At least I now know what type of bulbs I have, even if it didn't last very long!

Looking forward to tending my bulbs and having a garden again oneday to plant them in.

Sharing My Dreams

One of the hardest things about separating from Peace has been feeling that so many of my dreams have died along with the relationship.That they are no longer possible. We had so many shared dreams,so many plans for the future. So much we wanted to do together and with our children.

I have felt so empty and lost. These dreams were my direction in life, things I'd been planning for years, goals I had partly achieved. And now I feel that it is not possible to achieve them on my own.

There was the plan we'd been talking about for ages to take the kids on an adventure. We wanted to canoe up the North Coast of Queensland, near the Daintree Rain forest, camping in the wilderness.

Yes, technically,I probably could do this on my own with the kids,but it would not be the same. It would require a lot more work on my part, it wouldn't be as enjoyable or safe as doing it with another person; someone you trust, someone you know has the skills and knowledge to make it work.

It is like my dream of buying land and building a solar-passive, Eco, straw-bale house. Peace and I have been planning this for 13 years. We dreamed of buying land in Northern New South Wales, building our house, growing food, making amazing gardens, creating an adventure playground for grown-ups.

We wanted to make a place where people could come to learn and rejuvenate. Where we could share our skills in abseiling, rock climbing, massage, healing, permaculture, edible weeds and bush tucker.In bush craft and building and gardening.
A place where families could come to re-connect with each other.
A place where people could visit our home and see that living in an Eco-friendly house does not mean living in a mud covered hippy shack but in a beautiful home with all the modern comforts. And that it can all be created on a budget and by yourself if you choose.

And yes, it is probably technically possible for me to learn the skills I need and do all this on my own it would feel like something is missing without Peace.
The most enjoyable times I have spent with Peace are when we were building or in the gardens. When we are talking about plants, how much a tree has grown, looking at a spider web with the morning dew sparkling on it, when we garden together without even needing to speak but both knowing what we need to do. I find it hard to imagine myself building without being able to discus the construction of the window frames or the recipe for the render with Peace. Or the laughter and companionship.

Lately we have been talking and have come to the conclusion that maybe we can still do these things together. We can buy land and create all this and co-habit on the land in separate dwellings. We can both be accessible to the kids all the time. We can still share the dreams.

And now I am sharing the dream with all of you. I'm putting it out to the Universe and hoping it will happen.

We would love another family or two to share our land; people with similar ideas and dreams, to create a community. Maybe this will all happen one day.

Eating locally

I love the idea of eating food that is grown and produced in the local area. Whenever I can I try to buy local produce. When money is prohibitive though it is often cheaper to buy imported food. Although I do understand the economics that causes this there is part of me that doesn't get it.
How can food that's grown organically, just down the road from me, cost more than food that is grown using expensive chemical fertilizers and transported halfway around the world?

I guess the easiest way for me to eat local produce is to grow my own food and make my own products right here. I am working on getting a veggie garden going. The soil here is very rocky and dry. (I am living on top of a ridge) So I am going to try growing in containers. I have an old bath tub that I am filling with compost. When it is almost full I will add some mushroom compost and some manure and start my garden.

 

Wandering around my new garden I have found some edible plants. So I can already begin eating locally! This oregano was hiding under some weeds.

There are a few edible weeds around to provide greens, nasturtium flowers and leaves, dandelion, dock, sorrel and chickweed.

Also a paw paw tree (papaya)

It is a hermaphrodite tree. It has both the male flowers and female. So it is self-fertile and sets fruit.The fruit on hermaphrodite trees is never as sweet as the fruit on female trees but they are great to cook with when they are still green.

With Tui's help I made some green paw paw chutney.

 Mr  loves it and has already eaten half the first jar!

I've also been baking bread. I use a slow rise fermented dough recipe. For this first batch I used 1/3 spelt flour, 1/3 buckwheat flour and 1/3 organic wheat flour.

It has a lot less gluten than just using wheat flour and because the dough is fermented the gluten is partly pre-digested so it is easier for me to digest :-)

It turned out very yummy! And went really well with the chutney.

Thankyou for the garden

Thankyou to the wonderful people who lived in this shack before me.

Thankyou for the beautiful flowers

and for the fresh food.

I hope the people living in my old house are enjoying the gardens we left behind for them as much as I'm enjoying this garden.

In the fairy garden.

The Jasmine vine has finally grown to cover the archway I built out of reo bar and concrete reinforcing mesh. I love walking through here into the fairy garden .

The Agapanthus that I grew from a single cutting from my Mum's bush surrounds the fairy circle. They are Tui's favourites because they are so bright and big.

This little seat which is a wonderful place to sit out of the Sun and to pick strawberries and mulberries straight out of the garden, yum!

I planted these two lilli pillys four years ago to form another arch to get to another secret part of the garden. Finally they are starting to touch, Peace pruned them into a really nice arch this morning :)

The tree with the platform is looking so lovely and bushy, a perfect spot to sit quietly and meditate.

This afternoon the kids took all the prunings from our garden tidy up and built a little humpy.

Tui hiding inside.

Now they are have started a camp fire and are roasting potatoes and cooking toast.

I have a blessed life.

Displaced wildlife and a wee little garden.

The forgotten victims of the recent flooding are all the wildlife. There are so many animals that have been affected by the floods. Their homes and burrows destroyed by raging water, food sources washed away and animals directly killed by the floods.

We have been having many visits from snakes this last week. I guess they are all up here away from the river and also are out looking for food now that it is sunny enough for them to be on the move.

This snake made it's way into a box of crockery I had packed to move.

The box was out in the shed but Peace thought the box looked too flimsy to hold the weight of the crockery so brought the box into the house to repack...and as he was unpacking it he came across this carpet python.

Carpet pythons are harmless although they do grow very big and the thought of having any snake inside the house is enough to scare the crap out of me...

He took the box out and the snake slowly moved on.

We have seen 5 snakes this past week, usually we see that many over a couple of months. Luckily they have all been pythons. Three carpet pythons, a Green Tree python and a Brown Tree Python.

This morning Mr T spent hours making things out of his block and then he helped me to make a mini-Rainbow Love Farm.

I am sad at the thought of leaving all my plants behind so we took some cutting of some herbs and planted them all into one big broccoli box, so that where ever we end up I will have the beginnings of a new herb garden.

We planted some lemon grass, comfrey root, ceylon spinach, oregano, yarrow, garlic chives and a small chill seedling. It looks a bit sad at the moment but hopefully they will all survive.

A Summer top and Rainbow crop

Just finished my new summer top. The pattern (from my head) turned out ok. Although I might make the next one a bit longer in the front and do braoder crocheted straps instead of corded straps. I've already started another one in black, chocolate and cream :)

And this morning I picked this beautiful rainbow Chard. I've tried to grow it before but have never had such variety in the colours. I love it!

Now and Then...the kids garden

I found some old photos taken four and a hlaf years ago when we first moved in.

It actually surprised me how much everything has grown. Because I am looking at it everyday I notice the gradual changes but you forget what it used to be like.

So, joy of joys, today I was given a new/old camera and I walked around the garden taking photos from the same positions as the original shots...

Kids garden from the house

Then

Now

The cubby...

Then

Now

Looking throught the archway...

Then (well the arch didn't exsists in the first photo)

Now

I love...

I love growing veggies because you get the whole vegetable, not the trimmed up, dried out version from the supermarket...

then you can juice all the fennel tops and make a most delicious sauce!!!

I love seeing the kids loving each other...

And watching Tui build her "nests"

I love champagne gardening with friends,

and seeing the kids all playing the same comptuer game on different computers.

and watching them learn to drive in the ol' paddock basher.

Lush growth

Some of the more hardier plants have started to take over the garden. I love these plants, they are the ones you don't have to worry about, you can forget to water them for weeks and they still grow and grow. They are also prolific producers of food.

This is the Madargasca bean growing on the garden fence. The beans are used dried like kindey beans. They are spotty pink and white beans. We always get bucket loads of these and they are so much more tender than dried beans you buy at the shops, and therefore have a heaps qicker cooking time.

But they are really starting to encroach on the paths...

and on the other plants. Here you can see the little basil poking it's head out but it'll be gone in a couple of days.

The pumpkins ae another prolific grower. This one is suspended from the top of a peach tree.

And another abundant plant is the perenial plant warrigal spinach (native to Australia) that is growing on the other side of the garden fence. So I had to make a decicion today, do we only want to eat spinach, pumpkins and beans or should I pull some of them out?

Well I decided to do a little (actually a lot of pruning back) I hate to waste good food but the chickens loved all the prunings which means more yummy eggs.

At least I know that th spinach will grow back, the pumpkin vines are reaching the end of their growing season anyway and we will still end up with hundreds of beans, but there is now room to plant some other stuff.

These chillies are looking good, P ate one and apparently they are extremely hot! He guzzled about two liters of water and was still complaining a couple of hours later...lol

All of the brasicas (Kale, Brocoli, Cauliflowers) we had tried to plant early this year to get an early crop have been infested with grubs, so I had to pull them out too. So I'm back off to the garden to plant some more seeds and try out the new watering system. (I'll post about that later)

LOHAS land

This great new blog I've started reading. LOHAS Land stands for: Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability- Life and Natural Development.

The latest article is about the amount of rubbish that makes its way into our oceans and not only polutes but actually kills some species. It is very sad. The article follows on with ways that we can reduce our own impact. Imagine if enough people started trying to reduce their impact and we started to see a difference in our lifetimes or the lifetime of our children.
I believe one of the best things we can pass on to our children is a respect for nature and the environment and the skills to do this.
Children love gardening. Even if you only have a few herbs in pots children will love helping to pick ingredience for their meals. Plant cherry tomatoes where children can help themselves and eat them straight off the bush. These are skills for life.
And talk to your children about ways to pollute less and create less rubbish.
A simple start is too reduce your usage of plastic bags.

Check out LOHAS Land for more great ideas.

There is lots of info about how each of us CAN make a difference and help clean up and hopefully one day start to heal the Earth.

LOHAS Land

The rain has made the garden explode witth growth, here are a few things I harvested yesterday.


I love the look of these Okra. Used them for dinner and they were really yum.

Spent most of the morning playing leggo with Mr T and Tui. It always amazes me how far leggo blocks get spread around the house and after you have packed them up you keep finding more for hours, under furniture and in all sorts of wierd places!

It's going to be hot today, hopefully I'll get time to take the kids for a swim at the creek which is looking alot cleaner now we've had some rain to flush it out. But first this morning I've got to go pick about a ton of tomatoes and eggplants and distribute them among the nieghbours (there really is way more than we can eat) Which is cool , I love sharing our yummy food.

Todays food

I love the colour of this red chard in the garden. It's growing so well this year.


We picked some new stuff today. The first birdseye chilli, pomegranets, squash and lemon grass.

Loads and loads of cherry tomatoes, a couple of ox heart tomatoes and some Romas.

And also a bucketful of of these sweetest passion fruits. The kids and I ate about 50 of them!!! They were just so sweet we couldn't stop.