So we visit the Italian supermarket about once a month and today was that day.

 What a place, full of all the good cheap stuff. We head there to stock up on cheap tomato passata, pasta, big blocks of parmesan cheese, canned tomatoes, dried and tinned beans, anchovies, boxes of  Sicilian sweets, gnocchi, amazing small goods and even unusual European seeds and lots, lots more.

We tend to view ourselves frugal rather than cheap and the quality of these items makes them an even better buy. Even by the standards of the Italians, Greeks and other Southern Europeans we are frugal as we buy some of the amazing small goods but we also buy a big bag of the cheap off cuts which is the ends of the small goods dropped in a bowl. It is cheap probably bad for you but ooh so good. Our daughter loves them and I use them up to make pasta sauces for the week and eat with A.’s how made sourdough.

Buying here is a balance, we question the food miles and its effect but at the end of the day we get organic quality items from Europe cheaper than we can any Australian items. It is sad but we can only do what we can. This year we plan to bottle some of our own passata and tomatoes and grow more vegetables we do what we can and in the end we waste as little as possible and that is probably the best thing we can do.

Our larder is full again and this gives us a lot of freedom in the week. We basically buy what we can’t grow or get from other sources from the big supermarkets. Their strangle hold on the Australian economy is pretty awful for all involved and bodes poorly for us all in the long term but that is a topic for another blog.

Basic, cheap, quick homemade food is the go during the week. We eat a lot of pasta or rice with tomato passata or canned tomatoes and beans mixed with a little bacon or small goods and with lots of fresh herbs. It is good for us and tastes great.

In the end it is a little bit of the frugal life that shows it not only saves you money but is good for you and tasty as well.

We have cats, not the best thing in Australia as they are like nuclear bomb on the local wildlife (and the neighbours chickens at times) but they have been a part of our life and my wife and kids love them.

However the down side is what happened today when we found one of the cats that had been hit by a car and is now gently buried under our cherry tree.

Etana was ex breeding cat that we got when the option was her being euthanized or coming to us. She has been a good cat if a bit wild and very beautiful and our two and half year old loved her as she would sleep on her bed.

So now I have to explain at some point when she misses her where Etana is.

Do I think that it is worth having animals when this happens. The answer is yes. Even though I am going to have to do the same talk as I did when my grandfather her great grandfather passed away last year and simply say she is heaven with Opa.

Children and adults need the grounding that nature brings and that includes looking after and understanding that we need to care for world animals live in and hopefully this leads to the an understanding that we the humans have a responsibility to look after all aspects of the earth not just those that affect we humans.

Having said that I do not look forward to this talk perhaps two and half is a little young for understanding the lose of a pet.

So off to work today after a four day weekend.  It got me wondering why I do this. Why go to work when I could be at home doing stuff I want to?

If I ever come up with an answer I will let you know.

On the up side one of the girls at work was up in the high country on the weekend and had picked up some nuts from a friends place. Fresh organic hazelnuts and chestnuts picked off the ground yesterday. Due to life and the universe I didn’t get anything done with them tonight but I got idea’s…

Going to start with a hazelnut pesto and some classic French chestnut paste. Pictures and stories to follow.

Maybe at the end of the day that is why I do it.

Just a heads up to those that have started to follow me. I have set myself a goal of one post per day this month so don’t be surprised if stuff hits your inbox each day in March but it will probably taper off in April at least a little bit.

But onto the post…

We terraced our backyard 6 months ago. With such a steep block we were losing all the water to run off and felt like we had little usable space. In the rush of work, family, life and the universe the back yard has been kind of let go to the point where you couldn’t tell the start of one terrace and the end of another.

I have been promising A. that I will put up some retaining walls and we had decided on second hand bluestone for upper edge of the bottom paved area and hardwood sleepers for the top section. I cleaned up the backyard and mowed it yesterday so today I decided to procrastinate a little less and go and start sourcing some items.

In our area we have a number of second hand dealers usually run by slightly questionable Italian gentlemen and the trick is to learn to bargain. So I went to the usual place I go as they have this massive mound of blue stone blocks 4 meters high in all shapes and sizes. Spoke to the gentleman and we came to a price of $3.50 per block. To some this may seem a bit expensive but these can be pretty big blocks (I struggle to lift some of the blocks and I easily lift 40kg bags of feed) and a retaining wall made of these is never going to need to be replaced in my lifetime. It occurred to me that at this price it would be cheaper if a bit harder to not use a hardwood wall on the second tier and I would not need to replace it in 20 years time.

Add to that it is second hand and all of the embodied energy has already been used to make it up and I don’t have to have guilt complex over using hardwood it seems like done deal. Straw that breaks the wood retaining walls back is A. likes this better. So there I am, looks like I am hauling stones for a while.

Purchased two sets of 10 today which is about all the old Suzuki which is my work horse will handle at once, even over a short distance.

In between I went to Bunnings which is a large hardware store chain with my daughter as I need to grab a few things. I notice that they are now selling second hand house bricks and notice that they are cheaper than at the second hand yard. Even more disturbing I noticed that the new bricks where 30% cheaper than recycled bricks…

So what gives here? How can it possibly be cheaper to buy new bricks with all of the energy involved in making them, and that is a lot of energy then shipping them a minimum of 200km which is the closest brick works, and they cost less than a brick where all of the embodied energy was paid out 50 years ago. And all you need to do is get them from houses being demolished in our area and clean them up…

Seems ludicrous and it is. We value things poorly in this society because damaging the environment either though bad practice or just the miss use of fossil fuels doesn’t get properly valued. It costs more if you look at the big picture but it costs less in the notes we hand over so most people will follow the notes and I can’t say I blame them. But even that doesn’t follow in some ways. When I worked out the area of an average block of bluestone it would take 7 -12 plus bricks to have a similar area. So I can have old bricks which are nice in their own way but cost two to four times the value, or have beautifully cut blocks of old stone that look fantastic. That makes no rational value argument. What it does show however is that often on top of bad environmental practice green washing and marketing of items distorts their real value.

I am going to continue to wander through the second hand yards as in time the energy to make these new items and ship them is going to get more and more expensive so for the rest of the people grab the new shiny stuff  now while you can or be like me and wander though the second hand yards.

And you like me could feel better getting wood and materials that are second hand with the  embodied energy already in the system and using what we have already created with so much effort over time.

I will be honest at least half the fun in it is searching out stuff and the bargaining, but don’t tell my wife that. So go and find the nearest second hand yard and enjoy.

‘Oooooh look at that timber … shiny, bright, shiny I could do something with that …’

Yesterday I got a package from Daley’s Fruit a company I can highly recommend having got a number of unusual and heritage trees and plants from them over time.

http://www.daleysfruit.com.au/

I have been looking for a particular type of black mulberry that I had red about called the

Red Shahtoot. Even though I propagate a heritage black mulberry myself that we planted a number of years ago and only have a small backyard I quite like collecting unusual types of trees and plants particularly edibles that we will use.  The Red Shahto ot has fruit that is up to 10cm long… what you can say about that other than yum. It is also dwarf root stock and will be planted in the area I cover to protect from birds and possums during the gowning season.

As I am apt to do I had ‘a bit of look’ just to see if there was anything we had to have’ or as my wife put it more stuff for the backyard.

While looking I notice that there was small coffee bean variety called the Catui available suitable for NSW so I thought hey why not. I am fond of my java in the morning and recently planted a green tree to try to grown some tea. Why not my own coffee? Hey it may not work out but it is worth a try. And will provide enjoyment just growing it even if I never get a bean off it.

Apart from the fact I just love to have them I honestly believe that everyone should be collecting unusual plant varieties if they can.  The more that we preserve old, rare and odd plants and trees the better.

 It was not so long ago (1970’s) that a leaf fungus was stopped by genes from old variety of wild Mexican corn. That fungus reduced the national crop by 15%. We have roughly 80,000 plus food plants in use in the world and yet less than 20 species are used for 90% of our food. In the early 20^th century there where over 450 varieties of lettuce advertised for sale in the US today there are around 30.

Old plants provide a buffer against our own stupidity as backyard growers we are in a good position to keep alive something that otherwise might never be again. Add to that the taste and nutritional value, longer growing season, ability to save seeds I am sure you can see you are doing the world a favour.

And it is very cool and fun and maybe, just maybe you might get your own favourite bean out of it all.