Saturday morning

Saturday morning is precious family time. As a rule, Quin snuggles in bed with us then Ads gets up before us and grinds the coffee. We are not huge coffee drinkers but enjoy it as a Saturday morning treat with crepes. I'm tempted from my warm snuggles with the sound if Ads grinding coffee beans in my granny's old grinder.

 

We don't have any fancy fly-you-to-the-moon coffee machines with pods, cup warming plates or frothy milk makers and that's the way I like it. Saturday morning is a time to savour, not rush. Especially if it comes with fresh crepes, sugar split on the  floor, and cuddles on the kitchen. 

Chokos

Chokos (aka chayote, from Mexico), are they the answer to world hunger and climate change? Well, maybe that's stretching it a bit far! However, chokos are probably one of the easiest and most productive vegies (although it is technically a fruit) you can grow in Australia.

They are in the cucurbit family and have a similar taste and texture to squash and zuchinni. It has high levels of amino acids and vitamin C. We found out about them when we were over east a few years back and have been trying to get seeds ever since. Then we found out that they don't grow from seed but from the fruit itself. I've never come across it in Perth. We went down south a few weeks ago and saw some at the Manjimup farmer's markets, so we bought a couple. One has started to sprout so it'll go in the ground soon. We've decided to rip out our perennially disappointing passion fruit and use its trelissing to grow the choko up.

Ok, it's not the prettiest thing around and lots of people dismiss it as only good for animal fodder but I actually like it, especially if you pick it small. That's when it's sweetest. It is perennial and doesn't suffer from mildew apparently, unlike the zuchinni which can be a pain to grow.

If it's a winner we plan to tell everybody in WA about it to spread the word. We'll report back on its progress.

What do patches mean to you?

A few mornings ago I had no school trousers for Quin to wear to school. Were they on the clothes line? No. Were they in a crumpled heap in the corner? No. Were they accidental put in the wrong draw? No. They were all in the mending basket. Why? Because my 6 year old prefers to get from point A to point B mainly by rolling and crawling, ninja style, which leaves gaping holes in the knees of his trousers (at least its not his knees!). I was left with two choices; Target or patching (there is a third choice here involving going over to Mum's to use her fancy machine, or even better having her mend our clothes on her fancy machine - I'd make the tea...but this was urgent). So, of course, I dragged out the old faithful Singer sewing machine. 

Often I try to patch with the fabric on the inside and then just zig zag like crazy. Its not as noticeable as a full on patch on the outside. But this time, I went for fully visible and proud pirate patches. 

And as I was zig zagging away I was thinking 'why doesn't everyone do this?'. I think its because we are too worried about what a patch means. I think we no longer value thrift or kooky creativity which a patch can symbolise. Or worse than thrift, maybe a patch means downright poverty. 

To me it means none of that. These patches, the six that I sewed over ripped knees of school trousers mean 'Get stuffed Target!'. They mean 'up yours Kmart'. They say 'no' to fast fashion where billions of items are made in third world countries with un-unionised workforces, then sold to us cheaply ('Ooh lets get one of each colour!'), then chucked because its poor quality or we just don't fancy it any more. I love patches and so does my boy. 

Okay, he does look a little bit povo because I was in a rush and didn't even bother hemming the edges, but you gotta admit, he looks happy!

Spraying the almond tree for shothole fungus

This year we got a good crop of almonds but every single one was shrivelled up and yucky. I later found out that this was due to shothole fungus and that it's very common in backyard trees. The give away sign is leaves with small round holes in them (hence the name) and dots of gum oozing out of the nuts. So this year I'm keen to get on top of it and it turns out it's not too hard. You need to spray the tree with a fungicide such as bordeaux or copper oxychloride. Many people think of spraying fruit trees as evil but there are many sprays which fall into the category of organic so I don't have a problem with it myself. I would much rather have a productive tree using organic/benign sprays than an unproductive 'spray free' tree.

Our almond tree is just starting to flower so I sprayed today and will follow it up with a repeat spray at budswell stage. Spray when the branches are dry and rain is not expected for six hours.

Hopefully we'll have our first good, edible crop in January 2014. I'll let you know of course!

Netting Brassicas

In Perth these little critters can turn your much loved brassicas in to lace. In seasons passed I've totally given up on broccoli and caulie crops because of them. In other parts of the world where its cooler frosts kill the moths and people are advised to wait until its really winter to avoid them, but here we have them all autumn, winter and spring. Bastards. 

We've tried a few hippy solutions like leaving egg shells or bread ties on sticks to repel the moths to no effect. I've sprayed with Success before and it does work pretty well, but I've been keen to try a greener solution - that works! And here it is...netting them. I was so impressed with our apple netting last year, surely this will work to keep cabbage whites off the barrassicas. I used an old mozzie net that we never bother using and tied it up to the grape trellis. I weighed it down with bricks, but you could just as easily peg it.

It might look a bit strange but I really reckon it will work. The only problems I foresee is that:

1.  I may have been a bit late and there might already be eggs on the leaves that hatch in to hungry little caterpillars 

2. It might shade the plants too much. Even in winter Perth is pretty sunny so I'm hoping that it might just slow them down a little. 

3. I have to move the net to do any liquid fertilizing and (hopefully) to harvest my bountiful unblemished broccoli. 

But its worth a shot. We love broccoli!

Blue Boogers

Quincey loves Scitech so Ads dutifully took him there this last school holidays. They watched a slime making demo and, lucky for parents, the recipe is online! But here are the basics:

1. Dissolve 5 g Borax (approximately 2 level teaspoons) into 100 ml warm water
2. Dissolve 3 g Guar Gum (approximately 1 slightly heaped teaspoon) into 150 ml warm water
3. Add 1 tablespoon of glycerol/glycerine to the guar gum solution
4. Add 3 drops of food colouring to guar gum solution.
5. While stirring, slowly add borax solution to guar gum solution. You will only need to add 30 – 50 ml of the borax. Continue stirring until the solution thickens!
6. Experiment with different concentrations of borax and guar gum solution to get different sorts of sliminess

It's exactly the same stuff I used to purchase when our parents let me and my cousin loose at the shopping center on my school holidays: Ghost Busters slime. The kind of slime that feels wet and doesn't stick to your hands but will totally ruin carpet. 

Awesome! We love it!

We made up a batch for Quin and a batch for a birthday pressie and I thought to myself, this is something all children should enjoy. So I think Quincey's next birthday party will be a slime themed party and we can make some up for all the kiddos so they can go home with slime instead of a landfill starter kit lolly bag. It's cheap, easy to make, minimal packaging and rates super high on the gross out/fun factor. Until it gets into the carpet. But kids are only kids for a short time, nice carpet is for retirement not parenthood. 

Going green: what's the payback?

Going 'green', or installing technologies which lower your footprint, is mostly done by people who are interested more in saving the planet than saving a dollar. This certainly applies to us. The perception for many is that being green is more costly, so I thought I'd show you how going green has lowered not only our ecological footprint but also our bills.

When we recently installed a grey water system it made me reflect on all the things we've done in the last five years. These include solar PV, rain water harvesting, solar hot water, cargo bikes and grey water. I added up the costs of the above and it came to $33,500, which is a lot of money. But how much will these technologies save us in the long run? Well, here are my best estimates:

system	cost		savings per year		payback (years)
PV	$6,500		$600		10.8
solar hot water	$3,500		$300		11.7
rain water	$10,000		$100		100.0
grey water	$4,500		$50		90.0
cargo bikes	$9,000		$5,000		1.8
Totals	$33,500		$6,050		5.5

There are some surprises in there and I'll explain each one.

First, PV. We have a 1.1 kW Kaneka thin film solar PV system. It generates more or less what we consume (4.5 kWh a day) and we feed in 75% of what we generate to the grid. We are lucky enough to qualify for a now defunct feed in tariff, which means we get paid 48 cents a kWh for power fed to the grid. This makes our bills around -$60 a year (credit) and our bill would be around $550 a year without PV, so we save around $600 a year. This means the system will pay itself off in about 11 years and after that we'll be saving money for another 15-30 years. This was obviously a good investment of $6,500.



Our solar hot system (a Solahart 180L thermosiphon system), cost $3,500 two and half years ago and it saves us around $300 on our gas bill. We boost a little bit between May and October, but this only costs us $20 a year in electricity. The payback time is very similar to PV.

Water is so cheap in WA that there is no way our rain water or grey water systems will ever pay for themselves. Both systems were quite expensive ($10,000 and $4,500 respectively). The 14,000L tank needed lots of digging and piping, new gutters etc to install and is piped into everything (whole house and retic). The Grey Flow system was less expensive and feeds a lawn and fruit trees.We harvest 70,000L of rain water a year and probably about 50,000L of grey water and you can see that the savings aren't great. However this isn't a big deal for us since we see these technologies as more of a society benefit than anything else. The more water we can generate the more water there will be in the dams and the less the need for desalination and ground water use (and the less power used to pump them around).







The bikes have almost paid for themselves already. How can that be I hear you say. Well thanks to the bikes we got rid of our second car, which cost us at least $5,000 a year to run. These are not your average bikes, they're both electric cargo bikes (one is a Bakfiets long, the other a retrofitted electric Workcycles Fr8). They're dutch and they'll probably last longer than me. They get us to work, to the beach, shopping, school runs and more.

So the payback time for all this is five and a half years, not bad eh? Obviously payback times will be different for everyone, depending on the costs and savings involved. However this shows quite clearly that going green can save you lots of money, especially if you invest in areas where you get the best bang for your buck.