Olive time

It's olive time again in Perth, so I went out picking today. My favourite verge tree is loaded again after a year off and the owner said no worries to pick from it. I picked 20kg for pickling in just one hour!

This should last us a year (we like olives in our family). I went to the supermarket and checked out how much this would cost me out of interest. The cheapest olives were $4 for 500g. This means my hour's work, plus a couple more for processing, has saved me $160. And they're organic and local produce, unlike the supermarket stuff...

My pickling method is described here, it's pretty simple and easy. When they're ready I don't even jar them up, I just leave the bucket under the kitchen table and scoop some out with a slotted spoon.

Don't be put off by the scummy look, once you rinse the olives they're yummy.

Twilight on the Horizon

After helping out at such an awesome and busy event as Less is More, you'd think I'd be hanging up the gazebo for a bit...but no, between my work, my family and my love of community gardening, we lurch on to the next wonderful event. The next one is the Twilight Fair and its a biggie. Its our annual Hilton Harvest celebration and this will be the fourth one, and no doubt the best!

My sister coordinates it and I'm her right hand woman. Its a really fun thing to do together. Sarah gets all fired up about it around November and makes a crazy mindmap of everything we need to do on the back of her kids pre-primary drawings. This becomes our one, precious planning document for the next four months. Generally, the idea is to sort out funding from the City of Fremantle and LotteryWest (which is usually approved no more than three weeks before the event!) and then con a few friendly locals into coordinating stalls, making flyers, baking, singing and dancing on the day. A few hundred emails later and it all falls in to place. And this is what it looks like; community at its best. Fun, free, wholesome, home.

We are super excited to have Wadumbah Indigenous Dance performing this year. They are also doing workshops with the kids at Hilton Primary School beforehand so they can help in the performance on the night - Its going to be fun! 

We also have kids woodworking, craft activities, an awesome pirate, a whole evening of entertainment with various bands, choirs, dancers, and musicians - event a string quartet! There is a scarecrow competition, an 'ask a gardening expert' table and cargo bike rides plus heaps of lovely food. We love our little event and made a conscious decision to keep it small and local. We only allow local, not-for-profit groups to have stalls so you wont find any coke for sale or any corporate plastic give aways. We run our own washing up stand so there is no plastic disposable cutlery or plates. 

Its great for the community to get together to just have a chance and celebrate. We've decided that our aim is not to raise money (though it does add a few grand to the bank account) but its more about getting people into the garden and into the spirit of things. 

I have to be honest and say that its a whole lot of work and Ads and Quin do suffer for the cause - not to mention my housework or my own garden. But to me, its worth it. We want to raise our boy in a community where people know each other and were there is a place to be outside and be creative. Organizing the fair and being involved in the garden makes me talk to heaps of people I would not otherwise even ever meet. It opens doors and makes life richer. And THAT is worth celebrating! Come along if you're in town!

Book Review - Living the Good Life by Linda Cockburn

I've decided to do the odd book review on the blog which is funny because I read very slowly and I don't really like books. But that means the ones that make it to the blog will be well worth it. I promise to only review books I've read all the way through.

I do like some books. Its novels I don't like. I am too feeble of heart to handle all the emotions. Its hard enough in life to deal with real people (self included), let alone made up ones. I mean, I can handle Bridget Jones's Diary but Captain Corelli's Mandolin; no, Catch 22; forget it. I also think its a waste of my time reading novels where the end of the story is already written. With the non-fiction stuff I'll review here, its about learning what is going on in our world and then feeling empowered to do something about it. We, good people, are the ones who will be writing the end to this story of our troubled world.

So to the review. Living the Good Life by Linda Cockburn (2006) is one of the two books that changed our lives (the second book review is coming...). I read it quite a few years ago now, but still enjoy flicking through it. The book is about a family in Queensland who go for six months without spending any money in order to be kind to the plant, kind to their bodies and to experience all the other beneficial spin offs the 'experiment' might entail. Linda calls it an experiment in 'domestic sustainability' rather than self sufficiency because that ' implies 'going it alone' or turning away from the world'. They provide what the family needs by growing it, using animals, using solar panels and water tanks and bartering (apart from exemptions like the mortgage and medical bills) all on a large suburban block of 2180 square metres. The family had been planning the experiment for a good few years before hand and had established fruit trees and other infrastructure already in place, as well as many skills like bread making, gardening and so on. Linda's partner is a genius at making/fixing/inventing all sorts of things in his 'recycling centre'. 

From me it gets five and a half stars out of five:

• One star because despite the fact this family is 100% amazing they are lovable, fallible and human: 'Caleb ate the last of the chocolate today...I feign disinterest as Caleb ate it while secretly hyperventilating.' I would do that but I was also inspired to think one day I could have a goat of my own too, damn it. 
• The second star is because it is simply beautifully written. 
• The third star is for geeky respect. The book is so well researched with facts about everything from the nutritional information of snails to the effects of volatile organic compounds (VOC's) to the specs on various types of hot water systems. 
• The fourth star is for its humor
• The fifth star is for all the doable tips and recopies
• The half star is because it was a life changer. I love her final comments, 'Your actions will not save the world. Who cares, it was never the goal. It's about doing the things that are within your power to do. That's all you can do. Don't think of it as an obligation, think of it as an adventure.'

Linda also keeps a blog, Living the Good Life and has a facbook page, both well worth checking out. 

The chook pooped on a book

I had to take my chook to work the other day. She is a beautiful girl and was needed for a photo shoot in the Grove Community Centre to promote the Less is More Festival. She was very well behaved and smiled when asked by the photographer.

However, she did poop. On a book. But we cleaned it up and the lovely staff at the library didn't seem to mind so much. And it resulted in a fantastic article on page 5 of the local paper - my chook and Lindsay Miles posing for the festival!

I absolutely love my job because I get to hang out with some amazing people and learn so much about living more sustainably. I spent all of Saturday at the Less is More Festival which was coordinated by Lindsay (an Earth Carers volunteer). With help from us in the office she gathered around 22 volunteer presenters and around 17 support volunteers to hold a day of rolling workshops and activities designed to help people live more sustainably and consciously. The festival is in its third year and 2014 was the best yet! I'm not sure if it was because we had some extra funding from Lotterywest for advertising or if people are just into it more, but there were hundreds and hundreds of people there. The nice thing about this year was that there were a lot of ordinary looking western suburbs folks who might not have been exposed to DIY toothpaste or composting much before. Lindsay specifically marketed the festival at everyone, not just our beloved hippies. I feel we really struck a chord with lots of people and we have been able to get the 'Full lives, empty bins' message out there.

I didn't take any photos on the day - I missed the chance to get one of Adam doing his fruit tree talk. He gave away a banana tree to a very happy chappy. And I did my usual on composting.

The festival was a lot of work, but its such a buzz to be able to share our passions with others and to get such a positive response from the community! My friend (and sometimes parallel blogger) Lindsay has popped some pics on her blog, so rather than duplicate here is the link to Treading My Own Path.

Renos a go go

We started doing some renovations in December and now that we're back things are really starting to happen. Our plan is to build a new room separate from the house out the back, with an outdoor bathroom, a big solar pergola and a wooden deck.

So far we have 6 big steel posts in, these are the supports for the pergola. The pergola slopes up to the north and will have solid tin in one area and clear sheeting in another. Underneath the clear sheeting we will have adjustable louvres to enable us to block or let in light depending on the time of year. Hopefully we will get lots of light coming into the house in winter to warm us up...

We have a pad for the new room and bathroom, it's polished concrete and looks quite nice.

Most of the timber for the walls is on now too. This is the new room looking south east. The room is about 3m by 5m and will be for visitors to stay in and for Quin when he gets older. It will have a kitchenette, with a sink, kettle and toaster. One of the steel posts is inside the room so we're hiding it inside a cupboard.

We have moved some jarrah door/windows from the main house to the new room and replaced them with aluminium framed doors and windows. We swapped them over because the jarrah frame has the wrong type of glass for north facing since it blocks all the warmth, but is perfect for a western aspect. The new windows in the house have Low E glass which is much better suited to a northern aspect. Eventually we may replace the floor boards out the back with a pad for thermal mass to store heat in winter.

This is the new room with jarrah door/windows. There are also banks of louvre windows in the corner and next to the kitchen area.

The post-hiding cupboard and kitchen area.

The outdoor bathroom will be beautiful (much nicer than the indoor one). We got cast iron slipper bath half price (it was a bit chipped during shipping but has been re-enameled), so that will be the centrepiece, plus we'll have a separate shower and it will all run into the relocated grey water system. The chooks can even watch us having a shower!

We'll keep you posted as work progresses.

Sporkless

Before we even made it through the gates our plastic free travel attempt was a fail. All my home made potions (toothpaste, hair treatments, coconut oil, essential oils etc) had to go in snap lock bags. This was super annoying, but in truth it's lucky because some did leak. I had my toothpaste and my dandruff potion in the same bag during the flight. Before touchdown I went to freshen up and brush my teeth. Something had leaked and I assumed it was my toothpaste, and so as not to waste any I scooped it up from the bottom of the bag. Of course it was my dandruff potion. Fail 1. Yuck. 

The rest of the journey was just as bad. I knew it would be. It was actually atrocious. All our food was wrapped in plastic, even the bread roll. Thinking we were doing the right thing we refrained from opening all the little packages hoping they would be saved for another traveller. In this process we realised that two of our three bamboo sporks were still at home in our kitchen draw. Fail 2. I was curious to know if our efforts to not open things were worth it, so I asked the staff. Alas EVERYTHING, opened or unopened, gets chucked after each meal. Sporkless and dejected we opened all of our meals, at least we were not wasting the food now. 

We also could not resist the lollies on take off and landing. Fail 3. 

We did have some wins though. Quincey turned down two Sponge Bob kids activity packs. I was very proud of him. He was impressed enough with unlimited access to screens. 

  

We also found it useful to ask staff to fill our stainless steel water bottles to avoid their plastic disposable ones. We refused the tea/coffee stirring pack - it occurred to me that you could BYO milk powder if you can stand the camping tea taste. This would avoid the tiny UHT milk packs. 

Our final fail was self imposed. We were tired, confused and exhausted. Hence the bottle of gin, complete with foam non breaky thing and an enormous snap lock bag. Things can only get better. 

Hello Qatar, goodbye Qatar

After a ten hour flight we we are about to touch down in Qatar. I don't even really know where Qatar is. I mean I've looked it up on a map - it's a gulf state, but that's all I know about it. Yet the pilot is welcoming us. Looking out over the city the lights look like some weird luminous mother board. I can't make out what the lights might be. Maybe they the are of mine sites or perhaps residential compounds. But what is more mysterious is the black space in between the lights. Maybe that is where Qatar's unique culture dwels, modest and timeless. Where the lights are sparse they could be stars. Hang on. Sink back in the seat. Breath. Stars are up, lights and land below. The truth is that this country is as unknown to me as the rest of the universe. I feel struck by this. Maybe it's because we are such seldom travellers I think it's strange to be so transient. Does all this travel we enjoy today really facilitate cultural exchange? Not for us and Qatar. Hello, goodbye. I like your shiny airport.