Rain. Twelve hours on Friday night. Twelve drenching, soaking, tank-filling hours. A tin roof and pelting rain - there can be no better sound to boost one's wellbeing, surely. The soil, though, it remains dust bowl dry. I think, on Saturday afternoon, that I should worry about this lack of water, but there are kilos of blueberries to pick, tiny, sweet golden tomatoes and, best of all, milky baby zucchini and their blossoms. All surviving without me and my army of watering cans. Bliss.
At some stage during the long, hard winter that has, thankfully, passed, a piece of news - delivered with barely disguised glee - stopped me in my tracks. Western medicine had, the newsreader declared, at last debunked homeopathy. What?, I thought. Huh? What's with the 'tude? Without a homeopathic tradition – until very recently the study of herbs was the sum of all we had available to us medicinally - Western Medicine as it is known and practised today would simply not exist.
All day it stayed top of mind. Sue and I discussed it at some length, and I spent the first few hours of werk throwing, from time to time, all sorts of herbal questions at google. Granted, Bach Flower remedies are pretty damned out there (and I say this as a person not at all afraid of esoterica) and yes, there are some nutty claims made, but how, I wondered, could anyone doubt the effectiveness of slowly steeped thyme tea for soothing - notice I don't use the word curing - a persistant cough? Olde doesn't necessarily equate to bad. A sadness about the 21st century human stayed there, stuck in my chest for some time.
I come from a family of dedicated, outer-suburban gardeners. There are many things I absorbed as a child simply by watching what my grandparents and parents did in their respective plots, how they developed ideas and fulfilled creative aspirations, overcame challenges and soothed nerves. The garden was a source of employment, both mental and physical, and above all a place of great joy. I've written before about a long-held desire to be a small scale herb farmer, and looking back at that post just now I'm happy to say I've come a long way toward that goal. The entire garden may be devoted to food, but the herbs are the most interesting plants growing there.
In turn my own garden has become a teacher, shown me things about plants, seasons and patience that I did not know I needed to learn. By establishing a rhythm to the ongoing tasks of weeding, sowing and pruning, and breathing deeply (and often) while diving deep into the natural world, I’ve come to know the self better. A surprising yet pleasing revelation. Therapist, meditation and workout all rolled into one very tangible activity, the garden is also, increasingly as I learn, my healer.
All of which is to say that I am writing a small book, quite a personal one, something I've kept quiet as quiet is, mostly these days, how I feel. Hopefully it will be useful - I feel sick about it being thought of as just pretty. It's not too far from completion - the pesky words part, anyway - and the photographs are slowly coming together. Can't thank my kinesiologist* enough for the swift kick needed to get it happening some months ago.
Going to share it over the coming months, parts of it, to flex my creative muscle. Thanks, as ever, for reading people.
P.S. We now have bees. Bees! Fascinating. I lay in the grass next to the hive for 20 minutes on the weekend, listening in to their collective hum. Beautiful creatures. Beautiful noise.
*Yep. Not at all afraid of a bit of weirdo esoterica, me.
Days are lengthening and the soil is warming, slowly but surely. Rows of radishes will go in in a couple of weeks and before you know it the entire garden will be going orf. Seems to be starting a little earlier each year. Sally-Anne and I talked about this early spring-ing over the counter a couple of weeks ago, me picking her brains about beekeeping, she picking mine about letting one's hair go grey. A perfect exchange. We'll be getting a hive soon enough thanks to that illuminating conversation. Bookshops are great places for information gathering. Long may they live.
Winter, she is o-v-e-r. The work now begins.
I have a lot of love for vanbar. Today ed cheered me up, told me that the impossible film comes with no guarantee. It's an expensive, arty sort of film, and results can vary wildly. When it works, your heart will feel happy, but inevitably there will be duds among them. You just have to suck it up. The difficulty is part of the (beautiful) deal.
Red is hard to catch. Am fond of this photo, taken in March, when things were a lot warmer. Temperature is key. By mid-winter the film, and the 1971 metal frame of the camera it lives in, is bloody freezing, and neither seem to warm up at our place even when I've got the fire roaring.
It was -3 up there overnight. Little wonder the film is less capable in June. The black radishes you can't quite make above (due to focus, ahem, as much as the c-c-c-old) are best when pulled, scrubbed and mandolined, fanned out on a nice plate and dressed in a light and lovely way, or with a thicker tahini-miso-lemon combination, thinned with water. A killer dill, yoghurt and walnut dressing I'll tell you about soon would work, too.
Lunch, late last week. The 31st of May, obviously. Quick-pickled cabbage and fennel, salad from the garden and some cooked-that-morning-for-the-coming-week quinoa topped with, be still my beating heart, a dollop of cashew sour cream. Lesh used it in something she posted on the twits recently, maybe it was rolled up in a super-clever beetroot and nori roll (?). All I knew was that I had to try making some myself, prontissimo.
Too easy. Soak a cup of cashews in water overnight. Next day, drain and rinse. Into a food processor they go. Add 1/4 cup of cold water, some salt, a teaspoon or two of cider vinegar and the juice of half a lemon. Whiz for at least 3 minutes is what all the recipes suggest, but I lose interest (and my hearing) after about 1 1/2, so mine's and always just a tiny bit on the wrong side chunky. Suits me just fine.
Pruned the orchard carefully one freezing winter's weekend last year, not a task I took lightly. I read book after book, practised in my head, on paper, then on an actual tree.
We took especial care of this particular apple, the one with the most delectable red fruit, dappled gold shoulders and crisp white flesh.
By October, things were looking gooood. Really good.
Then it completely stopped raining. It's been a bit of a disaster, this summer.
Well, let's step back a little. It's been difficult, but not altogether a disaster. There's been no fruit for us, as we, once again, left the fruit to thirsty rosellas and grey currawongs. It's been brutally dry and I thought they deserved something.
The vegetable garden's had some incredible successes, though. Hello, tomato-fest! Hell-oo zucchini madness! Perfect conditions for a Mediterranean vegetable garden.
I never have any trouble keeping up with zucchini. Gardeners often moan about the glut, but not me. No way. There's so much to do with them, a recipe for every stage of growth. Even those huge marrow-sized ones that lurk beneath the leaves.
My nemesis, however, remains the elusive borlotti bean. For the past three summers (and a few before that let me tell you) I have patiently pushed seed into pots of sifted compost, nursed seedlings through all sorts of conditions. Yet no matter what I do, no matter from whom I obtain seed, my dreams of freshly podded borlotti beans simmered with home-grown garlic and sage and thyme and lashings of good, green olive oil never quite come off. Until - ta-dah - the smallest but sweetest of victories this year.
They are bush variety - I'd've preferred a climber, but beggers cannot be choosers - that I sowed into jiffy coir pellet-things and there's not a lot of pod action, but at last. Success! Enormously proud of self, and all grown with scant but carefully applied watering. Next year will be the true success I dream about.
Genie's hosting a great little event called Our Growing Edge, and this little success story is my submission.
On the first day of an Australian heatwave, you shut and darken all the doors and windows of your home. Underneath the corrugated iron roof lies a layer of insulating seaweed. The hours pass in a dim and listless obscurity, until eight o'clock - or perhaps nine - when it has become cool enough outside to open up the windows. After dark, all the houses are empty, and from every garden comes the sound of quiet voices, relaxing into sociabilty.
Perhaps at midnight you carry your mattress on to the lawn, where a mass of pinky-white oleander flowers, sweeping to the ground beside you, reflect such brilliance from the moon that you must needs turn the other way...Sand and grit are everywhere, and flies of course, and no water for the garden. And all the talk is of the bushfires to the north.
When the change comes, which may be in five days, or in fifteen, the wind swings around quite suddenly, and a great freshness blows up from the sea. Doors bang and the trees bend the other way and the temperature may drop 20 ° in half an hour. Everyone collapses.
Stella Bowen, in the opening chapter of Drawn from Life.
Today's heatwave, with its bushfire-scented winds swooping through doors and windows flung open when they should have been closed early on, brought to mind this (edited) passage from Bowen's carefully crafted autobiography, read during another heatwave at the end of last year. As we sat on the verandah, worried by a severe lack of rain, drained by days of incessant heat, these words soothed, for, though written as remembrance for her 1890's Adelaide childhood, there is an odd sort of comfort in knowing they too had searing, drying summers way back then. Drought is no new condition in this country. All managed without airconditioning (as, very un-21st century, do we) and dressed in corsets and neck-high layers of fabric, no doubt. Thankfully, 110 years later, women can dress in diaphanous, loose linen.
Heat, and particularly bushfire season heat, can make for stunning sunsets. Incredible sunrises. Still, Autumn, you cannot arrive fast enough for this little black duck. We've not yet resorted to carting water in, though our neighbours have.
Maybe it was seeing the richly-iced cake at the top of my last post each time I logged on to the 'puter, or perhaps it was the huge bag of couverture chocolate staring out wantonly each time the pantry door is opened. Maybe, even, it was the typically sage advice a friend of Kathryn's shared with her, then subsequently with me, from Michael Pollan's Food Rules - that you may eat any kind of junk food you like, so long as you make it yourself.
Maybe. But over the weekend an odd, serendipitous, and most exciting thing happened. On Friday morning I opened an old, old Donna Hay book, one I've not so much as glanced at in years, and cooked her "chocolate cake for a glass of milk" - an iced, layered, and dairy-heavy affair - simply because Quentin Bacon's polaroid transfers are so damned dreamy. It's a work of Art, that book, and I'm rather glad - given it's current (ouch) price point - that I kept my copy. A few hours later, cake cooling on the sink, awaiting its ganache topping, Peter walked in the door and handed me a paper bag with a POLAROID CAMERA and two packs of Impossible film inside.
Forget the cake - it was nice, yes, of course it was - it's the camera that really made my weekend shine.
