We’ve finally finished our pond (click here to see what the area looked like before).

Yesterday was Engogirl’s birthday and her uncle offered to fill our pond with water plants as a birthday present.

I hope you all had a nice Christmas and an excellent new year!

As is usual, the time between Christmas and New Year’s day is packed with feasting and socialising. That’s my excuse for being slack with posting and I’m sticking to it.

Here in Sydney Australia it’s stinking hot right now and for reasons I don’t understand, I always get highly motivated to do major projects around the house at this time of the year. The smart time to do most of these laborious jobs would be in the cooler weather, but no, that would make too much sense. I never really feel like doing such things until it gets uncomfortably hot and humid.

Further proof that I’m a complete idiot. 

Last year at about this time I landscaped the front yard in the blazing sun. This year I’ll be toiling in the backyard making a pond and replacing two toilet sets in the house. 

The photo below is of Engogirl on the first day of this year, helping me with the construction of some bench seating that will surround the pond we are constructing.

After sweating our butts off for a day, we decided that instead of getting stuck into our backyard work and knocking it over quickly, we would rather get into an air-conditioned car and take couple of days off to visit Engogirl’s parents at their holiday home in Tallong (2 hours south of Sydney).

There are a few orchards in Tallong and stone fruits are in season. Engogirl’s father loves jam and makes his own.

Here’s Engogirl’s father’s recipe for apricot jam

Ingredients

Equal quantity of firm (slightly unripe) apricots and sugar. For the jam that was being prepared in the photo above, 1kg of apricots and 1kg of sugar were used.
Pectin (use only half the amount that is recommended on the packet or the jam will be too firm).
Water.
Glass jars. 

Method

Place freshly washed jars with lids and sugar into an oven and heat up to 100 degrees C (which is boiling point at sea level or about 212 degrees F). The sugar is preheated so that it dissolves quickly and completely when it is added to the fruit. Wash, pit and halve the apricots. Place prepared apricots into a saucepan with a cup of water, then heat for about 15 minutes, until the fruit begins to soften, over medium heat.

When the fruit is soft add the sugar and pectin stir until dissolved. Bring the mixture to the boil and cook for about another 5 minutes, whilst continually stirring. You will know when the jam is ready to fill the jars when the jam mixture sticks to the side of the saucepan in thick blobs. When the mixture is ready, take the jars and lids out of the oven (don’t forget that they will be hot, so use oven mitts) and fill with the hot jam mixture and screw on the lids straight away. It’s probably best to perform this operation in your sink in case there are any spills or accidents.

Spring has well and truly sprung. It’s almost like someone just flipped a switch. One day it’s cold, overcast and windy and suddenly the next day is clear and hot. The weather has been so glorious that my wife and I spent last weekend pottering around in the garden planting new plants (mainly Australian natives as they’re much more hardy and require far less water) and re-oiling our outdoor furniture.

Although our back yard is very small, we have over the years made it into a very nice place sit and relax. My idea of heaven is to sit outside in the morning with my wife and read the weekend paper together then do a bit of gardening during the day to be followed by a barbeque at night. As a matter of fact that’s just what we did. On Saturday night we had the neighbours over to help us eat some barbequed and smoked loin of pork and knock over several bottles of wine whilst chilling out to Gabin

Ahhh…. life can be so good!

A short drive south of Sydney will take you to the second oldest (1879) national park in the world, the Royal National Park.  The park basically consists of two types of scenery, coastal cliffs and heathland.  Most of the plant in the Park salt resistant hearty, prickly little things that somehow managed to eke a living out of probably some of the poorest soil in the world. Come to think of it, that’s probably why it was declared a national park, because it’s absolutely useless for farming.

Since the weather finally cleared up on Sunday, my wife and I went for a drive and a walk in the Royal National Park.

We’ve had a few rain falls over the last couple of weeks and although it’s still technically winter nobody seems to have told the plant world, because nearly everything with roots in the soil is blooming. 

As you look across the heath it is though one is looking at a slow motion corybantic dithyramb of plants in heat presenting themselves to all comers. With no brains to experience any shame, the plants wantonly went about their reproductive business, oblivious to rest of the world. I’ve always thought it strangely ironic that we humans present the torn off sex organs of plants to the targets of our desires. Not very a subtle hint and a rather callously barbaric practice when you actually think about it.

Most of the heath plants have tiny little spiky leaves to preserve moisture and their flowers tend to be quite small.  Around about the size of a little fingernail.

Of course, there are always exceptions to the rule,

and in the Royal National Park it is the Gymea Lily (Doryanthes excelsa) which send flower spikes up to 6 m high (about 18 ft).

After witnessing all of the botanical fecundity last weekend, my wife and I intend to follow nature’s lead and begin planting out our vegetable garden, next weekend. This year we will be trying out some heritage tomatoes (old styles that are no longer commercially own) that have been bred for taste rather than toughness for transportation such as the ones available in supermarkets.

I was having breakfast in my backyard as usual this morning when the lorikeet in the photo landed in the ficifolia (red flowering gum) about 3 metres (3 yards) away.

Over the last few years my wife and I have landscaped our backyard from a sterile and sun-baked wasteland of lawn into a beautiful oasis of colour and calm. I have my breakfast outside nearly everyday and my wife and I eat outside about two or three times a week throughout most of the year. Even in the cooler weather we light up the chiminea and sit out and enjoy the enviroment we have created for ourselves.

Recently I’ve been counting my blessings (doing the old “be here now” thing) and I feel that I’ve got it made. I’ve got a lovely wife; a great circle of friends; a nice little house that’s nearly paid off; my freedom and I live in a prosporous stable country. I think that the mood of Jamiroquai song “Corner of the earth” from the album “A Funk Odyssey“best describes how I feel when I’m blissed-out about such things.

I’ve also been thinking about Epicurus lately and how what he has to say has so much relevance to my life. He is quoted as saying “ It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and well and justly (agreeing ‘neither to harm nor be harmed’). And it is impossible to live wisely and well and justly without living a pleasant life.”

Epicurus promoted ethical reciprocity (treat others as you would like to be treated) 300 years before Christianity appeared and started to claim credit for such a concept. He also came up with a very useful little list (for this confusing consumerist, status driven, hero worshipping world we live in) of what is necessary

• Freedom
• A life free of pain
• Shelter
• Friends
• Food

unnecessary but nice

• A big house
• Meat every day
• Wealth

and what is totally unnecessary

• Power
• Fame

If you’d like to know a little more about Epicurus and a few other philosophers I like to recommend the following book by Alain de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy

We had a good crop of beautiful organic tomatoes this year. We had both cherry tomatoes and beefsteak tomatoes and we grew way more than what we could eat so I decided to semi dry and preserve them in olive oil.

Ingredients 

Tomatoes
Light olive oil (enough to cover the tomatoes)
3 cloves of garlic
1 Table spoon of salted capers
1 Teaspoon of dried basil

Method

Cut the cherry tomatoes in half and the larger tomatoes into 1cm (about a third of an inch) slices.

Dry the tomatoes in a dehydrator for 12 hours at 60 degrees C (about 140 F).

Place enough jars and their lids in a oven heated to 120 degrees C (about 250 F) for 30 minutes. Leave the jars in the hot oven until you are ready to use them.

Heat up the olive oil with the three cloves of finely sliced garlic, a table spoon of salted capers and a teaspoon of dried basil. Heat the oil until it starts to cook the garlic then it take it off the heat. You don’t want to really cook the garlic, it’s heated just to help infuse the flavours into the oil and help with keeping things sterile.

Pour a little of the hot oil with the garlic, basil and capers into each the hot sterilised jars and then place the semi dried tomatoes in the jars a little at a time, covering them with a little more hot oil as you fill up the jar.

If you try this, I’d suggest that the oil pouring is done in the kitchen sink in case the jar breaks. Needless to say, hot oil can cause very serious burns so take care at all times.

Here’s what we’ve just picked in our garden today.

We grow our tomatoes without the use of pesticides by tying paper bags over them just as they are starting to form and that keeps off the bugs.

The supermarket chains have really killed off good tasting tomatoes here in Australia and I refuse to buy my vegetables from them anymore.

Mike Stasse is one of my oldest friends (here in Australia) and he is the owner of the “Running on empty Oz“, peak oil discussion group. “Peak oil” refers to the imminent decline of oil production.

Mike and his wife Glenda have moved to beautiful Cooran in Queensland and are getting ready for what they see as the inevitable chaos that will result from the shortage of oil by becoming self-sufficient. Two years ago, my wife and I visited Mike and Glenda on their land as Mike was still building the outside of their self-designed and built home.

 We stayed with them for about three days. During our time together we were shown their permaculture garden,

solar electricity system (they sell electricity to the power company when they have excess) and various other ecologically sustainable systems that have installed, such as:

• A simple off the shelf greywater system that uses no power
• A kitchen greasetrap that works with compost and worms, no odours, no maintenance to speak of 
• A zero flush toilet that saves thousands of litres water a year

It is a lovely house in a beautiful setting. The picture below was taken from the back window at sunrise, looking out towards Mt. Cooran.

It takes courage and commitment to do what Mike and Glenda are doing. The sort of courage and commitment that I sometimes wish I had, but I will be instituting some of their ideas into our next house we buy later on this year.
 

To avoid using pesticides on our home grown tomatoes, Engogirl and I tie paper bags around them with twist ties when they are very small to stop the bugs getting at them. The paper bags are surprisingly robust and stand up to the rain without any problems. Sometimes we have to change the bags because the clumps of tomatoes get so big that they burst open the bags.

The bags shown in the photo above have already survived several downfalls of rain.

We found out about this through Engogirl’s uncle who has a green thumb and a healthy distrust of all pest control chemicals.

Home grown tomatoes taste so much better than commercially grown tomatoes. I can’t bring myself to buy tomatoes any more now that I grow my own. It really makes me angry when I see the nasty tomatoes that are on offer in the supermarkets. Apparently the supermarkets are the ones that are demanding that farmers grow varieties that have thicker skins allowing them to travel well and look good on arrival rather than taste good. 

I was out in the front garden pruning back my wattle trees (Acacia longifolia) when I came across this spectacular weevil. It was about 2.5cm (1″) in length.

 I identified it by going to the CSIRO website and according to the ABC website it was one of the first Australian insects to be described from material collected by Joseph Banks (the botanist who voyaged with James Cook on the Endeavour) back in 1770. 

Although this weevil is quite beautiful they are considered a pest in the home garden as the adults eat new acacia growth and the grubs eat the roots.