When you do stuff, stuff gets done

On the Easter weekend I was out in the garden and thought it was time to harvest the quinces and pomegranates and the one single pumpkin which survived the summer. When I put them in the basket, I realised just how pretty they all looked and so I took a picture of it. Sometimes you just have to celebrate the abundance of what you have and how wonderful it is that some things survive and grow and multiply. 

We are also harvesting limes and basil, and the first of the pink grapefruit. 

We have a new chorister in the choir at the moment, a mature person who is taking a sabbatical from her academic work in England  by working here at our university. She commented that she couldn't get used to the idea that our autumn is not about things dying back, but everything springing to life. These banksia flowers are a sign that autumn is here -or Djeran, the Noongar season name. 

I have completed the quilt top for my queen size quilt.Finally! I will be taking this one to the long armer to quilt up, because it is way too big for me on my domestic sewing machine. I bought a large piece of fabric for the back, and some wadding, but now I have to make the binding. The long armer puts the binding on one side before she is finished with the quilt, which is a lovely service! 

The garlic is planted, and I have seeds of coriander and dill in the ground. 

I have today planted two new  plants on the verge: 

Carissa Desert Star and Chrysocephalum apiculatum (yellow buttons). Our local tip shop has a bit of a plant section and they often have quite good bargains. I am hoping both will be as hardy as described, because it is tough out therre on the verge. We have a few days of rain forecast, and I hope they will be bedded in nicely by the rain. 

Here are some good things to read or listen to: 

 Perth is drying up 

Ideas for transitionng to a permaculture garden 

How to establish a small space intensice food garden 

Jack Munro on the Food Program (Listen) 

Waiting for rain, and other Djeran activities

Djeran season at last sees a break in the really hot weather. A key indicator of the change of season is the cool nights that once again bring a dewy presence for us to discover in the early mornings.

The winds have also changed, especially in their intensity, with light breezes being the go and generally swinging from southerly directions (i.e. south east to south west). Many flying ants can be seen cruising around in the light winds.

Djeran is a time of red flowers especially from the Red Flowering Gum (Corimbia ficifolia), as well as the smaller and more petite flowers of the Summer Flame (Beaufortia aestiva). As you travel around the Perth area, you may also notice the red 'rust' and seed cones forming on the male and female Sheoaks (Allocasuarina fraseriana). Banksias start to display their flowers, ensuring that there are nectar food sources for the many small mammals and birds that rely upon them. Source: http://www.bom.gov.au/iwk/nyoongar/djeran.shtml

Eagerly we are watching the skies, the weather charts, the plants in the garden. There have been a couple of very short showers of rain, and the temperatures are gradually cooling down to the low 30C. Is the summer over? Can we start planting autumn crops? Can the garden recover from the heat? 

A week or so ago I took down one shade sail, on the western side of the house. We have a large bottlebrush tree there, and the bed is planted with cumquat, sweet potato, fennel, basil.When the garden did not die from the heat (!) I took the rest of the shade sails down too. I rather too hopefully planted some rainbow chard and 12 garlic cloves, but it may be a bit early yet. 

The garden has survived the summer, but it was not as productive as I hoped, and I don't really know why. I planted some zucchini but had only one fruit, even though there were plenty of flowers. The passionfruit has had lots of flowers, but no fruit set either. The pumpkin that self seeded has only one fruit on it. The dwarf beans I planted came to nothing. I wonder about the pollinators -was it too hot for the bees? There are some  bee attracting flowers in my garden all the time -I have alyssum, which bees love, and nasturtiums, and parsley, and basil, but it has been some time since I saw the bees out in force.

Gardening, no matter how long you have been doing it, is an exercise in observation and patience. If I was actually relying on the garden to feed us, there would be times when we had a 'hungry gap'. Nevertheless, we are now harvesting limes, pomegranates, fennel and mint. DH found an olive tree on the street near our home, with small black olives, and harvested 3 jars for a quick batch. Our kalamata olives are very green still. 

If the rains come, I hope the parsley will come back again - I miss it! 

I continue to play with my sourdough recipe. Lately I have been adding 3 teaspoons of malt powder - I used to use malt extract, the syrupy stuff but I have found malt powder used by amateur beer makers, and it is great. It adds crumb and makes a great crust, as well as adding some nutrients to the bread. I am also using flax seed too. 

My favourite tree is now in flower around the suburbs : Eucalyptus erythrocorys, commonly known as illyarrie, red-capped gum or helmet nut gum, from Western Australia. It has smooth bark, sickle-shaped to curved adult leaves, characteristically large flower buds in groups of three with a bright red operculum, bright yellow to yellowish green flowers and sculptured, bell-shaped fruit.

It was our great delight to finally -after 2 whole years -see and hear the Australian String Quartet live in concert. They had been unable to attend in person, due to WA's COVID restrictions on travel. We are now open to the world (!) and COVID is at last running through our community. I know this is very different to the experiences of others in Australian states, and in other parts of the world, but our State Government took the stance to protect us until we had the chance of getting most of the population safely vaccinated, before opening up. It was hard for some families, being so isolated from relatives, but so far our hospitalisation and death rates are far below other places. We have to wear masks indoors, and that is a struggle for some people, but it is helping to keep vulnerable people safe. I hope that wherever you are, you are taking care and finding ways to connect with others even though the pandemic is not over, not by any means

Finally, I have a couple of recommendations for you: 

Recommended Book 

Henry Reynolds "The Other Side of the Frontier"

Recommended Podcast 

The Urban Farm podcast episode 668 

We talk a lot about agricultural practices, climate change, and the global food supply, and the news is not always great. Rebecca Ruda reflects on the anxiety this can cause and reminds us that just as the problems of the world deserve our attention, so does our mental health. She provides tips for recognizing anxiety symptoms and openly shares her own experience. Then Rebecca offers simple but useful strategies for continuing the work of advocating for nature without doing harm to ourselves.

Perth heat

I have a new project -helping at the children's community centre playground!

Recently I responded to a call out on social media for a person to help a community centre for children develop their garden with more vegetables and fruits.  I spend a couple of hours each week at the garden. There are two areas -one for little toddles and babies and one for the 3-4 year olds. 

They already have some good infrastructure. They have two chickens! There are two large rainwater tanks, a worm farm and an irrigation system.

The bones of the garden are already set up -shady trees, paths for little feet and trikes, logs for balancing on, sheds for storing play equipment. To the north -through the fence- is a school with a spare block of land, which may one day become a community garden. 

It has been really interesting to work in another garden than my own! I have been putting the permaculture principles I have studied privately (not done a PDC) into action. One of the best things I did was take a sketchbook and try to draw what I could see of the garden -it helped me identify the watering scheme and its possible problems, the big trees on the boundary and the shade they provide, the opportunities to get more plants in the ground and where. 

There are three raised garden beds. One of them had three very stressed eggplants in it. I built a rough shade structure over it to give it a break from the baking sun, and put some dwarf beans in, just to help with nitrogen fixing and to fill up the bed. I was pleased that some of them have come up after just one week! 

The other two raised beds are even drier and more dead than this one! We need COMPOST and MULCH before we can plant anything in them. 

Apparently the irrigation system failed over the summer - I think between Christmas and New Year, when the centre was closed and we had that distressingly hot 8 day period of extreme weather. Several trees died -a couple of young citrus and an dwarf apple. In an institutional garden, unlike a domestic setting, there was no-one to notice that things were going wrong. The centre needs a back up plan! 

There is a covered play area with a solid roof which could be another opportunity for rainwater harvesting, and a couple of big sheds, which could also have gutters and tanks added. Maybe if there were some more volunteers like me, we could have keys to the garden and go and check when the centre staff are not working, and use the water from the water tanks to make sure the garden stays alive? 

I have been working on reviving the compost system. There was one compost bin, which was about a third full of very dry weedy stuff. As well as the buckets of prunings I can bring from home, I was given several buckets of roughly made compost from a neighbour- and the plastic bin they had been in! One of these buckets of compost  I spread on an empty raised bed, and the others I have added to the compost bin. Today someone has offered me three bags of shredded paper, which will add to the bin I am filling. The new bin will be used when the first is full, so we can have one filling and one turning. 

The staff are working on an application for a grant to help us get some tools and some plants. 

In the middle of the dreadful news from Ukraine, and the IPCC report, and the terrible floods on Australia's east coast, this project has been a blessing. 

Here are some recommendations for you 

I read and enjoyed this book by Fritjof Capra

You might also like this one from the ABC 

How to grow liveable worlds  

"Forget everything you thought a garden was. And everything you thought a gardener was supposed to do. Your job in the Planthroposcene is to stage plant/people conspiracies to keep this planet liveable and breathable. Your primary commitment will be to support plant growth".

It's working! What we chose to cool our house

 

What is that new thing on the roof? Just to the left of the solar panels is our new evaporative air conditioner, installed 2 days ago in the middle of a Perth run of hot weather, with maximum temperatures running over 34C for more than a week now. 

This post is about our decision to choose the evaporative air conditioning, after deciding that the passive heating and cooling measures we had taken already in retrofitting our house, needed amendment for the changing climate. See our post about it here 

I am not sure that everyone understands evaporative air conditioning and how it works.  An evaporative air conditioner uses the natural cooling properties of water to lower the temperature of a room through evaporation. A ducted cooling unit is installed on the roof and connected to a series of outlets throughout the home that draws in fresh air from outside. 

The hot air passes through filter pads located inside the roof unit which cools the air and then distributes it through the vents inside your house. With an evaporative air conditioner, the entire volume of air within the house is refreshed every few minutes. 
Evaporative air conditioners work best in Perth on days when the air is hot and dry. So essentially, the hotter the air, the better the cooling effect will be. We have LOTS of these. 

Benefits include the use of fresh air to cool the home, and the ability to have the windows open! It is low in energy use compared to refrigerated air conditioning. We have noticed that because it operates with open windows, the patio outside our kitchen is also feeling the benefits of the cool air. This would not happen with refrigerated air conditioners, which rely on keeping windows closed. 

Of course, if the weather is humid, the evaporative air conditioning does not provide much assistance. Compared to the east coast of Australia, where they have summer rain, Perth does has a mediterranean type climate with a summer drought, so evaporative air conditioning has more application. In fact, we estimate about one third of the houses in our suburb have evaporative air conditioners visible on their roof. 

When the water has been used for cooling, it runs down a pipe to this bin which is on the side of our house away from the entrance, and from there we run it over to our struggling lemon tree. I am hoping the extra water will cheer it up! 

Comparing the cost of a whole of house evaporative air conditioner and a whole of house  heat pump type air conditioner, the evaporative is much cheaper. We could have chosen a split system to cool the bedrooms -because being too hot overnight is a really difficult thing, if you want to sleep- or the whole of house evaporative airconditioner. We choose the option which would give more comfort for us wherever we were, for the amount of money we could afford at this time. 

What will we do if it is humid, and evaporative airconditioning is not an option? The system can be operated without the water, as a fan, but I reckon we would rever to the way we did things before -closing the house during the cool of the morning, using our ceiling fans, and waiting for cooler temperatures overnight. We still will have had many more comfortable days than we did before. 

There is still the option for a heat pump -especially a split system for the bedrooms -at some later date, if we so choose. 

How has it been so far? It has made an astonishing difference. It feels cool in here, and we have more energy for living life. I am even happy to turn on the oven and cook in the middle of the day! 

What I learned in a heat wave

 

It has been hot here, and for a long time.  Perth has broken its record for the longest stretch of days over 40 degrees Celsius, as it swelters through one of its hottest summers on record. Little over halfway through summer, Perth has also broken the record for the highest number of days over 40C between December and February.  So far, 10 days have broken that mark this summer.

Summer is only beginning- we have the months of February and March to go through yet.

The beach is a lovely way to start the day -but we don't stay after 9 am as it is too hot and too hard to stay safe from UV rays. Even though we are only 7 km from the beach, the wonderful 'sea breeze' which is so famous in Perth for racing in after a hot morning, to cool things down, has been weak and hardly made it to our place, for about a week now. 

DH and I have been remembering how things were when we were kids -in those days people had no insulation in their houses. They used to sleep outside on hot nights, or just put the sprinklers on and let the kids run around in their bathers all day. Some people who live in rentals are still in houses that are poorly set up for hot weather, and that makes it very hard.

Here are some things I have learned during this heat wave: 

1.. Most of the garden has survived on it's regular watering, but you get some emergencies. There is one chilli plant in full sun which got very shrivelled, but a couple of days or watering has brought it back. Please note -chilli won't germinate unless it is over 30C, and it generally looks fabulous in hot weather, but this is weather is extreme.   Roses are pretty cheery too, even if the flower crisps and dries in one day. The grapes are fine with the hot weather. I have been giving the eureka lemon some extra water because it really was stressed. Don't know if it is going to pull through.

We are still harvesting blueberries, and some eggplants, and herbs, grapes and rhubarb. 

The little pond in the wine barrel, tucked in shade under the patio, still loses a lot of water through evaporation! I am topping it up every 2 days. 

WORMS - I nearly lost all of the worm farm, but read about a technique of putting bottles of frozen water in the farm to cool things down and so far they are still alive. I also throw a wet hessian coffee sack over them to try to keep them cool. 

We have had tiny ants trying to get in the house -and anywhere else they might find moisture and coolness. It takes a bit extra diligence to make sure there are no places they can make ingress.

The local birds are heat stressed! We have a lot of water bowls out for them, and in this weather we need to refresh them in the middle of the day. Birds I don't normally see are now coming into the garden for water. These big trees to the west of us, in the Council owned walkway, are wonderful! In the late afternoon, from about 4:30pm, they cast a shade over the house and bring the temperature down immediately. Mature trees and green spaces help to cool communities by as much as 10 degrees and the shade they provide cools our homes and streets. 

Our older cat is not really interested in eating much at the moment. I guess I understand that! She is sleeping in the coolest place she can find. 

2. We probably will need a RCAC  or some other kind of air conditioning soon. Up till now, with Perth's usual pattern of just a day or two of extreme heat before a cool change, the passive cooling strategies we have taken have kept us pretty comfortable. In a week of hot weather, however, the house just heats up, and it doesn't get cool if the overnight temperature doesn't drop very much. We have shade sails, we have a grape pergola on the north side, we have extra insulation, we have thermal curtains. We operate this house like a yacht- we open to the breeze, we close against the heat, but it isn't enough.  

This may in fact be the new normal for Perth- climate change is making every extreme 'more extreme'. Cold is colder, hotter is hotter and for longer. Drought goes on and on, or rain brings floods. 

Of course the very worst time to try to buy airconditioning is during a heat wave! There are no stocks in the shops, due to transport problems due to COVID, and the installers are flat out. We are thinking of installing a split system to service just our bedroom and our daughter's bedroom, as it is the heat overnight which is really debilitiating. If we can do that, then a "swampy" - an evaporative air conditioner- would be something we would add to the rest of the house at a later date. I am swinging wildly in opinions about the best options here, and continue to do research. I need some quotes for installing systems which will work here before I decide. 

3. It is better to stay busy than think about the heat! I have a new book about preserving the italian way, and have made some pickled onions as one of the first things to try. I am also working on my quilt.  Reading is a way of escaping into another world, and my local library is a treasure! 

4. When it is hot it is OK to cut yourself some slack. I allow myself to buy bread rather than making it (I just feed the starter and hope for the best). We sometimes have sandwiches for dinner! I cook a roast chicken in the slow cooker to avoid heating up the house with the oven. We want salads, watermelon, icecream. Sometimes a risotto or a quick pasta is OK but no-one has much energy or desire for hot food. I have read that heat kills more Australians than any natural disaster, so it is important to take hydration seriously. 

5. Respite can be lovely -we went to the local pool today, and the other day we took Mr 7 to the local cinema. A few hours in airconditioning is a lovely thing, to escape the hottest time of the day -our son and daughter in law invited us over to their place last night, where the evaporative ducted air conditioner was working to perfection. 

Escaping to a library, shopping centre or museum is a bit more complicated as our COVID situation makes some indoor settings problematic, but so far it has been OK. We got our third vaccine shot -the booster recently. 

I found some good stories here, that you may wish to check out

Self seeding plants -they come up by themselves! 

A lovely story of permaculture in indigenous communities in our North West of WA Here 

Surving in the heat -don't make these mistakes 

Mid summer Christmas

The forecast for Christmas is HOT -that is over 107.6 degrees fahrenheit. As usual here in Perth, really. We do all the usual Christmas things -but of course we don't have snow, and we don't need huge roast meals and pudding! We eat salads and ham and fish. I am making a traditional trifle for desert. 

We had a  Christmas choir performance in a local church. I took the pictures because I had lost my voice for a few days, but it was really lovely.  

With such hot weather, I have put up some more shade around the garden for a few days. A run of hot weather like this usually finishes off the lettuce, but hardy things like passionfruit and citrus usually survive as long as they are mulched and watered well.I am picking blueberries, mulberries, tomatoes, eggplants and rhubarb at the moment.

We helped our son put up a shade sail to protect a western wall of his house. We also spread some mulch under the fruit trees which are still quite young. DH is now making a couple of shade window blinds for the south west front of the house -it gets quite hot there in the late afternoon despite facing the south westerly sea breeze when it comes. 

So here we are a few days away from Christmas. Some parts of Australia already are struggling with the Omicron virus and the disappointment of another disrupted festive season. Our own state government has held on to its very tight border restrictions so our lives have continued pretty much as they did before the virus. All that is about to change. If the virus doesn't escape into the state before, we are supposed to open the borders on February 5th, when we have reached 90% of our population vaccinated. My own COVID booster is due mid January. None of us really know what will happen in February, but it will seem like a backwards step after all this time to be wearing masks and socially isolating. 

Anyway, I guess we will find out in Febrary. In the meantime, I hope you all have a lovely Christmas wherever you are. 

Here are a few things I found which you might enjoy.

Christmas in Australia -the video of a Paul Kelly song which is a favourite at Christmas

Making it better with volunteers 

How Nottingham is cutting carbon 

Syntropic farming for an abundant future

Best permaculture books written by women

Birak -it is early summer

 

I have noticed the change of the seasons for a couple of weeks now, as the rain bands  have drifted away further south, and the daytime temperatures are warming up. On Nyoongar boodja the Nyoongar season word is Birak or early summer. The afternoons are cooled by the sea breezes that abound from the southwest.An almost clockwork style of easterly winds in the morning and sea breezes in the afternoon, meant that traditionally this was the burning time of year for Nyoongars.They would burn the country in mosaic patterns for several reasons including fuel reduction, increasing the grazing pastures for some animals, to aid in seed germination for some plants and for ease of mobility across the country.

As for the animals, there are many fledglings now venturing out of nests, though some are still staying close to their parents. Our family of magpies have succesfully got their fledglings out of the nest, but still come to us for snacks and a drink almost every day. 

The birds and I are getting used to a new backyard fence, which is about 50 cm higher than the old one, and instead of crumbling super 6 panels we now have a dark green colourbond fence with extra depth, into the soil, to fend off the glyphosate the Council sprays on weeds in the walkway behind it. It has made a lovely difference to our backyard, which I was not expecting, really. I would have liked something more see-through, so we could enjoy the walkway, but all efforts to get the council to stop spraying have failed. As this is where most of my fruit trees and vegetables are growing, a good high, deep fence is an investment. 

Our new apple tree has been setting fruit. We also have tomatoes and blueberries ripening on their vines and bushes, and I have been planting seedling lettuces. I reckon we have about 4 weeks before growing lettuces will be impossible, due to the heat, even under the 50% shadecloth covers I have installed. When this happens, I try to move into growing seeds to sprout stage indoors, as a substitute, instead of buying bags of lettuce leaves. 

I attended the annual general meeting of CARAD to talk about its history over the last 20 years, and was given this lovely flower arrangement. It was highly perfumed, too. By taking the flowers out of the foam, recutting the stems and putting them in vases, I was able to extend the life of the flowers for about 7 more days. 

The northern grapevine trellis is now offering useful shade, which will deepen as the season goes on. It keeps the hot sun away from the walls and windows whilst allowing any cooling breezes to get through. The grandchildren like to bring a blanket out here and sit under the vine for an afternoon tea picnic.

Last Sunday we decorated my house for Christmas. Our 7 year old grandson made these cupcakes with his Pa, to keep us all going as we worked. I used the classic whole orange cake recipe but added 1 teaspoon of cinnamon -could have been 2- for an extra seasonal spice. They were great. I am about to start wrapping presents and putting them under the tree. I have a few which were ordered early, to try to beat the problems with shipping and supply issues. 

This year my advent table is decorated with four Kosta Boda 'snowball" tealight holders, which I have collected from op shops over the years. As we get hotter days, most taper style candles struggle to stay upright, but tealights are easier to manage. We light one each week, adding to the number lit until just prior to Christmas all four candles are lit. The central candle is lit on Christmas day and is used daily to Epiphany on January 6. 

As I write the new Omicron strain of the COVID 19 virus has been detected in Sydney. I guess we are all hoping that it won't impinge too much on our Christmas celebrations, but only time will tell. The most important thing is to stay safe and take care of each other as much as we possibly can.

I leave you with these things I found recently. 

Masai Woman's off grid home and garden 

Permaculture - a problematic conversation

How to use plants to keep you cool 

A story about a new stolen generations memorial in Perth.