The devil came to Georgia… Well actually he came to dinner. His horns are golden and a little upside down.

Yes we had Maccas for dinner! The shock the horror… the tasty burgers and fries.

In my defence A. was off to her fortnight quilting group and I was running late at work and picked up the kids a bit late. With A. just back at work and us not being as organised as we could be I knew that the two and half year old would at least eat the quick and easy option so I could get her to bed on time.

The point of my post is to show that we are all human and do things that others may perceive as not the best practice or even ethical. Hell more importantly ‘we’ may perceive them as not the being ethical. I am aware of the evils that the corporation with the clown has done to the earth and its people. Ranging from the stupidity of 100% Australain beef to the way famers near where I grew up are driven to break the earth they live on to make a buck.  So I am far from an uneducated consumer. I am not sure if this makes me better or worse but really it just makes me cringe at myself more often.

The debate about fast food is much like the debate about most things in our society very black and white, junk food is bad organic handmade food is good . The truth as with most things sits in between.

Is a little junk food bad as part of balanced diet? No.

Is feeding the family five types of fast food for the week bad? Well yes

We all try to  do what we can. I believe that I am pretty green yet I eat fast food, shop at Coles and Woollies, sometimes drink coke  and don’t always do the right thing. We also grow our own food, shop for organic where we can, shop at farmers markets and buy local. In short we do what we can when we can. We have the luxury to purchase green power but the people unable to buy it, but reducing their power bill do as much or more as part of the green culture as we do.

Less food miles is good, even if it takes up to eight times the amount of green house gases to produce it?

Permaculture is the great saviour, monoculture the great ruiner? Really some crops in some areas have worked well as mono crops for 5000 years?  Some of ‘the permaculture’ gardens I have seen require more input than they get out…  

Vaccines are bad. But is watching your child die of whooping cough good?

Nothing is black and white. The best thing you can do is to not judge. Do what you can, be as informed as you can, purchase what you can afford to purchase, decrease where you can and if like me you fall off the wagon and buy some fast food cook up some vegan food to put in the freezer for those quick meals rather than the inviting the devil in. If nothing else it may salve your conscience.

Can’t say I am terribly happy with Monday this week. Even the sunflowers seemed to have turned their backs on us it appears.

 On the way in to work I heard the easy beats song ‘Friday on Mind’ and it stuck in my head by 10am I had come up with the chorus below.

 Gonna have fun in the city,
My permaculture garden she’s so pretty,
She looks fine tonight,
The garden beds are out of sight to me,
Tonight….I will bake sourdough bread,
Tonight…I harvest cabbage heads,
Tonight…I got to get tonight
Monday I have Friday on my mind.

 Cheered myself up for the day by organising for an extra long weekend by having Friday off as well Monday as a public holiday. Plans are afoot already on what I can do in the garden with Friday to Monday to play with … hmmm plans …

So the weekend had ended. after the busy day that was yesterday today felt flat. With kids in crèche it is not unusual for us to get a bug a fortnight through the house so us all being off colour today only exacerbated it.

In the end though we still had a pretty nice day surrounded by the kids just chilling out even had a nanna nap (siesta) in the afternoon and felt better. Had a couple of beers with the neighbour next door where we solved the world’s problems as we often do over a beer. Dinner of my wife’s brilliant fresh warm sourdough and chicken and salad so I should feel good about life and I do… but…

I am lucky I have decent well paid job with a reasonably flexible times if a bit to much work at times but at the end of the weekend I just get this feeling that I have so much more I could/would/should do. Yes we get the house ready for the week, iron clothes wash the dishes and generally get ready for the work week ahead but I mean what about all the projects I could/would/should do rather than go to work tomorrow.

There is the foundations for the shed move so my wife can do her kitchen garden the setup of the hot house so I can get the aquaponics system working, more garden beds to build, chicken run to update, duck ponics pond to build, trees to be pruned and so many more … All things that could reduce my load on the world on my budget. On me. They could make me feel more free and yet off to work I go as a slave to the system just like most people. What to do that is the question. At the end of the day all you can do is slog on and do the best you can.

And as my wife says look at the sunflowers they are happy flowers.

There is a ‘saying backyard chickens are good for eggs, for the garden for the environment.’

But the real reason I keep them is they are good for the kids. We get a good number of eggs and some serious amounts of manure and compost from them but if I look at the cost of feed we are probably only just slightly in front on all this.

The level of self sufficiency is great and the eggs do taste better but nothing beats my two and half year old asking me ‘can we get the eggs’ and then helping me to lock up the girls.

Being a bit of a permi (permaculture wanna be) I have tried to build the chickens into my backyard structure. I have put my chickens right up in the back corner out of the way. Some of the advocates of permaculture would argue this is in the wrong zone but with such a small back yard (1/8 of acre) I only have two zones to play with (three if you count the fact I am espaliering all the fences with tree’s and putting some more on the front nature strip) so I have put it right up in the back corner.

I did this as chicken runs can smell and are a bit messy especially in the wet times and my wife is a city girl and prefers it to be out of the way. On the upside I have structured my back yard so that when anyone lets out the chickens, lock them up at night or collect the eggs they have to all through the main garden area’s so you often end up coming back with cucumbers, tomatoes, figs or berries of one type or another along with a couple of eggs.

I will go over how I built the run and how I feed and keep the chickens in another post along with a couple of easy suggestions for people to keep them in their back yard and how not to let the most destructive creature to a garden know to man loose on your private world.

 This is the first post of the blog I am going to try to maintain on the adventures and sometimes lack of in trying to live a green life in the fair city of Melbourne Australia.

I have a modest goal initially to post everyday for March 2012 as a start working on the principle that 30 days of doing something develops a habit.