catching summer

I've got the picture in my head that I keep going back to. It was about 10 days ago, it was just before dark maybe about eight o'clock, and we were in the car my farmer boy and I, driving around the farm on the road and through the paddocks. The air was still, the night was warm, and the sting of the summer sun was slowly disappearing behind the tallest trees of the forest.

He was driving. And stopping often to clean the filters, check on the irrigation, feed the dogs and chooks, and see how the apples were sizing up and ripening. And as we drove my left arm slowly danced outside the car window, catching summer and that wide and endless feeling.

I remember we weren't talking much, we do this drive every night and sometimes we do and mostly we don't. It's just nice to escape the chaos of the house for a while and be together.

'I think I'm happier now than I've ever been in my whole life' I blurted out as we drove past the newly planted sunflower patch. 'I feel like I'm more authentically, honestly me than I can ever remember being. Like my skin fits and I feel comfortable wearing it.'

And I didn't mean that kind of happiness that is short lived, giggly joy. I could have called it satisfied or honest, but it felt bigger and more worthy than that. It was more of an underlying positive feeling about where we live and the way we've chosen to live. It was about nature and love and creativity and time.

In amongst that feeling there are the day-to-day disappointments, annoyances, frustrations, loses, successes, proud moments, worried moments, and general highs and lows. But running underneath all of that is this calm feeling of good. Of right.

As we drove on to his parent's house to pick some plums I started to get nervous about admitting this stuff that I'd been thinking about for a while out loud. What if I jinx it and get hit by a truck tomorrow? Talking about the big, good, lucky stuff doesn't bother him. He encourages it. It's the dark what if's that he can't do. So I took back my truck fear and kept it to myself. And at the same time I made a big decision there and then to hold onto this feeling, to fight to protect it if I have to and to guard it with my life.

And I knew challenging times were ahead with the start of the school year and the fading of summer into autumn and then winter. But if I've acknowledged that feeling won't I be able to access it when I need it? 

Ten days later and although the sun is most certainly still shining and warming up the soil and my heart, the small stresses of life feel like they're piling up; thrip in the flowers, an extremely hormonal daughter, a big landscaping decision to be made, a dreadful bout of insomnia, kangaroos ripping the apple nets, a dog escaping, a dog dying, pump issues, bird issues, a house that needs a clean from top to bottom, a crazy full family diary, expectations, overwhelmations (haha), not enough hours in the day and too many at night...I could go on but I'm sure you get the picture.

But underneath that annoying pile is that warm summer's night. And so far, if I stick my real left arm out of my imaginary car window and slowly dance it through the evening breeze, I can take myself back there. I can reclaim that feeling. It's mine.

I'm hoping that putting it into words and publishing it here will solidify it even further.

And as well as all of those fancy hand dancing moves, I'm picking basket-fulls of cucumbers every day to eat and to pickle.

I'm admiring the flowers my farmer boy is arranging and scattering around the house.

I'm loving this view through the garden to our house.

I'm becoming more and more frustrated with blogger for dulling down my photos that look so sharp in Lightroom and on my computer and so out of focus here. I wish swapping over to a new platform was that easy.

I'm dead heading, and weeding, and planting, and wondering how many more sunny summer days we have left .

I'm finally admitting that the potted colour I bought late last June has got to go.

I'm reading my Dad's library copy of The Family. Woah, such crazy stuff.

We're watching Waco. Do you see a bit of a theme emerging here?

And I'm still knitting the front of my Mirehouse, maybe I'll get a chance to make a start on the back this weekend.

It just occurred to me that those people who email me every few weeks to let me know that they're reading through my blog from the start to now must be rolling their eyes at this one. Without trawling through my archives I'm pretty sure that - holding onto the long, sunshine filled summer days as autumn and crazy school routines draw near - must be a pretty common theme around Fox Lane.

But then again everything about my life is seasonal; the plums in the dehydrator, the school picnic this afternoon, the tomatoes waiting to be turned into sauce, the mad scramble for glass containers with lids for freezing produce, the smell of honey in the air, the mud wasp nests, the blackberry scratches on my arms, the empty laundry basket, the basil pesto, the cabbage moths, the thistle flowers, the broken drip lines, the sound of crickets... I wouldn't want it any other way.

How are you going anyway?
What's the flavour of your season?
Are you hanging on tight to this time right now or counting the days til the next?
If I ever did move blog platforms, would you come and find me?

I hope you have a wonderful weekend my friends. Ours is bound to be filled with lots of preserving, homework and gardening.

See you next week!

Love, Kate x

let the sun shine in

It feels a little superficial and silly to say that a living space has changed my life, but our new sun room really has. When it's wet and windy outside - it's protected and warm inside, when there are dishes in the sink and the laundry waiting to be hung - you can literally close the door and turn your back on them, when it feels dark and gloomy in the house - it's bright and airy in the sun room, when you want to jam with your sisters, clean and sharpen your knife collection, darn in the ends of your socks, drink your morning coffee, make plans for your birthday party, grow plants that are a little fragile, read your book, do your homework, practise your instrument, chat on the phone... the sun room is the place to be.

Bren promises me that he'll never get sick of me gushing about how happy I am with that space, but surely 50 plus times a day must be pushing his limits.

This past week Bren and Jobbo continued paving outside the laundry. Hopefully by next week there will be an undercover clothesline and a big door at the end to close it all off.

The paving also continued to make a landing out the front door to to welcome you from the garden into the house. It's almost time to plant some grass seeds out the front and plan where the new veggie gardens will go.

This week I spent a lot of time weeding the garden, staking some plants that got knocked over in the storm, planting and harvesting.

It looks like the first of the zinnias might burst into bloom any day now which excites me no end. I've actually enrolled in an online flower farming course starting in the new year. It's something I've been thinking about for a while now and when the opportunity arose I took it. At this stage I have no idea what it means for the future of Daylesford Organics but I do love the thought of growing rows and rows of colourful blooms. I also really love the fantasy of dressing my girls in linen aprons and sending them off down the rows to pick armfuls of flowers at dusk for my photo shoots. Watch this space...

In the meantime that wild jungle of a self-seeded corn flower bed that I've been threatening to pull out for weeks now is a vision of green and blue and providing us with the prettiest posies.

The cat is still playing hide and seek and jumping out at me from all the most unexpected places.
 

I've been knitting up a couple of child sized socks for my master class at the Soul Craft festival.

In my class I'll be showing you how to knit a sock just like this. Using a circular needle we'll cast on the toe (pale blue), knit up the foot (red), increase for the gusset (navy), turn the heel (pink/green), knit up the leg (grey), rib for the cuff (yellow), and finish with a stretchy bind off. 

If sock knitting is something you've been thinking about trying for a while, if you've knitted socks cuff down and want to try toe up, if you want to ditch the DPN's for circs and the magic loop, then this class is for you. Imagine the fun we're going to have. I'm so excited.

Please click on this link for more info on my class.

Please click on this link to book for my class.

Please click on this link to check out the amazing program of speakers and demonstrations and masterclasses on offer. (If you book into my class on Saturday the 9th June, your ticket includes entry to the festival, the speakers and demonstrations, a curated market, community projects, craft dating (I'm not actually sure what that is - sounds interesting), lots of spaces to sit and make, delicious food and opportunities to connect with other crafters. Sounds cool, right!

And other than all of that I've been planting cucumbers, eating broad beans, going to all of the end of year performances, reading Morris Gleitzman's After, counting down til the last drive of the school year, wondering if we should pull the rest of the garlic out, hoping for a bit of weekend sunshine it's freezing today, looking for some inserts for some old wire hanging baskets, feeling all of the feels about our girls going into grade 5, year 9 and year 12(!!!!!) next year and listening to my tummy grumbling I think it's time for lunch.

I hope you're doing really well my friends.
Has a space ever changed your life?
Do you ever feel like you're on top of the weeding?
Are you going to come and hang out with me at the Soul Craft festival?
Do you have plans to start something new next year?
Do you have something fun planned for this weekend?

I hope you have a great one!
See you next week.

Love Kate x

all the spring things

Well hello there, it's so nice to see you. How's your week been? Can you believe it's Friday again already?

This week I officially ran out of space in my green house. Every shelf and every spare bit of table and even parts of the floor are covered with pots and tubs of growing things. Bren keeps telling me that I'm early this year, that I can slow down and take a break, but the reality is that I love it in there; I love the floral smell that greets you as you walk in, the pots of colour on the window sills, the plants in their various stages of growth and the view outside of the kitchen garden nestled in the forest. Apart from a few more shelves which will hopefully be added next week, I think we've built the perfect green-house for me. And so every spare second finds me up to my elbows in soil, playing with seeds, examining roots, getting excited about leaves and chatting excitedly with my plant babies about how gorgeous they're going to grow up to be.

This week I noticed that the self seeded tomatoes in the garden are starting to come up, so my green-house seeded tomatoes are right on schedule.

The first of my cucumbers are up which got me very excited about pickle season but also a tiny bit nervous about growing without a poly tunnel this year. Fingers crossed for a frost free summer.

And the beans started raising their alien-like heads out of the soil. I know most people plant big seeds like beans straight into the garden, and I probably will too later in the season, but I do love watching them closely as they germinate in their trays, potting them into bigger pots and then out into the garden.

This week the green-house extension began. Or rather the green-rooms. Building on to the sunny side of the house, we're planning a beautiful, bright area with lots of greenery and a big old kitchen table and chairs, a mud room, and a wood shed/room. I've already bought some rope to start macrame-ing up some hanging baskets to dangle down from the roof.

When our friend Annabel the architect came over the other day to pick me up for gym she said she feels like our house is transitioning from the house you see and think - oh wow do Kate and Bren really live here? To the house that looks like our dream home. That makes me happy.

The farm we bought 16 years ago had a house on it that we never loved. We always planned to build another but the children and the business sort of got in the way. Now that we finally do have the time and the head space to do something about it, we're freshening her up to our taste, fixing her up instead of starting again, I think she's going to love it as much as we are.

This week I finally started planting out into the garden. For weeks I was hassling my farmer boy to spade the green manure in and to prepare the beds and then when the weather cooperated and he finally could, I got stage fright. I couldn't work out what to plant where, and how. 

Eventually I just took the biggest of the the plants in the green-house, strung up a string line and popped them in. So far, under the black crates for protection from the kangaroos until we put a fence up, are cabbage and silver beet, and in the next row we've got onions and peas. Hopefully by the end of the weekend there'll be a whole lot more.

In other farming news, this week farmer Bren spread fertiliser in the orchards and then sprayed them with seaweed, fish emulsion and potassium bicarbonate for prevention of powdery mildew and black spot. Just as he was finishing up Mother Nature completely cooperated and dumped 30mm of rain over the top. If everything goes to plan and we have some beautiful, still, sunny days for the bees to fly and fertilise the blossom as it comes out over the next couple of weeks, we'll be right on track for a bountiful crop. Fingers crossed.

Earlier in the week we started watering the garden again. It's funny how seasons change almost inperceptively and all of a sudden you find yourself doing things that felt impossible and unnecessary only weeks before. Later in the week it rained heavily for hours so we won't need to water again for a while.

After deciding last weekend that it was time to cut my losses and pull apart the cardigan I was knitting because it looked like it was never going to fit Miss Pepper properly, I changed my mind and thought I'd do the i-cord bind off up the button band and around the neck and see what it looked like then. After I knitted the i-cord bind off I still couldn't decide (and my model was at school camp and couldn't try it on for size) so I started to knit the sleeves, both at the same time, until she comes home. I'm assuming she'll be too tired tonight to try it, so tomorrow is the day. Wouldn't it be wonderful if it worked!

Ravelry details here.

This week we've been picking Peonies, Camellias, Proteas and Waratahs from the garden and planting so many flower seeds in the garden and in pots.

I particularly love how the Waratahs start out looking so faded until it rains on them and they turn up the colour to bright.

I've loved listening to this podcast about the sports bra,  and this podcast about periods and menstrual taboos.

And I'm half way through and loving Brigid Delaney's book Wellmania.

See that asparagus and spring garlic, just picked by those hands? Well as we speak it's being cooked in some butter with some herbs and tossed over a piece of toast and is the reason I have to love you and leave you now.

I hope you have a wonderful weekend.
Do you have something fun planned?
What are you planting in your garden at the moment?
What is your favourite thing to eat for lunch?
Can you imagine life without a sports bra!! Ouch!

Bye bye!

Love Kate xx

the second week

sixth

When I decided to do a photo a day in May project last week one of the rules I imposed on myself was to not always capture the prettiest moments, but to challenge myself to look for the interesting and the gritty too. The two photos I took last Saturday are heading in that direction.

It was a freezing cold, wet, windy day and we'd called off all of the girls' activities and were bunkering down inside instead. There was one point in the late afternoon where I looked around at the cozy scene wondering what to capture. If I didn't get my shot then, I'd lose the light and miss my day. The fire was roaring, the house was a mess of papers and computers and musical instruments and girls, but nothing called to me. Then I looked outside, onto the back deck and decided.

I slipped on my clogs, quickly slid open the back door, snapped two photos and dashed inside again.

Leaves from the grape-vine that cover our back deck and give us shade in summer, grapes at the height of autumn, and then a sludgy mess as they decompose into winter.

seventh

Miss Pepper helping me out by searching for scarlet runner bean pods inside the tee-pee.

eighth

Knitted with love for my kitty cat obsessed, youngest. She loves them but did not love me dragging her outside into the cold and pulling up her leggings, as proven by her goose bumps.  

It's a free pattern I found on ravelry, you can find the details here.

ninth

Last year we grew a paddock of pumpkins. This year we didn't get them in til so late that they didn't get a chance to really get going before the days started to cool off, so we gave up on them and eventually pulled them out. The compost it seems had ideas, and seeds, of its own and grew this load. It's probably more than enough for us for the season anyway.

tenth

One of the first things we built when we moved to our farm back in 2001 was this hot house onto the side of our house. Using bits of poly pipe and greenhouse plastic, but without the help of YouTube, farmer Bren and my dad constructed a place for me to raise seeds and shelter some sensitive plants.

It's hard for us to remember where the idea for the plans came from. It's hard to imagine if we thought it would be a temporary fix or a long term solution. It's crazy to think about who we were back then: a couple with one baby girl and no farming experience.

And here we are all these years later pulling it down. Cutting the pipe, slicing at the plastic and digging out all of the soil. It's served us well over the years. I'd guess it's grown hundreds of thousands of plants.

And now it's time for an upgrade. We've drawn up the plans, we've gathered some old windows, we're starting on Monday. Watch this space.

eleventh

Rushing outside last night to catch a photo of the flame tree glowing in the afternoon sun, it occurred to me that I could take the shot from what until the day before was inside the hot-house. Four steps to the right gave me another perspective. Makes me pleased to know that the new hot house will have opening windows. And how about that tree hey!

twelfth

My current knitting project is a Guernsey wrap for Miss Indi. Remember when I told you a few weeks ago that Pepper had a list up on the door where family members could place their knitting orders? Indi ordered a scarf.

The thought of that scarf and the meters of knit stitch or purl stitch that would be involved in the making made me shudder. A more tedious project I couldn't imagine. That is until we sat on Ravelry for a while and looked at the endless possibilities of stitch combinations.

We chose this pattern because it was a mixture of textured patterns found on traditional fisherman's sweaters which would keep it interesting for me and yet was a simple long, rectangular scarf for her. I know I've barely even started, but so far I'm loving knitting it, long may it continue and grow.

The ravelry details are here.


And there they are, my seven (plus a couple) photos of the week.

It's been a bit of a topsy-turvey week for me. One afternoon I cried three separate times on the drive home from school at the sheer magnificence of the show that mother nature was putting on for us, the next day I heard a friend's difficult news and felt so weighed down by the weight of the world. Nasty, short sighted comments on a friend's Facebook shocked me and hurt my heart, but then a brother and sister raised over two million dollars in five cent pieces to kick cancer where it hurts and smash a world record. One of our girls got a role in a local production of The Three Lost Children and we were all thrilled, but then she has this bit of eczema that makes her so uncomfortable it hurts. Some of the olives were hit by frost, but the carrots are sweeter than ever. Up, down, up down. I'm blaming PMS and the full moon. And I'm hoping for clear skies and calm waters ahead. And sunshine of course.


I hope you've had a gorgeous week.
I wonder if the leaves are growing or falling off where you are?
If the days are getting longer or shorter?
If you use circulars or DPN's to knit your socks and sleeves?

Happy Mother's day!

Love Kate xx