sunshine in my soul

Over the past few months I've settled into this new sort of sleep pattern. After I have a shower and go to bed I read my book until I'm so bleary eyed and sleepy that I can hardly see the words on the page anymore. Sometimes I try to read past this point if I'm up to a good bit in the story, but mostly by now I recognise the peak tired point, I turn off my lamp, pop my ear plugs in and within 15 or 20 minutes I'm asleep. This is new for me, I used to find the getting to sleep part agonising.

Then I generally sleep to anywhere between two and four in the morning when I wake up, get up and go to the toilet and then repeat the reading bit. I can be awake at this point anywhere from half an hour, to the rest of the night til morning. 

I practise mindfulness, I practise good sleep hygiene, but I've never been a good sleeper and I probably never will be.

But the other night, about a week ago, I woke up in the middle of the night and had this realisation that everything right now is good. Now is one of those rare times in life where there don't seem to be any dramas. Everyone in my family is healthy and doing well. There are no big issues, no overwhelming stresses and nothing to keep me awake in the middle of the night. I went through each person in my mind and when I'd convinced myself it was true, I turned the light off and went back to sleep.

And somehow this sense of well being has stayed with me throughout the week. I feel like I've had sunshine in my soul.

On Friday after I wrote my blog we picked little tomatoes to toss over pesto pasta for our dinner, we picked cucumbers and nashis and sunflowers, and we spoke to our Indi while she decorated her kibbutz room with flowers in vodka bottle vases.

On Saturday we picked apples and plums and hazelnuts and tomatoes and cucumbers and flowers. Late in the afternoon I took a basketful of tomatoes outside, laid them out on the ground then stood over them and photographed them. 'Just like I used to do when I was an olden days blogger' I told my farmer boy. He laughed and asked me what exactly I thought I was now. Okay true, nothing's changed there.

On Sunday we strolled the aisles of The Daylesford Sunday Market trying to decide if we should have a flower stall soon, I bought some new kitchen knives and then we came home and celebrated them with super thin slices of tomato, cheese and pickled cucumber on toast. After that we picked huge bunches of straw flowers to hang upside down and dry, we picked tomatoes and cucumbers and we visited our bees to see how they were coping with the heat and if they were making any honey.

On Monday we spent time in the garden deadheading, weeding and harvesting. When the sun went down and it got a bit cooler I started stacking firewood in the woodshed - as much as I hate to think about it, I'm sure the first fire of the season can't be too far away. And I made the most delicious cauliflower and freeka salad from Julia Nishimura's book Ostro for dinner.

On Tuesday I started ceramics lessons and I LOVED it!! The first lesson was all about hand building - pinch-pots, coil pots and slabs. I made a few different styles of vases. It's so interesting to think that I've never enjoyed ceramics when I've tried it in the past and now I love it. Why the change? Why now? My teacher Kim sent us home with a chunk of clay to play with over the weekend and I'm hoping to have time on Sunday, I'm so looking forward to it.

On Wednesday we covered a few of the rows of the apple orchard with nets. It's been an incredibly hot and dry summer and despite the fact that we've been irrigating continuously, this year's crop has been small and disappointing. I blame the dreadful cold, windy and wet weeks we had last year when the blossom was out but the bees couldn't leave their hives to pollinate. If you've been waiting to see us at market or to pop into the farm gate stall, it doesn't look like it's going to happen this season. We're sorry and we're disappointed. But we do claim to be seasonal growers and some seasons are just crap.

This morning when we drove past the orchards to take Pepper to school the trees were FULL of white cockatoos holding apples in their hands eating them. The ground is littered thick with half eaten cores. We didn't feel like it was worth the cost and effort of netting the whole orchard for a disappointing crop, but hopefully we've saved a few rows of our family's favourites.

On Thursday apart from driving Jazzy to school, picking tomatoes, cucumbers and flowers and going to gym, we spent almost the entire day in the kitchen. We squished tomatoes and made an enormous cauldron of sauce and I made some more pickled cucumbers.

Every year just before our tomatoes start to ripen I have a panic and fear that we'll never have enough and end up buying a box from a local organic farmer to get me started and stop my worrying. This year I made a decision to be patient and to trust and not to panic buy.

Last year I made somewhere between 100 and 120 jars of tomatoes sauce and there are still around 15 jars left in the cupboard. That means I'd better get busy and fill that cupboard back up. I'm sitting on zero right now but I do feel so happy that I waited and that they'll all be ours.

To make - fry up an onion and some garlic, stir in the squished tomatoes, add loads of basil, bottle, seal, water-bath.

Rather than just bottling tomatoes by themselves, we add lots of other summer seasonal ingredients from our garden that we won't have growing later in the year

Which brings us to Friday, today. I took Pepper to school early, I picked bunches of flowers, tomatoes and cucumbers with Jazzy, I hunted through the dahlias for the grasshoppers that have been munching my flowers, Bren had a meeting with Dave and another guy about fixing our house dam and now I'm writing my blog.

Over the weekend I hope to start bottling the tomatoes (I'll keep you posted on the tally), keep knitting my socks, continue reading Abby's copy of Inappropriation by Lexi Freiman, start listening to the latest episode of Who The Hell is Hamish podcast, take Jazzy to the orthodontist, maybe speak to Indi, hopefully crochet something that's in my head, go to gym, fill baskets and vases with produce, and hopefully, hopefully, hopefully continue this streak of family wellness and wellbeing-ness.

And if at all possible I would absolutely love to order another week of this sunshine in my soul feeling. I'd love to order one for you too.

So how's your week been?
Did you get up to anything fun?
Are you making anything interesting?
Deciding on anything important?
Dreaming about something wonderful?

See ya next Friday.

Lots of love,

Kate x

the missing month

Hello friends,

How are you? How have the first few days of your new year been treating you?

I'm good. It's ridiculously hot and scarily windy outside, so after a morning of farm work I'm now sheltering in my dark bedroom, in a tee-shirt and undies, with my laptop on my lap, thinking about my blog.

It's been a month since I last posted here.

In the beginning I just ran out of time. It was a Friday early in December. I had taken, edited and loaded a whole bunch of photos documenting the transformation of the old farm shed into farmer Bren's new wood-workshop, and all that was left was to write the words. The words would be straight forward and easy. It's all very beautiful and exciting.

But then somehow the hours disappeared and it was time to go and visit a local ceramicist friend, then we came home and I had washing to hang out, a greenhouse to water and girls to feed. And then it was time to get ourselves dressed and ready for our beautiful friends' wedding. And then we had so much fun that we stayed all afternoon and evening and by the time we got home, after all those champagnes, I was in no state to write the words.

The next morning I woke up with all the best intentions but then my computer died. I knew it had been coming - it had been acting up for a while - so I closed it down and walked away. Unlike other computer malfunctions, this time there was no tantrum, there were no tears and there would be no blog post that week.

I felt a little bit disappointed, a little bit relieved and a little part of me wondered if it was a sign. If my time as a blogger was over and done with.

Blogging does take up a huge chunk of my life each Friday and as the growing season progresses and my time gets more valuable, it's hard to justify the whole process.

I'm a little bit embarrassed to admit that over the next few days I waited for the messages to start arriving. I thought that some people would notice my absence and write to ask why. And although I never wanted this to be about ego, I did feel a bit disappointed when nobody did. Not my family, not my friends, nobody. (Poor me - I'm so embarrassed to write this but it's true).

I think it was then that I stopped being a blogger. 

I stopped taking photos, I stopped writing posts in my head, I stopped thinking about it and I worked right on through my Fridays without another thought.

After a little while a few messages did trickle in, and then a few more. Mostly I replied that I was having computer problems, which was officially true considering I still hadn't turned my computer back on since that first Friday.

When I eventually did try to turn it on and it still wasn't working my farmer boy took all the photos off, wiped it and then reinstalled everything. 

Then he wrapped it up with a bow and left it on my bed.

Over those few weeks I thought a lot about who I was without my blog. I thought about what it gave me and what it took away. It challenged me when one of Indi's friends told her he just could not understand why I did it. And then I considered signing out of all social media altogether. I wondered if six months short of my 10 year blog anniversary, it had all just run its natural course, petered out.

As the weeks went by I received some beautiful messages from people telling me how much my blog has meant to them over the years. Lots of memories and stories and thoughts. So much kindness. Those messages meant the world to me.

And then this past week as the flowers started blossoming and the girls picked a bouquet a day, as the late afternoon golden summer sunshine intensified the beauty of where we live, and as the vegetable harvests began in earnest, I discovered that I missed the whole blogging process and was ready to have another go.

I took these photos last night, I edited them and loaded them into my blog early this afternoon when it was too hot to work outside anymore, and then, just as I was getting ready to write the words, my computer crashed. Again! Apparently the operating system I'm using is so ancient it's stopped being able to talk to Safari. Or whatever that means.

So while my computer is updating itself in the other room, I'm back on blogger on Jazzy's computer. Fingers crossed I can make it to the finish line this time.

I quite like the thought of writing a post summing up 2018, but for now I think I'll count my blessings and stop before something else goes wrong. Maybe in the next few days.

Until then I'd like to take this opportunity to thank you so much for hanging out with me at Foxs Lane. I hope your 2019 is full of all the best, most beautiful and love filled stuff. Hopefully I'll see you here really soon for more flowers and farming, family and knitting.

Big love,

Kate xx

some answers

Hello friends,

Another week has flown right on by. So many times I thought of these photos and that I should post them along with the answers to the questions in the comments at the bottom of my last post, but it never came to be.

This past week was warm and dry and I feel like we made use of every minute; planting veggies and flowers, weeding, mulching, pulling the garlic, watering and mowing. From first thing in the morning til last light at night. Summer craziness on the farm has begun.

And it's exciting to watch as the scarlet runner bean fronds grab hold and wind their way up and around the trellises, flowers on the tomatoes begin to emerge, broad beans fatten up and await their picking, dahlia shoots emerge out of the soil, lettuces grow and plump up, strawberries and peas wait for you to walk by and snap them off and each day new flowers open and show their pretty faces to the world.

So here are the photos now. My Lanes cardigan still buttonless (Ravelry details here). Indi and Jazzy, the foxgloves, delphiniums and the warm summer's eve.

And now for the question and answer bit.

Hi Carly. Now that Indi has finished school she's trying to get her hours of learner driving up to 120 so she can get her driver's license (she's currently sitting at about 94), she's relaxing and socialising and she's working for me on the farm. I can't actually remember any stand out signs from the climate rally but at one stage Bren turned to me and said we should have made one that said 'Organic Farming is the answer!' I love that imagined one too. My advice for a new gardener would be to only grow the things you love to eat and look at. And to grow rocket and radishes because they are quick and easy. And I'm okay. Not great. I had a fight with one of my kids this week that really rocked me (we're good again now) and yesterday I finally went to the doctor about my elbow and ankle and now I'm all strapped up in purple tape with exercises to do and a list of things I'm not allowed to do. And I'm not allowed to knit for a week which I am stressing about. Or spin. Ugh, what's a girl to do?! A week feels like such a very long time. x

Hi Small Catalogue, has my brain returned now that my youngest is 10 and if so did it come back gradually or in a rush? Hmmmm definitely not in a rush. Actually I feel like for me it's been less about getting my brain back and more about carving out a space of my own. And I don't just mean a physical space, although the construction of my studio definitely helped with that. Over the past year I've come out from behind my girls and really felt a push to rediscover who I am, what I need and want, and to create some projects for myself. It's ongoing obviously, and it often gets squashed by things like VCE and other demanding family issues, but I feel like this past year I have felt more true to myself than I ever remember feeling before. Do you? x

Hi Kate, ooooooh I love your question about the other senses and what they add to my stories. So often when I'm in the garden wandering around or working, with the soundtrack of the calling of the birds, the singing of the frogs, the rustling of the wind through the trees, the fountain of the water as it comes out of the ground and pours into the house dam, I'll grab my phone and try to record the visual together with the audio to try to capture the scene as a whole. It's a shame I can't do that here now. I think that when I took these photos of the girls it was early evening and the birds must have all been calling out to each other but my focus would have been on Indi and Jazzy, laughing, breaking into song, telling each other stories, finishing each other's sentences and being silly. And as for the smell, I've been finding the sweet peas quite overpowering. There would have been that just freshly watered smell and the dry forest smell is just starting to be noticeable. I'm writing all of this from inside my studio where I can't really smell anything except for the wood of the walls, but I'm sure I'll be much more aware of everything later on when I go back to work. x

And that's me today.

Where are you? What are you up to? What can you hear and smell? And how do you feel?

See you next week friends.

Love,

Kate x

bugs on the flowers

I don't know where I should start this blog post: With the flowers - the larger, metaphorical picture, or with me - the smaller personal one?

Okay let's begin with the flowers.

If you've been following along here for a while, you'll know that sometime last year, after about 16 years of organic farming, something inside of me felt very strongly that we had to start growing flowers. I think it was the romantic picture in my head of row after row of beautiful blossoms that initially drew me to them, but it also had a lot to do with the colours, the shapes and the need to grow something completely new and different.

So we prepared a patch and planted a green manure crop to nurture the soil, then we spaded it in, planted seeds, set up the irrigation, weeded them, visited them several times a day and gave them our energy, fertilised the soil and their leaves, staked them to help them stand upright in the weather and then we started to marvel as bud after bud began opening and our garden of green stems and leaves became filled with flowers.

Of course we were overjoyed and in love! We picked them and made posies, we gave big bunches away, we took loads of photographs of them and we even sold some.

But then, as is so often the case in farming, as soon as you think you've got something, Mother Nature comes along with her own ideas.

One day we woke up to find a cloud of tiny bugs in the flowers. We tried to shake them off, but they flew right back and landed. A few days later we noticed that some of the leaves of the plants looked eaten and in fact some of the flower petals did too.

Not the flowers!!

After 17 years of farming apples and vegetables, we've come in contact with most of the problems that can crop up and mostly know the reasons why they do, but flowers are a new and completely different story. We were starting from scratch.

So we took pictures of the bugs, we looked at them under magnifying glasses, we googled to identify them, and then we tried to find out all we could about why they'd come and how we could get rid of them.

Around the same time I discovered a bunch of people on an online flower grower forum were dealing with the same issue.

To start with we changed the irrigation from overhead to drip to get rid of the tropical atmosphere we had created. Then we waited and watched, and I worried. The online people were buying 'organic insecticide' to kill the bugs and were starting to see results, but still we waited and watched, and I worried.

After a while the joy that had filled me up whenever I'd spent time in the garden turned to dread as I encountered misshapen buds and asymmetrical flowers and more signs of the bugs making the flowers their homes.

After a week or so of expressing my anguish at our inaction, a courier turned up one day to deliver a bottle of the 'organic insecticide'. For a second my heart lifted at the thought of the imminent solution and then I looked over at my farmer boy's face and saw that it wasn't that simple: what I thought was going to be the solution was filling him up with dread. The insecticide went into the shed and we went back to watching and waiting.

The next day I noticed that the weather had changed, the humidity had gone and the insects had reduced in number. Some time after that some of the most magnificent dahlias I had ever seen opened up their great big, perfect faces. And then a whole bunch more. And I was delighted.

But then you guessed it: the weather changed, the bugs returned, I went back to the online flower farmers and saw that they were still spraying and I started hassling my farmer boy with 'when can we spray?' all over again.

Time after time I brought it up and it didn't happen. I threw at him that when there were issues with the apples we did everything we could to try to fix them - we sprayed potassium bicarbonate in humid weather against black spot, we fertilised them to make them healthy and strong, we netted them against the birds and hail, and we tried to keep the kangaroos out. But he drew the line at insecticide and the bottle of oil sat in the shed.

Looking back I'm not sure why I didn't mix it and spray it myself. I guess I must have known deep down that that's not how we do things here. It's reactive and panicky. I've also heard enough stories of farmers getting the maths wrong and killing whole crops by mixing the wrong quantities.

A few weeks into this bug story I finally understood what was going on. We were sitting in the car one day and he told me that in our recent organic inspection the inspector had asked him what our weed management plan is. 'I don't believe in weeds', he replied. 'I think that answer should automatically guarantee your organic certification', she replied. And then I understood.

Panicking and using insecticide to kill the bugs, even if it is organic, upsets the natural balance. The insects are there for a reason and we can't possibly understand what impact eradicating them will have on our environment. It feels arrogant to think that we know what effect killing some bugs will do to the bigger garden picture. Ladybugs, frogs and hover-flies predate on aphids and thrip; what happens to their populations without them? Once we start on these interventionist paths it can change our mindset and the whole way we garden. Once we believe we can control things, the quick fix becomes expensive and we get addicted to it.

Let alone the fact that the spray we bought is certified organic for use on flowers but not on food.

So like the cabbage moth caterpillars on the cabbages, the slugs on the lettuces and the slater-bugs in the strawberries, I've come back around to plucking off those I can, researching gentle, kind, natural methods of control and trying to be patient and accept. To trust Mother Nature and hope that this crazy wind blows them away.

Which in a very long winded way brings me back to me. Despite continuing with the meditation and starting on Valerian tablets I'm still not sleeping well. The past few days have also found me feeling overly sensitive and weepy. But instead of heading down the path of prescription sleeping tablets which I have been tempted by so many times, I've decided to trust my farmer boy's theory and be patient, look for the kind and natural solutions, remember that the four other women in my family also suffer from sleep issues, and hope that this crazy wind that's going to blow away all the thrip, takes my grumpiness and sleep issues with it.

Oh my goodness, I did not intend to write an essay. Are you still with me? Does the metaphor work? 

I think I need to end this by stating very clearly that I'm DEFINITELY not judging farmers who deal with their weed issues as problems or their bug issues by spraying; or people who respond to their sleep issues with medication. We are all about balance here and believe that it's okay for everyone to draw their own line in the dirt.

Just quickly to end this off because it's fun -
I'm reading The Language of Flowers, my dear and thoughtful friend Delia sent me and so far it's beautiful.
I'm still knitting the back of my Mirehouse sweater.
We've just finished watching and loving Better Things (thanks for the recommendation Abby x).
I'm listening to This Is Criminal podcast.
And I'm hoping that our girls come home from school happy and calm for the weekend.

What about you?
How are you feeling? What are you hoping for? Dreaming of? Sleeping remedies?

Sending love and a bunch of imperfectly perfect dahlias.

See you next week.

Love, Kate xx