Herbs!

Woohoo, it's great to be related in a round-about way to herb-nursery owners. Not that we live anywhere near the nursery, but a tray or two seems to make it down to us every now and again.

My garden now has a few duplicates, but that's ok, it's great to fill the spaces to try and reduce back those never-ending weeds. I was also excited to see a tiny self-seeded parsley plant on it's way up while I was putting the new herbs into the ground. My last one had gone to seed and I pulled it out a few weeks ago - only I now have a regular parsley where the Italian parsley was...

More cooking-without-electricity supplies

(Still requires seasoning)

The other night when I was out, I picked up a camp oven that I've had my eye on for a while. I'm not too sure how I will get to use it since it seems to be best used over an open fire which doesn't really feature in my life lol. But I figure it will be useful no matter what I do with it whether it's on top of the cooktop of my woodburner or in my electric oven as a casserole dish and make up a part of my emergency supplies too!

Not having had ANY idea what to do with it when I bought it, I mentioned to my mum I had bought one and she asked if I knew what to do. Ummm, no...

Anyway, when she and my step-dad travelled around the Australian outback 7-8yrs ago for a couple of years, they used one quite extensively while camping in sites set up for open fires. So she explained how to build up the fire to one side in a pit, then transfer some embers over beside it, put the pot on and pile up embers on the lid. When those embers had died down (and meanwhile keeping the original fire burning) you transfer more embers into another patch and build up the previous embers again to keep things going.

Then googling tonight turned up this document with some New Zealand recipes using very basic ingredients and a "how to use your cooker".

Not even sure we're allowed to have open-fires outside here without a permit, so need to find out some info so we can trial this thing!

Failing all of that, I will see how it fares if I ever get around to making a solar oven... Looking forward to hooking up with Em and Johanna for a cook up!

(Runs off to retrieve cooker from car to take a photo and finds it REALLY warm from being in the car all day so reckons it might do well!)

My sparse fridge

As mentioned in the previous post, it is grocery day tomorrow. The funny thing is though, you could open my fridge up the day I've done the shopping and it wouldn't look a lot different! I make so much from scratch these days that there really isn't the need to refrigerate a lot. We make our milk up from powder daily and I buy my butter in our organic co-op and it's frozen in 1kg lumps. The only thing that will be added to the fridge tomorrow will be a 1kg block of cheese for the fortnight and a carton of eggs (I still buy 1 dozen a fortnight as well as eating the eggs from our chooks). Any meat that I buy is separated into meal portion sizes and frozen. I think our fridge size is an overkill really.

(It does occasionally have a bottle of wine and some beer in there too though).

Eating vegan

I realised tonight that our meal was a vegan one. We went through a phase a while back where a lot of the meatless dinners I was making were vegan due to the fact that dairy prices were really high (still are, but I think I'm over the shock and it's become normal...). Since I do the grocery shopping once a fortnight, and we are one day out from shopping again, we've run out of a few things. Dinner would have contained cheese on top if I had it, but due to none in the fridge, we went without. We also had no onions arrive in the vege box (must be the off season coz we haven't had any for about a month now and have just been chopping up extra garlic) I had forgotten how *clean* these meals feel to eat when there is the absence of animal products. I'm sure if we were eating vegan long-term that it could have been better balanced (to include some protein for example) with something like sunflower seeds or similar.

Rice noodles with roasted potato and kumara chunks, topped with a tomato sauce which contained tinned tomatoes, garlic, broccoli, fresh herbs and seasonings and covered with some asparagus' that arrived in our vege box today.

Natural decorations

For years I've been making decorations predominantly out of natural materials trying to get away from all that tinsel and fake snow (come on, I live in the southern hemisphere and this aspect alone has made me realise from an early age just how commercial and fake it all seems). Since we have our Christmas/Solstice in summer it has meant that my decorations gathered from nature are generally summer-based too.

Over the years I have made felted balls which I've beaded and I've collected pieces of nice driftwood from the beach and embelished them.

So it was timely that I was reading over at Happy and Free and came across a star that Stephanie had made. I liked this idea and gathered up some twigs from our kindling pile, found a bit of lichen moss in the back of my car that I had found a few months back, and a bunch of flowers from our garden (violets, lavender and some sort of weed flower). I made the star by using rubber bands to hold them together and then covered them with some hemp twine. I'm quite pleased with it, although don't think the flowers will last paticularly well, so may need to redecorate it over the next month.

The kids also brought the basket of pine cones in from the front door and put some glue into the spaces and sprinkled glitter in. I came across a similar idea here which inspired me. So these can be placed around the tree.

We plan to give some painted and glittered ones a go with some little seed pod things we collected today while out on a walk.

A little crafting

I seem to go through fits and spurts with wanting to do some crafting. Perhaps because the garden is just doing it's thing and there's nothing much to harvest or preserve at the moment that I felt the need to get my teeth into something new. Ideally I'd be thinking about making some Christmas gifts, but haven't thought much about that either! Last year I did quite well with making some Christmas tree decorations by making some felted balls and then beaded them and also made some other beaded balls. Hopefully they have held up ok and will find out next week when we get the tree and decorations down from the wardrobe to set up.

As for gifts last year - I grew a potted tomato plant for each of the nana's and brewed a batch of ginger beer for my step-dad and for my mum I made a cushion cover as a part of her gift.

Anyway, last night I was looking at Danielle's dolls stroller and thought it really was time to replace the cloth seat part since it's been in a state of falling to bits since we were given it and had sewn up areas where the original stitching had split and then frayed away too much.

Little Miss was suitably impressed this morning when she spotted it sitting in the lounge.

I also felt an urge to put some decoration onto Danielle's bedroom walls yesterday. So last night got out some scrapbooking paper (I don't scrapbook but love the papers) and decided to make a bunting - I started with making my triangle template. This afternoon I sat with the kids while I cut out the triangles, then unpegged her artwork from the ribbon on the wall and put them up instead. I initially was wondering how to attach the paper cutouts permanently when I realised that the pegs looked quite cool as they were. Means I also don't need to commit to this and can feel free to change things as I want.


And then, a few nights back I was browsing online as you do and felt the urge to get a bunch of felting wools to do with whatever took my fancy whenever and know I'd have some supplies on hand. They arrived on the courier today and we had fun oohing and aahhing over the pretty colours. No plans for these just yet.

Wild Foods Walk

Well, today was the day.

I spent a lovely 3hrs out walking, chatting and learning.

I think we looked at around 20 different wild foods. Out of those 20 I'd say that half were either new to me or confirmed some things with others in the know that I wasn't too sure about myself.

I tried sheep sorrel and wood sorrel both of which I loved the citrusy zing that they had. Probably my two favourites for flavour, but apparently not so much as far as nutrients go (and high in oxalic acid, so not to be eaten in large quantities).

We tried clover flowers - white and red - hmmm, not so fussed on eating funny flower petals like that lol.

Chickweed, cleavers and fumitory - all weeds I have growing in my garden but hadn't actually tried raw before.

We looked at dandelion and the various look-alikes and discussed the differences. Checked out dock, shepherds purse, plantain, yarrow, puha, lambs quarters, beach spinach.

We compared the wild turnip and the wild swede and noted where the difference lies. The wild swede flowers are set down from the buds and with the wild turnips, the flowers are set above the level of the buds. Other than that, both are edible in small quantities.

We identified a big poisonous hemlock plant - so it was great to have a live example to see for ourselves.

After returning back to the guides house we brewed up some pine needles for a very pleasantly fragranced tea - very high in vitamin C!

So for tonight's dinner Nathan and I decided to gather a few things from around our own garden to add to it. I found some wood sorrel, sheep sorrel, white clover flowers, cleavers and chickweed to chop in.

Pond, plums and pottering...

Well, the pond is complete! It's taken me ages to finish it off. Months back we completed digging, lining it, placed some rocks in the bottom, driftwood around the outside and covered it with netting and half-heartedly filled it with rainwater. Then it just sat there looking very sad.

About a month ago, Nathan and I were reading one of his books on Ecology and it gave some ideas on how to make a pond. It suggested finding some pond plants and a bucket of water from an existing pond. Well, lucky for us we have a friend with just those two things. So today our friend gave us a couple of containers of water and some lily pads to put in the pond. I dumped a generous amount of soil in the bottom, buried the roots of the plants as best I could and covered them with stones and filled up the pond again with the kids help.

So, if we're going to attract frogs to our pond, we're in the best position to now.

I can see my carrot bed very quickly getting low in growing carrots if the kids continue to snack on them. But ah well, I love to see the kids so excited about growing and eating our own produce I don't really care whether they grow to full size or not.

I have a few more silverbeet and beetroot seedlings that can be transplanted out soon.

My plum tree (which only has a few handfuls of plums growing this year) are starting to ripen. Was really cool to spot a lone red plum up there the other day. Nathan's already put in his request to make more plum ice cream as we did last year. We also recalled a couple of plum trees down by our local shops in a little grassy reserve area which hopefully we'll be able to gather from too.

This weekend I'm off on a Wild Foods Walk with friends which is being run by a local couple just a couple of roads over from me. So am really looking forward to being introduced to some new edibles growing in our own backyard so to speak.

Baking even I can do

Yep, I'm pretty hopeless when it comes to most baking. But *really* I think it's because it doesn't enthuse me, so I don't really put the effort in.

But, I was reading over at Rinelle's and she had posted a neat idea for making some little breads with savoury flavourings in it which looked like something I could definitely do.

So I made it up as per the gluten free bread mix instructions (which ends up looking like cake batter rather than a wheat bread dough), let it rise, then added some cooked bacon pieces and grated cheese and dolloped into my muffin tray. Baked it till they were brown (about 20mins I think).

I was told I was the best mummy chef. Says it all really!

A time for identification

Today we caught up on some tidying up of the yard.

Random branches were removed from the garden area which had been taken over by couch grass.

The paths and surrounding areas received a spruce up with a combination of line trimmer, lawnmower and handmower depending on the state of the overgrowth.

I tidied up the herb gardens a little and took photo's of everything that's now growing. I'm loving all the lovely flowers and frangrances that they're letting off.


It's time to identify a bunch of others now that they are big enough since I either lost my labels along the way or got lazy and just started putting seeds in places without labelling. In the garden somewhere there should be Marshmallow, Valerian, Calendula, Feverfew, Rue, Woodworm, Borage, Angelica, Cornflower, german Chamomile, Echinacea, Evening Primrose - some probably lost and never made it...





Wormwood?

Feverfew?

Accidental discoveries

I was just wandering past the carrot bed this afternoon and decided to do a little more thinning. I was excited to find some cute wee carrots that looked totally edible and appealing. They were lovely and straight and we look forward to a bumper crop this year!

Enjoying some peas...

Back in the swing of things...

Well, we had a lovely family holiday away for 4 days and now back into the routine of everyday life.

This afternoon after playcentre, the kids and I let the chickens out to have a roam around (and discovered that the broody chicken was no more! yay!). I had tried last week to have her contained in the separate coop inside the larger one but couldn't bring myself to do it for longer than a day and night. I tried several times but each time she'd race back for the nest pretty straight away. However, sometime over the weekend she got over it (well, I'm hoping!) since every time I've gone down there she's been walking around, so a good sign at least.

The kids helped me out with some weeding. I could hardly see the corn seedlings for the weeds!

We're now eating peas, silverbeet, beetroot, lettuce and cabbage. My broccoli's are definitely starting to grow heads now. It's taken a while, but I'm not fighting the caterpillars as I was last year when I planted them in spring, and hopefully they'll be harvested before it becomes a problem. I'll definitely do some brassica's over winter again next year and avoid them over the warmer months. A lot of my tomatoes also have little flowers forming which is exciting.

Just meandering along...

Have staked the tomato plants, tied old pantihose around them and been nipping off the lateral shoots to maximise my crop.

Simon made the broody chicken a special little coop which is now situated inside the main coop (a heavy wooden lid is just placed over the opening) and propped it off the ground to keep her bottom airy lol. Poor girl, I do feel a bit mean doing this, but feel just as mean dragging her off the nest squarking at me and getting her all anxious. So I donned some leather gloves and picked her up out of the nesting box expecting the worst but was a lot easier than I expected, I think she's been getting less fiesty as each day goes by. She was straight into eating and drinking. So I'll give it a few days and if all else fails, I will leave the gloves for my friend to retrieve the eggs from under her if need be.

Some of my potato plants are flowering already. Don't recall that happening this time last year.

Have put the final courgette and all my capsicum seedlings in the garden. Have sown more carrot and onion seeds in a spare patch vacated by some gone-to-seed silverbeet.

I have some lovely sized peas almost ready to harvest from my front garden bed.

Found a little crafting apron in my nana's things which I had bought home knowing it could be put to use somewhere. When I was vacumming the other day I decided to put it on so I could collect up all those random bits and pieces that get found all around the house in corners and under curtains.


I picked the kids some flowers from our garden the other night and popped them in their bath to enjoy. Afterwards we scooped them out and arranged them in a bowl that I've left sitting on the vanity - days later and they still look lovely.


Made another skirt for a wee friend of the kids who turned 3 on Saturday. Why can I not feel that it was "ok" to just give the skirt and felt the need to pump the gift out with something bought too...sigh...

Loving my easy to make and super quick mayonnaise (and gluten free since a lot of store bought ones seem to contain wheat) to add to potato salad (fortunately no pregnant friends to worry about due to the raw egg in it).

1 egg
2 T vinegar
1/2 t mustard powder
1/2 t salt
1/2 t sugar
1 cup olive oil

Whizz it all together and done! Add to cooked potato cubes and chopped boiled potatoes, add in some fresh herbs (parsley or mint are good) or spring onions.