photos of flowers and things

The other morning when we came inside for breakfast after taking the girls to their schools, stacking a load of firewood in the woodshed and bottling up 12 jars of tomatoes sauce for the Fowlers machine, Farmer Bren looked at me and said 'I get it, this is who we are. This is what we do. This is our life'. 

I guess when you're so deeply involved in what you do sometimes it's hard to remember that not everyone is doing it the same way as you. Not everyone grows a lot of their food from tiny seeds; not everyone makes their muesli from the contents of about 15 jars each morning; not everyone lives so far from their closest neighbours that if they went outside and screamed as loudly as they could no-one would hear them; not everyone could have their growing season ended by one surprise weather event; not everyone uses fire to heat their houses and cook on; not everyone has a kitchen floor that's covered with crates full of autumn bounty ready to be preserved; not everyone only ever eats cucumbers and tomatoes when they are in season; and not everyone owns two pairs of the same boots - one for work and one for town.

There are some things about our world that probably sound so foreign to some people, like the fact that we have a mob of about 50 kangaroos that live on our property and most of the time don't bother us, but sometimes tear the nets in the orchards and eat all the apples. I'm sure there are koalas here too, although I've only ever seen one.

And lots of things I do feel terribly ordinary, like looking at my phone too much, trying to problem-solve for my kids a lot, and boring old housework (only ever the minimum I can get away with though).

I don't actually know what this is all about. My head's a bit cloudy today. I guess what Bren said, plus the messages you guys send me often telling me how different my world is to yours, reminds me to notice the special bits, encourages me to remember the choices we've made, and allows me to see the beauty.

I think that's enough words for today. I'll let the pictures tell the story.

I'd love you to tell me a bit about how your world differs from mine, or from those around you. It doesn't need to be big, just anything really.

Wishing you a happy International Women's Day!

And a fabulous weekend.

See you next week.

Love, Kate x

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

spots on socks + other fancy stuff

Hello dear friends and welcome to today's episode of the Friday Foxs Lane.

I hope you've had a lovely week and that you're gearing up for a wonderful weekend.

My week has passed by in a haze of hot days, sleepless nights, garden and girls. Actually I can't work out whether the word I want to use is haze or daze, but you know that blurry feeling you get when your body gets out of the habit of sleeping at night for no apparent reason, your nights are never ending and your days are filled with fog? Yep, that.

So in honour of my loosening grasp of the English language and the hazey-daze, I have decided to take a blogging short cut today and make a list of ten things I am doing right now. Or more precisely doing or done, past tense, so I can include the spotty socks above.

Are you ready? Here we go...

one - sewing in the ends

Everything about sock knitting fascinates me but especially the way it makes me into someone I'm not. On the top shelf of our studio there is a basket that is filled with clothes that need mending. Shirts that buttons have fallen off, skirts with hems that have come down, socks with holes in the heels...the list goes on. This basket has in fact recently overflowed onto the back of my desk chair and on top of my sewing machine. Optimistically, I imagine that one of these days I'll pull that basket down and methodically work my way through it, buttoning and hemming and darning. But the truth is, I probably never will. But for some reason every single time I cast off a pair of socks I finish them off all the way to the end. I find a needle and I thread each of the loose bits of yarn on in turn and I darn them in until they're all done. It's like the little shoe-maker's elves have visited. And only then can I consider them finished.

two - admiring the insides
There's something so unexpected and surprising about the wrong side of a fair isle knitting project that I only really discovered a few months ago when I started knitting colour-work. Since then I've started a little ritual where I save the inside-looking until I've cast them off. Once I'm done I turn them inside out and sit with the wrong side for a while, looking at all the strands and the negative colour pattern. Each time it's so interesting to see how things have knit up on the back, sometimes I even prefer the wrong side.

three - finishing up
Once the knitting, the darning and the admiring are done, the next step is to hunt down a daughter for the photographing part. Sometimes it's as easy as stand, snap, done! But other times the foot looks funny, the part of the sock that I'm not thrilled with is too obvious, the light's not right, the foot model is in a hurry and won't stand still...you get the picture.

Luckily last night all the sock moons and planets aligned and we got the shot and the sock model was back to singing scales within ten minutes.

The details are on Ravelry if you're interested in such things.

four - casting on

I'm going to call the next project to hit my needles - when you love someone who loves the Bulldogs. Not exactly my usual type of colours or colour combination, but I do love her and she does love them. 

I guess it's not really cheating on the Bulldogs socks if I'm sitting here daydreaming about a beautiful skein of CircusTonicHandmade sock yarn that fell into my shopping cart this morning. Australian merino wool...indi dyer...soft variegated yarn...ochre, greys, charcoal and the slightest hint of lemon...mmmmmmm.....

five - preserving the sunshine
Over the past few weeks I've mentioned a few times that this season's harvest isn't looking to be quite as bountiful as we'd hoped and expected. There are definitely some things that have positively surprised us, like the cucumbers, the berries and the beetroots. There are some things that have flat out disappointed us like the apples and the plums. And then there are some that could still go either way.

Over the past five or eight years we've grown most of and made all of our own tomato passata. Enough to last the whole year through. Over January our tomatoes get going slowly allowing us to finally break our tomato fast and to eat them on everything and in everything we can. By March we're not keeping up with the harvest and we start with the cooking and bottling.

This year has been the strangest tomato season ever. The vines are heavily laden with fruit but it's just not ripening. Or rather it's just starting to now, but only enough to eat, definitely not enough to preserve for later.

So yesterday we made the call and went and picked up a 10kg box off our mate Florian at Mount Franklin Organics down the road. Tomorrow we'll squish them, cook them into a sauce with some onion, garlic and basil, and then we'll pop them into jars for later. Hopefully our green tomatoes saw the boxful of red beauties make its way in and will hurry on up. And if not, we've arranged to pick up another box next week, just to be on the safe side.

six - listening

During the week Jo, another knitting mum of three, contacted me about her daughters Mabel and Ivy and their folk duo Charm of Finches. She was hoping we could work together to put on a house concert and as we've been talking a lot lately about doing something like this, we loved the idea and were hoping the same. Unfortunately, at this stage the dates didn't work, but in the meantime Jo sent me the girls' CD and I fell in love.

We've spent the past few days with Staring at the Starry Ceiling as the soundtrack to our drives to school and back, our dinner prep and our lying on the couch with closed eyes, feeling completely transported by their angelic voices, their beautiful harmonies, their original lyrics and all of the instruments in-between. 

With Mabel and Ivy being only one year older than our Indi and Jazzy, I can't help but dream of the places their shared love of music and song and flowy dresses might one day take them.

In the meantime I highly recommend you to click on over to the Charm of Finches site and support the girls and their dreams and melodies by buying their CD. 

Hopefully we'll get another chance to work with them in the future.

seven - listening to the scrape of Bren's knife against his spoon 
One of the best things to come out of this year so far is the dedicated Friday craft day. Just last night my Mum sent me a text asking if we needed help with stacking some wood today. The fact that I didn't have to think twice, or justify myself, or agonise over the decision was awesome. Friday is craft day. A whole guilt-free day for carving, knitting, sewing, drawing, playing guitar and writing my blog. If we decide to do a bit of farm work in amongst all of that then cool, but otherwise even cooler I say.

seven point five - listening to podcasts
Yesterday I listened to Richard Fidler interviewing Kate Summerscale about the life of Robert Coombes who in 1895 when he was 13 killed his mother and went on a spree with his little brother across London. I always love Richard's interviews but this particular story gripped me so tight that I hardly noticed the physical work I was doing in the garden until the whole hour was up.

It is a tragic story of Victorian-era matricide that also includes a boy's own adventure, a court case, an examination of family life with a father at sea and travels all the way over to Australia for the ending.

Kate has written a book about Robert's life called The Wicked Boy which I'm sure is a fantastic read, but I don't feel the need to read it now I've followed the whole story so closely in the author's words. Perhaps I'll look up some of her other books.

eight - splitting

The wood splitter is back for another week and the splinters in my hands and the ache in my muscles are there to prove it. Gosh I love watching that blade slice through those enormous rounds of wood as if they were butter. Not to mention that growing pile of firewood that will be stacked along the driveway and look pretty for a while and then keep us warm when the weather turns horrid.

nine - fermenting

If you were to ask me what I grow well on this farm, after little girls I think my next answer would be cucumbers. I seriously love growing cucumbers. I love how big their first leaves are when they poke their green tips out of the soil, I love how quickly they grow, I love their prolific yellow flowers and I love those green, crunchy, water filled fruit (?) and how much joy they add to my kitchen.

We mostly eat them as they come, in sandwiches and on salads, but when the season really gets going and we're bringing them in by the bagful, we ferment them by the jarful.

The recipe we use is from this book. We pretty much follow it, but often add and subtract ingredients. Lately we've been adding lemon slices (thanks Meg), and bay leaves, and as much garlic as we can be bothered peeling. 

Have I told you that my girls have started calling me Pickle? Tis true.

ten - reading
I just finished reading The Seven Good Years. Bren read it in a few days but I think I took a whole week. Even though I often struggle with short stories, and these are extremely short, I really enjoyed it. I laughed and cried at times but mostly I just admired Etgar's ability to take a simple thing that happened to him and make it into a great story.

I'm not sure what I'm going to read next. I heard Wendy James interviewed on the radio a few days ago, maybe I'll start her new book The Golden Child. It sounds very interesting and topical.


And with that my lovely friends, I'll bid you farewell. Pepper is sleeping over at her friend's house, the big girls will be home in an hour, which gives me just enough time to pop some washing on the line and get started on those tomatoes.

I hope you have a wonderful weekend.
I'm going away for three days with my Mum and one of my sisters and I can't wait!

As always please feel free to leave me any suggestions you might have for podcasts, books, music, shows and patterns you're enjoying.

LoveLove,

Kate xx

What I've been up to - the late summer edition

Hello!

How are you lovely blog buddy?

What have I been up to? I thought you'd never ask. Here goes;

I've been picking celery, carrots, potatoes, lettuce, tomatoes, zucchini and cucumbers and herbs from the garden.

Somewhere along the line I ditched the cider vinegar method of preserving and fell in love with fermenting. These fermented pickles are super easy to make, barely cost a thing in terms of ingredients and dollars, they are DELICIOUS and are full of beneficial nutrients for your gut. WinwinwinwinwinYUM!

I'm using Amanda Feifer's book - Ferment Your Vegetables as a bit of a bible, but I'm certain there are loads of great recipes online and in other books too.

I think my poly tunnel cucumber vines are nearing the end of their season but my market garden vines are just taking off. Looks like I'll be shoving cucumbers into jars, filling them with herbs and brine and vine leaves and burping their air bubbles for many weeks still to come.

We're picking apples! So far we've picked the the Jersey Macs, the Abbas and the Galas. Gosh it's good to be an apple farmer in apple season.

After a few years break from pumpkin growing due to lack of interest, we finally planted the seeds and had another grow(!). I'd forgotten how much fun it is to watch those big leafy vines take over the space, to watch those yellow flowers form bulbs behind them that seem to grow and grow and grow every time you look, and even though I am not a pumpkin eater, none of us are, this autumn I resolve to try a whole lot of recipes until we become so.

We've been sharing our grapes with the birds.

I read, and fell in a deep hole, and wept over, and despaired over, and then finally finished Hanya Yangihara's A Little Life. Reading it affected my entire life for two weeks like a bad dream that haunted my days. But as traumatic and heart breaking as I found it, I also thought it was brilliant. I couldn't put it down. I made excuses to run inside to my bedroom to change clothes just so I could sneak a few pages, I stayed up waaaaay too late at night to devour big chunks and I read on the treadmill - which is something I've never done before but which I have always done since. I loved this book and still feel myself sobbing a little when I think back to it.

And even though I made jokes that I needed to read a fluffy romance novel after I finished A Little Life - I started reading Room by Emma Donoghue, a much less traumatic but still very disturbing and claustrophobic novel.

I've almost finished my Flower King beanie from Anna Maltz's gorgeous book Penguin. The pattern calls for a big pom-pom on top, but I'm thinking an i-cord finish might be better for my little penguins to wear to school.

Ravelled here.

I've started a Bracken jumper for Miss Pepper which is knitted inside out with two different sized needles which is fun and fast. It's been ages since I've knitted jumpers and cardigans for my girls but this year I'm hoping to have them all rugged up in time for winter.

I felt like the luckiest Mum on earth when I discovered that an entire ball of HOT PINK yarn had gone through the washing machine cycle and not coloured anything else pink. I have no idea who the yarn belonged to, I have no idea how it even happened but I do know that I am grateful beyond words that there wasn't even a streak, or a tinge, or a speck of pink on anything to be found.

I am loving the little posies of garden cut flowers that have been appearing in jars around the place.

We watched and loved both seasons of The Leftovers and have no idea what to watch next.

And I'm thrilled to report that we have finally joined the rest of Australia by having bowls of tomatoes on the kitchen table. Finally. For a while there I thought that the girls would eat every single one that I brought into the house as I brought it in, but eventually supply overcame even their demand. We still are nowhere near a saucepan of passata or a tray of semi-drieds, but as I keep chanting to myself - tomatoes are an autumn fruit and we are still 10 days away from autumn.

And as usual I've been watering and weeding and feeding and planting and digging and fencing and cooking and baking and jamming and dehydrating, and driving, and listening and solving and writing and photographing.

I haven't yet used the spinning wheel I borrowed from my spinning group, maybe this weekend.


And that's me, us, we.

Tell me about you. How are you travelling? What are you reading, growing, dreaming about?


Wishing you the most wonderful weekend.

Love Kate
xoxo