lost a day – damn it

Sometimes it is ok to give yourself a rest day. But not too many. Resting is great. But not productive. To stay alive in body and brain we need to stay productive.

Self care is one thing.

Self indulgence – another.

The day before yesterday I gave myself a rest day and now I am literally a day behind.

The city garden

Gardening from scratch is a bit like cooking from scratch but much heavier. First a person needs all the ingredients, then the pots, and the time but at the end we all get to sit down and admire our work and know it is healthy, just what we wanted and we can track the provenance of every piece. Gardening and cooking from scratch is a bit like story telling.

I have finished building the second pair of raised beds. So the two main beds are finished. And arranged according to my plan. All 4 square meters of the soil is in. A few plants are planted. Lots of seeds sown. But the thing with raised beds is they have too many sharp corners. Which I really hate. But I cannot attend to those until I have finished planting up these beds.

I had to go to raised beds because of the sandy soil and the dog. I like the height but they put weight into a garden – they are visually heavy – and height/weight needs balancing. And the dog thinks the raised are just elevations in his BMX racing track so that did not work.

And bare soil is like a magnet for cats and dogs. But. I am a patient person. At least the rabbits are no longer visiting! And dogs are trainable.

The bones are here. The plants will grow. And this is just a beginning.

On screen left of the garden shot above are the new raised beds I just finished building and filling. Now, Daughter wants flowers in there and as we all know there is no arguing with the pregnant woman. Especially as she is still working full time and my writing is not making enough money to keep me fed let alone watered, we have lost farm markets, and my investments have gone into hibernation due to the recent shocks to the stock market. My panic is threatening to go into free fall. Maybe flowers will be good for me. Maybe I focus too hard on providing food. Flowers sound lovely.

It will take a few months before my winter garden begins to feed us. Maybe sooner with baby greens.

Baking

Today I am going to make focaccia with the good oil. So I had better start that soon. I have brought fresh flour, that last batch tasted bad – it had gone rancid – I wrote to the company to let them know. I fermented it to test it and it was immediately rank. I have gone back to commercial pasteurized flour for the meantime. Hoping to be able to sell loaves of bread but I need good tasty flour first.

Going forward I am looking for organic spelt – I can’t find Red Fife here but I have a line on Spitfire wheat flour which is grown not far from here. I need a flour from a company that notes the milling date on the label. This is important to me. So hopefully they don’t mind me asking.

I have lines on some other mills from a few of our Aussie readers so as soon as I get my feet back under me this week – I will start sending out emails.

I don’t like old flour. We need to do research to find good fresh food. Good food at a good healthy price. No point cooking or gardening from scratch with rubbish ingredients.

Cookies.

Our regular muesli cookies.

A box of these have gone to the cop shop and a box to the neighbours who lent me her wheelbarrow – which broke on the last load. (Sorry). I need to get down to a hardware store to buy a couple of bolts and CRC to fix it. It is about a hundred years old and very rusty so I will do it carefully so as not to break something else!

Here is the recipe.

Have a gorgeous day/evening.

Celi

PS A reminder about the lounge of comments. Do not bring your anger into my lounge of comments. Sadness yes. Hurt, yes. Fear, yes. Your offers of Solutions, yes. But not anger. Not unkindness. Not threats. That is hard – right? Our knee jerk reaction is to bite. I am also angry and hurt and full of fear for the poor and sick and elderly and defenseless. I am watching services being stripped away from them. I see the homeless services department closed. I see more veterans speaking out. I see soup kitchens and food pantries losing funding. I am watching journalists sites being gagged. I am seeing the fall-out in my farm and my finances. Federal programmed in support of farmers slashed. I am affected right over here in Australia. My family in Canada is aghast and not a little frightened. People are afraid here too when they hear war drums. My gay and trans friends are hiding themselves. My immigrant community being attacked trying to fast track passports in case they are mistakenly deported. And that’s just me. What about you? We can be hurt, disillusioned, defensive – all those things – but when we write and speak we need to use bold well informed courtesy and strong objective care with others. Disagree – of course. But be courteous and kind. Use your manners.

Kindness first.

A lot of what we see in the political arena now is the antithesis of my beliefs. Real trouble is here. We cannot argue that. I believe in people. I believe in choices. I believe in sharing our space and our food with those who need help. And I will continue to do that – even from this distance, because I am a citizen of the world in all its tattered messy glory.

I watch the comments here closely and mean people get blocked. If their comments are threatening they will not be up for long. It is and has always been critical to me that we feel safe to speak. All of us. Even if we do not agree all the time. Be kind and clear.

This is a volatile period – it has been designed this way. We must not bury our heads in the sand. We will suffocate if we do. I need you to feel confident in the knowledge that you can speak here. And I need to feel safe in my own blog space too. We are all citizens of the world, we all have our problems, we all have our agenda, we all have our beliefs and we should all be heard. But there have to be limits and old fashioned guard rails. Apply kindness and good behaviour. Language and good manners and conversational etiquette are our legacy. Use them well.

Fear is a terrible enemy. Fear to speak up is awful.

Fear bites.

Be kind.