food on the table

how's this for bringing food to the table? it's from this blog:

my sister's diary

madeleine is my very talented younger sister who lives with her husband, chris, and five children outside bath in the uk. she has been keeeping an illustrated journal for many years now and just sent me a photo of her entry on our property - bobo creek. i include it here, although we can't read the detail. i think she was a little over enthusiastic with her zeroes as she has reported that we bought 40,000 acres! we wish! actually the 42 seem pretty big to us.

permaculture plans are presented

on monday paula came for dinner and presented her overarching plan for the 'paradising' of bobo creek. i won't post it here, but you can read about it on our bobo creek blog.

here's one of the layers:

some garden pics

spring is certainly in the air. the birds are crazy outside, and our little quill (the cockatiel) is crazy in his cage talking to them and wolf-whistling at rosie in her pyjamas.

i've scoured the neighbourhood for plants i can propagate for bobo creek and some of them are showing promise - especially the mulberries.
here is an italian broccoli plant. one of my students gave me a little seedling and now it's so big.
once i lifted the keffir lime tree out of reach of the marauding rabbit it put out dozens of new shoots.
and olympia made a little succulent garden which is looking pretty.

even more sourdough

yes, i know, i am obsessed! i've been reasonably happy with my locally harvested (ie, the air of the kitchen here in marrickville) sourdough starter, but thought it would be interesting to get hold of someone elses and experiment. so i bought some starter from ed wood's site. i chose the culture from finland: "this culture is hard to describe, as the wonderful and distinctive flavour and aroma it imparts are truly indescribable. it rises well." i grew the culture over about a week and it frothed nicely and smelled very mild. once it had reached optimum growth ( a few centimetres of rising within few hours) in its jar, i made a 'sponge' with some warm water, honey and about a cupful of starter, a cup of flour and left it for a few hours in the sun. then added enough flour for a big loaf of bread (i never measure so i can't help you here) and enough extra warm water to make a good dough. after about half an hour i added salt which gives an immediate pliability to the dough and kneaded it well. left in an oiled bowl lightly covered with cling wrap it rose very quickly. i knocked it back twice before i shaped it into a loaf and baked it after a last brief rise. it's really fluffy and sweet smelling and makes good toast and sandwiches. i'll try the french starter next time...

my potatoes are sprouting

i've been waiting for my potatoes to sprout and now they have. i set them in hessian sacks with the sides rolled down and now that they've come up i will continue to pile soil around them and unroll the sides of the sacks. this encourages the stems of the shoots to actually perform the function of roots and bear little potatoes.
i'll keep posting pics as they come up.
izzy and i made another vertical garden in an old fabric shoe holder.

end of the soccer season

all through winter olympia has been braving the cold on a wednesday evening for an hour and a half's soccer training and then weekly matches on a sunday morning. (except for the four weeks she had in hong kong and europe!) her team plays in an age division a year ahead of themselves as they are pretty good, but today reached the end of the line in a final that saw them defeated after a penalty shootout following two 35 minute halves and twenty minutes of extra time. and it was hot for the spectators - i'm a bit sunburned!
so here's a photo of the team, as gracious in defeat as they were in victory last year...

geoff lawton in the inner west, blossoming permaculture

last night was the launch of permaculture sydney south. leichhardt town hall was packed. after some formalities and speeches by vicki ferekos and jill finane describing permaculture achievements in the southern areas of sydney, geoff lawton took to the microphone. he's eloquent and inspiring in a quiet and confident way. it still seems extraordinary that permaculture is both so recent and so under-recognised, given that it contains such immense wisdom and good sense and profound solutions to a myriad of problems besetting us. as geoff said, it seems so ironic that we are dying of civilisation. most uncivilised! geoff described the greening of the dead sea valley in jordan, and his own uncertainties at the beginning of the project faced with massive salinity, very limited rainfall and 50 degree temperatures. he started with the 'mainframe' - water harvesting and compost from surrounding villages and put his faith in the system. sure enough it flourished and within a relatively short space they could reduce the need to irrigate to just 4 months each year.
it seems that with urban and peripheral farming on small-scale plots the total area required to sustain our earth's population is just 2 to 3% of currently used agricultural land!

and marrickville council have planted trees everywhere. these are blossoming around the cornner from us...

apra returns

apra returns are due in pretty soon, so i have just spent two hours itemising the 67 gigs we had over the past financial year. now i have to input the songs we performed....

bokashi composting

i am really into fermenting things at the moment. into this category falls my sourdough bread, the kefir that i sneak into the girls' healthy breakfast smoothies, the kombucha tea that pete and i enjoy (like a cross between ginger beer and iced tea), and now a solution for my composting dilemma. my problem is thus: despite now having 40 acres of garden, i don't have ready access to it, and we have only pebble-crete and a pool in our backyard. we have a worm farm, but they are already overloaded with just some of the food scraps from 6 of us...and although i can collect compost and take it up every few weeks to bobo creek it would arrive as sludge... i am making a bokashi composting bin.

bokashi is the japanese term for ‘fermented organic matter’. the bokashi is actually the fermented bran-based product sprinkled on food scraps that acts to 'pickle' all food waste. this activates breakdown in an anaerobic setting - a tight lid is important. the active ingredient is known as ‘em’ or effective micro-organisms, a mixture of bacteria and fungi. once the bin is full, and the scraps layered with the bokashi mix, it is left for a further week or so and then the contents are buried in a garden, added to a compost pile or put into deep planter pots. once it is in the soil further breakdown occurs really quickly. it actually takes only three weeks to break down into rich soil.

most of our kitchen waste can be processed, including cooked and uncooked meat, fish, small bones, pastry, bread, dairy products, eggs, plate scrapings, fruit and vegetables, cooked left-overs, tea leaves and coffee grinds.

as you will see the bucket is designed to separate the liquids and these can be drained out through a spigot. this liquor can be diluted and used as a fertiliser, or poured down the sink (it’s rich in beneficial bacteria).

the bin
there are small, cute-looking bins on the market, and expensive packets of the bokashi activator, but i wanted to do it all myself. so I got two buckets from reverse garbage. one had a hole to insert a spigot which was lucky. i cut a disc from the lid of the spare bucket and with a silicone glue used the rim of that lid to form a support towards the base of the bin bucket to support the disc of plastic. I drilled holes for drainage in the disc and then glues it inside the bin bucket. I screwed in the spigot and let it all dry out. that’s the bucket taken care of. I made sure the lid fits securely as an airtight environment is important.

the bokashii used 3 kg wheat bran (unprocessed), a dollop of organic molasses, a handful of sea salt, another of clay powder, about 30ml of em (these are the effective micro-organisms from here and two litres of hot water. i added a dash of my kombucha for good measure too. i mixed these well and made sure I could clump it together in my hand. then I left the mixture in an airtight bucket for two weeks. at the end it has a nice slightly vinegary smell.

when it's full i put it into a larger container with a thick layer of mulch at the bottom, and then take it to my parent's garden or to bobo creek where the contents is buried.

now i've started something...

the trail of the vertical garden continues. it meanders into creative containers for gardens. are we a little duped by all the specialist products for gardening, when the essential elements - seed, soil, compost, mulch, containers - not to mention sun and rain - come pretty freely available?
so here are some solutions. i hope i have given credit where credit is due...
tyres and plastic bags, bag gardens.
i like the potatoes in a sack that i am doing, but they will take a while. no sprouts yet...
polystyrene boxes are as good as anything.

rain gutters as gardening space

such a good idea - rain gutters as gardening space
Originally uploaded by keeping it real

and another one...from keeping it real.

vertical veggie garden.

vertical veggie garden.
Originally uploaded by Maz-Hur

here's another example. from maz-hur.

haiku

i saw this cool tee-shirt:

haikus are easy
but sometimes they don't make sense
refrigerator

vertical gardening at home

after soccer on saturday, olympia and i called into a big garden shop and bought some seedlings and a beautiful blood orange bush as well as a few irresistible succulents and cacti. that afternoon izzy and i made some vertical garden bags out of some shopping bags we scored at reverse garbage for a dollar a pack, some sugarcane mulch, cow poo (courtesy bobo creek) and some organic potting mix. we cut slits in the bags and arranged the handles to hod the whole thing steady. then, keeping the eager rabbit away, we tucked little cos lettuce, tomato, broccoli and italian parsley seedlings in. we made six and strung them along and old piece of pipe suspended on to wall that gets the most sun. i'll post some photos when they grow a little.

i've been thinking about recycling some sweatshirts into hanging garden bags. when i did a bit of a search i came across something just like i imagined, but more upmarket looking. check out their gorgeous website and blog...

and look at these big bags of garden:
i found these images here.

bobo creek painting

izzy says i should put some of my creative stuff and less about composting toilets and cooking. so here is a painting in progress that i did last time we were at bobo creek. incidentally pete and simon are going up there tomorrow to lug all the bits of the cottage closer to the building spot. i can't go, alas, as i have to teach on monday. but i did make a thai curry for them, and have some sour dough rising slowly tonight to cook in the morning
meanwhile, izzy and i have been working on a 'vertical garden', but more on that later. more about compost coming up too.