Thoughts on Simple Living

A recent post at the contentment-filled Down to Earth has given me mixed feelings, and I'm trying to sort them out. I am wondering if Simple Living is as simple as all that!

It is very easy to move from contentment with a simple life to smugness about it. Hardly conducive to moving other people forward, though. I also think it's often a bit simplistic. Often a decision early in life sets a trajectory which is very difficult to shift. As a positive example: The Geek is a computer programmer -- it's all he has ever wanted to be. Now in Australia, there are only two cities where you can get the kind of job he wants: Sydney and Melbourne. We're Sydneysiders. As it happens, the parts of Sydney with computing jobs in them are all at major transport hubs, except for one. The Geek has always walked and/or used public transport to and from work. But if he were in the building trades, the story would be quite different. The Geek's apparent eco-friendliness is a result of his career choice, rather than a transport choice.

We can't always see how our previous choices will affect the options open to us later, and for some people, the usual prescriptions for starting Simple Living are close to insurmountable. How do you cook from scratch, for example, if you have never been taught much cooking and all your family have a firmly-set taste for processed foods? (Don't look at me for the answer: I chose a family which could cook!) Perhaps more entry points to the simple lifestyle need to be shared around?

That's my first feeling: that sometimes simplifying one's life is quite complex! And in particular, that if you have more money to start with, you have more ability to live simply.

On the other hand, sometimes I feel that more medium-level articles are what I need. The Geek commented the other night that the usual items in Make Your House Greener articles are things we have already done -- we're now heading for the expensive-and-daunting end of the spectrum, where the photovoltaics and grey-water treatment kits live. Surely there is something in the middle, between $200 and $20,000?

Pruning Mania!

Now that the sun is no longer so hot, and the shade no longer so important to my house and plants, I've pruned the plants along my front yard's western boundary. The Parramatta Wattle has lost some of its more awkward lower limbs, and the 'Moonlight' grevilleas have been cut back to half their size. Does this sound extreme?

In general, Australian natives from dry sclerophyll areas cope well with hard pruning, because they are used to losing their leaves and twigs every year to bushfire. When left unpruned, they tend to become gangling and graceless. It's like having a garden full of sulky teenagers.

My 'Moonlights' form a loose hedge, and the pruning will encourage them to bush out more near the ground. It also brings the creamy flowers down to viewing height. I'm looking forward to the next flush, though I will have to wait a while!

I've also tried an experiment on a gnarled and senescent rosemary. It's never looked very well, probably not helped by my hesitance to cut it back. The difficulty is that rosemary, like lavender, doesn't like being cut back to old wood, but this plant has only sparse foliage. I've cut each branch back to the lowest growing branchlet, as well as removing the dead wood. If it dies, you'll all know not to try this at home!

Carol doesn't have HERBS? An Easy Top Ten

Shockwaves are rippling through the garden blogosphere: Carol at May Dreams Gardens has confessed that she doesn't grow many herbs and doesn't use them in cooking much.

Herbs, to me, are comfort gardening. Even when my peas have mysteriously disappeared, the tomatoes are full of fruit fly and the cabbages holed by caterpillars, I can console myself that at least something of tonight's dinner came from our garden, even if it's only the chives in the salad!

As a service to Carol and those who are new to herb gardening, I've put together a Top Ten List of annual and perennial herbs that are reasonably easy to grow and very useful in cooking. Herbs are usually native to warm, dry places with stony, poor soils. As a general rule, they prefer a sunny spot with well-drained soil and no additional fertiliser. Most are good pot subjects, and they are beautiful to look at, touch and smell, so keep them where visitors have a chance to enjoy them: close to your back door, or on your patio. You'll be more likely to use them, too.

1. Parsley. I prefer Italian flat-leaf, for its more robust flavour and happy habit of self-sowing. The most I do is strew seeds around. I have raised it in pots occasionally. It is biennial: in its second year it will form an edible root (in loam), flower and set seed.
   
2. Dill. A frail and short-lived annual in my heavy soil, but I keep strewing seeds about hopefully most of the year. Dill is the quintessential scent of summer. I love it in cucumber salad, or with fish, and in soups.
   
3. Chives. That lovely polite mild onion taste, great for egg dishes, salads and wherever an ordinary onion would be Too Much. In autumn, give the clump a haircut and divide it.
4. Common mint. Mine comes wandering in from next door. I only use it for mint sauce with roast lamb, but my Lebanese neighbours put it in rice-stuffed vine leaves, and probably tzatziki and tabbouli as well. Drop crushed leaves and some lemon slices into a jug of iced water on hot days. I've never had luck with mint in pots -- it is invariably skeletonised by some bug or other -- but unrestrained mint can be a real nuisance, especially in a damp spot. YOu have been warned...
   
5. Thyme. Delicious in beef stews. So pretty, too, with its tiny leaves and flowers. There is a large family of thymes, all lovely to look at. A mixed bed of thymes would be delightful, but it won't happen here! My most recent thyme plant has just turned up its toes as we've had plenty of summer rain: exactly what a Mediterranean herb dislikes.
6. Basil. Essential with tomato salads and sauces, and for pesto. This annual needs protection from snails when young and a regular supply of water. I grow it in the vegie patch.
7. Rosemary. Wonderful with lamb, though it should be used carefully, as too much gives food a resinous taste. This elegant shrub responds well to clipping and is great as a low hedge. We wear a sprig of rosemary 'for remembrance' on Anzac Day. I have three cultivars: the common one, a pink-flowered one, and a dark-blue-flowered type with a lax habit, possibly Benenden Blue. This last was from an elderly lady in a nearby street. The lady, her house and her garden are gone now; I am so glad I asked her for cuttings!
8. Oregano. Beloved of all Greek Australians; I use it with olive oil, lemon juice and garlic to dress Greek salad. Unsurprisingly, it also enhances lamb. Easy to grow but tends to become leggy; I need to pinch it more often to keep it neat.
9. Sage. The well-known stuffing herb for poultry and pork dishes. Use it sparingly, as it's strong-flavoured. Large grey-green leaves with pretty blue flower-spikes. It can struggle here in wet weather, being another Mediterranean herb.
   
10. Lemon grass. Important if you like South-East Asian food -- and I do! I use it in stir-fries with ginger and chilli, mainly, and am continuing to plant it around my vegie patch in an effort to keep the kikuyu grass out. Being a tropical grass, it doesn't mind the damper parts of the garden. Easy to divide and replant in autumn -- just wear gloves, as the leaves can be sharp.
    

Happy herbal gardening!

Ghastly Moments in Gardening II and III

Alas, I have had two Ghastly Moments in the past week. Someone tell me that I'm not the only one that has them!

Ghastly Moment II

Penny the chook knows that food comes from our house. She is also quite happy to walk in and ask for it. And our back door flies open easily.

The rest of us were in various part of the house, and the first we heard was the sound of a chicken fluttering. When we came into the kitchen, there was Penny at the table, as if she'd come for dinner! So of course I caught her to take her out. Now the usual way you hold a chook is around the body, holding the wings so they don't flap. I thought I had a good grip on her as I swung past the table to take her out, but then I thought I saw something moving on her feathers. I turned her sideways to get a better look and she got a wing free.

Flap--snap. Her wing hit my arm at an odd angle, and the top bone shattered. I feel sick just remembering the noise.

On the bright side, she's holding it fairly normally, and the vet thinks that she will be OK although she probably won't be able to fly properly. That isn't a huge problem for a back yard chook; flying means "goes over fences and meets a dog" in suburbia.

Ghastly Moment III

It was a large family, but a happy one. The children looked clean and well-fed, though the parents were absent when we looked into their house. The house was much tidier than mine: not a speck of dirt to be seen. Those sweet little children played with each other happily as we watched. And I realised I had to kill them.

I thought drowning was the kindest method as it's quick. They were climbing over each other's plump little bodies one minute, and next they were trying vainly to climb out of the water --- a horrid symmetry. It took five minutes at most. I still feel guilty, ending the lives of a dozen sweet babies. But what else can you do when you find a rat's nest?

Mid-February Vegie Guilds

Today I moved the chooks back into their dome on the vegie patch. They will be in the one place for a couple of weeks, eating insects and plants, scratching up weeds, and manuring and turning over the soil. This is permaculture in action: with minimal use of (my) energy, but good use of a biological resource, the various natural behaviours of the chooks lead to improvement in my vegie patch.

I'll use glyphosate on any remaining grass after that, before I plant. I have tried to plant straight after moving the dome, but the result wasn't good!

In my Guild 1 spot, of the seeds I sowed a fortnight ago I can now see:

• a few French beans
• purple carrots
• dill
• Florence fennel
• 5 plants dwarf snow peas
• a row of radish "French Breakfast"

The Welsh onions and silverbeet have not come up. They might be slow germinators, but I think I will put them in punnets in future. I suspect the other peas and beans have probably rotted; we've had 170mm since I planted those seeds! I will plant some more in the gaps tomorrow.

My punnets have done quite well. The only seedlings not up are the lettuces -- and I was trying to use up old seed.

Where in the Gardening World is Chookie?

Bloomingwriter asked,

Tell your readers a bit about your hometown, your state, province…something that really tells us where you are in the world. What’s really special about your community? Pretend you’re trying to entice visitors to the region, and remember—what might be obvious to you isn’t necessarily obvious to even the blogger in the community next door.

I've already dealt with this question a bit here, in terms of geography and climate.

My part of Sydney is not the part that international tourists tend to visit a lot, though I suppose some of them come out to Sydney Olympic Park for sporting events. My municipality is mainly residential, with some light and a little heavy industry. It is one of the most ethnically diverse parts of Sydney--only a quarter of the 60,000 residents are native English speakers.

The municipality is bounded by Parramatta River on the north, and the main Sydney Water Supply Line on the south. At the eastern end is Rookwood Cemetery, and to the west is Duck River and its parklands. I live up the Rookwood end.

Few probably visit Rookwood Cemetery, but perhaps more should. It is beautiful -- one of the largest cemeteries in the world, full of history and of rare plants. Rookwood and Sydney Olympic Park not only provide local residents with open space: they keep the air clean, no mean feat considering the number of people who pass through the area to work each day. I used to work in the grittiest part of Sydney and it was a pleasure to breathe clean(er) air when I alighted from the train at home. I love Rookwood now, in late summer. The grasses grow tall around the leaning sandstone headstones, creating romantic pictures under the gum trees.

Rookwood is home to the rare Acacia pubescens, the Downy Wattle. It is a small pretty shrub a couple of metres in height, with blue-green ferny leaves and scented wattle-balls in spring. An ideal garden plant, one would think, but apparently it is extraordinarily difficult to propagate. Root cuttings are the most reliable, and you can't take too many of those for fear of damage to the parent plant. One of my ambitions is to grow it.

Sydney Olympic Park is home to some of our rarest plant communities and an astonishing variety of animals. Further details (including some pics) here. They hold a series of free outdoor concerts each February. We're planning to go to the Sydney Symphony one shortly.

Come over for a cuppa some time...

Autumn Already?

I notice that some Northern Hemisphere posters are mentioning unusually mild temperatures for late winter: Bliss and Ewa in the Garden, for example. We too are having mild temperatures. Generally, February is an inferno. We experience temperatures over 35 C for about five days, with a day or two reaching 40 C or more. Some years we get two heatwaves, not one. Then the weather breaks, we receive some welcome rain, and when it clears, we find ourselves in autumn.

Well, our rain seems to have come early. After a deluge in December and a pretty typical humid January, it rained for the first ten days of February instead of getting hotter. I suppose the amount of water in the soil has caused the caused the cool temperatures these last few fine days. Yesterday, it was only 14 C at 7am, and it smelt like autumn. (What does autumn smell like elsewhere? Here it is cool dewy mornings, the smell of damp earth, and green things growing.)

The highest temperature forecast this week is 27 C. I have seen a pink tibouchina coming into flower. If I'm lucky, we'll have a long, long autumn. It's my favourite season -- planting time.

A giant golden orb weaver is spinning her web at our front porch. She's probably 5 cm across when she's sitting comfortably and waiting for her dinner. She's not very elegant, with her plumpness and her rather stumpy legs, and she is too hairy for human ideals of feminine beauty, but she is a great benefactor. We've barely been troubled by mosquitoes inside the house this year, though I hear they are in great numbers due to the rain. If our spider is at work, it must be bed-time. Goodnight!