Bathtub gardens update

As promised, a picture of a bathtub garden actually growing stuff.

This one contains a yacon, also known as a peruvian ground apple, sweet fruit root or jicama (but not to be confused with the yam bean jicama-these foreign crops get so confusing!) Also, it contains five garlics, two Darwin lettuces and a pak choi. All are growing well with complete ignorance from me-thinking of that, i’ll give it a dose of worm wee tomorrow.

  The watering pipes are also proving to be excellent habitat for frogs, we have tree frogs living in each one. We’ve also discovered another bonus-the winter sun on the metal in the early morning ensures the soil is always significantly warmer than the ground. Currently they’re growing much better than the ground beds, probably also related to the fact that our backyard is somewhat boggy and the wetter than usual autumn means it’s just not drying out.

Rooster not-kill day

    Well, we wimped out. But here’s how we got ready for the nearly-kill, and what ended up happening!

  The day before, the roosters were in what the kids christened ‘The Dome of Death’. It’s basically a starvation chamber, so they were nice and empty of food and other ickyness. They’d been put in it a few days previously (with food), as there were some particularly nasty gang-rape incidents happening. This channelled that energy into cock fighting instead.

  That night, they went back into their crates under the house. They only had to deal with these for two nights, when their crowing suddenly hit grown-rooster status. At 3am. Seven roosters crowing at once in the deathly-quiet suburbs is scary when it’s your fault. Note the onion bag on the left-that one just would not stop. He went in a crate, then a flowerpot, then finally we stuffed him headfirst in the bag. That shut him up.

  Mr Red-Vest, not looking happy even though he has more space than the average battery hen

  Then they went back into the Dome of Death that morning, and we waited for our instructor to turn up. By this stage I think i’d already wimped out, and had sort of decided that maybe i’d just give the husband moral support and observe. Reading a Buddhism book over the previous few days didn’t really help-i’ll have to stick with the farming books next time. Then our instructor turned up, and instead of her being the bossy, can-do, shut-up-and-toughen-up person we’d been hoping for, she was really quiet and unsure! Turns out she hadn’t done much of the actual chop-chop part herself, and wasn’t particularly keen to. We had pictured someone waltzing in, pinning and dispatching a rooster in an efficient manner, then sweeping us along before we had a chance to think about it. As it was none of the four adults present wanted to do it! The husband and I were having horror thoughts about botching it and causing needless suffering with our ineptness. So we pulled out, fed them, then I rang around and found someone to take them all before we went through another noisy night, and we *might* reschedule another day with someone else. Probably Tamara, as she would laugh at us mercilessly and tell us to toughen up. Which is just what a difficult task needs.

My babies have grown…….and it’s nearly time to eat them.

  From this in January, to now.

 

  My 12 babies are now arrogant, pushy teenagers.  Apparently the roosters (seven of them) are attempting to crow. Or so the kids say, I haven’t heard them. I can’t wait for the part where they attempt to ‘tackle’ (kidspeak for giving the hens a good rogering) the old hens, who most certainly won’t put up with silly business from teenagers. Meanwhile, we’re trying to muster the courage to ‘harvest’ them. 

  This is an interesting part of the journey for us, as vegetarians of a few years now. Mostly, for me, it comes down to the fact that we do plan to breed fowl in some capacity (and have done so before). Knowing us and our gung-ho, over the top attitude to everything, we’ll do it on a grand scale. We have two breeds in our suburban backyard, and another three on our ‘must have’ list (If you have Crele Penedesencas, I have money for you).  As a breeder, you must cull. I see people who believe they’ll keep or sell all of the hens and somehow manage to give all the roosters away, off in their la-la land. The market for roosters is very limited and heavily saturated, even for heritage breeds. So what else are you going to do with a few kilos of free-range, high quality protein you’ve paid to feed if you have trouble even giving it away? Shoot it from a distance and throw it in a pit?

  Also, as a breeder, you must breed good stock. If hens are extremely stupid, or terrible mothers, or just plain nasty, it’s irresponsible to allow them to pass those undesirable traits onto the next generation. I’m sure everyone knows a person they think shouldn’t be breeding-in your animals, you actually have the responsibility to stop them. Plus there’s the mercy killing side of things-you can’t really call the knacker for a hen that’s at death’s door. Or for the elderly who have finished laying, but still cost to keep.

  Plus it’s free, quality, (mostly) organic, very local food. I’m vegetarian more from a refusal to eat anything factory farmed, chemical laden and generally of shitty quality. Give me lentils instead of watery, fatty pork anyday. But i’ve had homegrown lamb and it was goooooood-flavoursome, tender, and not seemingly related to the insipid stuff you buy on polystyrene trays. I imagine homegrown chicken would be much the same.

  I think this is the point where we are most definitely going to have to learn how to do the dirty part of the job, or limit ourselves to a couple of hens in the backyard. As the second sounds incredibly boring…………….eek.

Be Prepared Challenge (and some ranting)

  I’ve been meaning to post this for aaaages-but i’m here now.

  While the floods were happening up here, I spent a lot of time shaking my head in disbelief. Our town was cut off by floodwater for a week, and to me a week without supermarkets is nothing. We did nine days out bush at the property last year with no problems. The strangest thing is, it happens semi-regularly here, this is not a one-off, never-before-seen occurrence. It happens every couple of years. Surely people can feed themselves for a week from their cupboards, and the many supermarkets in town? Considering we have a dairy here as an added bonus? And the town is an old one, with many backyards having productive trees?

  Obviously not. People were freaking out everywhere, panic-buying at the supermarkets. There were food donations and food drops organised for smaller areas cut off from the main part of town. The local health food shop reported people coming in asking for breadmaking tips, and just how do you cook lentils? I spent a lot of time scratching my head, wondering what was going on. Surely people don’t go shopping every day as part of normal life? Surely they can dig up lots of food from the back of their cupboards, that may not be their favourite but will sustain them? AND WHAT WERE THEY DOING IN THE TWO WEEKS OR SO BEFOREHAND, WHEN WE KNEW WE WOULD GET FLOODED IN?!

Obviously, what many people do-rely on everyone else to fix things for them. Don’t worry about what’s coming, some person or agency will magically appear to solve all of your problems. Sadly, it usually happens-I would personally love to see more responses along the lines of ‘Sorry, take some responsibility for yourself-we have more important things to do’. Within reason of course, making someone eat out-of-date chickpeas from their bare cupboard is completely different to letting them die.

 

  Well, if you’re not one of those people (or are and realise it’s silly) Dixiebelle and Gavin are doing something far better than my ranting about it, and have provided a series on how to prepare yourselves for unexpected outcomes. I’m following some of it haphazardly (I don’t do well with structure), because while being a doomsday-ish person i’m well-prepared in food and medicines i’m not so prepared in some of the rest of the areas (although surely my recent involvement in starting up a Transition Initiative counts for this one?)

*Of course I am not referring to anyone who truly suffered during the floods. Duh.

Soft drink? When you could have mung beans?

Making a bathtub garden

  Moving into a rental means gardening downsizes. There’s no point spending time and money on improving someone else’s soil, when the odds are we’ll move within a year. But small pots are so troublesome to look after, so I came up with this idea-now even our garden beds are transportable! We’ll just load them up onto the hire truck and take our soil and crops with us, and have no break in garden productivity. This one is based loosely on the wicking worm beds design, so it will suit us perfectly over winter here in Queensland. If you’re in a different climate you may want to do your drainage differently to suit. I know now I definitely need to cover them over summer-they dealt very badly with 100mL+ of rain in a day. Repeatedly.

  Here’s how to do it. (note: i’d been stockpiling fill for this one in it, hence the dirtiness-I had to dig it all out to do it)

  1. Find yourself a bathtub. Tip shops are a great place to start-ours charges $10 for a basic one, $15 with fittings.

  2. Give it a good scrub out, taking special care to clean and dry the plughole. Now, silicon a 20cm length of pipe (pvc, poly etc) into the plug, making sure it’s watertight. Slather it on. Leave to dry completely.

  3. Rubber band some flywire or nylon netting (something that won’t rot) over the opening of your pipe. This is your drainage outlet, and it is higher than the base to give you a water reservoir.

  4. Make your two watering pipes. These are anchored in the beds, allowing you to water straight to the bottom of the bath, minimising evaporation. The length of pipe you will need depends on your bath-one end needs to sit on the bottom while the other will protrude from the soil. Drill holes all around the base of your pipes, to about 20cm up.

  5. Fill your base with drainage material. Some people advocate rocks or sand, but they’re tiresome to clean out (which will need doing every few years). Sticks, unfit macadamias and poinciana pods from the backyard are a better option IMO-wood is a great water retainer, and they break down so sloooowly that nitrogen draw-down shouldn’t be a problem. Just keep it chunky.

  6. Anchor your watering pipes in their places, using some of your soil. I went to step 7 before remembering to take the photo, sorry.

  7. Throw a layer of mulch in-I used sugar cane, use whatever is available to you locally, that is weed-free. This gives it bulk and aeration. STOP worrying about nitrogen draw-down, i’ve got it under control here.

8. Now, add anything you’ve got in your garden that will give it nutrients. I’ve got  comfrey leaves and a couple of borage plants that keeled over and died in the floods. Plus a few banana peels that the kids threw in on their way past-it’s all organic material, right?

  9. Fill it up with growing medium! I think there’s some potting mix, cow manure and mushroom compost here, with a little dug-up garden soil to fill it up. Plus more of the icky macadamias, to save our bare feet. The food you get out of it will be equivalent to the quality of what you put in, so don’t be tempted to fill it up with crap-or you will eat crap.

  10. Mulch well, water thoroughly and let sit for a couple of weeks. Then plant, wait and dine!

  You could also build boxes for them out of timber from old pallets if they’re permanent, and paint them up nicely. You could use them around the edge of a patio, or instead of a rail along an edge in the garden. Grow herbs in them next to the BBQ, or right next to the back door…………

Sorry I don’t have any raging success photos to show you-they didn’t do too well with torrential rain and they’re just getting back on their feet after I replanted them. However, they’re full and growing well now, give me another month or so!

MAINTENANCE

They’re pretty easy to look after, but here’s a few pointers.

-Like any plant in a container, they’ll need regular feeding. I throw on a few handfuls of mulch from the chook run when it’s getting sparse-this will not burn them in small amounts. Any mulch that will also feed it is great. We also have a slow-release organic fertiliser-make sure anything you buy is CERTIFIED organic. Organic is slapped on many, many garden products that aren’t ‘organic’ in the non-chemical means.

-Don’t let them get too wet. They do not drain quickly. That is the idea, so there’s plenty of moisture in dry times.

-Seedlings and seeds will need water from above until their roots hit the wet zone.

-They will probably need to be dug out and re-done periodically. I’ve had some going for 9 months and they’re fine, so I have no idea how often. It sounds like a crappy task so look after the soil in them and you should be able to drag it out to once every couple of years.

Just use good sense, follow basic container planting guidelines, and you should be fine.

Making banana ‘ice-cream’

  This stuff is so good. Like, really, really good. Creamy, and sweet, and so more-ish. And the only ingredient is bananas. No sugar, no dairy. It’s especially great if you have a whole bunch of bananas that need eating quickly, or you pick up a box of overripe ones cheaply. I always have bananas in the freezer for baking-well, I did, until I discovered this.

Take some overripe, frozen bananas, soak for a minute or two in hot water until you can peel them. Whip them up using a food processor or stick mixer until it’s creamy.

Whack it back in the freezer for half an hour or so, then devour.

Or eat it with dessert, such as this banana batter pudding (guess who harvested a huge bunch of bananas from the mulch pit last week?!)

It really is that easy. And it’s an entirely guilt-free feast, suitable for yourself and the kids to gorge on.

Apparently you can also do it with mangoes, but seeing as the mango crop failed this year, and we got one measly fruit, we didn’t get to try it. Maybe next year.

While we’re short of fresh food…….

……….the supermarkets are still throwing perfectly good food away. These lettuces are fresher than what’s available at the local markets. So even while we’re cut off north and south with floods, with no fresh fruit and vegies making their way in, the supermarkets haven’t bothered to curb their waste. We’ve planted  the spring onions, with the chooks and worms feasting on the rest. There’s also 2kgs of sausages in the freezer, waiting to be doled out to the animals.

I feed my family from the bin

I don’t really, but I had you going there didn’t I? But I reckon I could if I wanted to, as long as we were happy to eat LOTS of dairy.

This is the haul from one supermarket’s dumpster one evening-four dozen eggs, seven litres of custard, loaf of bread, cottage cheese, yogurt galore and funny over-marketed yogurt drink thingys. About $70 worth, bought full price. We didn’t get everything either-we left the meat pies, lobster and bacon with even more custard, vegetables, dog food  and cans of Pepsi, plus another three dozen eggs. Tis the season to be wasteful.

Most of this stuff is within date too-the eggs had two weeks left, the custard three. The yogurts and yogurt drinks were one day over, with no mark down. The cottage cheese was the only thing with price reduction stickers.

The chickens had a Christmas feast, but they’re blase about it. Last time it was six dozen of yesterdays rolls, cheese topped and all. This type of waste can be seen in virtually every supermarket’s bin, every evening. It’s absolutely criminal.

I shall call you rump, and you sirloin

As part of our efforts to eat well and ethically, here is next years dinner.

 

They have no names, they are just 'the moos'. They were five weeks old when we got them a week ago, originally from a Friesian dairy herd which has no use for boys like ours. I wondered if it would be hard to raise animals for eating, but so far it's not at all-sure they're cute, but their final destination is first and foremost in our minds. I now understand when people say it's not like eating your cat. I saw the husband playing with them and crooning to them, and thought uh oh, he's getting attached...........then got closer and realised he was saying to them 'I'm gonna eat you. You're gonna to be delicious!' Pick the family that hasn't eaten any meat for a year.............

But for now they can gambol around the paddock, eat our long grass and save us slashing, and give us lots of bedding straw and cowpats for the garden. Most definitely a good multiple use animal.

Science

I read an article in Warm Earth tonight, written by Joel Salatin. Others with an interest in sustainable agriculture will know the name. He runs Polyface Farm in the US, a sustainable, humane polyculture that is one of the growing number of places that is showing people that chemical agriculture is not actually all that great.
Anyway, it's about sound science, and our worship of science and scientifically gained results, and our acceptance of those result over good old common sense. I love this part-

What are the new darlings of sound science? Irradiation, genetic
engineering, more concentration, less domestic production, and a Wal-Mart on
every corner stocked to the hilt with amalgamated, extruded, reconstituted,
chlorinated, adulterated, manipulated, constipated psuedo-food.

Describes the stuff at the supermarket perfectly.

And don't even get me started on media misrepresentation of sound scientific research, gah.

The cakefest is over

I'm beginning to think that i've set myself up for an exhausting few months every years-all five kids birthdays fall between December 30th and April 5th. Add another week either side and you also have the husband's birthday, Christmas and Easter-but at least I now get a break until December!

Shorty had a pirate ship cake for his third birthday. It was pretty quick and easy to assemble, but I gave up on getting black icing-I wondered beforehand how successful tinting white icing black would be, and I don't think you could without twelve bottles of the stuff. As it was the icing started sweating black liquid whenever it was out of the fridge for a couple of minutes.

My task before the next round begins is to find a better replacement for butter cream-one that is easier to use and doesn't taste like animal fat! Since I stopped eating meat butter tastes revolting.

We also didn't do the handmade presents this year-we've had too much on our plates lately and some things had to give. But I will definitely be reinstating it from now on, giving shop presents is very unfulfilling and the two of the girls actually asked where the presents were that we'd made. No more babies so we can get back to normal life!

Must chill out........

I really have to work out how to chill out and relax. I always begin to, but before I know it i'm back to doing 90 things at once, and none of them well. Cooking and gardening work well, even better when you combine them. Forrest going off to bed early has certainly helped tonight-I can actually feel myself relaxing, with the aid of a bit of JBT as background music.

The girls are obsessed with 'the olden days', and have wanted to make bread by hand for a while. As i'm still working my way back up to full bread production even with the assistance of the breadmaker we used it for the dough and did the final kneading, rising and shaping by hand. They had a ball bashing the bread around and seeing how much it puffed up.

The final result-a spinach and parmesan bloomer, made with malabar spinach from the backyard. A bit burnt on the outside but that's the oven-I hate scabby landlords who think a $500 oven will be great for their rental. They suck!

Tomorrows chill out can be to help the kids plant their flowers out-the seedlings are starting to outgrow the tray.

Wow, my kids are getting big

Birthdays galore here ATM-my eldest is five, my twins are four and Shorty is three in a couple of weeks. So we've been getting sugared up-luckily breastfeeding is working as a no-work weight loss plan! So after gawking at aqua's cake blog I decided to blog mine-i'm not sure why either, they look pathetic in comparison!

G wanted a fairy party, so we did the house up with garish pink everywhere. She adored it. This was the best I could do cake-wise with a four week old babe-a simple butter cake with coloured sugar for the fairy. As it was it nearly caused a sleep-deprived stress overload meltdown, it wasn't taking much at that stage.

Sparkles and Lols decided on an under the sea theme, and picked a whale and a frog (yeah, I know, you don't find many frogs at the beach. But try telling that to a three year old, water is water!) Butter cakes again, with butter cream icing. The whale was much neater, until A fell on it and squished his tail and smeared icing everywhere *sigh*

I've convinced Shorty he would like a pirate ship-it looks very impressive and dead easy, i'll leave it until next year before volunteering for something complex again!

Ethical Eating

Here I was thinking that pregnancy had just totally killed all brain and energy I had and I was doomed to a couple of months of doing not much and only being able to read moronic chick-lit type books-turned out I was just iron deficient. Once I worked that out and started treating it I felt great!

So when I came across the ethics section of the library I stocked up. The Ethics of What we Eat by Peter Singer and Jim Mason was first up. Many people hate Singer but I find his books quite interesting and thought provoking-the one about Bush's ethics and morals (The President of Good and Evil?) was very good. Ethics of eating is rather relevant to our situation now. Before I fell pregnant I was loving cooking, and we were eating mostly fresh and homegrown food with very little meat. However when morning sickness kicked in I lost all interest in food and cooking-moving interstate didn't help, and even now i'm not particularly into it. So our diet has slid somewhat-some convenience food crept in, meat consumption increased and junk increased. Reading this has given me enough of a guilt trip to pull my socks up.

So the goals now are

Animal cruelty-no more meat. We'll eat what we have and that'll be it. We don't have much, but I did turn to meat products to fix my iron deficiency. So once it's out it's out, and we won't be eating it when we go out anymore either, we've been dithering for years and I think it's time for total vegetarianism. In regards to other animal products, we're dairy fiends so milk, cheese and other dairy products will remain. I've started replacing some cows milk with soy and that'll do until we get settled back into non-meat eating again, reducing it can be my next goal. Eggs-I don't believe any supermarket eggs are ethical to eat. Even 'free-range' hens aren't kept in anywhere near optimal conditions. I put in a request weeks ago to get some chooks but our RE agent is absolutely useless and can't seem to return calls-i'm thinking of getting them anyway, screw them, it's not like i'm asking to get a rottweiler. Until then i'll use the vegan Orgran Egg Replacer for eggs in cooking-we don't eat egg meals anymore because I can't stand the rubbery tasteless things i've been buying after our completely free-range eggs from our chooks. I'd already cut out most other non-necessary animal products a while back (eg Massel vegan stocks) so that's easy to continue. I also need to do more research on the 'hidden' animal products, like rennet.

Environmental-Cutting back on animal products goes a long way towards minimising environmental harm-one thing i've never considered before was disposal of animal waste from factory farming which is hugely polluting. An intriguing part of the book investigated the newish fad of locavores which is basically eating as locally as possible in order to reduce food miles. Their conclusion was that a lot of the time eating locally will produce more pollution if you have to go out of your way to buy it, due to the food making smaller trips from the producer to stores/market then home to you. I'll keep getting vegies from the local markets because they're so much fresher and better quality and it's less than 2kms away. I used to walk there, and will do so again once i'm not so huge. We're getting more organised with the garden now as well and focussing on fast-growing, high yielding foods rather than all our whimsical things (really, I don't need to be growing giant gourds in a rental). Until we buy we're somewhat limited in growing, but producing some part of every meal is my current goal-we're about halfway there.

Health-i'm making much more of an effort to cook from scratch again, I got pretty lazy there for a while. This generally means we eat masses of grains, fruit and veg because that's what I know how to prepare the best. I'll stick to making loaves of bread from scratch but will stop beating myself up about buying other breads like rolls-it can be a future goal when I get a better oven. I also now have a pasta maker which is awesome-how did I live with that terrible bagged stuff?? The snack foods I do buy can generally be bought 'better' so i'm doing that-eg organic, low packaging rice and corn cakes.

Another interesting part was about freegans who obtain all their food for free, mainly by 'dumpster diving'. I've heard of this before and was revolted, I suppose picturing eating from my bin. But the way it was explained here made it look like a much better idea, bringing up how much food supermarkets turf which is still completely packaged and within date. It wouldn't really fit into my lifestyle now, being rather time-intensive (but less so than slaving away at work to pay the supermarket) but I think i'd be open to it if it was just me to feed-i'd definitely go along for a trip.

That's it for the food for now-but I still have the rest of the lifestyle to bring back in line. A book about waste is next on the shelf, should be interesting.