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Goodbye, 2020, and good riddance
Jan. 3rd, 2021 01:23 pmMy family and I are still doing well—healthy, happy, and so grateful for Australia’s active response to minor outbreaks, which has generally kept our lockdowns regional, short, and manageable and the cases near us occasional and isolated.
For the last couple of years, since I moved on from writing so much, I’ve been putting my energy into gardening and self-sufficiency. While this year has certainly been a good one for that for most people, it’s actually made it more difficult for me to make progress on that front. In the end, I’ve managed somewhat despite Covid and the associated wipeout home learning with my quirky kids imposed on me for any kind of additional activity at the end of the school day.
Pre-Covid I had put in a chicken coop and set them up to process compost on our very steep block. They have four levels to roam over, including their henhouse at the top, the coop floor level with our back patio and deck where I dump scraps, leaves, and garden debris, and then I’ve enclosed the area under the deck as their run, with a long switchback path to one side and then back to underneath the coop at the bottom of the hill. The chickens scratch through the scraps looking for interesting stuff, then scratch through looking for sprouted seeds or grubs, worms, and insect life that come to chow down on what they didn’t eat in the first round, and continue to scratch it all the way down the switch back path to the door underneath the coop—where I can take out essentially finished compost that they’ve turned for me and de-seeded and manured for my garden. They get food and entertainment, I get fresh, organic, happy eggs and rich compost, and the kids get pets and fun projects like...
We’ve set up an egg money jar for the boys to run as a business: they roam the streets and hawk excess eggs to relatives and neighbors for $5 per dozen; I take feed money out of the jar when I need to buy a new bag, and they divide any money left in the jar after that between them. And we’ve got a hen who likes to go broody, so she's helped us two separate batches of chicks. We’ve got fancy chickens so we should be able to sell any young ladies we hatch and raise for around $50-75 each. With only the sale of excess eggs (and with me taking eggs for our family needs as my cut for having absorbed the setup costs) the jar doesn’t usually tend to produce a profit—but we have five young hens in the coop approaching suitable age right now, only two of whom we want to keep. So we’ll see how the theory translates to practice soon! Once we've raised a couple to point of lay age and have photos of how the particular pairings in our coop turn out, we should be able to sell them younger, as well. It's been a fun project in genetics, tracing the origin of various traits and predicting the outcomes! Sadly, our first hatch (using purchased eggs) gave us only two chicks, both roosters. One young gentlemen we fitted with a no-crow collar and kept to father future generations, the other one we sold to a friendly farm where he would find some lady friends all of his own. Our second hatch (with our own eggs) was much more successful; some young gentlemen whom we could identify as such straight away became food for my niece’s snake, and the other two young gentlemen whom we had had to raise to find out, I processed a couple of days ago to become tonight’s dinner. Circle of life—I don’t tend to eat much meat, but I firmly believe that if we are eating meat, we should be willing to look it in the eye first. The process was less awful than I was expecting and the boys were saddened but not truly upset. Having done it once now, I don’t feel a need to deliberately raise birds for slaughter, but I feel that the responsibility of respecting a cockerel’s life by processing them for the table was a reasonable price to pay for the joy that hatching chicks has given us and the opportunity to make the boys' egg jar business an experience that turns a profit.
My garden has been getting more lush and fertile as I put more effort into building the soil, and although I had the setback of mostly missing chance for a winter garden (which is the productive time of year in our climate) due to the emotional energy sink that was home learning, I still got a surprising amount of food out of it. Our mango tree gave us 50kg of orange gold in January, which was pretty epic, although sadly, it’s looking like this year’s harvest going to be comparatively lean. Oh well. We got two bunches of bananas, which were incredibly sweet and delicious, and a peach which was okay, but dropped before it was fully ripe and I’m lucky I got to eat at all. I’ve had a handful of strawberries and raspberries and loganberries, I’ve got some blackberries almost ripe, although I haven’t managed to follow a panama berry all the way to ripe without it being snaffled by some opportunistic critter—I might need to net my tree so I can discover whether panama berries are indeed as delicious as I’ve been told and the local wildlife seems to agree. My lemon tree has finally decided to bear fruit, and what a crop it’s giving me! The first couple of lemons are nearly ripe, and it looks like I’m going to get about thirty lemons of a tree barely a metre and a half round. Can never have too many lemons! I’ve had cut flowers from the garden on my bench for pretty much the last six months, which has been a real source of joy and pride to me. I managed to crack growing snake beans and brazillian spinach which have been providing all our greens over the past couple of months, and we got a few whopper tomatoes and a couple of half-decent crops of potatoes despite mainly missing the season for them. Sweet potatoes and yam have done well, too—I’ve planted more of both of those to mature over our hot, wet summer. Sweet corn hasn’t been as successful—I’m pretty sure I haven’t been feeding them enough, but the main problem is timing—I find it incredibly difficult to both spot the exact moment to pick the mature cobs and even when I do, they tend to go without being picked at all because I know that for maximum taste, they should be picked moments before consumption, so I leave them out in the garden and don’t think of them when I’m staring into my veggie drawer looking for dinner. I’m having another go over the summer season: fingers crossed I can find a system that works for me.
I’ve also succeeded a whole lot in greening our environment and inviting in more of the local wildlife—we now have a decent population of dwarf tree frogs living and raising young in the ponds where I also grow duckweed to supplement the chicken’s diet. They hang out and croak and eat bugs and generally are just adorable—the adults are the size of a thumbnail, the baby frogs after metamorphosis are a little smaller than my pinkie. Sadly the tadpoles are excellent at hiding, so we haven’t yet managed to get a good look at the development of legs etc—I’m considering getting a small fish tank to catch some tadpoles and monitor the process a bit more closely. I got a native stingless bee hive for my birthday in 2019, and in 2020 I managed to divide it into two hives and also (which was a surprise, but meant my bees were incredibly happy) collect some of the most amazing, complex honey that I’ve ever tasted. Native “sugarbag” honey is kind of sweet-and-sour, with a slightly eucalyptus, maybe, note? In any case, yum. The general population of caterpillars and grasshoppers that prey on my plants are pretty much kept under control by the frogs, the blue-tongue lizard who lives in our yard, various predatory insects who are regular visitors to the buffet—and when all else fails, picked off and hand-fed to the voraciously grateful chickens. Keeping the chickens have actually turned out to be an amazing motivation in keeping up with weed and pest control—it’s much more fun weeding, hand-picking caterpillars, or brushing down spiderwebs when you know the product is going to be so appreciated and clucked over.
I’ve been trying to approach zero waste by utilising more and more of my waste for other purposes before they even make it to the compost—I’ve been making broth from vegetable peelings and bones, I’ve been making vinegar from fruit scraps and apple cores, and all our organic waste (including the remains of broth and vinegar) goes either through the chickens or the in-ground soldier fly farms I have scattered through my garden. I’ve been focussing hard in 2020 on reducing my single-use-plastic load by doing things like making my own bread and pasta, home-baking all our museli bars and cookies and crackers for kids lunches and snacks, shopping at the bulk food store, etc. I’ve been wondering lately, however, if my dedication to the project is more trouble than its worth. I assiduously recycle the vast majority of our single use plastic in any case, at through kerbside collection and dropping it to various collection points, and most of the stuff that doesn’t recycle isn’t something that I can make instead anyway. So while it’s obviously better to avoid the single use plastic, I wonder if it would be a better use of my time and energy to do less of the more arduous of those workarounds, and invest that time and energy in other things that might comparatively make a bigger impact on the planet.
Then again, as an additional impact of making stuff myself, our diet has become a little slower. We’ve never had problems with food allergies or similar in our family, however, I’m a great believer in the impact of gut bacteria on physical and mental health, and certainly plenty of people seem to notice an affect of food additives on the behavioural aspects of ADHD, OCD and autism. Improving our gut flora is a way to improve our lives… and gut flora starts with diet. We’ve been eating a lot less additives, preservatives and pesticides, and a lot more fresh vegetables and whole grains, the vast majority of which are either soured or sprouted. Has the change in diet had an impact on our mental health? Who knows.
Speaking of which, my mental health is still travelling well, and surprisingly much so also with my autistic eldest who has been doing extremely well particularly in the last month. We had 10 days holiday on the coast at the beginning of December, and he went the entire time without one single meltdown, which is just… a gamechanger. It was the best, most relaxed holiday with children that I’ve ever had. Our youngest has received the expected diagnosis of ADHD, but has unfortunately reacted badly to the first two medications he trialled towards the end of the last term. We are looking forward to following up with his paediatrician about in the hopes we can help make his life little easier for him to manage. Hubby has successfully completed two years as a master of alcohol, rather than feeling he was its slave—he now comfortably has a couple of drinks socially when appropriate, but doesn’t feel the need to drink regularly nor to excess. We would have been happy to teetotal as a family if it had been necessary—but we’re very pleased to have found a healthy balance.
For 2021, my resolution is to put more effort into following improvement projects all the way to conclusion, rather than leaving things half done around the place, or finished but without having put the debris away. I’ve increasingly been observing “Free-up Friday”, with the idea that it’s a day to finish and clear up and clean down and enter the weekend (including Slacker Saturday) with a reduced mental load of half-finished things or mess. I need to be more consistent about that—but also make it a habit to actually finish and tidy up a project all in one consecutive bout to keep that mental load down all the time. When a project breaks because I strike a problem that I need to think on how to solve, I need to tidy it away in the meantime while I think or gather extra materials. I really notice what a huge difference it makes to my and Hubby’s mental health when I do, so let’s try to do it more!
Wishing everyone a safe, peaceful and productive 2021!
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