life'n'stuff

Rhonda’s posting about saying “no” has got me thinking. For a few years, I have been working to simplify my life and lead a more duckherding existence. Mr Duck Herder teases me because when we met, I was “go get’em girl” – successful, ambitious, clever, busy. The last ten years has seen me shift from a “bright and shiny clever young thing” in the community sector to a “cranky girl who would really like to be left alone” in the public service. The more successful I became, the less meaning and fulfillment I got out of my work, and the crankier and more frazzled I got. Intuitively, I became a “down shifter” – actively seeking jobs and projects that interested me and seemed important, rather than focusing on jobs as a staircase to bounce up. And then came the Lacuna Sabbath, an attempt to grow the parts of my life I was passionate and interested in, and stave off public service induced insanity.

Recently I was challenged to come up with my life’s vision or purpose. This was a really tricky question! What is your vision or goal for your life?

I gave it a bit of mulling over, and was able to draw inspiration for two unrelated sources. Once was a reference in a book written by fellow ONCian Alyson Hill, called “Chooks in the City”. In this book, Alyson, while sitting on the back porch, nursing a cuppa and watching her chooks, muses that she doesn’t want to be a battery hen, bound and subjected to other people’s demands on her time, body, freedom and production, but a free range chook –spontaneous, raucous, engaged in the moment and completely absorbed in her work and play. The other obvious source of inspiration was the Radio National program on tutti fruiti time featured in a previous post. When I hold these two concepts in my mind, I fell like I’m getting very close to a very happy place – a way of living and a state of being. So, my life purpose or goal has become this:

To be a free range chook living in tutti fruiti time.

Where my hours are stretchy, ribboned, enchanted and wild. Where my life is earthy, connected, engaged and abundant. To live in harmony with the seasons and cycles of the earth. To live and love well.

The other thing I have realized is that to be happy, I need to see tangible outcomes from my work. Looking back over my work history, I have been most happy, most fulfilled and most energized when I have felt that what I am doing makes a tangible difference to people’s lives or to the planet. Obviously this is why I get so much joy out of gardening and building stuff.

It also explains why the strategic planning focus of my current work, and the shift away from direct service delivery feels frustrating and futile - not in general, but for me. Funnily enough, once I became a little clearer about what was important, new opportunities for duck herding started to emerge. And now, I have only three weeks to go, and a little break, before I start a new project, working from home, arranging my own hours, working on something that feels important, exciting, meaningful and challenging. Sometimes I will go to work in my jammies, other times I will be on the road. It is all good! Suddenly, all sorts of other folks are offering me additional consulting work – so I am feeling a growing sence of confidence that this is the right thing to do, and that the universe supports my growth in this area. (yay)

Yesterday I purchased a beautiful second hand desk for my new home office and I will be using my Dads original office chair from when he worked in the PM&G way back in the 70’s.

I feel so lucky. Yup, this is what duck herding is all about.

Stupid Chicken Update

Well, Winter is obviously a time for contemplation and chickens. Not much is growing in the duckherder gardens, and my thoughts are preoccupied with my silly chooks. Nefley is sitting on 8 fertile eggs. I candled them two nights ago, and two were blank. This was to be expected as these had been laid on the 7th July, and were already 3 weeks old when I put them in the nest. The others however, were all little “spiders in the web”.

“Maurice” as he is now called, is still struggling with the ladder. He can get up there with coaching, but left to his own devises, still camps on the ground rather than following his lady friends up to bed. Here he is, practicing! I am hoping that if I keep putting him on the bottom of the ladder, his feet will remember how to get to bed, even if his little brain does not.

This photo is of Nefley and Maurice in their respective nests, with Jenni's perch in the background – she is the only one chicken enough to perch at night, the others - too many poodle genes methinks.

Bush Tucker

Yesterday I went to the first week of a Bush Tucker course held at the ACT Aboriginal and TSI Cultural Centre. The centre is in a beautiuful location, on the banks of lake burley griffin, very close to the special place between the mountain and the river where the Ngambri used to camp prior to white settlement. If you want to learn more about the Ngambri, and Aboriginal history in the Canberra area, then Ann Jackson-Nakano's work "The Kamberri, A History of Aboriginal Families in the ACT and Surrounds" would be a very good place to start. It is available here.

I am pretty sure that part of an elegantly frugal life must involve learning about the cornucopia of native foods that surround us. So off I went, keen to learn more about the spuds and peas of the Ngambri, and I wasnt dissapointed.

My main interest in the course was to find out what was possible with the abundant lomandras that grow in our garden. You can find out more about lomandras here. When they flower, the backyard is FILLED with the sweetest, honey smell. I learned that the flowers can be soaked in lemon juice, or water and then strained to made a lovely sweet drink. They can also be used to make "elderberry wine", except you substitute the elderberries for the lomandra blossoms.

The white stem bases can be eaten raw, and taste just like freshly picked peas. I just tried this, and it is true - they do! In a very efficient way, the discarded leaves left over from eating the bases would have been used to make baskets for use in earth ovens, and for carrying things.

Now for the potatoes. The potato of the Ngambri was probably the Yam Daisy, or Microseris lanceolata. In South Australia this is called the Murnong. We went for a little look at what was around in the native pasture near the cultural centre, but it is the wrong time for Yam Daisies. Apparently it would have been baked in an earth oven, probably wrapped in a woven basket, and either eaten for dinner or cold for breaky. Weight for weight the Yam Daisy tubers provide 80% of the calories of a spud, but have no starch, and taste a little on the water chestnut side of potato. I think I recognise this little plant though, and will keep a look out for it in spring.


Photo source here

We also wandered down to the lake and played around with the bullrushes, but it was a bit hard to pull up the tubers. We also started building an earth oven which we will hopefully get to use some time later in the course.

I also found out that the slippery jacks I had eaten ealier this year were probably a native mushy, rather than the imported varierty - which explains why they look a little different to the text books but tasted good just the same.

Well, thats about it for yesterday -unless folks want my recipie for pear and pepita muffins - yum yum, I am eating one with a cuppa while I write.

Lacuna Sabbath

This Lacuna Sabbath dawned with a special treat – RAIN!!! Not a lot, just a little, but RAIN none the less.

It has been a BIG week. I have been offered a new job. I am leaving the public service. I am scared and excited, and also feeling like the layers of stress and frustration and fracturedness and wasted effort and boredom are lifting off my little shoulders layer by layer.

For the first time in 5 years, I will be working on a project that I would do for free if I didn’t have a mortgage – and this fills me with hope and joy. I will also be able to work from home, surrounded by teapots, chooks, ducks, garden and laptop, and still get to travel, and work with folks who care passionately about the planet, diversion of organics from the waste stream, and sustainable agriculture and linking city folks with farmers and their food production.

Am I really allowed to have it all? I hope so. Scary but good. This is what it is all about I think – trying to get integration and a path with heart.

In other news, Nefley is sitting on 10 hopefully fertile eggs from Margot Gardner in Victoria. Margot is the source of my original line of silly silkies. These silly chooks are especially precious because a few months after Nefley, Jenni and their siblings hatched in 2005, Margot lost her home and a lifetime of breeding stock in a bushfire. These precious eggs are from her last surviving hens, and I feel so privileged to have them. By tomorrow we should be ready to candle the eggs and see how many of them are developing.

And about that rooster. Mr Duck Herder and I have established he is no rocket scientist. AND he has lice. Lucy dusted him with derris/sulphur when I picked him up, and I have been feeding him sulphur powder all week, but this morning, I found two little buggers crawling around under his tail. So today he got a good dusting of derris and sulphur again. None of my stock have EVER had mites or lice before, so I am hoping we can get on top of this problem before it spreads. He is struggling with the intellectual challenge of climbing up the ladder to bed, and seems scared to venture out into the garden. ON the cute side, once upstairs in bed, he did the cutest thing…he made a NEST in the straw, right beside Nefley’s. I think his nest is bigger than her’s, and he SLEEPS in it! He is also very gentle, and doesn’t seem to crow before 7.30am – so if he keeps this up he can stay with the girls overnight rather than be locked in a box in the glass house.

I am calling him “he” because neither :Willy", “Wally” or “Fabio” seems to suit him. He may be more of a “princess” or a “Maurice”. We will see.

Frugal Subversive Award

Hee hee, What a lovely treat. Those who know the duck herder in real life know that she thrives on attention. ANY attention.

Eileen has bestowed the Frugal Subversive Award upon my humble ranting and litany of obsessions. Yay! This has inspired me to think lots about frugality this week.

While I very much like the concept of subversive frugality, and all it entails in terms of using our individual purchasing power to support or NOT support various systems of production, I am most drawn to the concept of elegant frugality.

As far as I can tell, the concept originally belongs to lovely old Henryk Skolimowski, ecological humanist extraordinaire. Mr Skolimowski obviously neglected to attended a plain English writing course, however his book Eco-Philosophy – Designing New Tactics for Living, published in 1981 , and purchased from a second hand book store in Melbourne in 1990, became a seminal text for me. I struggled through his dense words, forgiving him his gendered language because his historical location in the moofy late 70’s and early 80’s, when we were all a bit mushed up in the head from struggling through bad Foucault translations probably encouraged him to write poorly. There are lots of gems in this little book, and this is one of them:

Alternative Lifestyles do not require living differently but also knowing differently.

We must be able to provide a rational justification for our new life styles, which will amount to nothing less than providing a new rationality.

We must be convinced in our hearts and minds that our frugality is not a depressing abnegation and self-denial but an act of positive manifestation of new qualities; only then will it become elegant frugality.

Therefore, alternative life styles must signify not only changes in our technology, economics, and patterns of living, but changes in our morality, rationality, and conceptual thinking. (pvii-viii)

Anyhoo, the origin of the subversive frugality award is Rhonda’s amazing Down to Earth blog. I feel a bit shy about sending the award on to other folks, and crazy mamma has already memed Scarecrow’s Garden, and of course, Scarecrow has memed Doc, and Eilleen memed me, and Rhonda started it all, and that about sums up my little online frugality tenticles!

Anyway, I am going to be brave and forward my subversive frugality award to Kristy at Gobler's Run. I have been lurking around Kristy's blog for a little while, and am enjoying it very much indeed! Congratulations Kristy - I love your blog!

Here are Rhonda's Instructions for the Elegant Frugality Award:

If you are given an award and want to take part in this meme, you can in turn select three other bloggers who have inspired you to be a frugal subversive. Passing the rules on with the award will make it easier for everyone to participate. Congratulations on the award. I hope it helps you spread awareness near and far.

MEME RULES
1. When you are tagged, write a post with links to three blogs who have inspired you with their frugal creativity or innovation.
2. In your post, please link back to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme and save the award graphic.
3. Leave a comment or message for the bloggers you’re tagging, so they they know they're received the award.
4. Display the Frugal Subversive Award badge to identify your blog as part of the movement that is turning its back on consumerism at any cost.

Who's that boy?

Ooooh! Breaking news! He doesn’t have a name yet, but please meet Nefley and Jenni’s new play date! What a lovely day I had today – driving up to past Cooma to meet a wonderful woman called Lucy, drinking mugs of tea in her warm kitchen surrounded by dogs and talking chooks. Yup, a woman, her farm and her flock.

Lucy breeds Silver Appleyard ducks (the nicest I’ve seen), seabrights, buff orpingtons, english games, muscovys and off course, silly silkies. I have searched the earth (well, the immediate region) for a fine and handsome white roo to hang with my lovely girls, and today I found him!

Here he is, just settling in.

Serendipitously, Lucy had been hanging on to a number of silkie roosters from last year because they were just too good quality to get rid of. Yay!

Nestled amongst a series of wonderful moments, I reflected on how much I love the company of women much older than myself.

(Lucy must be into her 70’s) and about how chooks and ducks bring folks together, and make instant friends of strangers, and then when another friend of her’s dropped by (a young fellow from even closer to the snowline, but not as close at the cougarnaut) who breeds Rhode Island Reds, I just melted at the whole multigenerational cross genderedness of it all.

I am not really sure how silkies fit into the whole backyard sustainability thang, especially silkie roos. I mean, the hens are most useful in their cluckiness and mothering, if not their not totally pathetic egg laying. And lets face it, they are the only breed of poultry that you cant really eat the extra boys with relish and delight. I mentioned this to Lucy, and she just replied, in her wonderful pragmatic scottishness :

“oooch well you know, you just havnt been hungry enough”.

Please God that I am never that hungry!

Any ideas for names for such a handsome fellow would be gratefully received.

greens, Byron and those avocados

Well, another cold day here is ONC – but finally the sun peeked out this afternoon. Here is a little look at where the duck herder can be found on a sunny winter day. We will never get scurvy over winter while we can grow lettuces, baby spinach and tatsoi in my little glass house. It is also a good place to put Byron in his little rooster box over night when he is visiting, so that we can only just hear him yodeling at 4.30am. Speaking of Byron, he has gone home to Jugiong, and we MISS him. I miss his crowing. I really do!

In other news, here is an avocado update. Definitely not thriving in our frosty winter, even with the avocado shanty but if you look REALLY closely, you will see a few surviving leaves on the Bacons. I am too upset to show any pictures of the Gwens. (you can see one very sorry sample in the background) Very sad indeed. Oooh well. I will be patient and hang in there - even if they die back a little each winter, hopefully when they are bigger they will cop it sweet!

yay for Shirley

In breaking news this morning, Shirley the sourdough starter has made a valiant attempt at becoming a loaf of organic whole meal spelt sourdough bread. Yup, a vast improvement on her predecessor Julie, Shirley made a somewhat dense, nicely flavored log.

Mmmmmmhmmmm! Warm with butter and honey last night, toasted with butter and honey this morning.

There is still a little bit of Shirley in the fridge, ready for next time. Lets see if we can get a little bit more height then eh?

Where did the week go?

It has been a bit of a whirlwind week down here in ONC

Nice things that happened way back last Sunday included the discovery of the Woden Farmers Market. Being a bit of a traditionalist, I have continued to trek out to the original Farmers Market held at the Showground. This is a whole 18km away. BUT, I can happily say that the newer, smaller Woden Farmers Market is bustling with a small but excellent selection of my favorite growers.

This is such a wonderful development - it means that growers can come to Canberra over the weekend for the 8:00am – 11:00am market on the northside then travel 25km for the Queanbeyan Farmers Market from 1:00pm – 4:00pm, and then turn up for the Sunday morning market at Woden from 9.00am – 12:00am. Very effective use of food miles says I!

What this means for the duck herder is a sleep in and less travel!. LOVE IT!

I love that ONC is large enough to support a thriving bunch of local small growers and farmers.


Here is a little shot of my stash. The organically grown PRINCE EDWARD potatoes are my absolute favorite, and the organic beetroot was sensational. As you can see, I have stocked up on loads of organic free range lamb and organic free range no breeding pen pork mince – yum yum. And the chocolates, well, proceeds from these go directly towards building wells for villages in Africa. How could I refuse? The hydroponic tomatoes are a nutritionally bereft indulgence for Mr Duck Herder.

Other exciting news includes the arrival of my new 1000 liter water tanks. Here is one here, all ready to be hooked up to the overflow of my existing rainwater tanks. This one will be used to fill up the duckpond. They were really cheap – less than $200 each, although Paul the Chaffman and I almost killed ourselves trying to navigate them up through the wilderness to the duckyard. You can see where I had to dismantle the fence to get it into position. I somewhat prematurely made a base for the tank out of an old pallet, not realizing that it has one attached, so this morning when the FROST clears, I will get out and remove the wooden pallet and have the tank just sitting on the grownd.


Speaking of FROST, here is a picture of this morning’s! I bet this makes you miss ONC Sherdie! .

Paul the Chaffman was amazed at the fecundity of our garden, ooohing and aaahing about it looking like a rainforest – quite a feat for drought and frost ravaged ONC me thinks. SoI took this picture to see what other folks think – and I reckon that even with no water, it is amazing what a duck poo powered garden can look like!



Oh, and here is Mr Duck Herder. I will quickly put this up to see if he reads my blog – I am sure he will demand I remove it if he does. But what a cutie – I love him, and I wanted the doubters who know about his slothful ways as a professional athlete to observe that SOMETIMES he does dress up and go to work – even if it is for just an hour or two….












And finally, a small achievement during the Lacuna Sabbath was the pruning of the kiwi vines. What would we do without baling twine?? This will be their fourth spring in the ground, so I am hoping for that first bumper crop - fingers crossed. Total number of kiwi fruit produced to date = 1 (and that was 3 years ago)

And super finally, here is a stupid fluffy chicken photo for Sherd.










seeya!

Give it up Guys....

So today I have decided, fellas, its time to give it a break, Come on now. You’ve had a good trot at it. You’re just not doing a very good job. Don’t get me wrong. I luvyouse and all. But you kinda have to admit, you’re not very good at it.

Oh, OK, You want some examples. …are you sure? I mean, I don’t want to rub your collective noses in it. sigh....... Well all right.

• George Bush: The whole War on Iraq thing.
• John Howard: Pretty much every decision you make. And the whole war on Iraq thing.
• Mal Brough: for thinking that somehow the army is going to prevent child abuse, heal people’s souls and stop alcoholism.
• The whole NSW Government: for a jaded litany of reasons
• Pretty much every president or prime minister – except perhaps Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi.
• Your general garden variety violent criminal, rapist, murderer etc.
• Every CEO and President of every environmentally horrific mining and manufacturing company in the world – for thinking it is OK and that you have some kind of right.
• Whoever it was that invented the atomic bomb, the gun, ddt, herbicides, artificial fertilizers, and now, GMO foods.
  

Shall I go on?

Anyway, the trouble for us girls I think, is that our choices are not very enticing – to actively change the world, we have to choose to engage directly with power - in Government, Politics and Business. And this means, engaging directly with greed, fear, hate and a propensity for violence, not to mention BUREAUCRACY! It’s a hard slog, and generally requires working along side folks whose values and behaviors are diametrically opposed to our own. To influence the operations of power, we have to get very close to the flame – we have to work within the system, and as a result, are shaped, ground down, and subject to those same systems we are trying to change. Sometimes despite out best efforts, it seems that to survive in that environment requires unpalatable compromises – we become that which we are trying to change, or we burn out.

Instead, many of us focus on where we can make a difference in our day to day lives – we end up teachers and nurses or managers of community organizations. We focus on the immediate value of this work….but for what end? We have been doing this for decades, perhaps even centuries? And frankly, things don’t seem to be getting better. And we continue to do this work for crappy wages in male dominated bureaucracies, or in the community sector for a pittance while we beg for resources from government and business.

Now before someone gets anti-princess or precious about free will and gender equity, and before someone makes the obvious point that girls can do bad things too, I am talking about the general meta-narrative that operates despite an environment of apparent social justice and legal equity. I am not saying that men are EVIL, just that there is a bizarrely unfortunate feedback loop between how we raise our boys to fill jails and political parties, the blundering murderous momentum of our economies, institutions and political structures, and the operations of power.

There is a lot of bad shit happening in the world that women have nothing to do with instigating.

Of course, my life is especially blessed with fellas who epitomize everything that is good and lovely in the world – my Dad, my Hubby, my Brother, the Cougarnaut, the Biggest Hippy and well, lots of others. So it isn’t ALL men, its just that where there are places in the world for evil, violence, genocide, hate, destruction, war or environmental suicide to operate, well, those places are invariably held by men.

So what is a girl to do? I am not really sure. I suspect it has something to do with growing veggies, pots of tea, and herding ducks.

Rant over.

Alas, poor Julie

Hmmm. I don’t think I am very good that the whole home baking thang. Poor Julie has failed to perform. My sourdough did not rise today! Well, perhaps she did, a bit, in a barely discernable microscopic way……I ‘m wondering if I need to practice on some wheat flour, rather than jumping straight to whole meal spelt flour super serious hippydom? The destructions do say it can take a while to rise….do we think 24 hours is to long to wait?

Hee hee, I hope the Norwegian Princess and Biggest Hippy didn’t spend too much time trying to get Juiliet and Julian to do their stuff….

Anyway, enter Shirley. Lets see if we can round up a more compliant and volcanious herd of while yeast monsters this time ‘round.

more hoochy!

Well, the Norwegian Warrior Princess was very happy to take possession of Juliet today and this evening I hived off another half of Julie to make Julian for the Biggest Hippy.

I am a little concerned that I have waited too long to put them in the fridge, and that this should have happened on Tuesday morning when Julie was at her frothiest, but anyhoo, all three smell sweet/sour/beery, have been fed every 24 hours and are regularly having their hooch layers poured off, so something is happening - just not sure what.

The Biggest Hippy has already made his own sourdough starter, but has promised to fire up the wood oven over the weekend and make a loaf out of each, for a bit of a compare and contrast of our respective herds of wild yeasts!

tutti fruiti time

In other news, today I learnt about tutti fruiti time - "where hours are stretchy, ribboned, enchanted and wild." Tutti fruiti time is where children live.

You can find out more about tutti fruiti time here. You can hear an interview with author Jay Griffiths through this link too - it is about 40 minutes into the "listen now" version of today's Life Matters program, but today was so good I reckon you should listen to the whole program if you have a cup of tea and some stretchy time.


All I know is that I want to live in tutti fruiti time too!

hoochy mama

Well, Julie (yes, the sourdough starter has a name) is going gangbusters! She was started on Sunday night, fed on Monday night and by Tuesday morning was frothy and bubbly and beery. This evening it looked like Julie might be feeling a bit deflated….(oh my poor hothouse flowered child) but realized she might be growing so fast that she ran out of food during the day. I then noticed she had a layer of HOOCH.

So, I did three things. I stirred the hooch back into Julie (as per S. John Ross’ destructions), poured half of her into another Jar (Juliet) to give to the Norwegian Warrior Princess, and finally, fed them both.

Hopefully Julie (and Juliet) will be back to her frothy self by morning, and I can pop her in the fridge.

I am thinking that the whole harvesting of wild yeasts thing was made a little easier by the fresh batch of Bokashi funking up the house while it was drying in front of the heater and that this might explain the accelerated starter process….? Who can tell?

WIll keep you posted

world sourdough expedition

In breaking news, Rhonda from Down to Earth blogging fame has invited like minded folks on a world sourdough making adventure, and well, you can count me in!

Here is my sourdough starter, and here is Rhonda’s link to destructions for making sourdough. http://www.io.com/~sjohn/sour.htm . Please note my lovely leopard skin tea cozy in the background. (Now that’s form AND fundtion!)


FYI, I am using organic whole meal spelt flour, rainwater and an old Polski Ogorki jar. Will keep you posted!

will worms eat a futon?

Well, after 10 years of excellent service, Mr Duck Herder and I decided up upgrade our sleeping arrangements from a futon to the softest, squishiest mattress on the planet. BLISS!

So what to do with the old futon? This particular futon was made from a thin sheet of foam covered with layers of cotton or wool (I’m not sure) wadding, so in theory, the foam should be reusable and the wadding biodegradable.

Naturally, one can’t rush into these things, so the futon lay strategically placed near the front door for a few weeks until the planets aligned sufficiently to precipitate action. The mattress has a cotton cover which was held together by a long zipper. This made it very easy to recover the wadding. Revolve then happily took custody of the foam and cotton cover for resale. If we still had a dog, the foam and cover would have been great to line a kennel with, however Silke the wonder dog is long gone.

So what to do with all that wadding? The wadding looked pretty clean – as if it had been washed during production, but not bleached, with lots of veg matter spread though it. I guess it would have been low cost wadding because of the seed and plant contamination. It will be interesting to see if any seed comes up! In the mean time, it is bagged up in the carport.

Serendipitously, the bedding in the duck house needed replacing, and I was fresh out of straw. The way things cycle through our little ecosystem is that straw or hay goes into the duck and chook houses, gets pooped on, (some might call this “microbial activation and nitrogen infusion”) and then gets put in either the worm farms or used as mulch in the veggie garden or around fruit trees.

So out with the straw and in with the wadding. I must say it looked very soft and warm. I would also have to say that the ducks were not impressed AT ALL. You can see them here looking very unsure about the whole thing. Ducks, for all their clownishness, are very conservative, have a boring palate and do not like change. Needless to say it took quite a while for me to coax them into bed last night. But they seemed to have survived and despite filling their water up with wadding, hopefully will become accustomed to their new sleeping arrangements.

The next step will be to see if the worms will eat the end product. I will keep you posted.

In other news, I am slowing getting the hang of the whole blogging thing, and managed to fix up the time/date zone thing so it no longer looks like I am keeping strange hours.

Oh and for Sherd, here is yesterday's photo of Nefley the stupid white fluffy chicken, just in case you are still feeling sooky.

Happy Composting!