Christmas, digging up the no-dig bed, and broodiness

Christmas has been and gone - just us four at home; no travelling, no accomodation issues, no interpersonal scrimmage. Lovely. The boys were a hoot - Reilly loved his bed ("I'm tired. I go to bed now." "I'm awake!. Oh-oh, I'm tired again").

G's favourite present of course is the Ben 10 watch from his little brother. He even leaves it alone when asked so we don't take it away from him.
Got my granite mortar and pestle, which I love. 'Green eggs and ham' for lunch today with Christmas left-over ham, scrambled eggs from the girls and some finely pounded (pestled?) silverbeet, parsley, thyme and sage mixed with a little water to make a gorgeous green colour.

D gave me a beautiful knife block, which I've been wanting for ages. Heavy, and only one place that I don't have the right knife for. Have to buy a new knife...
I got him a turntable to convert his albums to MP3s, so we were both perfectly happy.

Have realised that my fundamental quality is laziness. Well, sort of. I reckon 97% or so is poor time-management and the other 3% is wanting to go back to bed. (On a good day, anyway.) I read recently a book called "On Guerilla Gardening", written by a bloke in England who is part of a worldwide movement of people who sneak out at night (or brazenly by day, often with official-looking fluoro vests on...) and beautify wasteland areas or small neglected and unloved parts of their environment. I thought "Oooh, yeah, chuck a bunch of seeds at a place and if it doesn't grow it doesn't matter - no commitment". On reading rather deeper, I realised that the initial bunch of flowers, vegies, trees, whatever is only the crust of this phenomena, and that maintenance of an area is just as rebellious, if not more so. Straggly flowers smothered by grass and weeds don't cut it when you're launching an attack on neglect and ugliness - they make it worse. So my previous rebellious thoughts died inside me when I looked at my own garden patch. I bought a good hoe today and got stuck into the place where the no-dig, no-maintenance grass-filled vegie bed is. I cleared along the fence for a section of it, and out to about a foot, where I discovered a small line of bricks buried quite deeply in the bed; apparently there was an edged garden bed there many years ago, before Dave's mum moved here. Have excavated around the line, which is still straight and level, and will use it for a path inside the new garden bed. I also planted a large rhubarb, put a small makeshift swale around it and gave it a bucket of water. I will also monitor the chooks' gate carefully. This time, I want the rhubarb to have the best possible chance at life.



Thinking of the chooks, I think Ruth may be broody - she's spent the whole day on the nesting box except when I turfed her out to get some of the good scraps I'd brought up. She was back on later. Doesn't appear to have any other symptoms, so I don't think she's ill. Will find out as we go along, I guess.

Summer

Summer is here ... sort of. Grey, muggy and cloudy. The garden was doing pretty well - seedlings up of beans, pumpkin, tomatoes (both purposeful and rogue), a few other things. Corn is doing well. We went down to Warrnambool & Port Fairy for a couple of days to visit the folks, got back and discovered that the chooks got out of their carefully constructed enclosure and ate through everything but the corn, which was behind a fence. Fortunately, I have the lettuces and a few more tomatoes in the front garden, so all is not lost.
Potatoes died off in the star-picket and chookwire so I harvested them. Twenty, and all small. I think maybe I should have been a tad less frugal with the water. More baths for the boys?

We got a new bed (for the bedroom, not the garden) a little while back, so the old one is out in the shed in pieces. When put together its like a box, so seems to me it's going to become a garden bed. Nice size for a square foot garden actually - about 4'x6'. Will try one. Our neighbours across the road were discarding some wooden venetians, so they'll become part of the bed as well, laying out the grid.

It's nearly Christmas, and I'm not as prepared as I hoped to be. Reilly's getting a big-boy bed, and I have to find the thing, buy it, have it delivered and set it up on Christmas Eve. Would *like* to do it and transfer him into it from the cot while he's asleep, but he doesn't sleep that soundly. If it was Gareth, I could hammer the thing together in his bedroom and he wouldn't notice till morning, even if he got up to use the toilet. Still have to organise Ros's subscription too, and maybe a voucher for Mike's glasswork. We'll see. *I* want a permablitz for my Christmas present, but it ain't gonna happen this year.

Have re-read Linda Cockburn's "Living the Good Life". Skipped the botulism story this time. I love the fact that even though they didn't manage to reach the goal of no expenditure, they kept going and did a ripper of a job of it. Makes me feel like it's a perfectly normal thing to want to do. Biggest issue is the expenditure building up for it - solar power, big tanks. But it's something we both want to aim at; even if we don't become self-sufficient (we're not likely to here on our 1/16 acre with Edwardian house and 60% of one income for the setting up of it) but the stories of the blowouts, the failures, buying goat food and saying "bugger it all" on a relatively regular basis make the whole thing more human and less 'out there' somehow. Plus, anyone who likes Vanilla Coke and Black Forest chocolate is allright by me.