drumroll please

I had a lovely week anticipating doing the draw for my inaugural competition. Sadly I don't have any ducks to do the real drumroll. There were nearly 20 entrants whose names went into the hat to win my old Levi's cunningly refashioned into a shopping tote.And the winner is.......
COLLETTE

Congratulations! Collette is an Aussie married to a Pom living in the US with their baby girl. Her blog is called 10 Minute Coffee Break - something I aim for...but never seem to achieve. Could you please email me with your address details to:
lhampshire at csu dot edu dot au

Until next time.....Lisa x

p.s. I'm going to take some photos today of my garden so I can update you on the progress of my Garden Challenge set by Melinda at Elements in Time. This blog is really astounding as she and her partner make some amazing adjustments to their lives as citizens of LA, to rural Californians doing their utmost to neutralise their carbon footprint and grow ALL their own food. I never cease to be amazed at what they produce on what is essentially a tiny plot of land at their rented house. Go and have a look if this description piques your interest.

assignment count: 120 to mark before I'm free

Yoo hoo hoo, lookin' out my backdoor....

Just as Creedence Clearwater Revival sang the song...so I have taken the photos.

Why?

I've been tagged by Kate at Our Red House, for the Front Door/Back Door Meme. The Meme simply asks for photos taken of the view out your front and back doors. Our house has three.

The one we use most often is the exit via the laundry. This glass paned wooden door takes you out to the back verandah that sweeps along the length of the house, shielding us from the worst of the weather. It looks out on what I call the "business" area of our home - the clothesline, the dog kennels, the vegie beds, the firepump and tanks, the swingset and trampoline, the woodshed etc.

This is the view in reverse....on the left hand side you can just see the new vegie beds. You also get a clear view of the solar hot water booster on the roof, as well as the custom built stainless steel rooftop sprinkler system...that DH is a clever bugger. It runs off the petrol firefighting pump, but we've also tested it on gravity alone and it is brilliant. Even though we want to grow as much of our own food as we think we can, we are limited to tank water, and the generosity of DH's dad who allows us to pump water out of the dam adjacent to our land. This means we've planted lots of smallish evergreen perennials (and large deciduous trees) within our yard to try and create a future cooler microclimate. None of these are watered. We use the dam water to fill a water tank that sits along our driveway. It is always kept filled for firefighting, but we also gravity feed the hose points in our yard with this water and we handwater our growing food. This means we don't have to use our rainwater. I've written previously about our greywater system off the shower and bath that irrigates our fruit trees.

Next, we move on to the kitchen doorway, which is a double glass door with sidelights - which provides a lovely view of our growing orchard and the bushland beyond. The pile of clippings you can see is a combination of lucerne trees that just had a haircut, and the pears who had their annual prune today. The birdnetting is (fingers crossed) still keeping the parrots out of the pink lady crop which is still not quite ready. If you look sideways from the kitchen doorway, you see our summer house...although I've never called it that. We just call it "the bbq area"...which I know is especially creative. I've just noticed the dinner triangle has fallen off again. It was a housewarming gift from one of my brothers. We always had a dinner bell at home when we were growing up - it was an honour we competed for to be the one to ring it. We've recently excavated the slope and had it levelled to create the only flat piece of ground on our land. You cannot play cricket on a 40 degree slope...not without tantrums anyway (and that's only me!!). The western side (you're looking at it) of the open sided area is generously shaded in Summer by an ornamental grapevine. (don't ask me why we didn't plant a real one...?#$!@

Then, we have another set of double doors from our loungeroom out onto a large elevated deck (15foot in the air I suppose) where you see this. Because I know they are there, I can see the sticklike visage of an almond and a peach in the very foreground of the photo, but you have to squint and hold your tongue just so.

So that's about it. I always enjoy sharing these little snippets of this life with you. I would like to tag the following to share the views from their front and back doors.

Belinda's Place
Kez's blog
Molly's Cross Roads
Bec's Sticks & Stones
Kate's 3anklebiters


And (tut tut...beginning a sentence with a preposition....)I'd like to add here today a special photo to direct you to Kate's Our Red House Gooey Chocolate Blancmange recipe....don't let the photos lull you into believing this is a childish recipe! You'll be scraping the bottom of your dish too! ...I'm sure there must be more in here somewhere?

While Kate posted this in the middle of the heatwave, we ate it warm on a cold, cold night...with a dollop of freshly whipped cream on top. Superb.

A special prize

Some time ago, I passed the milestone of writing my 100th post...and I'd thought at the time it would be nice to run some kind of competition to celebrate the many wonderful things joining the community of bloggers has brought me.

As is my habit, I slept on it.

...quite a few times as it happens.

Anyway, there I was today wondering if I could mend my favourite jeans.

This might look like a simple tear, but in truth, the fabric is dissolving with fatigue in front of your very eyes.

I'd seen an American lady somewhere in blogland who I never thought to bookmark, who makes aprons out of old jeans....so I thought that might be something I could do. But then I decided to make a bag.

So off came the legs.

Then I used some of the leg fabric to create a base...all the while juggling the position of the pin cushion and scissors to keep naughty fingers at bay!

Some of you might remember a hilarious pastel stripe dress I wore to an 80's party a few months ago....well out she came, to be reborn as the lining of my bag.

This was handsewn into place.

More of the legs were salvaged to make some handles, and voila.

Look, this bag will not be winning any sewing awards, but it is a real, honest to goodness, 'saved from the scrapheap', useful thing, and I have created it as the exclusive one of a kind prize for my Tin House Inaugural competition.

If you'd like to acquire a free and virtual raffle ticket, please leave a comment here and I will put you in the draw. I'll happily post this off to wherever you might be. I'll keep entries open until next weekend and do the draw on Sunday the 25th (?) of May.

I'm so grateful to the wonderful little community of readers who visit me - thankyou so much..

Oh, and just because I have the photo here, this is the second of the new garden beds finished on Thursday. Can you see the brown gadalan onions? The other half will be planted with garlic bulbs.

I've purchases snow pea, spinach & spring onion seeds but we haven't decided on our crop rotations for this year so haven't put them in the ground yet. Life's good. xx

Biccies & a new veggie bed

You know you're reading the work of an Australian when you have both "biccies" and "veggies" in the one title!

One of the constants of simple living, for me, is finding homemade alternatives to expensive, store bought foods. Last week, I bought a bag of smaller bags of tiny wee biscuits. The bag of smaller bags (go plastics go) was a little over $3. Of course, the children thought it was great to have these tiny bags of biscuits in their lunchboxes, but I never intended buying them more than once.

So today, I donned my long forgotten ambition of being a test kitchen cook, and created a recipe for teeny, tiny choc chip biscuits...minus the transfats and other assorted rubbish. It's probably not particularly original - perhaps an amalgam of recipes in my head, but it worked and here it is:

Lisa's teeny choc chip biscuits

1 cup Self Raising Flour
1 cup Plain Flour
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup cocoa
1/2 cup choc bits
1 crushed weetbix
1/2 cup rolled oats
125gm (1/4 lb) butter
1 cup milk
Destructions: melt butter and mix everything up being careful to add the milk a bit at a time. Roll into tiny balls and cook in a moderate oven (180C) for 13 minutes....(slightly longer or shorter cooking time depending on the size of your biccies)

I made about 60 of these fine little munchies. Because they are so small, not every biscuit has a choc bit in it either, but no one seems to have minded. Everyone is taking a few to school/work/childcare tomorrow.

After a survey of our food growing options here on-site (we have a larger plot up the road) DH decided to mark out two more no-dig vegetable beds.

The difficult part of the equation for us is not the land...we have 15 acres, but it is 15 wooded acres. Bushfire regulations required a certain amount of land clearing when we built our house here, including a perimeter around the home, but we kept to as little as possible for the sake of the land. Growing anything in an acid slatey soil is difficult, but doubly difficult when the cleared areas are still in the influence and sometimes the shade of a dry, schlerophyll Eucalypt ecosystem. Anyway, to cut a long story short, there is a spot inside our fenced yard where we've been wholly unsuccessful in encouraging grass to grow, so that's where the new beds are going.

The little corrugated iron shed you can see in the photo above houses our dedicated petrol water pump for bushfire. It also connects to our rooftop sprinkler system. God help us if we ever need it, but it's there and we are as ready as we can be for the worst.

DH got these hardwood planks from a building site he was working on a few years ago. They were building a Bunnings hardware shop, and these pieces of wood were part of the packing material that held the new shelves together in each container. He salvaged about a thousand from the dumpster before it went. What a waste! Lucky for us though.

Each corner of the patch is made of a long piece of angle iron flogged mercilessly into the ground with a sledgehammer by a slightly nervous but athletic gentleman, worried just a teeny bit that he might hit one of the irrigation pipes he laid in the general area two or three years ago....

Then the hardwood is slotted in between the iron, and screwed into place.

Our other garden beds are made this way. They are all into their 4th growing season and of course we don't expect them to last forever, but they're still looking strong and robust. Here are some as viewed by me this afternoon from the back verandah.

But what about the new one I hear you ask. Well, here it is. Filled with a mixture of local topsoil, commercial compost purchased by the uteload, & some very well rotted sheep manure and straw from last year's lambing.

The second no dig bed will be done by lunchtime tomorrow. It will run perpendicular to this new one, and parallel to the strawberry & iris bed that runs up the garden path...about where the wheelbarrow sits in the photo. Also, to keep the weeds/grass at bay, he's laying a path of crushed rock in between the beds.

So that's life here. I am up late tonight when I know I should be in bed. Only problem is I caught a quickfire nanna nap this afternoon and I'm not really tired enough to go to sleep. Mind you, I could just watch the Federal Budget coverage - the ultimate cure for insomnia. Sweet dreams. Lisa x

Taking time

Yesterday was a home day. No trips to town. No work. No childcare.

Having a bit of down time (in between washing, cooking, cleaning, nappies...) gave me the chance to think quietly. I wasn't thinking about metaphysics, or politics or anything like that.

I was thinking about....

shoes just like dads.

Of mending that needs doing.

A handmade jumper gifted from a friend.

The simple satisfaction of a clean and tidy kitchen.

Clean clothes drying in front of the fire.

And the just warm pale afternoon sunlight of Autumn drifting through the blinds.

It was a really beautiful day where absolutely nothing out of the ordinary happened. That's not to say it wasn't amazing.

Chutney

Life's pretty sweet here at the Tin House. The air is filled with the pungent, sweet aroma of chutney boiling away on the cooktop. The boys are outdoors chopping and lugging firewood, and baby is asleep.

Last week, I made Green Tomato Chutney. I hadn't made it before, but I'm pretty pleased with the outcome.

I've already given away two jars worth, as I'm the only chutney eater in the house, and 6 jars is more than a year's supply for me.

Green Tomato Chutney
10 medium green tomatoes chopped (about 1kg)
2 medium onions chopped
2 large apples chopped
1 litre brown vinegar
2.5 cups brown sugar firmly packed
1.5 cups sultanas
1.5 teas dry mustard
1 teas ground cinnamon
1/4 teas ground cloves
1/4 teas cayenne pepper

Combine all ingredients in a large pan and stir over heat without boiling until sugar is dissolved. Bring to boil and simmer uncovered, stirring occasionally, for about one and a half hours or until mixture is thick. Pour into hot sterilised jars. Seal. Makes about 6 cups.

Today's chutney (as pictured at the top) is my all time favourite.

Apple & Red Pepper Chutney
2 large apples - peeled and chopped
3 medium red capsicums (peeppers) chopped
2 medium onions chopped
2 cloves garlic crushed
1/2 cup currants
2 cups cider vinegar
1/2 cup dry white wine
2.5 cups water
2 teas black peppercorns
1 teas cloves (tied up in muslin with the peppercorns)
1.5 cups brown sugar firmly packed

Combine all but the sugar in a large saucepan. Bring to the boil and cook for about 15 minutes or until apples and peppers are soft. Add sugar and stir over heat without boiling until it's dissolved. Bring back to the boil and simmer stirring occasionally for about one and a half hours, or until thick. Discard muslin bag and pour into hot sterilised jars. Makes about 3 cups.

Stunning served with crusty bread and cheese.

Since making the decision to retreat (once more) from the workforce after this semester ends in early June, I've been a lot more settled, and have been devoting considerable thought and energy to how I will direct things once I'm free to be a full time Mum again. The garden won't know what's hit it! I'll be back counting the laps at the swimming pool. There'll be cooking every day. There'll be laughter by the bulk carrier load. Not a bad plan eh?

And for you entertainment...here's a mirror just like mine!! lol xxxx

Just a few things I threw together

Oh dear, I am going to be in diabolical bother in the morning when my eldest son wakes up to discover I missed the first 10 minutes of banal commentary on his beloved Rugby League broadcast....just hit the record button now.

He and his cousin are curled up together snug as bugs in a rug in a double bed having spent the last two hours trying to outgiggle one another. I am not very good at sounding fierce when I grumble at them....they were just having too much fun.

I thought I'd entertain you tonight with a few snaps I took the other day roving around the place.

Here I am loafing in the hammock watching my house framed by red grape leaves. The wind blew them all away yesterday. It must have been substantially warmer this day - note the thongs. (note to North American readers: flip flops/rubber footwear..not to be confused with brief underwear!)

We picked some more apples too. Nature's candy.

And here's the last of my potatoes - one basket is the red desiree, the other is the white coliban.

The hydrangea let out a strangled last gulp of air before Monday's snow storm. It's gone now too.

The mercury will be below zero tonight. The dogs are tucked up nice and cosy in their kennels with blankets from the Salvos - they keep a box for pets. I guess these are the ones too far gone for people. Sam the kelpie is a useless guard dog - but a ruthless smoocher. She's my girl!

She gets along well with Alfred the cattle dog cross...because she knows he is in charge.

That's me done for now. I've entertained again this afternoon with fresh scones, whipped cream & homemade apple & strawberry jam, iced chocolate cake & tea. I was catching up with a woman I've worked with who I really like, but don't know all that well. She's had a rotten time with a marriage breakup (he's 66 and sharing his life with their old 36 year old next door neighbour and her three children...ouch...he said he didn't want kids)

Tonight, it was just me and four children enjoying the warmth of our slow combustion wood fire. We ate beef scallopine with steamed rice, and the kids ate the horrid iced donuts Sandra kindly brought with her. That's my day. Hope yours was even better. Lisa xx