3 More things.

Posted on January 7, 2016 by anthonypickering

Bill Gates used to say do an extra thing each day and that will be another 365 things you get done for the year.

Me I am believer in the rounding function so for me do 3 extra things each day and you will have over a 1000 extra things done each year 🙂

One of the myths I often see in the alternative world is this thought a simple life being easy. It is harder than most people realise and that is part of the problem in a world where we expect life to cut us chances. But also more rewarding , or at least I think so.

So tonight’s 3 …

Sorted two barrow loads of bricks from the pile and cleaned those that needed it. For the next section of paving.

More firewood from down the street

The Daily Bread as always before bed.

Time for sleep 🙂

Preparing for Winter.

Posted on January 6, 2016 by anthonypickering

We haven’t had to use the stove since early December and it is unlikely we will see weather in the next few months that will require it but already I am getting ready for winter.

Last winter the pallet numbers dropped off dramatically late in the season as it got cold and people were looking for wood.

We chose to use up our wood for space with the granny flat project and had about 2 barrow loads come end of winter. I did a run up to wood for good and got a load and most of that is still left.

Since then I have managed to hit a few local fallen branches from people and locations, a good load from a friend up around Macedon along pruning from trees.

I am also getting in pallets making sure they are all heat treated timber and preferably hardwood.

So the hunt is ongoing. I have a hand saw and loppers in the car if I come across anything decent. Even a small branch can be a half to a full days heating in our very efficient stove.

Managed to harvest below and another barrow load locally after a large branch had come down in the wind over Christmas.

And tonight I noted a tree dropped and nicely cut up into foot long blocks by an arborist two streets down on my way home. A quick knock on the door and a question and invited to take half. But the best was to meet and speak to a neighbour who I had never meet. An older guy very nice chatted for some time on his tomatoes and gave him some advice on his new lemon tree. Good to get to know the locals.

Three big barrow loads and the offer of the rest if his friends do not pickup there’s by tomorrow. I took the longer pieces as I have access to cut them up the other people may not have this. You need to be fair.

Pity some of the branches where not a bit longer or I would have inoculated them with some shitake but beggars cannot be choosers.

As it is this wood is still a year of drying away from being used but it will get used.

And didn’t even need to use a car to bring it home that is local.

Cut up it will fuel us for a week or more 🙂

Working with or against Nature? (fat hen spanakopita)

Posted on January 4, 2016 by anthonypickering

I visited my parents place over the Christmas period had a really nice relaxing time. Foraged some items, took the family to a few different places but mostly just relaxed.

My father is the king of the drip system. He has beautiful rich red volcanic soil that is free draining, very free draining as such he tends to drip water the plants and along with 40 plus years of adding organic matter to the soil means his vegies grow incredibly well.

Because of this he also has minimal weed issues how ever one thing I did note that fat hen sometimes called lambs ear (Chenopodium album), dock and the purslane where doing really well.

I grabbed some purslane to plant at my place and grabbed a large bag of fat hen which I made into spanakopita (recipe below).

To me it is interesting that this high protein crop that by my father’s admission (he is a rabid anti weed man 🙂 ) the chickens and sheep love is torn out spayed out and treated with disdain.

And there it is growing without water or love and just doings its own good thing. From a point of view of plants we are going to have to start to look at what will work by itself without lots of inputs or work and this is potentially a great option for fodder and food. The broad acre style of farming the crops you want rather that what will grow easily is simply not going to hold true in the long run.

And much to my father annoyance his granddaughter loves the fresh leaves of this plant and now it is naturalised in my back yard we have access to it for salads, cooking or as fodder for the chickens.

As for the taste of the spanakopita. A. and I made up two batches of rolls and a pie with a half side fat hen and half spinach and apart from being slightly more beefy texture the kids and wife could not tell them apart and all was eaten.

This is one good weed.

Recipe for Fat Hen (or spinach) Spanakopita.

Packet of filo or puff pastry (or if you are a better cook than me make your own 🙂 )
3 eggs
150 gram of feta
75 grams of ricotta
75 grams of quark cheese (could use another 75 grams of ricotta)
2 bunches of spinach or equivalent or more of fat hen.( I like lots of green in my mix) shredded.
Butter melted and a brush
Two onions finely diced.
1 or 2 Sprigs of mint finely sliced (to taste)
1 or 2 Sprigs of dill finely sliced (to taste)
Dash of nutmeg.
Salt and Pepper to taste.

Mix all ingredients apart from the melted butter and pastry in a large bowl.

Lay out the filo or puff pastry. If using filo make sure you keep a damp towel over it put brushed melted butter over each sheet as you layer them. A. helped me with this process as two people make this easier. We use 3 or so layers for a roll and 3 or so layers top and then same bottom in a pie. Puff pastry is just one layer.

Spoon mix onto the pastry sheets and roll or make into pies. Do not over fill.

Butter top and make sure you butter the tray they are sitting on.

Put in an oven at 150 to 170 degrees Celsius till cooked through and browned (about 45 minutes) slow cook is a better option for your health than the western desire to deep fry/fast cook everything.

Once cooked leave to stand for 5 minutes before serving with a nice salad.

Back to Work…

Posted on January 3, 2016 by anthonypickering

Yes back to working for the man after a few weeks off.

While my job is good and I enjoy the work. It is still working for the man. It will take effort ensure that I don’t fall into the 40 hour week trap. I have been making all our meals from scratch and working around the house despite a few incidents (car crash – minor) it has been a very effective and productive time despite the daily nana naps or perhaps because of them. It is these simple cheap things that tend to go first when you are busy at work and earning the dollar. It is hard sometime to prioritise these things.

So last year ‘the year that said meh’ to us has shown that we need to work on a few things from a sustainable point of view, try though we will.

Time to try to get the debt back down and sustainability back up.

A couple of interesting articles below.

Time to go. Things to do 🙂

Your Life Has Already been Designed for you – http://www.raptitude.com/2010/07/your-lifestyle-has-already-been-designed/

The Year Ahead – http://bealtainecottage.com/2014/12/25/the-year-ahead-be-prepared/

2016 And Onward

Posted on January 1, 2016 by anthonypickering

So 2015 was very much the year that said meh to us. Definitely not good but not bad either.

It was summed up by the accident on new year’s eve. Car a bit of a mess, annoyance with insurance but no one hurt able to limp home with the trailer load of material for the path I am building in the back yard.

So what is on for the year coming?

Well below is the philosophy I am going to try to take into the year.

Maybe not ‘Epic Shit’ but definitely try to get shit done each day.

Spent the afternoon helping a friend with something he had been wanting to try for an extended time that one of the martial art I know teaches.

Also got the chance to teach him and a partner some foraging and plants we have in the back yard and send him home with plants. The start of a good year?

Just a start.

Let’s see how we deal with meh shall we!

Buy Nothing New October 2015

Posted on October 2, 2015 by anthonypickering

So Buy Nothing New October started yesterday. A. and I have decided that we will pledge again for this.

http://www.buynothingnew.com.au/why/

Given how over the last few months I have had to clear out 10 cubic meters of stuff into skips this will be a cathartic process for me.

It will also be a nice break for our bank accounts which have been pummelled by the work on the back yard and granny flat.

I have enough items to keep me in projects probably till the end of the year LOL J as does A. with our room looking like a quilting store 🙂

Our main driver is that we need to reduce our impact as a collective reduce the amount of stuff we are stealing from our kids future!

We all have to try to live by the motto

Reduce then Repair then Reuse then Recycle

So why not give it a try what is the worst that could happen?

Finishing Christmas with a simple meal and simple lesson in life

Posted on December 28, 2014 by anthonypickering

So we have had our Christmas splurge. In reality ours while generous it was not the masses of excess I have seen other years or from others.

I will say this, it may be the crowd I hang with but the year seems to be a lot quieter at this time of year. A great many people are simply not buying into the sales and mess (could have been spending Christmas in a depressed regional centre as well)

Our Christmas plans were interrupted to a degree by a bought of gastro in the house. We ended up simplifying them and reduced travel time by 2-3 hours and the pace just felt a lot more relaxed.

We ended up at my parents, dry and warm but quiet and relaxed.

The meals for us where generous but relatively simple, presents where practical and not ostentatious and the main thing was simply time spent with family. In time this will become the norm rather than the exception. The decline perhaps has already begun with a great many people so the chance for waste and excess will become less.

On the last day at my parents place we decided to head to the local trout farm as we had promised the children that they could try fishing and sitting on a river bank for 4 hours to get nothing will not attract children to fishing (it put me off most fishing 🙂 ).

So we spent about an hour got 9 beautiful rainbow trout

Cooked simply n a BBQ nothing better. A salad from my parents’ house, chips from their own potatoes. Simple but good.

And the kids well they again know where the food came from and the only comment was from the 5 year old that she would eat the fish but not bloody 🙂

Guest post on Ranting’s of an Amateur Chef.

Posted on December 24, 2014 by anthonypickering

So I have been a follower of the Ranting chef for several years.

I am honoured he offered me a guest post and had a post I was about to put together for something A. and I have been eating a fair bit later that I thought would suite.

To me he the ranting chef is a constant. Every day in rolls another email about a meal to make.

My wife often comments can go to a fridge and pull together a meal from what appears to be nothing. It is a skill I used living in share houses in London when I lived there in the 90’s it is skill that allows me to save money and means we waste little.

Perhaps the first step in people taking back some control of their lives is cooking their own meals and knowing what is in them. Cooking from scratch should not be in the realm of master chef style reality television shows or only the realm of celebrity chefs it should be a day to day thing. Shown to be easy skill it really is.

With knowing what comes in your meal is the ability to mix in the few ingredients have in your garden you started gardening in or the items you have never seen before from the local farmers market.

The Ranting Chef blog shows this day by day, week by week, building up skills and using ingredients.

His stamina is also quite impressive in regards to rolling out blog posts as a blogger who is an absentee writer a lot of the time I know how hard to roll out a post almost every day for years at a time.

http://rantingchef.com/2014/12/23/guest-post-anthony-meat-balls-and-zoodles/

The Silence

Posted on October 18, 2014 by anthonypickering

I woke up late and fairly tired yesterday morning. The previous night I moved the back hive to my parents place. In many ways it was a triumph as no bees died in this move (which means by default I didn’t get stung). I am getting the structure of the hives down pat and managing the bees is becoming easier in some ways.

On the other hand the movement of the bees is a complete disaster. We had a complaint late last Sunday that our bees where attacking our back neighbour. Threats ensued of calls to the council and pest exterminators so we made a decision even though we are flat out and it is five our round trip to get them out of Dodge City for a while.

From what we can tell the neighbours had a swarm in their compost. Dug up the compost got stung looked over the fence and saw the hive which has been there for three years with different bees in it. Freaked out and became very, very, very irrational about it. (Quite scarily irrational to be honest) and started yelling and screaming.

It is a great shame as this is a very urban friendly hive. If they had one fault they were so indifferent to humans that they would fly near them and not flee. This lead people to believe they were being attacked, swatting them and getting stung.

Our 5 year old is devastated, my wife is devastated and I am far from happy. This is a swarm we got as a fist of bees and just filled the hive to the point we needed a new box on top.

So the last two mornings I went up to open up the chicken run and went past the location where the hive used to be, had a quick look to check if any had been left behind (nope all clear) and noted the absence of them in the flowering kale, again I noted it in the lavender out front. Thursday in far less sunny and warm day the back yard and front yard hummed with bees.

And today? Silence.

The neighbour’s husband while I was talking to him was raving at his almond tree and the productivity of his vegetables last year. Well not now. And this is the big debate that needs to be had in a culture where a person get to reach into another’s back yard and be irrational about something well with that comes a responsibility.

The person in question invoked the ‘I am worried for my children’ comment for her own fears. Well I am worried for my kids future but not because of a few bees which they know about but because this very same rational if taken to its extreme (and that is something humans are good at) will lead to my children having a poorer future.

‘I will get arguments about well as a community we all need to respect each other’s views’. Having grown up in a small community YES you do and they will not be your views so you need to suck it up and move on! A community of like minded souls is not a community it is somewhere between a cult and self-validating support group.

A. ss annoyed as a scientist she wants a rational conversation with people and that is simply not happening with people these days. It is not just the urban folks it is also parts of the alternative community and permies. The bigger picture is hidden as everyone want their ‘personal rights’ to supersede everything. Everyone is getting into their own bunkers and not even bothering to look at empirical evidence or each other’s views.

On the upside there a small number of feral bees around and at some point we will likely move the bees back and put them in a private location where people cannot just look over the back fence (mind your own business people) and away from this neighbour. We will be quiet about it and work on our desire to get people to realise the value of these beautiful creatures in a way that allows us not be target by this type of person.

It is the old flying under the radar vs. getting things done argument and on this occasion low flying looks like the option.

I still cannot shudder at a world that our children seem to be destined to inherit!

Enough for one day I have swarm trap to setup in the hidden corner of the chicken run !

The Old Splitter

Posted on August 13, 2014 by anthonypickering

I was up at dad’s place and split a few logs for him with the old splitter.

This old girl has been with us for 50 years. When dad broke the handle he took it down to my uncle who welded a pipe into it for him.

We talked that if we had a few cents for every log it had split we would be a lot richer than we are now. If I had a dollar every time that handle jarred my hands on a cold morning getting the wood for the day 😉 And in a way we are. My family heated house hot water and cooked on wood almost entirely in my youth so each split was in its own way a version of currency. A self sufficient currency many of us might end up going back to.

A good Canadian splitter is a must if you have a small holding or just warm your house with wood.

It fills the roll of a sledge for most farm jobs like putting in posts and is one of the most used tools even at my place in the city.

I am NOT an urban hippie

The rampant ramblings of someone trying to live a greenish life while seeing the world. From Melbourne Australia to the United Kingdom to the Netherlands this is a look at life as lived.

Category Archives: Self Reliance