Category Archives: Urban Hippie Philosophy

Taking Stock

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So Today was our famers market day. We go to the farmers market at Bundoora stock up on good meat, small goods, cheeses and a week or two of any fresh vegies that we don’t grow or swap that are on offer.

Today before I headed off I did a fridge and freezer clean out and stock take to check what I needed and to ensure that I did not waste anything, or buy things I already have.

We have some changes coming to our house as we retro fit it for conserving energy and the power will be off for a few days to a week so one of the plans is to clean out the freezer. It will also not hurt to process what I have in there, either by cooking it or it processing it for alternate storage such as bottling/canning drying etc. I like most people can rely a bit too much on the freezer  and while a very useful tool for improving self-sufficiency we should remember that at the end of the day it costs us to run whereas bottled fruit or a pack of dried mushrooms can sit there for a couple of years and not cost me a penny.

It is also going to help our budget as well. The retro fit is not going to be cheap but by my calculations we are pretty much setup for the bulk of meals for the next couple of months.

So it might be a good chance for everyone to see what they have in their larder, fridge or freezer and ensure that all nothing is going to go to waste.

Once done I have cleaned out my freezer I will be putting in a good chunk of a whole pig I am buying in the freezer in May to see how I go with it as my primary source of animal protein for the winter. But I will also be processing some into smoked bacon, salami and prosciutto as I have said I want to reduce that reliance on the freezer and keep it as simple as I can  which will help my budget and hopefully the world at large.

To this end tomorrow I will start to plant my bed in the community garden with winter veg. After all if you can grow and harvest it as you go then you are even better off than storing it in the end.

taking stock 001-2000

A Year of Blogging as NOTANURBANHIPPIE

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So a year ago today I started this blog. In that time I have put through 91 blog posts or roughly one every 4 days but that is not entirely accurate as I have had a lot on and have not blogged much in the last couple of months. I have noticed that a lot of the blogs I follow have been a bit quiet of late not just this one. I am not sure if it is cyclical being high summer here and winter in the northern hemisphere and people have other things to do in high summer and less in winter or if people have just got on with their own lives or something entirely differently. Either way I have missed the tales of many of these people’s journeys and look forward to them continuing their tales in the future and hearing what they have to say.

What I have noticed is that despite not blogging I am often thinking of a blog. Doing this blog has and does impact the way I look at the world and not in a bad way.

 I have not really changed my views of the world or of the fact that if I am not blogging about it, I am getting out there and living the dream. And my desire is to still live that sustainable dream I have and teach my children to enjoy life as they go.

I am still tracking along on the sustainable path and still interested in everything I can learn but like all parents with children I find the path gets a bit bogged down with life J The back yard is both a mess and yet more productive than a year ago so that cannot be a bad thing.

I have already booked a course in April on sustainable building with the folks at Milkwood Permaculture  , I am a part of a community garden, Andrea is working on here bees and the kids love to get out in the back yard and enjoy life. Sabrina even has a bee suite and joins her mother in bee keeping. Yes life is good.

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As I have said I do enjoy the blogging as such I will continue and it is with this in mind that I have decided to try to replicate the first month of blogging and put up a blog up each day for March.

Just to get myself moving along as much as anything else.

Look forward to any comments and hope you all enjoy.

Making it a bit easier – Laying Boxs on the easy

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Like it or not we all lead very busy lives and the amount time we can get things done in impacts on what else we can get done.

Time should be treated as, as much of a resource as water, soil or anything else required to live your life. And it is very much a non renewable resource, once gone it will not be back. The effective use of that time is what allows us to enjoy the sit down and the time spent with kids, family and friends.

I harp on about how every dollar is time out of your life the less you have to spend the less you have to make the more time you have to enjoy yourself. Pretty simple equation.

I try to tackle the regular jobs that need to be done as efficiently as I can. Getting the setup of this helps out a lot and I was reminded of this morning when I needed to clean out the chickens laying box’s before work.

needs to be cleaned

For a lot of years I had an old 44 gallon drum that I used to use as a chicken laying box in my chicken run. It was something I inherited from my sister with her chickens when she moved north. It sort of worked as the rest of my chicken run was from recycled hard waste. It kept the chickens out of the way and provided them with a space to lay in. The problem with it was that to clean it out was a pain. It meant that I had to reach all the way in and drag out the old straw. The task was messy and unpleasant as you ended covered in dust and chicken manure. It was also time consuming and the combination meant it happened a little less often than would be optimal.

The other big problem was that it was dark and had lots of nooks and crannies could easily lead to lice and other pests not being cleared out of the laying box allowing for reinfestation.  

When I mentioned this process clean out process to a girl at work she said her dad of Sicilian decent just used large plastic pots as laying boxes. Easy to clean easy to handle and can be washed out and left to dry in the sun giving the nasties a good dose of UV to kill them off.

I had no spare large pots but I did have some large plastic barrels used for importing olives that I had picked up.

So I cleared out the old 44 gallon drum out of the shed and cut the plastic barrel in half and washed it out thoroughly and viola as below I had laying box’s setup. A board at the front to stop the chicken kicking out the straw and it was finished.

Where as before the clean out took 15-20 minutes of messy work the clean out now takes 30 seconds dump the contents into the compost bin.

emptied out

Give them a quick squirt out with water if required and dry. emptie out and ready for straw

Fill with straw and done. Maybe two minutes on average and can be done in my work clothes without any worry of getting messed up.

all clean

Mine are on the ground as my birds seem to prefer not to roost but you could easily put them on a shelf up a bit higher if you wanted to as they weigh next to nothing.

I am going to be sharing a few ideas on my chicken run. Partially because i promised it when i started this blog but also my friend Libby from libby cooks is building a new chicken run so it seems like an opportune time to post on the subject.

Much to do …

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I have the day off from my day time job and a list of things to do.

Sheds to clean up, wicking beds to build, shelves to make.

And yet I suffer from the dilemma that we all often feel of the flatness. I could blame the weather it has been all over the place and is currently quite cold. I could blame having travelled and competed in a martial arts seminar for 4 days or the running around we did yesterday with my family to make up for the 4 days. But at the end of the day there is little point in blaming anything. I am making some sourdough cheese toasties and making another coffee, writing this and then I will start.

 

sourdough toastie

I remember reading an article in which they had a quote from one of the rural class who moved to the greater cities in England in the early part of the industrial age. He discussed that the standard of his life had improved in a material sense. Material things he could never have afforded before, greater food security and education for his children. But one of the negatives that he mentioned struck a chord with me. He discussed the grinding shifts day and night, how on the land he could sit back and relax for 4 days and then for the last 3 work long hours to get everything done. The natural rhythm of his life of all of our lives. But in his industrial job he started by the clock and finished by the clock day in day out. Good days bad days productive days less so it was all driven by the machines he worked with. He found it tiring and draining.

So today I will eat my toasty drink my coffee and get what I can get done while I remind myself I am a man not a machine.

But it doesn’t look the same as the bought one…

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Today I went looking for a meal to make. We will be getting the back area shelled in March and I need to clean out the freezer in preparation for this and my pig in the box experiment for next winter. I still had a frozen rooster I had killed dressed a while ago when my father had given me a few more than planned.

fowl

hile I cooked up a Spanish stew of chicken and chorizo (recipe below) and number one son watched me cook as mum and sis where at a party the look of the home butchered chicken caught my eye. Here was no plump rounded chicken of perfect proportions skin snow white and ready to roast. No here was lean rangy bird frozen out of perfect proportions but I knew that this less perfect frozen thing would have a taste that the perfect chicken could never surpass.

It reminded me of an article I had read on the waste of food in the world being as high as 50%. One of the items that caught my eye as a ‘reason’ for the waste was that the food was not perfect or umblemished. What is this word perfect? In a world where we waste 50% of our food on stuff like not perfect I think we need to take a nice big reality check here people. Sadly even those who have  claimed to have grasped the idea have looked at the less than perfect food the carrots not quite the right shape the marked fruit on the trees even the tomato not quite round and perfect and red or even this chicken and turned up their nose. Everyone wants to be good but be able to have their old ways and requirements at the same time. Doesn’t work that way I am afraid people.

But you can’t blame them. You see the celebrity chefs turning out perfect food with perfect ingredients that are same as those you can buy in the supermarket but are better, more organic more local more of everything but they look the same…

If we are going to be living more local then we are going to be eating a lot less perfect food but it will be a lot better for us and damn side better for the earth and the plants and beasts on it.

And the result is below. Tastes fantastic. Still not perfect to most people after all where else are you going to get the neck served up as part of your meal and boy if you have not eaten the neck cooked like this you have missed out.

plated

Chicken and Chorizo Casserole

  • One chicken cut up or the equivalent in pieces
  • 5 chorizo sliced into pennies
  • 4-5 finely diced onions
  • 5-10 garlic gloves sliced thinly
  • 4-5 carrots diced
  • 4-5 bay leaves
  • 2 table spoons of good smoky paprika
  • Salt and pepper to taste
  • Chilli to taste
  • Can of tomato
  • 2 cups of white wine
  • 2 table spoons of plain flour in a cup of cold water.
  • Handfull of olives

Fry off chicken pieces in sunflower oil, put aside. Fry off the onions, add the diced carrots bay leaves, garlic and paprika fry until the onion just start to cover. Remove from the pot. Fry off the chorizo and when nicely browned add back in the chicken and onion mix. Add the other ingredients with the exception of the flour mix. Simmer for an hour or so then add the flour mix and simmer for another 10 minutes or so until the flour is cooked off and the sauce thickened. Serve with rice and few olives on top.

My what a busy year you have had.

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My what a busy year you have had.

Well it has been a very, very, very busy year.

As I am sitting here having eaten a nice meal home cooked with my family and knocking back a nice cold elderberry champagne I must admit I am pretty content.

Not complacent just content. I wandered around my back yard this evening thinking I need to do this. I need to do that but I reminded myself of the many things I have done.

In some ways the approach I am taking to lighten my step on the earth is working but it is still way too heavy. I am not the worst or the best and if the whole world lived like me we would be in trouble. Conversely if the whole of Australia lived like me we would perhaps be starting down a better road (just my opinion here).

So where to from here? Well for me I intend to keep going. I have a number of things I would like to do this year as listed below but one of things I will do is take more time to spend with my family.

While I was always interested in the world and the long term living of within means, my children bring home why I have to continue to change.  For anyone reading this it is a long term thing. Each day you look at the world a little differently and hopefully a little better.

Achievements this year.

  • Garden more productive than last year.
  • Passive solar changes for the house underway
  • Front yard full of idea’s (most would call it full of junk)
  • 87 posts on this blog (some of them readable)
  • Lots of good meals with friends and family
  • Some bartering for services.
  • Lots of plant swaps.
  • Most of my seedlings self grown (or bartered)
  • New skills such as salami making, meat curing and stone carving learnt
  • A lot of booze brewed (some of it even drinkable – cheers)
  • Foraging skills for plants, materials etc  increased.
  • Bees in the back yard
  • Started a few people on the road to growing their own gardens
  • A reconnection to local food through the garden, the ceres box, and the cheese and tofu coop.
  • And mostly two happy little kids who love the world.

It is short list but there is a good number of things to be happy for I think.

For next year

  • Shed move
  • Retaining walls.
  • Retro fit the house for energy saving
  • The new plot in the community garden
  • More garden beds
  • Cellar space
  • Harvest Honey
  • Hot house
  • More time with my family and of course…
  • two happy little kids who love the world 

This list is shorter as more things will creep in and the last two items will be a strong focus. Time spent smelling the roses and enjoying friends and family more.

I still had to work tonight and again tomorrow, a reminder of the bad old days for me in the corporate world but I am starting see that there is some light at the end of the tunnel. Happy to be working at the end of the day and working towards the rest of my goals

May you all have a great new years and safe break (if you are having one) see you all next year (yes that is tomorrow)

New Years Eve Dinner (yes it can be a food blog at times)

Chicken

  • 3 or 4 chicken thighs (you can use breast fillets but thigh are better flavour and will not dry out so much)
  • 2 table spoons fish sauce
  • 1 table spoon of soy sauce
  • Juice of 1 lime
  • Table spoon of water
  • 3 cloves of garlic crushed
  • Teaspoon of fresh chilli
  • Walnut sized piece of ginger grated
  • 4 or 5 spring onions sliced up.
  • 1 teaspoon of brown sugar (or coconut sugar)
  • 1 table spoon sesame oil

Put the chicken breasts in foil and pour over the rest of the ingredients you have mixed in a jug. Wrap up and seal the tin foil and cook in an oven at 170 degree Celsius for around 30 to 45 minutes (breast fillets 30 minutes, thighs longer)

Meat will fall off the bone and both children where getting right into it.

Salad

  • 1 cucumber sliced on grater slicer
  • 1 zucchini sliced on grater slicer
  • 1 carrot peeled and sliced with a peeler in long strips
  • 1 tablespoon of flaked almonds (I ran out tonight)

Mix vegetables together and season with macadamia/olive oil, vinegar salt and pepper  leave for a while then toss in the almonds prior to serving.

Works very well mixed together on a plate with chicken meat, and steamed rice.

Merry Christmas to All

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Well it is Christmas and I have been just a tad busy with the month to post anything.

Enjoying the season at my parents place with family drinking elderflower champagne and just chilling.

I will be back on board soon and posting again. I have few things to update on including a new plot in a community garden. As you can see from the photo below it is a clean slate and I am looking forward to permi it and get production up and running.

Hope you all have a great Christmas. Enjoy family and enjoy life.

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Days of Sunshine

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This has been a good weekend spent with the family and doing small but import (well to me) things.

I have had a great time with A. and the kids we went to a community market, ate great food had friends over for dinner, some awsome urban salvaging and even had a short notice visit by my parents and grandmother.

With the weather being so good on the weekend and some serious manic drive we have got through a number of projects which I will cover off on posts this week.

The thing that struck me was these where days of sunshine for me. The kinds of days that I would love to see more of in my life. Time spent with kids and doing things in the back yard with A. and family. Simple food from the garden or locally produced and siesta’s.

Tomorrow I have to return to my job. And while I have previously posted that the job is not too bad and most people on this planet would swap their life for mine in a heartbeat (and I still believe this). I still do feel that the corporate life is not doing me any or most other people in it any good.

It perhaps reinforces in my mind those changes I need to make so the days of sunshine are the greater part of my days.

Have great week all and enjoy.

Of Mallow and Strawberries

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On Sunday I went and did the excellent Adam Grubb of Very Edible Gardens edible weed walk.

I am interested in foraging and already do some foraging eating nettles and wild fennel, converting sticky weed into bio fertilizer, getting into wild foraged elder and other trees. I have known about dock and dandelion and have eaten them before but wanted to improve my knowledge of the food options that we underestimate and are so widely available. Being self-sufficient is a part of what I am looking at and this is just one small part of the puzzle.

I won’t go into details as to individual plants in this post as this is an area that you are best to go and do a course with or/and get mentored and learn this important skill safely. I have done a courses with Ballarart Permaculture Guild and now with Adam and feel a level of comfort with what I know and don’t know (and have posted on things like nettles) but even then I use a field guide to check things out I am 100% sure of it.

Adam said at the start that you will look at the average plot of grass and weeds a bit differently after the course and yes this is certainly the case and last night I spotted about 5 different edible weeds in my back yard that there was good mallow plant up near the strawberries. So while the 3 year old got stuck into picking the strawberries I picked a handful of mallow buds or mallow cheese as they are known.

They have a nice crunchy texture and taste not unlike edame. So Sabrina and I brought in the strawberries to share and after seeing me eat the mallow she asked to to try it and low and behold she loved them eating them over the strawberries (she can be a strange child at times 🙂 )but she did then clean up the strawberries when the mallow was all done 🙂

Our rule is that you don’t have to eat a meal but you do have to try it and I am glad that this is now coming out in my daughter being willing to try anything.

So go out and learnt some new skills and learn to forage (and do it safely) and if like me you have a family then you might just manage to influence that next generation to something just a bit more sustainable.

So you bought nothing new in October … Big Deal?

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So we finished buy nothing new in October a few days ago and it was an interesting experience.

In some ways enlightening in a lot of ways quite scary.

Yes we ended up using our exemptions. Andrea got all her bee equipment and I ended up getting a roll of bird netting other than that there were a few items we purchased that fell out of the exemption but not many but they are listed below.

  • Plastic cups for the kids
  • New sandals for the kids for the hot weather we had
  • Potting mix for seedlings

I found it easy once I got into the rhythm of it and found that I actually enjoyed the way it made me sit back and think about things. I can be a bit (LOT) driven to get things done and sometimes rather than finding something I already have I will like most people rush forward to bunnings or another store to get the items to get the job done to rush around some more. I very quickly realized all that the time spent charging around to get the items was greater than the time saved and I got more done by not running off to buy things ‘to save time’.

One of the main examples of this was pots. October is a major seedling time in our part of the world leading into summer September/October is the busiest time for us. As I couldn’t buy any trays or pots this year I had to go looking and find the ones I had and find new ways to grow things.

When I went looking a just kept finding plastic pots, in the back yard, in my shed, under my house. I am not only setup for this year but next and onward. I also trialed using old toilet rolls and other small cardboard items as seedling posts which has worked out brilliantly and will be repeated every year. I may or may not have done these without the buy nothing new month but it brought it into clarity and made me try things.

Equally we have tended to buy a lot of plastic box’s to store stuff and use the cardboard box’s as either weed suppressant in the back yard or it goes into recycling. Using them to store things while cleaning up the spare room (read old storage room/son’s new room) has been good we have looked at the boxes now as a resource for reuse. And as we have bought nothing new these are from work or family or friends. We now look at boxes and go ‘ooh that is a good one for this or that’. I also stored things in boxes freeing up the plastic boxes for better uses.  It is quite ridiculous what we waste in this society and what can be reused.

While I enjoyed it and so did A. She found it a little harder particularly with the children but she admitted it was good to not go looking in shops for stuff. In time I think she would have got into the rhythm of second hand stores but at the end of the day the buy nothing new month is a short time we have enough that we don’t really need to buy things for a month in this rich society.

I have built both my garden shed and the chicken run out second hand materials found as hard waste. It took time as you are not working with standard materials and this will seem odd to many when you can just duck down to the store and buy a tin shed and put it up pretty quickly. In a lot of countries what I have built from is better than what many people have to build their homes.

I saw a show on a refugee camp and one of the things that really struck me was the bucket repairer.  A plastic bucket here in Australia cost me about 40 seconds of earning time. If they break most people here would just throw them out. But this guy reworked them and repaired them and kept parts to repair another. Given the embodied energy in the item yet again the third world through necessity is doing what the rest of us should be doing by default.

This is not for everyone and it will be a long time before most Australians are forced to do it by cost (and I hope we never really get there as by that stage the already dire situation for the guy repairing buckets is going to be terminal) but it is something we should be doing as we have the greatest impact on the planet through our profligate and stupidly wasteful ways.

Perhaps a better way for us in the first world is to use our wealth to purchase items that last longer and are more ethical and really show the value of that embodied energy and resources. We purchased handmade Italian leather boots some time ago. Yes they were expensive but they have lasted through our daughter and now our son and looking like they will last should the plan of a third come to fruition and then go to friends or family. Put your value into that embodied energy and allow those not so wealthy in the world to do what they need to do to get by.

At the end I was a bit surprised that we didn’t rush out and buy stuff. We didn’t seem to need to. Yes A. bought some clothes but that more to do with a giant growing baby and a wedding we had to attend than just shopping withdrawal symptoms.

So where to from here?

I enjoyed it and would like to do this for a quarter next time and see how it goes but it will require careful negotiation at the end of the day I am in a family and a relationship and forcing your own views on people is just being a zealot and that does not help change anything.

What I can do is to work on myself and fixing that up first. I am not sure if I will ever get to the point of my neighbor who would not spend by his own accounting more than 10% of his wage on new stuff and I will most certainly never ever get to the guy who repairs buckets but as I play peekaboo and chasey with my son in between writing this post I am reminded that is what I personally have many reasons to try.