Living and loving it Monday 26 August 2019

Hello from Dora, who has found that the chair next to my desk gets wonderful morning sunshine and has a quilt over it, which of course is what a well-brought-up cat desires in her bedding! 

We have had some sunshine this week and lots of rain too. The 3000 litre water tank is finally full, and DH has put a bucket under it to catch the overflow! We were both greatly impressed with the Greening the Desert video of a permaculture set up in Jordan, on the same size block as ours. We are inspired to try to do a lot more with our resources, including water! Do watch this video! 

We had bok choy which we harvested leaves from and then let flower and set seed. These are the seeds. I have picked them and put them in paper bags (I got nearly a thousand paper bags free from a neighbour!) and they are drying. We want to grow more! As it is coming into cabbage moth season, we will need to provide a insect free tent for them to grow in. 

My main work in the garden has been to keep spreading the mulch. DH had to go to get some more! The Council here gives us vouchers for  some free trailer loads per year, -they recycle green waste from the city. Mulch is really a key to our garden: it feeds the soil and reduces evaporation. I have some tomato seedlings coming up, and have been encouraged by signs of life in the goji berry plants I repotted and put into the big free tubs we picked up a few weeks ago. Our deciduous trees are showing signs of leaf and bud growth.

I am a collector of cornucopia vases- the ones shaped like little horns. I found this one in an op shop. It is an Italian one and it cost me just $4. It is perfect for a single rose or two. This rose is a rambler we grow on the back fence It is always the first to come to flower, and has a lovely old fashioned perfume. 

You can see the back and a little of the front of a small table runner I made from scraps. 

Here it is on our new-to-us coffee table. This runner was a test run of a few new-to-me techniques in quilting. I wanted to use my new wedge template, I wanted to try adding the binding before I trimmed the runner  and I wanted to use a new binding tool to help me make the final join on the binding flat. It was a good exercise. 

If you are looking for a good inspiring read, see if you can find this one from your local library. I am loving it. 

The other thing I have been busy with have been a couple of community projects, including attending a rally to try to make a ban on fracking in WA. I find that action is a good antidote to depression at the state of the news of environmental problems around the world.

Thanks for reading. This blog is my journal and also a way of connecting with like minded people.

Island life -another weekend

DH took a turn on a duty roster on Wadjemup (also known as Rottnest Island) this past weekend. The roster provides cheap accommodation, and subsidised ferry ride for him. It was open for me to go for a relatively small price too, but I wasn't sure. It is winter here, and the 23 km stretch of water between Fremantle and the island is notorious for being rough even in summer! 

In the end I decided to brave it and booked my tickets a few days out...and watched as the forecast began inexorably to link our travel time with the onset of a huge wind and potential storm. Oh great! I bought some sea sickness pills and we had a wild ride, with the largish and fast ferry bumping it's way through the waves and swells. Up the wave we went---the boat was above the water---and then bang, down we plunged! 

We survived, remarkably well, and I felt (and still feel) very proud of myself for conquering my fears and doing it anyway! The weather was setting in for a big storm, so we took ourselves to the island store for a few groceries and snuggled in for a night of reading novels and eating pizza! 

The next morning, the storm had pretty much blown itself out. We ventured out for a walk to the closest lighthouse. It did rain again in the afternoon, but we were again snug in our little cabin.

Sunday was the day DH had duties, but they were over in time for us to take the island bus to the furthest part of the island, the West End called Cape Vlamingh. The colours in these pictures are not enhanced at all- this is as it looked on the day! 

The little Thompson Bay settlement is a meeting place for island visitors. On the Sunday we ate lunch in the pub, which was a nice treat.

The trip back on Monday was a delight -absolutely flat calm and sunny!

Wonderfully cheap and free: our score this week

This week's post is about some wonderfully free or cheap things we have achieved this week.

For some time I have been looking for a longer coffee table. My lounge room is a long and rectangular space, and the coffee table I had (from the op shop and painted up by DH) had been good but it was square and was really not long enough. I didn't want to squish the seating up around this table when I had such a lovely long room to expand into.

We looked and looked: new ones were not the right size and were expensive.Second hand shops didn't have anything we wanted. We looked at one we found online -second hand- but DH was not sure about it. He offered to make me a new coffee table, just the right size, but when he costed the purchase of new wood supplies, it was hundreds of dollars. I wondered if he could find a table at the tip shop which would provide the wood he needed. It would be a new use for something which otherwise would end up in the tip.We hitched the trailer on the back of the car and went along.

Our tip shop is a social enterprise. It is nicely run, well organised and friendly. We looked at a number of tables, but none of them were exactly what we thought we needed. There was one, though, hiding under 4 chairs stacked on top. It was a dark wooden extension table, and DH thought he might like to have a go at it. We paid $25 for it.

When we got  it home, DH started to get excited. He is pretty sure it was made here in WA of our lovely hardwood called Jarrah- this is the wood used for expensive furniture here in Western Australia. It has a wonderful red colour and plenty of pretty grain. He spent a while taking the extension rails off the table and removing the table top. Then he cut down the extension leaf and fitted it back as one entire table top. The legs were shortened to coffee table height and he used the bits cut off to add to the thickness of the legs.

LOTS and LOTS of sanding, then finishing with danish oil and wax.

This was a good project for DH in his retirement. It took quite a few hours, but his time is his own now! He had to spend some time thinking about how he could solve the various technical challenges along the way, and he has had a huge sense of achievement in finishing it.

We splurged on a couple of sets of stone coasters from Kmart in honour of our new table. We love it!

We hitched up the trailer again later in the week to pick up three half olive barrels which someone was giving away. Now, these olive barrels are great for big plants in the garden - and in the past I have paid $50 for a whole one to cut in half to make two pots. I have used them to pot up a goji berry plant I was given, which is getting one last chance to produce fruit. It has a new, sunnier spot along side the driveway. We have removed a number of suckers which were in the same pot. As they are deciduous  we aren't sure which ones want to grow, but we potted them up too. The other two olive pots are ready for the tomato glut I want to grow this spring/summer.

I have been spreading the free mulch we got a couple of weeks ago, and fertilising and weeding as I go. This is also a FREE WORKOUT, as was the lovely walk we had down at the beach yesterday.

I have a table runner which I have nearly finished. It is another free thing because it is made of left-overs from another project, including the wadding, the backing and the binding which I hope to finish this week.

We have had a lovely productive week.

Thanks for reading my blog all the way to the end of this post!

Retrosuburbia Conference in Fremantle

DH and I were excited to attend the Retrosuburbia Conference in Fremantle on Saturday 3rd August, even though it meant being on the local railway station at  8 am! We joined over 200 like minded people who wanted to hear the author of Retrosuburbia, David Holmgren (co-founder of Perrmaculture!) speak about this wonderful book. 

"RetroSuburbia is part manual and part manifesto. The book shows how Australian suburbs can be transformed to become productive and resilient in an energy descent future. It focuses on what can be done by an individual at the household level (rather than community or government levels)". 

.DH has heard me talking about the concepts and helped me put some of them into practice, but hasn't been able to attend a meeting. Now he is retired so off we went! DH was very impressed with the "Aussie Street" story that David presented.

If you click on the link below you will learn a lot more about this inspirational book.  

https://retrosuburbia.com/book/

A great part of the day was given over to discussion groups on any topic at all which a group of people wanted to discuss together.

• I learned from people who had established verge gardens (do you call them nature strips?) -what works and what problems might occur, especially with council regulations here in the city. I have been thinking about removing some of the brick paving we put down years ago, so I can plant native plants to encourage the wildlife around here.
• There was a good discussion of bartering: how to do it, what sometimes goes wrong.
• I attended a group which wanted to talk about rescuing building material from skip bins! 
• DH went to a discussion on the humane management of bees. 

The lunches and morning tea were all brought by the participants. You can imagine that the fare was really wonderful and we were very well fed. A bunch of happy volunteers attended to help with the logistics. We were modelling the kind of community spirit which Retrosuburbia advocates!

We met a number of people from my side of Perth. Did you know that Perth is divided by the Swan River -and in our minds- as North and South? The city spreads a long way in both directions, so it was especially pleasing to finally identify the "Northern Permies" group.

Community was also big in another way this week around here. Our local Street Pantry was the part of a story on the needs of the community, on one of the local TV stations current affairs shows. The pantry shelves were a bit bare, so one of our admins put out a shout for more donations, and people turned up with donations in response. I went down with a basket, hoping to get in and out before the cameras arrived, but they TV crew turned up as I got there. I ended up being filmed putting donations on the shelves. Here are the shelves as of today: much less full than on TV. We have a lot of need in our communities for people who 'run out of money before they run out of month" and whatever comes in to the pantry goes out again pretty quickly. The way our Government has failed to heed the calls to #RaiseTheRate of Newstart is putting huge pressure on people who are already struggling.

Apart from all of these exciting things, I have been spreading mulch on my garden beds. This is quite a workout, and I have been feeling it a bit as I climb into bed.
DH has a wood project which he has been working on, and we hope to tell you about when it is finished in a week or so.
I have also been unpicking seams on the quilt blocks I have been given. I have decided on a setting, and will be gradually working on adding sashing strips to the quilt blocks.

So, I am off now to get into the kitchen and do some preparation for the week.

Thanks so much for stopping by and reading my blog post today!

Achievements: Monday 29 July 2019- and a worrying marker

 Dora's big achievement this week has been finding the very best place in the house to sleep the day away. The northern sun comes low into the house at this time of the year, and my sewing room has a chair with a quilt, which is just in the right spot to warm up her black and white fur.

After I finished my Blue Mountains Mystery quilt I was feeling a bit low in energy to start something new. One way I find that helps me find the quilting mojo again is to start clearing the scraps and leftovers from my bench. This bag is the result of running big pieces through my Accuquilt cutter. I don't know what it will be, but it is a lot better than a pile of crinkled and unsorted scraps. 

We took advantage of a sunny morning to go for a walk in the Walyunga National Park. One of our goals in 2019 was to see this park in all 6 of the Noongar seasons. This season is Makuru—season of fertility, and winter. The bushland is getting ready for the big spring flowering. This eucalyptus is one of the few trees in flower right now.

Last time we were here was late summer and the river was so dry that we could walk across to the other bank. It was good to see the river in flood, and everything around it green and lush.

DH has been busy this week. He got us another free load of mulch, so we will have a lot of work spreading it over the garden to make sure our plants have the best chance to survive the long dry summer.  We finished the pruning of the citrus today, by tackling the grapefruit and the tangelo. 

We are proud of our Kangaroo Paws (left) and the nasturtiums now in flower in the garden.  I have started some seeds to plant in a couple of weeks, thinking that we might do well to have some early tomatoes and some lettuce soon. 

Finally, today marks the day that the we have used up our earth budget- we are now in the 'red" as far as our earth's resources go.

Even more worrying, Australia uses its yearly budget by March 31! 

We need to all learn to reduce waste, stop over-consumption, learn to live on less. That is what is driving our simple lifestyle. We are not perfect, but we are trying! How about you? 

Planning for spring 21 July 2019

We tackled a big task this week: completely renovating our largest raised garden bed. We had this idea a month or so ago, that the dwarf nectarine which we were growing in a large pot, might do better in this bed, whilst also providing some shade to other plants in the summer.

We thought we could also put the cumquat (also in a pot) into this bed: citrus shade is not very dense so the other herbs we grow here won't be struggling for light. This bed is on the west so can get quite hot. We have a shade sail (50%) which we put over it during the height of summer.

We want bigger crops from both of these trees , but do not want either of them in the ground where they might get too big. As our weather has been quite mild, we were worried the nectarine would start new leaves soon, so we needed to get on to it!

The bed got a spa treatment: home made compost, rock minerals, fertiliser, mushroom compost and mulch. I had all of the ingredients already here, apart from the mushroom compost which was recommended for the worms, so I guess it cost about $10 to do this bed, plus about $2 for the plastic pot saucers we are using for the tower lids.

DH had been taken with the idea of providing each tree with a 'worm tower" and to this end, went and chatted up a young neighbour who has been doing the most monster renovation on his place. DH had noticed a large diameter plastic pipe in the rubbish pile, which he thought would do nicely for the worm towers. The neighbour was happy to pass it on.

DH drilled holes all down the sides, then we buried them up to their necks near each tree. With some mushroom compost and food scraps in the bottom, we added our own compost worms. These will escape via the holes to do their magic in the beds, but return to the towers for the food we provide. As it is a raised bed which sits on a concrete pad that was here when we bought the house, the worms won't escape further into the garden. There is one worm tower near each tree, providing wonderful food for them.

One of DH's friends has given us more worms, so we can add more towers around the garden. The only trouble will be that I now have 4 compost bins and two worm towers and one worm farm, all needing vegetable matter! I may have to turn to my neighbours for food scraps soon.

The Drylands Permaculture farm is north of here, in the drier and hotter Geraldton area. I have bought Yilgarn seeds from them before. I appreciate the way their seeds are adapted to our growing conditions -if they survive in Geraldton they should be good here.

I have some lovely new varieties to try:
Asparagus Peas
East Indian Clove basil
White Flowering Catnip
Laos Tiger Green Stripe Eggplant
 Palestinian Za'atar;
and Dongara Long white apple cucumber.

As a result of the renovated garden bed, I have now two large pots for my summer tomatoes. Wouldn't it be great if I actually got a glut of tomatoes this year?

We are planning a really good spring/summer season.

And then it was finished! Blue Mountain Majesties quilt

It was very exciting to go out to pick up my Queen Size quilt from the long-armer last week. Margo from Patchwerks had quilted it with a pantograph called "eucalypt leaves" and also put one side of the binding on for me. I was overwhelmed by the way the texture of the quilting enhanced my quilt, and soon got the binding on. I actually sewed it on by hand- which was a bit of an effort as I have over-rotating joints and arthritis, but I took it slowly and am very pleased with the result. Machine binding can be great, too, but this one needed something else.

I call this quilt "Blue Mountain Mystery". Many of the fabrics were bought from local quilt shops during out epic 3000km journey by train last year through the Blue Mountains and beyond. This ancient scenery with its fabulous local flora had us both enchanted. DH says that it was our best trip ever, and I am so happy that I have commemorated it with this quilt. 

The pattern is a free Bonnie Hunter pattern called Scrappy Mountain Majesties.

We are planning quite a bit of redecorating on this room in the spring -new paint and some new furniture. I am thinking about a blue/grey wall behind the bed. Also I should make some pillowcases from the quilt scraps! 

Apart from that excitement and sense of achievement, we did a lot of other fun things this week including:

Choir performance: 
The power of community was really apparent on Sunday when our choir joined 4 others to perform sets of music for each other at the Voice Moves WA Winter Choir bash. It was really apparent just how much fun each choir member gets from performing, and that the point to the whole thing is participation not perfection. Mind you, we did really well! Performance lifts our singing tremendously.

Our choir is a community choir so we are not auditioned: anyone is allowed to join. Our wonderful choir director helps us learn how to sing and blends us into a harmonious group. We are a place for everyone to feel that they belong, that they can contribute.

Here we are on stage!

Free Mulch

A neighbour helped us out with vouchers for free mulch. DH also met another neighbour and asked if they had any use for a piece of 150 mm polypipe he had noticed outside their fence in the pile of junk left from their renovations. They didn't -and so he is going to set up a couple of worm pipes in a raised bed we are planning to renovate. 

Walks

We had a wonderful walk in King's Park on Saturday -one of those lovely winter days which just sparkle. There were a couple of red tailed black cockatoos on the bare branches of this tree in the centre of the photo.

Now we start a new week, with a pile of mulch to deal with, and lots of plans for more projects around here.

Have a good week everyone!