more things in jars...

Recently we managed to gather quite the quantity of blackberries, enough to make jam. As I've discussed here before, I quite like playing the homemaker and preserving lots of things in jars. Oh don't worry I've analysed it and am fully aware of where my yearning to provide comes from. So while aware, I choose to ignore because, well, I just love it and so while Annie sews, I cook and preserve and it's one big happy crafty house really. Olive had her first foray into crochet this eve and the little boy next door was pretty keen to give it a try too so yep it's all just craft craft craft. Nauseating really. Oh but the blackberries were far from nauseating as Oscar can attest. Big and fat and sweet and just so rich in flavour...

I ended up using a composite of recipes for my entree to blackberry jam making and it worked a treat. I had around 10 cups of blackberries and added 8 cups of sugar and the juice of 2 lemons to them. I then left the beautiful sweet mass for a few hours.

After getting all juicy and delicious, it goes into a pot for cooking. Blackberries are a low pectin fruit and, mindful of this, I probably overdid the cooking a bit. All up, it bubbled away for a good 2 hours. We ended up with a very thick jam. Delicious as it is I might ease up on the cooking time next time around.

After this it goes into warm sterile jars. I learned a trick, for setting the seal, from Stephanie whereby you invert the warm jar filled with hot ingredients immediately. Once cool, you turn back the right way, press down the middle of the lid and the contents have sealed (unless the lid is faulty or too old).

So far so good, this jam has been enjoyed with butter on homemade banana bread, with butter on homemade apple and sultana bread and with butter (once again) on plain old wholemeal toast. Frankly all freaking delicious.

But once again our eating patterns reveal we need to get ourselves our own house cow quick smart. Some women we recently met have promised us their darling little Jersey in about a year's time. We are a butter loving family and local, organic butter seems impossible to come by so we need to get a move on and make our own with one of these. I love the way they promote this churn as making butter in just 30minutes! I guess there's something in that and not being one for exercise by design I am loving the idea of a regular workout in the pursuit of uber-creamy Jersey milk butter.

Speaking of cows, we have 25 cows grazing our land as I type. They belong to our neighbour. It's a lovely synchronicity - we are helping him by providing new feed for his cows and he is helping us as his cows will relieve us of some of our weed problem while simultaneously tramping and "fertilising" our block. This will help us as we start to plant things - indigenous natives that will contribute to a wildlife corridor, fruit trees and our Zone 1 kitchen garden. Ah but more on the tramping and fertilising in a later post.

In the meantime, we have excavators on their way and 150 strawbales to order and the tomato preserving continues. I am the bargain buyer of Bega, sniffing out almost rotting tomatoes for a bargain basement price and passata-ing it up in our kitchen. Some of those almost-rotten tomatoes found their way into a lovely slow cooked lamb, tomato and green bean stew this evening. As I chopped and cooked I had a moment of reflection regarding the provenance of all the ingredients. I felt pretty good as I realised everything had come from our local producers market. Then I realised that in a few years it will all come from our very own 7 acres. What a good day that will be.

On not reading properly

I have just had a pretty lovely evening. After a delicious dinner (Pearl's version of the Mexican bean and corn casserole from Feeding the Whole Family) we put the kids to bed (aren't they just the cutest when they're sleeping?) and set up for our evening of pleasurable tasks. I sat at the kitchen table sewing a skirt, then plaiting my rag rug, and Genevieve bottled her second round of tomatoes while we chatted and listened to Jesse Sykes, Hem, Jolie Holland and the Decemberists. All of this was beautiful, peaceful work at the end of our hectic day of working and taking kids to school and cooking and trying to decipher engineering drawings and thinking about building materials and generally being mums, and it was made even more beautiful, I think, by the sweet nectar that is my first batch of home-made-from-scratch ginger beer.

As soon as we moved to Bega I put down a batch of kit-form ginger beer. It was OK, and was well-received over summer, but I thought I could do better. So I tried this.

The recipe came from my mum's good friend Carol, and I was pretty bloody excited. I've been brewing for about 4 years now, and I absolutely love it. LOVE IT. But, aside from some experimentation with dried hops and cracked malted barley, have pretty much stuck to the kits. So seeing my little jar of ginger, sugar, sultanas and lemon juice fermenting away on the kitchen window sill and feeding it every day for a week was.. well.. it was exciting. I could see stuff happening in the jar. Crazy stuff! Well it seemed to me to be crazy (deliberate fermentation? What is with that??). But of course, fermentation is awesome, and a super-important and useful thing in the world - hello beer, which is only the most important example of good-shit-happening-as-a-result-of-fermentation.

But I digress. The little jar on the windowsill bubbled away and hungrily consumed the teaspoons of sugar and powdered ginger I fed it every day, until day 7, when it was time to bottle. I was a little apprehensive on account of the fact that my last batch of beer was a dud, so I was paranoid that something had gone awry in my bottling technique. But I proceeded to sterilise my bottles with the upmost care, filling them with love and caping them in beautiful gold caps.

Olive helpfully painted them all for me so I could tell them apart from my bottles of beer beer, which also have gold caps. Job well done. I was pleased with my efforts, all self-congratulatory and already counting down the days til I could have a taste. But then I had a closer look at my 'Helpful Kitchen Conversions' teatowel, which I had used to determine measurable quantities from the old-school measurements in the recipe. What's this? A pint is actually 20, not 40 fluid ounces??? How could this be?? How could I mistake a 2 for a 4? I did 4 unit maths in my HSC for crying out loud!

Big sigh. Excitement turned to disappointment as I anticipated another dud batch, though this one attributable to nothing more than the fact that I apparently can't read properly. But today, day 3 after bottling, I dutifully put a bottle in the freezer for chilling, just in case it was drinkable, despite the fact that it had twice the recommended amount of water in it.

It was better than drinkable. It was delicious!! Refreshing and sweet without being sickly (which it probably would have been with the 'correct' amount of water). Yay for not reading properly!!

So chaps, if you've ever thought about having a go at making ginger beer, don't worry about the kit. I just made 15 stubbies and 17 long necks of delicious ginger beer for less than 10 bucks. What a winner. The recipe above works, but you might want to try using a computer instead of a teatowel to work out your conversion rates.

PS. The photo above is of me squeezing out the 'plant' (jar of fermented stuff) in muslin, ready to mix with the sugar syrup and (too much) water. It was really fun - delicious-smelling and sensual (the stuff in the muslin felt AMAZING) and even though I know you can't smell or feel the photo, I thought it might act as an extra little prompt to encourage you to get to beer-making.

Introducing... The Rochelle

A few weeks after the birth of her third bubba, Rochelle is going to a wedding. As many of you may know, breastfeeding in a frock presents a unique set of challenges, which Rochelle has (hopefully) managed to circumvent by ordering herself a custom P&E breastfeeding-at-a-wedding-and-still-looking-quite-glamorous-and-lovely frock.

Rochelle picked out the fabric herself - a gorgeous voile - floaty and light and perfect for a bias-cut wrap dress. As you may have noticed I am a huge fan of the bias cut on account of the fact that it makes a pretty lovely fit. The main criteria for The Rochelle were that it made it easy for her to get her milk maids out when required, and that it fit nicely, but not too nicely, so that any remaining baby-carrying lumps and bumps weren't right out there on display. The bias and the wrap combine so beautifully to achieve both of these things, and also mean that the dress will be able to be worn even after Rochelle's body goes back to normal and it isn't imperative for her boobs to be coming out all the time. Win win!

Because of the lovely floatiness of the voile I knew I needed to pull out my very special rolled-hem-making sewing-machine foot.

I (obviously) don't know what the technical name is for this thing, but crikeys is it useful in a slightly fancy don't-want-to-use-it-all-the-time kind of way. Only for special occasions, you see. On a bias cut it is especially gorgeous-making, as it somehow magically creates these beautiful, soft ruffly kind of hems,

which, teamed with the almost-a-ruffle (but not in a pirate kind of way... not that there's anything wrong with pirates...) collar, make the whole dress a bit special, and maybe even a bit fancy, without being fussy.

Perfect for the summertime when you've just had a bubba.

But the proof will be in the pudding, or perhaps more appropriately in the accessibility of the mama's milk, so we'll wait and see. I would LOVE to post a photo of Rochelle feeding her gorgeous new baby at the wedding, but of course that's up to her. Fingers crossed...

Weeds? What weeds?

Today, after visiting a nearby strawbale home and interrogating the owners for a good hour or so, we all went up to the land to get us some more blackberries, this time with the intention of collecting enough berries to make some jam.

The main source of my experience with blackberries in the past has come about through my career as a bush regenerator. Many a sunny day was spent by me and my comrades crouched in the thorniness digging around trying to get out the pesky tap-root, and not, unfortunately partaking of the "juicy as" deliciousness. But those days are behind me now, not to say I haven't been deeply affected by them.

I'm loving the blackberries! Yes, I know they are a terrible pest and many many hours and dollars are spent by well-intentioned people each year trying to get rid of them. But you know what? They feed us. They feed us well. And they grow themselves. These sentiments are inclining me towards leaving the blackberries to ramble on our land, but the bush regenerator in me tells me I'm being irresponsible - a weak link in what should be a consolidated effort to get rid of them.

Weediness, I'm learning, is subjective. Just ask any permaculturist. And then ask a bush regenerator. There has been a long-standing perception of incompatability between these 2 (excellent) schools of thought which has, for the most part, seemed a little silly to me. But by jingo by crikey is it hotly debated, as was evinced at the Weeds or Wild Nature? Forum I went to a few months back. Personally, I can pretty much wholeheartedly identify with and see the good in both of these factions. Am I a fence-sitter? Not really. I prefer to see myself as a pragmatist who sees the good in both schools of thought and thinks they are not entirely mutually exclusive.

For example: I worked a site in Sydney that was a revegetated, regenerated corridor of 'bush' leading down to a large, constructed wetland and reserve that was built on an old dump site. No remnant bushland here, but we worked diligently, replanting and encouraging indigenous native plants and removing the 'weeds'. Except for the mulberry tree. It was huge and abundant and well-visited by many many locals. And its edible status seemed to give it a free pass, meaning that instead of cutting it down, as we would have done without question had it been, say, a liquid amber, we happily weeded 'weeds' out of the native grasses underneath and enjoyed the annual bounty. Weird eh?

But cool! NOT that I'm advocating planting edible exotics in tracts of remnant native bushland or orchards in the national park, but the mentality of either/or in an urban setting is, I think kinda crazy. Our urban and suburban spaces have been so irreversibly altered by the presence of white human settlement it seems slightly ill-conceived to try to pretend that revegetation of a piece of 'native bush' should exclude the edible plants we all rely on. And the same goes for rural land, like our precious 7 acres. Can't get much more altered than hundreds of trees cut down to make way for the planting of, what are according to bush regenerators, weeds, to grow the cows to make the milk so we can all eat Bega cheese whenever we feel like it. So why not embrace the blackberries who thrive in the disturbed landscape? We embrace the cheese, after all.

But I also embrace the native grasses, shrubs, vines and trees. They, on par with the blackberries, warm my heart. I love that they have survived the last 150 years, that they're coming back, picking up where they left off when hundreds of cows started trampling them and chewing them and providing them with a tad more nitrogen than they'd probably like under 'normal' circumstances. I say bring on the coexistence. Except when it comes to introduced grass species. Several years of removing kikuyu and buffalo and ehrharta from native bushland is bound to give you more than a slight disdain for lawns. Not to mention the fact that they're total waste of resources. Lawns, you see, were invented a couple of hundred years ago by rich people who wanted to advertise the fact that they were so wealthy they didn't have to grow their own food. Nothing, not even 'weeds' invading 'native' bush, raises my hackles more than conspicuous consumption, so I've basically got it in for lawns of any and all varieties. Oscar does too (well, he will once he's old enough to be brainwashed) but he's also pretty keen on the hand mover I picked up at the tip shop for 5 bucks so I could 'maintain' the lawn at our rental place.

And now, for your reading pleasure and to reiterate the sentiments contained within this rant, I give you God's thoughts on lawn, courtesy of Paul Wheaton's awesomely awesome and inspiring permaculture blog.

God on Lawns

Imagine the conversation The Creator might have had with St. Francis on the subject of lawns:

God: Hey St. Francis, you know all about gardens and nature. What in the world is going on down there in the Midwest? What happened to the dandelions, violets, thistle and stuff I started eons ago? I had a perfect "no maintenance" garden plan. Those plants grow in any type of soil, withstand drought and multiply with abandon. The nectar from the long lasting blossoms attracts butterflies, honey bees and flocks of songbirds. I expected to see a vast garden of colors by now. But all I see are these green rectangles.

St. Francis: It's the tribes that settled there, Lord. The Suburbanites. They started calling your flowers "weeds" and went to great lengths to kill them and replace them with grass.

God: Grass? But it's so boring. It's not colorful. It doesn't attract butterflies, birds and bees, only grubs and sod worms. It's temperamental with temperatures. Do these Suburbanites really want all that grass growing there?

St. Francis: Apparently so, Lord. They go to great pains to grow it and keep it green. The begin each spring by fertilizing grass and poisoning any other plant that crops up in the lawn.

God: The spring rains and warm weather probably make grass grow really fast. That must make the Suburbanites happy.

St. Francis: Apparently not, Lord. As soon as it grows a little, they cut it... sometimes twice a week.

God: They cut it? Do they then bail it like hay?

St. Francis: Not exactly, Lord. Most of them rake it up and put it in bags.

God: They bag it? Why? Is it a cash crop? Do they sell it?

St. Francis: No Sir. Just the opposite. They pay to throw it away.

God: Now let me get this straight. They fertilize grass so when it does grow, they cut it off and pay to throw it away?

St. Francis: Yes, Sir.

God: These Suburbanites must be relieved in the summer when we cut back on the rain and turn up the heat. That surely slows the growth and saves them a lot of work.

St. Francis: You are not going to believe this Lord. When the grass stops growing so fast, they drag out hoses and pay more money to water it so they can continue to mow it and pay to get rid of it.

God: What nonsense. At least they kept some of the trees. That was a sheer stroke of genius, if I do say so myself. The trees grow leaves in the spring to provide beauty and shade in the summer. In the autumn they fall to the ground and form a natural blanket to keep moisture in the soil and protect the trees and bushes. Plus, as they rot, the leaves form compost to enhance the soil. It's a natural circle of life.

St. Francis: You better sit down, Lord. The Suburbanites have drawn a new circle. As soon as the leaves fall, they rake them into great piles and pay to have them hauled away.

God: No. What do they do to protect the shrub and tree roots in the winter and to keep the soil moist and loose?

St. Francis: After throwing away the leaves, they go out and buy something which they call mulch. The haul it home and spread it around in place of the leaves.

God: And where do they get this mulch?

St. Francis: They cut down trees and grind them up to make the mulch.

God: Enough. I don't want to think about this anymore. Sister Catherine, you're in charge of the arts. What movie have you scheduled for us tonight?

Sister Catherine: "Dumb and Dumber", Lord. It's a real stupid movie about.....

God: Never mind, I think I just heard the whole story from St. Francis.

Bit of a bitsa...

We've been having some lovely times with some lovely loved ones of late and while these times have been wonderful they're not so good for continuing the action-stations theme of this blog. Oh but you would have seen that Annie has still been churning out the P & E wares. Her productivity is second to none. We like to engage in a little bit of pathetic cultural stereotyping about this, attributing it to her German heritage. My experience of Germans is limited to Annie and her family and the 2005 Berlin film festival, all of which serve to heartily reinforce the stereotype (yes yes hardly a representative sample). Meanwhile my friend Drew assures me that he does indeed know some lazy Germans so whether Annie's productivity is cultural or genetic or learned or none of the above, the point is she is one productive lady and this is simultaneously inspiring and exhausting but certainly great when considering owner building straw bale dwellings and food forest creating on our 7 acres.

Ok, so we've had some fun summer times with some people we love. But now it feels that we must declare the summer fun over. Our first born just started school ( so far, so great) and well, it hasn't stopped raining for awhile now and there are flood warnings. So what better time to knuckle down and preserve tomatoes and start planning our April build.

Speaking of the build, we thought it as all over red rover. Banks don't like owner builders. Apparently their disdain has increased since the GFC which is a little frustrating since the GFC was hardly caused by owner builders. We had a few tears, a bit of hand wringing, a lot of woe is me (which is, upon reflection, pretty embarrassing given how many billions of people go hungry each day) and now it seems we've found a way through and have a modest amount that should cover the costs of excavating of our house site and driveway, a new dam and swales for fruit trees, "little straw bale", a water tank, composting toilet and solar panels. Little straw bale is the 3x6 + loft studio cottage we'll be living in while we build "big straw bale", our actual house. Anyhoo, it's all back on. Hurray. Oh and best of all, the straw-bale builder we are working with, Frank Thomas, is German so well, you know, we're happy. Our free straw bale building workshop with Frank runs from 16-20 April so if you're busting a gut to learn how, let us know we may still have a spot left. But beware, Frank tells us that the workshop will run from 8am to 5pm for 5 days straight (again with the stereotype). We'll feed you and thank you and love you for participating.

As for the tomatoes you may recall some earlier discussion here about tomato preserving. And I am happy to say that tomatoes are now at their peak here in the south. I bottled my first batch today.

I decided to move on from the raw pack method of previous years, get a little more sophisticated and actually make a passata, of sorts, for bottling this year. Today's batch is the first of many. My rough calculations tell me that we will need at least 28 bottles to last us from April through to November, for these are the months that tomatoes are not available in these parts. However 28 bottles, only leaves us with, on average, a bottle a week, not much for this tomato loving family so I'm aiming for 35 bottles. Only 27 to go! In time I'm hoping the tomatoes we bottles will be grown on our land but I'm giving myself several years for that. Something to aspire to around the age of 42 methinks.

Following the plum bonanza of December, we've moved into full-on berry bonanza territory. Being a lifelong Sydney dweller, my experience of berries has been somewhat limited. I recently realised I'd never actually had a blackberry. Oh my! what absolute delight. Is there anything more delicious? Yep the picking is hazardous but so worth it. These gorgeous pestilents are everywhere in these parts, including across our land, and we've been scoffing up a storm. It's hard with berries, they taste so good and they're so small, it's easy to eat so many while picking. However I am determined that a few jars of blackberry jam should make it into the pantry before the end of the season.

Cue - gratuitous shot of a thistle

We have thistles aplenty across our land and while we think them quite beautiful there is no denying they are even more a pesty pestilent than blackberries, with significantly less culinary appeal. So while Gourmet Farmer hasn't totally changed our view of them, we were pretty excited to discover that the stamen of the thistle flower can be used as rennet! Ah nature, you are so wonderful. Trite but true. We'll let you know how we go in our goat cheese making endeavours.

It's busy time ahead as we finalise our bare rooted fruit tree order with a local nursery, equivocate over building materials, decide on our solar power needs, continue to research earthen/adobe floors, work through our mountain of anxiety about what our water tank should be made of and work out how we will cheaply but deliciously feed over 15 participants in our straw bale workshop for 5 days - breakfast, morning tea, lunch, afternoon tea and dinner...

Ah so busy, so good...

B is for Beth looking Beautiful in her Best-lady frock

Apparently the wedding was amazing. presumably this is not least of all because Beth looked so gorgeous and radiant in her glorious frock! Check out the purple nail polish!!!!

A little experiment

My very very least favourite thing about this little clothes-making biz of mine is, hands down, pricing my stuff. Has always been , probably always will be. I suspect that this results from the fact that I am constitutionally deficient in the skills needed to deal with the rigours of this shindig we call capitalism that is, unfortunately, running the show right now. I just feel icky about asking for money for something that, 9 times out of 10, I've had an absolute ball creating. Mind you, the pocket money always comes in handy, especially in the midst of the shit-fight we're engaged in at the moment, trying to fund our little house build. And of course I do so love the feeling I get when I realise that, by paying for my clothes, people are actually saying "Hey! I dig what you're doing over here!".

But still, I've been thinking of ways I could start to get around or at least play with the boundaries prescribed by the "I do something for you and you pay me what I tell you" rules of the open market. This experiment was, in a little way, inspired by a cafe I visited in Salt Lake City (of all places) that had no prices, instead requesting that customers make a donation, according to their capacity and their feelings about the meal, or, if they weren't able to pay, to contribute in some other way, such as doing the dishes or taking out the rubbish. I thought this was a pretty ace idea, made somewhat acer by the fact that the cafe had been in operation for 12 freakin' years or something!

Sooooooo...

I few weeks ago I got an email from Denise, in Denmark, WA, who was looking to extend her P&E collection. Denise, I know from our previous interactions, is a pretty cool lady, who has always seemed to be very respectful and appreciative of what I do. These qualities (teamed with the fact that she calls her cat her "fur husband", which appealed to the part of me that thought it was a good idea to get my cat, Bunn's name tattooed in a big red heart on my leg) led me to believe that Denise was a perfect candidate to invite on my little pricing experiment. So, when the question I dread came up - "How much do I owe you?" - I replied by suggesting that Denise set the price according to what she thought the clothes were worth, and what she could afford. Initially, Denise was apprehensive and uncomfortable about the suggestion, but (and this is the bit I love) she recognised that her discomfort was something worth interrogating and trying to work through, so we agreed that she would set the price as long as I promised to let her know if it wasn't enough. I was stoked with this arrangement, and set to work sewing her skirts and boleros, astoundingly happy and safe-feeling in the knowledge that, even if we weren't putting an end to capitalism, we were at least playing with it a little bit.

I asked Denise what it was she thought made her feel uncomfortable. She replied: "I think the uncomfortable feeling comes because I'm still learning how to receive graciously! Well, partly, anyway. Because essentially, letting the purchaser decide on a price to pay, is giving them a gift, putting the power in their hands." I love this insight, not least of all because it kind of mirrors my own feelings about the whole affair: Having someone value my work enough to part with their hard-earned cashola is a gift and a compliment, all in one - who doesn't like receiving one of those?

In all, I have been thrilled by the engagement, mutual trust and gift-giving that this experiment has generated, if for no other reason that it's so out of the ordinary in our daily, money-exchanging lives.

Now, onto the clothes.

Yes, you have seen this tablecloth before. How great that there are now 2 "Greetings West Australia" clothing items out there in the world? I especially like that the back of this is reminiscent of the emblems on the back of bikie jackets. But with a twist.

This purple floral skirt is a remake of a vintage dress Denise sent for me to work with. The fabric is absolutely divine - so soft! The dress was a gorgeous, home-made number with a little inset pocket at the side, and not a skerrick of overlocking to be found, which meant that all the inside seams are starting to fray a little, from millions of washes. My initial inclination was to actually re-do the skirt, including all the seams, so that they could be finished 'properly'. But then I thought about the actual provenance of the skirt (nee dress) and decided to leave them as a little historical reference point.

Denise actually requested an embellishment on this one, in the form of a patch or a pocket, but once I started on this skirt I was so in love with it that I wanted to stay as true to the original as I could. Denise, if you still want a pocket/patch, let me know and I can put one on, but I think it's beautiful as it is.

Yay for kitty-cat skirts! This wrap n go makes its pockets from a special tea-towel, which Denise sent along with the skirt, featuring the spitting image of her beloved Mr Topper. Of course, he needed to be on a pocket. Denise says the cats on the flowers reminds her of "seeing my furboy napping in the grass outside my window". Nothing much better than frolicking cats, except perhaps frolicking kittens...

And another bolero. Not much to say about this little baby other than that the fabric (formerly a tablecloth) is pretty unique, and Pearlie has requested a bolero for herself made out of the other half of said tablecloth, which just happens to be red. Oh, and Denise, I think it's gonna look great on you! Thank you so much for being my experiment-buddy! x

Collars and cuffs

Last week I got an email from a lady called Imelda, who was a bit keen on a bit of P&E after seeing Beth's best lady dress. Imelda, apparently, has a bit of a stash of fabric she thought would make a fab-o frock. Lucky her!

The dress she was after, however, was to have a collar and 3/4 sleeves. For some reason this sent me into a tizz, probably because a) I have never made a 3/4 sleeved dress and b) I have enormous arms, so am perhaps hyper-conscious of the fact sometimes sleeves don't fit well.

I suggested instead, that she might like a lovely jersey top with a collar and 3/4 sleeves, and an A line skirt. I promised to let her see a few photos of other collared and 3/4-sleeved tops, so here they are. These are 3 tops I made for Pearl in the last couple of years.

Imelda (and anyone else), let me know what you think!

For this one I used a silk scarf to make the collar and cuffs,

This one is a play on the old boat neck (Pearlie looks lovely in a boat neck) made from some vintage wool stripe and amazing printed crepe,

And this one is a grey and green striped wool which is kind of like a very fine sweater-weight. The collar on this is a gorgeous vintage print.

I decided to leave the edges raw, with just a little run over with the pinking shears, and then I hand stitched it down for extra detail and security. I reckon this top would be over 2 years old, and has been very well worn, but is still looking pretty hot!