The Greening of Gavin

Making a Difference from Bed

@ By 1 Comment

Some days, it takes a while to think of something to right about, so I don’t try and force a post about something random and meaningless. So, every so often I will skip a few days and do not write, but just do stuff and jot down ideas during the day! Writing about sustainable living is one thing, but actually doing something about it is another.

For instance, yesterday, I had a bit of a small setback with my injury, with my legs aching for most of the day. It was probably all the moving around I did over the weekend! However, the time that I needed in bed to recover was well spent. I finished of a few books from the library, being “Saving the Planet – 52 brilliant ideas for rescuing our world”, by Natalia Marshall, and “Outdoor Kids – A practical guide for kids in the garden”, by Jamie Durie.

The first book is one of those “how to” books of which I have read so many times. I really didn’t find anything new in it, but it would be a fantastic starter for anyone just beginning a green journey. I did find one fantastic quote that I will share;

“If you think you are too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito in the room.” – Anita Roddick (founder of the Body Shop)

What a powerful statement and it helped me get through the day!

The second book was so that I could get a few ideas on how to drag Ben away from his PC (besides turning it off), and get him to willingly volunteer to help in the garden. I got a few ideas, but will try them before writing about them. The one I did try during our winter planting, which works, was to get him to plant his favourite vegetable, broccoli, and help tend it for the season. That way, I noticed that he took an interest in its growth and helped keep the caterpillars off of them. But alas, I planted them too early and the aphids attacked them, so he lost interest in the other vegetables.

After I finished reading, Kim and I ordered our seeds from the Diggers club for our summer crop. We still had a fair bit of seed left over from last season, so I did a quick stock take of seed stock, and we ordered a few different things this year. Here is the list;


  • Lazy Housewife Beans
  • Capsicum Mixed Italian Fryers
  • Eggplant Heirloom Mixed
  • Melon African Horned
  • Spring Onion Red (grew last year)
  • Silverbeet Five Colour Mix (grew last year)
  • Tomato Elfie
  • Tomato Broad Ripple Yellow Currant
  • Tomato Mortgage Lifter (grew last year)
  • Tomato Tigerella (grew last year)
  • Tomatillo Purple
  • Chilean Guava


We are both quite excited about all the new fruits and vegetables, especially the Horny African Melon (did that come out wrong?), and I don’t think we will have any trouble finding anywhere to plant them. The total cost including postage was $49.80, which is fantastic value for money, especially when the Chilean Guava is a perennial. That amount used to be our fortnightly fruit and vegetable bill, and now it lasts a whole season and then some when I preserve some produce with the Fowler-Vacola kit. The annuals should last me for two seasons, even though I did plant far too many tomato seedlings last year, and half of them died because I didn’t re-pot them soon enough. Not bad for our first summer of growing though. We had so many tomatoes, that we ate them nearly every day, and had to preserve some near the end of the season for pasta sauce, because the plants just kept producing!

These seeds are not the only ones I will be planting. I will still sew most of what I did last year, especially the cucumbers, chilies, salad greens and different types of tomatoes, and of course the sweet corn that is now destined for the front yard. I also had a breakthrough yesterday. Kim is starting to go off the ornamental in the fruit tree side of the garden, so I am going to ask Adam to rip out one of the jasmine vines and we will prepare the soil for a couple of black passionfruit vines I have been nurturing for quite a while now. It will be great to see edibles growing, even though jasmine does look fantastic in the spring. But, we are starting to realise that if you can’t eat it, then we are just wasting our time, water, and money on a non-productive garden.

I also caught up on my blog reading and left quite a few comments on my usual reads, and found a few new green blogs. All good reading, and many thought provoking posts as usual.

I have managed to cook dinner two nights in a row now, without too much pain, both meals being simple, hearty fare. Last night, I added to the chicken stock I made on Sunday night from the leftovers from the normal roast chicken, to make our usual Monday night chicken soup. I added a little curry powder this time, and it was very delicious. Home made stock is definitely the best tasting stock I have ever tried. It beats that stuff you buy in a tetra pack or stock cubes any day! Tonight, I cooked up a very easy creamy mushroom sauce that I ladled over some ravioli. I bought the ravioli from NQR, and never again, as it was terrible. At least the sauce gave it some substance.

Tomorrow, our friends Phil (Wombat064) and Stacy are popping around for morning tea, so we can catch up and have a good chat about all thing environmental, and the recent WWOOF’ing (Willing Workers On Organic Farms), that Phil did for a few days locally. It should be a good catch up.

It is amazing the green things you can get up to in bed!


Chicken House Update and other Stuff

@ By 1 Comment

After working some of the morning and most of the afternoon on the chicken house, I have nearly finished the nesting box and night house. It has been a slow day, as I was working with off-cuts and working without a plan. Basically, I was making it up as I went along with the materials I have at hand, and the hardwood I utilised had to have all the screw holes pre-drilled, or the wood would have split. Nothing like a bit of reuse and recycling to help a project along. Tomorrow, I finish off the nesting box and put the hinged roof on, so that we can collect the eggs, and muck it out when necessary.

Megan and Amy dug the last two holes for the remaining posts to complete the chicken run. I have enough money put aside now to get the chicken wire and nails that I require to finish the run part of the project. Amy went to Bunnings and bought me a 20Kg bag of quick-set concrete to set the posts in the ground. So far, it looks pretty good, however, I didn’t take any photos today. Kim will take some tomorrow when it is nearer completion.

One sad thing happened today. I had to pull out all of my broccoli, as it became infested with aphids. It didn’t seem to matter what I did to deter these beasties, they just kept coming back in droves. No matter how much garlic & chilli spray or derris dust was applied, a week or two later they were back. I just had to give up in the end, and compost the lot. The Aerobin should be hot enough to kill them all off. The aphids did not attack any other plants, so Adam dug the bed up for me and I took the sugar cane mulch off the top and dumped it where the chicken run is going to be. It will be the chooks first bedding. I am sure they will have a ball picking through it all. I will let the bed rest for a week and then plant some lettuce seedlings that I have been growing. They should take off very quickly as the soil is still very fertile.

For dinner, I whipped up a wonderful Chicken and Vegetable stew, which I cooked in the pressure cooker. It only took 15 minutes to prepare and 30 minutes to cook. The flavours were amazing and the meat just fell apart. Everyone said it was fantastic, and we have had about five meals prepared in this way now. So simple and quick, and full of nutrition. What a great birthday present! Every time I cook with the pressure cooker, I think of my Mum, and all of the wonderful meals she used to cook in her pressure cooker when I was a child. She used to cook most of the winter lamb and beef stews in it (we rarely had chicken), and they were always very tasty. Come to think of it, my mum also used to make lots of preserved fruit from the very large fruit orchard we used to have on the dairy farm. Maybe that is where I inherited the urge to preserve everything I could lay my hands on this year. Thanks Mum, I love you and you brought me up well!

Whilst the dinner was cooking, I watched the little valve go round and round, and sampled a pint or two of the Coopers Canadian Blonde beer I brewed a while back. It is a lovely drop, and very malty. It has been in the bottle for about two months, so it has very small compact bubbles, and a nice light head. It went down very well. Kim thought it was nice, even though she made her beer into a shandy. It must be the English in her!


Planting Peas, Salad, and Pickling

@ By Leave a Comment

I have been a busy boy in the garden over the last few days. Friday I made some trellis out of some bamboo sticks I had previously used as tomato stakes. The trellis is for the Purple Podded peas (I saved the seeds from last season) and Snowpeas to grow up. They are a very simple construction, with four sticks in a pyramid shape and fastened at the top with a cable tie that I had spare. Then across the top lay another stick to finish it off. I then planted the seeds 5 cm apart in troughs around the base of each pyramid and watered well. The seedlings should be poking through in about 10 days. I couldn’t do the entire row as you can see the eggplant and chilli bushes are still producing well because of the recent hot weather.

Adam and I moved Ben’s little garden bed to the other side of the house where the main vegetable patch is. I had a spare bit of land that gets decent sun most of the year round, so it was the ideal place. Yesterday, I planted the winter salad garden into it. I sowed Wild Arugula, Mizuna mustard, Mesclun mix and, Goldrush lettuce. These are all loose leaf varieties that you pick as you need. There should be enough to feed the entire family for the winter. I just checked the root crop bed and the three types of radishes have sprouted and burst through. They really do not take very long to germinate!

Today, it has been raining on and off and all the excess rainwater is topping up the swimming pool. Not that it is pool weather, but it is better than going down the storm drain, as the tank is full to the brim! I started off the day early, and took Megan to the dentist for a checkup, and she had to have a filling (poor girl). Then we walked to the supermarket to buy a few things I needed for making some pickles. We got back home at about 0930 and I started to make a Green tomato pickle to use up all of the green tomatoes I had left after pulling the remainder of the tomato vines last week. It took about an hour but was well worth it. It tasted great! Then I made a second batch of Brinjal Pickle which is essentially eggplant in character, with some onion and chilli. It is great with curries, and we are half way through the first batch as it is so nice.

After the Brinjal Pickle was most of the way through cooking, I started to make a Hot Chilli Chutney to use up the glut of Jalepeno chillies that I had. The recipe was simple enough, and called for 450gm of chillies. I had more than that, so I used up all of the red chillies I had and left a lot of green chillies on the bush to ripen. The chilli chutney is very oily and I have modified the oil content for when next I make it. As you can see from the photo, there is about 1.5 cm of oil in the top of each jar, and by hell, the oil is hot. Maybe I should just siphon the oil off and put it in a small bottle and call it chilli oil! I finished it all off by processing all the jars in the Folwer-Vacola preserving pot for 45 minutes at 93 degrees C. This kills all the bacteria and creates a vacuum so that the food will last for over 6 months. You will notice that I used a few left over jars that have the little button on the top. I have found that these work just as well as the proper preserving jars, and you can process them in the same way.

We are all looking forward to Earth hour tonight, but as it is overcast and raining we probably won’t be breaking out my telescope to have a look at the very dark night sky. Kim and I have a Chickpea curry for dinner that we are going to share by candle light, with some of the condiments that I made today. The kids are going to play monopoly by candle light which should be interesting. I will make sure that all of the candles are in a safe place so that we don’t end up with a house fire instead of an environmental statement! Kim wants to walk around the neighbourhood and put little notes of shame for all of those people that don’t have their lights off at 8pm, but I told her that this is bordering on extremism (but a great idea though). I am, however looking forward to the TV coverage of the event to see what difference it made throughout the world. Here is hoping, anyway.