The longest day, the shortest night, the night of midsummer dreaming. In these longest days it is easy to get wrapped up, carried away, with projects and plans. It is easy to get to runaway speed especially in Australia where the Christmas holidays fall on the midsummer solstice (and not the traditional midwinter one). It is good to take a moment to remember to relax and enjoy life. It is…
I make soap once a year, in time to give it away as Christmas presents. I truly hate the commercialisation of Christmas. Unless I can do handmade presents I feel really yucky and conned by the whole thing. But homemade vegetable oil soap is so luxurious that it makes a great present.
I plant callistemon and grevillias ostensibly as a permaculture strategy to encourage insectivorous birds and insects, but like most “sensible” garden strategies, it has some lovely side benefits.
There is a little bit of science to this.
My mowing meditation this week was about a great post on Cluttercut about the planned obsolescence that is the basis of our very loopy economy. How does it work…
Ok, I admit it. There was no staging necessary for this shot. This is the real state of my laundry tub. That is, until today…
A habit I am working on at the moment is always carrying a water bottle – or two actually – a small one in my handbag and a bigger one in my basket.
In 1998 I spent most of a year living and working in Havana, Cuba. I’m not sure how valuable it was to the Cubans. One of the very first tenets of permaculture is protracted and thoughtful observation, and here I was flying into a completely foreign climate and culture and trying to teach it.
A wallaby got into the garden last night, and demolished my newly planted sweet potato patch. I spent my whole mowing session this morning devising recipes for wallaby – Turkish wallaby stew, marinated baked wallaby, wallaby kebabs….