Making cheese!

For a long time now I've wanted to give cheese making a try, but I was a bit scared of the implied commitment. What if I bought a kit and hated the whole thing?
Last weekend I gave in and bought the Mozzarella and Hard Cheese making kit from Green Living Australia and it arrived at the end of the week. I've just made my first mozzarella and aside from a little hiccup (should have kneaded the salt in better) I'm pretty happy!
During the course of the week I also purchased a brew kit via Gumtree from a lovely older couple. They offered to sell us some more bottles and I definitely misheard the quantity, because we'll need to make at least one more car trip to get them. The price is good though and at worst, I can share the bottles with some friends that brew. At best, we'll get a lot of beer put aside next winter (I did mention to my mum that she should donate a little space in her always-cool home to my brewing endeavours jokingly, that would be nice!).
We also got some work done in the garden and I've been working on sewing a bag but for now, my bed is calling me.

Got started planting!

Tonight after work I got stuck into planting! First up were some San Marzano tomatoes I got as little seedlings; they went straight into my raised bed with my basil seedlings. Topped that off with some pea straw and then had the bright idea to move my capsicums, eggplants and chillies out the back to get more sunlight. There's only a few of those..or a few of as many varieties as I can get (jalapeno, habanero and all the ones I got on Saturday, eggplants I got .50c for a punnet..).
Then we surrounded the bed with chicken wire. Hopefully the chooks can't beat that! They did get into a lower one last week and eat almost every thing so I need to start again on corn, beans and squash. Fingers crossed!

In the background the compost heap is visible;

Today's effort;

Salsa! Fire roasted and lots of it. Since my oven's on the fritz I had to toast the ingredients under the grill but it was still delicious.
I found the recipe here via Pinterest and fortunately it comes in both a small batch recipe and a canning recipe. I'll definitely be coming back to this once I've run out to make a full on preserving batch for later!

Happy Saturday

This morning I deviated from my normal 'breakfast at my parents' routine and went to the Spring ABC Gardener's Market.
It was the first time I've gone and I have to say it was lovely. I bought a handwoven basket, comfrey, horseradish, poblano chili, serrano chili, bhut jolokhia and scorpion chili. I think I'll have to go along to the Autumn Market next year to compare.

I was also a bit lucky as I just planted the new plants out into larger pots and found my serrano was actually three plants! They're all in separate pots now so hopefully they'll all recover well and I'll have a happy bonus.

Adventures in Hot Composting

 

This is what I got up to last weekend! I've had some compost bins for a while, just the standard types you can get from hardware stores; plastic square things that take ages to break anything down and a tumbling composter that makes a nice, rich mix in a few short months. But a week or two ago I caught a great segment on Gardening Australia (Produce to Preserves from 28/09/2013 which can be found here).

This segment captured my imagination for three reasons; 

• The couple in question are from my state (home state pride!)
• I really want to learn to preserve food
• I'd love to be able to churn out my own compost for my garden

So I set to work! I started trawling Gumtree and found a listing for free pallets, then my friend Sarah and I went and picked up a trailer load to share. I used mine to construct a simple little compost area as seen above, then set to work mowing the verge to collect enough "greens" to use in the layers. I followed the tips I found on Deep Green Permaculture and layered the cuttings with shredded paper, dry leaves, horse manure and wood chips that I had left over from my large gumtree being removed. Because we had some cool rainy weather during the week I covered it up with some black plastic pool liner. 

Since I have a spare propogation thermometer I've kept it stuck in the top of the pile to ensure it's staying warm and today J did the first turn for me; so far it's looking pretty good! This is the temperature it was sitting at the other day and this morning it was up at 50 degrees. The thermometer was back down at around 30 degrees when I put it back in after the turning so I covered it back up with the plastic to keep the warmth in overnight. We'll keep turning it every couple of days and hopefully soon I'll have a cubic metre or so of compost for my patch!

On useful things...like coffee

I'm not a big coffee drinker.


That might be the understatement of the century. I like the smell and the taste is ok, but I rarely drink coffee. My most notable exceptions to this are sleepy mornings of which I have few since my back has been corrected, Saturday mornings at my parents house which are for bonding with my mum and sister and prior to tattoo appointments  for my obligatory get psyched up and maintain the sugar levels intake. Because of this, I've never had a steady supply of spent coffee (grinds? grounds?) to use in my garden.

Until! Until I used my little noodly brain and realised that I work for an internet company. People who work at internet companies are normally composed of coffee. They subsist on it. At least, the nerdy sleepless ones who are compelled to spend hours of their time post-work time playing computers games do. Luckily, I work with those people and we have coffee machines everywhere. Different kinds, too. Fully manual enormous cafe style machines which I have no idea how to use and which have handy little buckets placed conveniently close for emptying coffee grounds into. Automated machines into which you place whole beans and which dispense the energy giving elixir at the touch of a button and hide coffee grounds within neat little buckets for the taking.

I've even thought about asking my local coffee shops if they do anything, you know, special with their coffee grounds or if they'd like to save them for their friendly neighbourhood..me.

That's right. I'm that girl. The one who uses the things that no one else wants. I really have been getting a bit of a reputation for it as well, since I prance around the kitchens on several floors of our building with a resealable bag, explaining the benefits of adding coffee to acid-loving tomatoes and compost bins to every fellow staff member who raises an eyebrow. My tomatoes seem to have appreciated the addition of coffee to my garden beds, although some of my workmates seem to have visions of over caffinated vegetables when I explain my plans to them.

I don't mind though. The best part about bringing home the spent coffee grounds, better than getting something for nothing, better than saving something so useful from landfill...

My compost smells amazing.

On happy returns

I'm a terrible blogger. I always find a way to forget to record my thoughts. Come to think of it, routine is not my strong point (my physios' face let me in on that one when I mentioned I'd forgotten to do my exercises for five weeks - straight).

Now that part is over, on to things I have been doing, keeping up with and accomplishing!

Home


I'm steadily working towards making my little piece of land more useful. I've added four hanging pots to my front verandah. My two little garden beds have been joined by another small bed and an enormous bed thanks to some colourbond, metal flashing and some pop rivets. I've moved my compost bins to a new area (by the back fence) to make more effective use of my yard. J has been invaluable in doing more of the heavy lifting work (moving soil etc) and pruning the hedge in our front yard. I also (finally!) have two chickens now who I have been letting out for a few hours every day to poke around the backyard and help to reduce the local bug population (those girls will be happy when they find out how many spiders can live under a pair of oversized gum trees!).

Derby

Amonsgt these small home-based victories, I've also taken up derby again. This time I joined a new league at the outset of its existence which has a significant point of difference - it's a co-ed league. Women and men skating together. It doesn't seem so intense for the most part because a lot of people are unaware that men don't tend to have a strong playing role in roller derby. I've got several male friends who are great skaters and I love being able to skate with them as players. We've had a couple of new people start with us and it's amazing when you see the lightbulb moment of derby-understanding that hits them as soon as you do even the simplest scrimmage based drill.

Part of the reason that I'd stopped skating with my old league was because I'd been spending a lot of time on the sidelines due to a nagging lower back injury that wouldn't go away. This settled down considerably when I stopped skating and flared back up again quite severely when I resumed. I saw a group of excellent physiotherapists who created an improvement plan for me and I have now been cleared to discontinue regular visits. I can't even begin to explain how nice it is to know I can start working on my core muscles again (and no more pesky Saturday visits to the other side of town!).

Finances

I had a stunning realisation a few months ago on a drive home from derby practise with J.

"I am terrible with money. I have been terrible with money for years. There is a difference between being a scroogey tightarse (like myself) and being good with money (like other people)."

This stunning realisation was blurted out in a very excited manner (no one should even be that excited about realising their not good at life-management). J gave me his best "amusing Bunny is amusing" reply, but the following things really hit home at that stage;

1) I have let other people manipulate me into getting into debt for them (very stupid)
2) I have let my fear of taking control set me back vastly
3) To fix it, I would need to actually do it. Take control myself.

With this in mind, I have recently set up direct deposits for each of my bills (divided by the amount of pay periods in each cycle) so I only really have to worry about top up payments for things like electricity and water. I applied for and received a consolidation loan for my personal loan and two credit cards. One credit card was closed; the other I've kept for emergency purposes. I set up a Savings bank account for my car registration, and two more for saving (one with another bank so I can't see the balance increasing, the other as a buffer if I need additional cash). I'm about to pay out my oven so I don't have to worry about that any more.

I used to have a very head in the sand attitude when it came to my finances and cannot possibly explain the feeling of freedom that I have right now, which is amusing since I have a mortgage and those are supposed to make you feel trapped. I was frugal through necessity, not because of a desire to live as cheaply as possible. I'll never out-cheap others, but I can give it my best shot and try to reduce that mortgage so I can experience some real freedom. This also comes back to the Home-based gardening as I'd like to become even just a little bit more self-reliant. I'll never be one of those dedicated off the grid people living as I am in the middle of suburbia but I can take something back and turn this oversized for two people plot of land into something useful and engaging.