October 2006


September slipped by so quickly I'm still grasping for its tail. Here's my endeavour to catch up.

Firstly, I've made good my promise to Trev to be the breadwinner and give him a chance for some quality time... alone, at home. Which has been good - for both of us. Trevor has always been good around the house, chief bottle washer etc, but he's had a renewed household vigour and I come home to fantastic meals and recently, Trev's first goats cheese.

Caleb is well recovered, apart from some residual nerve damage, he is pain free. He's enjoying mastering chess, chopping down small trees (a local school aged child initiative) and getting back on the trampoline. Caleb and Nuju are having a cuddle in bed, and believe it or not the dog is yawning, and not about to eat him.

Spring has finally really sprung, though we had a recent dusting of icing sugar on Mount Tinkateboo or something phonetically like it. Hence piccy with small amount of snow figuring in the top right hand side. We've also had a snowy white pair of goshawks hanging around, and Trev took the piccy of one of them, who, having been sprung eating the dogs left over rabbit, decided the top of a tree was a safer option. I'm told that they join in flocks of cockatoos, who, being insectarians, and vegetarians are not considered a threat to small animals, so when flying over they are vulnerable to attack from the sudden swoop of the goshawks.

Germination lag ... the incredibly long time it takes for things to shrug off the seed case and make good with the greenery. It's been bugging me. I bought a heated seed tray, and this has been good, but for direct sown things such as carrots and onions it took the talented Trev to come up with a mini greenhouse that fits over the same bed size as the chook pen, and will hopefully help increase soil temp and protect young seedlings from wind and any late and unexpected frosts. My only ingenious gardening device occurred when I discovered that weed seeds were quicker to germinate than mine and make weeding very difficult, and mulching is impossible when the wind knocks over my rows of mulch and buries the vulnerable. Peeved I've decided to mulch with bricks between the rows till the seedlings are big enough to cope with mulch. They don't call it the roaring 40's for nothing.







The spring edition of the ABC Organic Gardening Magazine has a great article by Steve Payne, the editor, about a TAFE Permaculture certificate where the classroom is literally in the backyard. What a fantastic concept. I'm really excited by the idea. It was first carried out in Albury. I'm keen to push for something similar in our area. The magazine, as usual, is a credit to the ABC - worth checking out just for the David Suzuki interview. (There's my plug for this month). Of course it also features an article about us :-)

The goats have made a successful escape attempt (or two) but are now firmly under the thumb of the fear of the electric fence, a dummy run of which is around the car, caravan and sheds, as Annabella was making alarming feints at the car as though to jump on it. So now they have to content themselves to poking their heads through the shed window and accepting the odd apple shaped tidbit.




The house Planning Permit is through the council, now we have to wait just that bit longer for the Building permit... so Trev is still in a state of reprieve. (And very happy about it).






























October 9

This update is dedicated to another Linda - this one lives in Melbourne (she wrote)...

I just have to let you know that I have finally started my own veggie patch in our apartment block back yard in the heart of St Kilda Melbourne. We have 4 apartments in the block and all are very excited that I am preparing our garden to plant veggies and the promise of our own food.
Your insight is inspiring – everyone in my building is excited and looking forward to a fresh harvest– but I am the one doing all the work, mind you there is lots of advice and requests for this type of tomato or that type of tomato blah blah! Of course, I told them to bugger off – and they’d get what I plant! The seeds I’ve sown have mostly sprouted and I love watching the green shoots burst through the soil and raise their heads to the sun. Very calming as well as exciting for “creating” something. Just hope I don’t get like a girlfriend of mine – she gets so attached to her plants she doesn’t want to eat them or give them away to be eaten! I can’t wait to bite into fresh produce I’ve had a hand in creating.
I have read and reread (and reread and reread…) parts of your book and absolutely love it. I look earnestly on the internet to see if you have updated your website with any news of your adventure!

I love hearing about all the gardens springing up, and how much people are enjoying feeding chooks and finding something useful to do with their gluts of eggplants etc. We get heaps of new gardener stories, and will have to make good with my promise to post them at some stage.

At the moment we are deep into Mission Mouse Control - but the whole thing kind of upped stakes and we now have Mission Mouse and ARRHHH TREV THERE'S A RAT IN THE BATHROOM AND IT WANTS TO EAT ME! Control. We purchased a rat trap and not long after had our first oversized rodent. Trev reset the trap and, unbeknowst to me,went out and checked it in the middle of the night. Having found another rat he decided to dispose of it, the easy way. Grab hold of tail with best throwing hand, and biff it as far as you can however, lack of secure hold meant the rat came free a little too soon and while falling from a great height managed to gain the weight and momentum of the average sized elephant and it landed with a resounding bang on the caravan roof. Heart thudding I've woken, checked the bed for my resident protector, found him gone, but, oh no, here he is at the caravan door looking slightly sheepish. Good one Trev.

Mouse erradication has taken a slightly different path, they're the ones making in roads into Nuju's food tray and, by the smell of it, doing a lot of peeing and definately a lot of pooing behind the couch. We invested in a Mice Device, a supposedly more humane way of catching mice. They walk through a little door which is triggered once they are inside and the flap drops trapping them inside. I used one of these in Sydney when there was a mouse plague, and it worked well, the second part comes when you drop the trap in a bucket of water and let the poor blighters drown. Well, we never did that, Carl, the boyfriend of the time used to take the trap for a walk and release them in a park, or, on lazy days, on someone elses front lawn. More humane? Yes. So far it's not caught a thing. Maybe the mice are too smart. Caleb was keen on doing the drowning honours, but I told him, wondering even as I did so at my logic, 'Only someone who truly hates doing it can drown the mouse, if someone enjoys it, then there is no way I'm letting them'. Hmmm, I might have to spend a few sleepless nights pondering the flaws in that argument. Caleb was certainly quick to point them out.

Sorry about the pesitilential rave this week, I'm just glad that Trev hasn't yet decided to turn them into an alternative to spatchcock.


October 14


My brother Stu from NZ, sent me Leo Hickman's book, 'A life Stripped Bare', a year of trying to live ethically, where he and his reluctant wife and oblivious small child attempt an experiment, not unlike our own, only in London and not quite so extreme. Something his wife Jane, who plays the part of Trev in the book, is unaware of.
Lots of crossovers in content with our book, but still very much worth a read, it's entertaining and enlightening, and again it's a book written by Joe Average and isn't too 'granola', as one of our recent emailers called it. Lots to identify with.

Had a very windy week, Caleb has discovered that there is a force almost greater than gravity, as it pushes him sideways off the trampoline when he's out there partaking of his two hour a day jumping habit. It's so strong that doing any of that activity that requires one foot to remain off the ground at any given time, 'walking', can result in a bit of sideways staggering that can get out of hand if you don't watch it. However, we did have 30 degrees on Tuesday, which was some kind of local record for October - it was stuffy, but it wasn't sweaty, Trev and my eyes bulged when our barometer measured only 6% humidity, in Queensland it would be 96% and you'd find your skin had a nasty habit of going velcro on you, and would make a sucky ripping noise whenever you moved off the couch. (and no, it wasn't vinyl). However, we have been lucky not to be in the fire ravaged areas of Hobart, may it rain on them there, and soon.

We will be in Hobart next weekend, at the Hobart Sustainable Home Expo and getting up and having a bit of a yak. It should be a great event, I'm looking forward to parking myself on a few seats and listening in to some of the other speakers. Especially the straw bale session.


October 18

Well, there you go, a once in a 20-30 year event - we get an unexpected and hard frost - all my lovely potatoes, of whom I have been keeping a daily count, have popped up their lovely heads only to have them frosted into a state of black droop, as to with the zuchini, my styrian hulless pumpkins, watermelons and grapes, I'd been sun hardening hundreds of seedlings which I have nursed through a difficult germination - gone. However, it's nothing compared to the many hundreds of Tasmanian farmers who are facing losses estimated to be in the tens of millions of dollars. Apples, cherries, grapes and apricots have all been effected.

Here's a panorama I took of the place the day we bought it. The panorama kind of falls apart on the right hand side, but you get the gist, the hills actually seem a lot closer than that, and the block not so big. But it's not a bad representation all the same.



October 22

Another climatic brutality to endure. I don't mind hot, virtually humidity free days, I can even tolerate a departure from the norm for a once in 20-30 year frost event, but the wind is something we could do without. On Wednesday night there were sleepless night time hours clocked up around the state as a major wind roared. The whole going airbourne in a caravan in the dead of the night fear was one aspect of remaining wakeful, exacerbated by the sound which comes down off the hill sounding like a runaway train and hits the sheds and caravans with such force you are shaken awake if you'd even managed to remain asleep that long. The next morning we discover all our buckets are missing in action, presumed dead, the wheelbarrow has moved a large distance and now rests against a fence, but, lo, Trev's cool recycled steel greenhouse is no longer there,(the one he'd pegged down securely), we can see where it has been dragged across the garden ploughing up the few plants not already frost effected, and then somehow it's lifted enough for the wind to get under it and it has caught the wind, and flown 50 metres or more and crashed down with a number of bent and buckled bits and a bit of torn plastic, but still more or less upright and intact. Trev and I wrestled it back into the garden area today, huffing and puffing, because it really is no lightweight, and wondered the amount of force behind the wind.

We visited the Sustainable Living Tasmania Expo in Hobart yesterday. It was fantastic to see the exhibits, and the amount of people attending. I've discovered a number of different products and programs that I'll write about in the future, but one that really stood out for me was phamplet which read, 'Sick of hearing about the environment and want to do something about it?' Where the blah blah blah ends and the action begins - sign up now for the environment challenge www.up2me.com.au What a fantastic initiative by Sustainable Living Tasmania and The Tassie Government. It's something that is readily achievable by all. Lots of interesting links and info, and hopefully, if you sign up, a sense of having achieved something within the framework of a supportive network. We often get emails from people feeling that the whole suburban conversion, 'Excuse me, do you mean to say you're born again Christians?' is something that can be quite isolating, and can lead to being dubbed, 'hippy herbal' as another writer called it, when it's nothing like it. We all live within a financial budget, increasingly we're becoming aware of an energy budget too, and remaining inside of that energy quota is not hippy, or alternative, it's basic commensense. Anyway, I'm ranting again. Check out up2me!

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