The years have passes and the garden is thriving

Wow it's been a very long time since I last posted. A lot has happened since then, in the garden and in my life. I am now a mother to a beautiful little girl and back teaching part time. Whilst I was pregnant I didn't do too much in the garden. There was a lot of work to be done but it was all very heavy work. There were raised garden beds to be made, soil to be dug, trees to be pruned and the cuttings to be mulched. I wasn't sure if hanging around the compost bin and fiddling with that and other manures were a good idea whilst pregnant. Being pregnant for the first time I read too much and scared myself from eating this and that and doing this and that. Mothers and pregnant women around the world will identify with this I'm sure!

Well it's nearly two years since my daughter was born and we are now in the middle of planting our second winter crop. Six rasied garden beds have been built, all but one of them filled using the no-dig method. An old bath from our house renovations has been converted into a strawberry patch and another bath is waiting to become a blackberry patch. There are still summer veggies growing, much to my surprise! Eggplants, capsicums, long peppers, long beans, they don't seem to want to stop producing and I'm not complaining!

Talking of summer vegetables, we had an awesome summer harvest. One thing I need to learn is to use the vegetables quicker and find ways of freezing or canning them because unfortunately the compost bin and the rabbits also ate their share of the goods. I guess this isn't really all that unfortunate, compost is black gold as far as I'm concerned and the rabbits do us a great service making manure for the garden.

It's been great to make savings on our food bill. This is the only area of our budget that we struggle with, buying organic and being big eaters. Out of curiosity I weighed all the zucchini we produced and calculated how much it would cost at organic supermarket prices. It turned out to be over $300.00. And that was only counting the zucchini! So maybe paying off the $2000.00 initial set-up cost will happen sooner than I thought. I can't wait till we have all systems in place and no longer need any outside input and thus really be producing 'free' food.

 Knowing that there a absolutely no pesticides or synthetic fertilisers on our veg also lets me sleep quite a lot better at nights. It also  makes me feel that I'm doing the most basic and most important thing I can do as a parent, feed my child quality food that has been produced with love. 

A garden really is the most wonderful place in the world! 

This is the kind of pizza we eat now!

Pizza is not a dirty word in our house, not anymore. What do you do when you've eliminated processed meats in your house and you want to eat pizza, but not vegetarian pizza? You fry up some mince meat and some chicken, or in this case quail, and shred that on top. How do you incorporate organically homegrown produce? Add rocket, pumpkin and lots of capsicum to your pizza toppings. How do you add extra flavor? Homegrown and dried herbs- oregano and thyme. How do you have the time to prepare the dough? Use a bread-maker! In 1 and a half hours it's ready and made using bio-dynamic unbleached flour. How does it taste? OMG so good and without the sickly oily after feeling you usually get when you've eaten pizza with processed meats.

My yummy quail, pumpkin, feta, rocket pizza with onion, dried thyme, tasty cheese and mozzarella too.

Husbands 'mexican' pizza. Ground beef with taco inspired spices, oregano, onion, lots of capsicum, mozzarella and tasty cheese.

Healthy eating for the whole family, scary stuff!

I've started to view my role in the family a little differently lately. After all the hoo-haa with the March Against Monsanto demonstration and the endless posts on Facebook regarding what's healthy and what's not OK to eat, I realized one of the main roles I play in my family is that of health care provider. I say health care because I can do things to keep my family 'healthy'. What we receive from the doctors and other medical professionals and pharmacies is 'sick care'.

So what does this mean? It means I have become very strict on what goes into the mouths of my family. I am starting to take more control over what we put in and on our bodies. From the water we drink to the stuff we use to wash our hair. I've never been a huge consumer of processed foods, if they are around I'll have some, but I won't often go seeking them or buying them at the supermarket.

My husband, on the other hand, LOVES the stuff and is what I call a sugar addict. He doesn't see the problem with it. He often says that he needs the sugar at work to keep him going, to give him energy. Forget trying to explain to him that he sounds like a drug user when he talks like that. He doesn't really seem to care about the quality of the food and drink he consumes. I'm not sure if he really understands the health dangers of eating the stuff. The most problematic part of it all is that he doesn't understand what normal portion size is. If he opens a box of biscuits it must all be eaten. If he opens a packet of M M's he has to finish them in one go. It is also normal for him to eat this stuff 2-3 times a day, most days. Also the part that pisses me off is that it's a LOT of money for JUNK!

So finally standing my ground and telling my husband NO MORE SUGAR! no more crap processed crumbed fish from a box, no more take-away pizza, no more frozen fries has been one of the scariest things I've done in my life. Scary because I was sure it was going to be followed up with divorce papers! So actually I have to be honest, I didn't really say it in the end, I just didn't serve it. And when I served the alternatives, i.e. fresh fish, crumbed by myself with salad, not fries, I didn't make eye contact because I knew I'd be looking at the most evil look my husband has ever given me!

It's been a few weeks now, and we've had Chinese take-away once, a few biscuits wrappers have been found in his car, but all in all, my hubby is aboard the good-eating train! I served lentil burgers today and he loved them! Who would have thought? I was so nervous even suggesting having lentil burgers. I myself wasn't sure if I would like to eat them, but yes they were pretty good! And my daughter even ate her 'lentil meat balls'. So now onto bigger, healthier and tastier things without the fear of being handed divorce papers!

MARCH AGAINST MONSANTO

I am proud to announce that I was one of the 2 million people world wide that marched on the 24th of May against the corporation Monsanto. Whilst I knew a fair bit about this company's activities prior to the rally, I've been doing a lot more reading about the company I like to call MONSATAN or MONsanSTER. As part of this extensive reading I've looked at their facebook page and read some of their PR literature. What infuriates me the most is their claim that they and GMO's are the only way we can feed a growing population.

Is it just me, or can you too name a 101 other ways we can truly feed the world? Is it just me, or do you too see the simple flaw in this argument, that feeding the world is not about producing more food but rather people being about to PAY for that food? I can't tell you how much my head hurts trying to comprehend such plain rubbish, such 'do-gooder' coverup bullshit that corporations like Monsanto try to sell us.

I'm sure you have all heard the saying 'Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.' Well I think this applies here. If you continue to have humanity rely on a small portion of the population to produce their food i.e. farmers, then you will only feed them for that period of time where these farmers are having successful harvests and can provide for them. It also requires that these people be able to PAY the farmers/supermarkets so they only eat when they can somehow afford the food.

If you teach all of humanity how to produce their own food (small plot gardens, container gardening on balconies etc) give them the initial tools to set up, then they will feed themselves for a lifetime. If you want to feed the world, everybody must take responsibility for the production of their own food.Organic methods, especially permaculture methods need to be employed and taught to every person. Law and government practice needs to allow people to do this freely. Food needs to be seen as something everyone is responsible for producing and not something that is bought and sold, the property of companies, corporations used to create profit.

We talk about going to work to make money to 'provide' for our families. Think about that, ' work to provide for your family' If I think about this from a westerners point of view and what one is saying when they say 'work to provide for my family' 'work to put food on the table' well actually there is nothing in the 'work' you do that is about putting food on the table. The way I see it you are working to allow 'food companies to make large profits by selling you food you should be working to make yourself. you are working to make richer companies that have convinced you that 'they' can provide for you. and the greatest insult is that what they sell you as food is not providing in most instances anything to your family but illness and empty promises. 'work to put food on the table' involves dirt, seeds and water.

Generally speaking, none of us work to provide for our families, we work to provide profits for those who offer us poor quality products that provide what they tell us our families need.

Continued improvement and Establishment

It's amazing to see how far this part of our garden has come along. In the last post I published a photo of how it looked when we moved in about a year and a half ago. It was just a patch of couch grass scattered with an assortment of human rubbish and a poor lemon tree in desperate need for some love and care.

There Have Been Improvements

It's funny how you don't realise how far you've come until you go through some old photos and see the changes in pictures.

This is a photo of an area of the garden that I thought would never be useful for anything. Initially I thought we would just let the kyku grass that was already there (and totally out of control) continue to take over and maybe through mowing become a lawn right to the edge of the fence. You can't see it in the photo but near the concrete; the roots were so entangled and compacted that driving a pitch fork through them to turn the soil over was almost impossible. The layers of roots were about 1o cm thick. It took us a few days to get through the mess and pull out enough of it so that we could see the soil.

Scattered throughout this stip are new argum lilies trying to come up. Argum lilies once were the main feature here but over the past 5 years we've pulled more and more out reducing them to a few shoots. There is also evidence of Jasmine near the back. Funny thing here is that Jasmine is supposed to be one of those plants that 'takes over' but this little bugger just has a few shoots, stands at about 15 cms and hasn't grown more than 2 cm over the past year!

Here is a photo where we have dug up some of the grass and rubbish. Oh yes you should see how much 'human' rubbish we found in this little bit of garden, paddlocks, pens, glass, plastic, forks, knives, small plastic toys, door stoppers, a large hand saw, rusted nails, cans, endless pieces of plastic sheeting, a variety of packaging from food like chocolate bars etc. just to name a few.