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

love, indi x

Hello to all you wonderful readers sitting behind your screens ready to read my mum's blog.

I hope you slept well, are happy and healthy and have something exciting to do with your day!

My day consists of making mum and the rest of the fam shlep into town in the hope of crossing as much of my shopping list off as we can before I head overseas for the year. In ten days! Aaaaaahhh!!

I know from experience that when you travel your eyes see many beautiful new sights, views and monuments, but it's always a funny feeling to leave home. Because through all my mum and dad's constant hard work and joy for what they do, our home is also one of the most tremendously beautiful places I've ever been! Especially as the flower season begins.

Looking at the photo above makes me know that as I watch through my screen from across the world each new exciting flower variety bloom, just how much I'm going to miss always being surrounded by flowers, walking through the garden to pick them, bunching them and filling my room with colour.

But somehow I think that I'll miss the flower farmer herself much much more!

Sorry to take my mum away from you for the day!
I promise I'll make mum sit down and write another blog soon!

Wish me luck with my shopping list and taming the butterflies for the next ten days!

Lots of love, flowers and foxslane appreciation!

Love, Indi x

short cut blogging

Hello lovely ones,

How's your week been?

Most Fridays by the time I finally sit down with my laptop I generally know what I'm going to write my blog about. Most Fridays I've been thinking about something, or feeling something, or making something and as soon as I've loaded the photos the words come. Not always the words I expect, not always in one go, not always in order and definitely not always in any sort of readable state. But over time the sentences and themes emerge, I type them, I rearrange them, I delete some and then, mostly, by the time I press publish, I'm happy I have.

But not today. It's been a bit of a messy old week and somehow it's gotten to an hour before I have to go and pick up Pepper from school and I feel rushed, and I haven't had lunch and I'm hungry, and what I really feel like is a cup of tea in Bren's workshop and a few rows of my socks.

So if it's all the same to you I think I'll load the bunch of photos I took this morning which will give you a little glimpse into my right now, I'll write a tiny bit about each one and then we can all go along our merry ways and hopefully have a wonderful weekend.

Here goes:

This is Miss Pepper's cat who until recently was called Popcorn but then somehow during a particularly intense Orange Is The New Black binging session, had a name change to Poussey Washington. It's such a good cat name and it just rolls off the tongue, don't ya think. She doesn't look like she minds anyway.

This is farmer Bren axing a bowl blank out of a piece of apple wood. He has plans to make us all breakfast bowls. I can't wait to see them.

This is of a pile of blankets that I've made on a shelf in our studio. The pile grows and shrinks as girls take blankets to put on their beds and snuggle on the couch and then put them back, but these three seem to remain the constants.

These are my baby cabbages. I tell you what, growing plants from seeds never fails to excite me. Each one of those stems and little leaves feels like a lucky blessing. I love germinating seeds, it seems to make sense even when the rest of the world doesn't.

We have a metal filing cabinet where we store our seeds. Packets and jars of saved and bought seeds all filed by the first letter of their name. These are the seeds I've pulled out over the past few weeks optimistically hoping to get a head start on spring. It's a bit of a mess. We are hoping to get organised and keep really good records this year so when next season rolls around it'll be less of a guessing game and more of a knowing game. Although working under Mother Nature you can never really be sure.

This is the book I'm reading. I love the cover. It's about Trevor Noah, who was born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother at a time in apartheid South Africa where such a union was punishable by five years imprisonment. It's an easy read but I'm finding it hard to really get stuck into it. I think that's because the last book I read, Idaho painted a picture that was so vivid that I felt like I'd watched a whole movie by the time I'd finished. I could not put it down and then I could not stop thinking about it once I had. What a magnificent book. I hope that this one grabs me soon and takes me on a journey with it like Idaho did.

This is a cup/bowl that Bren carved during the week out of Native Cherry. It's such a beautiful piece and when you hold it up to the light, parts of it glow bright pink. Right now it's drying out slowly in that pile of wood shavings but I cannot wait to see how it dries and how it looks when it's oiled. we're not sure how it'll hold hot coffee, but gosh wouldn't that be a perfect way to honour one of my favourite rituals.

This is an arm warmer I knitted for someone I've never met who asked for one via a local Facebook page. Apparently it fits and is exactly what they were after. Yay!

This is a slipper I knitted for a giant. Oops. Just a gentle reminder to knit a gauge square when you are knitting an old fave pattern but in new to you yarn.

These are the first socks I ever knitted, three years ago almost to the the day. Look at how much they've faded. I still love them and wear them often despite the hole in the sole of one of them.

These are the socks I am currently knitting. Colour work is addictive! I can't wait to grab a chunk of time tonight to knit some more. I've gone up a needle size to 2.5 because the last pair of patterned socks I knitted were too tight. Fingers crossed these ones turn out just right.

This week is musical week for our big girls. This is the puzzle we've been doing with Pepper while they've been busy rehearsing and performing. It's of Santorini in Greece. It's hard to imagine that it's been almost two years since we were there ourselves.

It's raining as I type this and with all the mucking around it's almost three hours since I started.

And by mucking around I mean pestering my youngest sister by text, watering the greenhouse, picking Pep up from school, putting some washing away, making myself a snack, pulling out some weeds, crying to Bren about the state of the world and our country, reading and looking at everything on Facebook and Instagram, feeding the fire and scrolling through Ravelry. But I guess some days are just more straight forward that others.

So that's me and my meant to be quick blog that ended up taking hours.

How about you, what do you like to do to procrastinate?
Are you a good seed organiser? Garden record keeper?
Do you get obsessed and stay up way too late at night looking for just one more puzzle piece?
What are you making/baking/reading/planning?
I'd love to know.

I hope your weekend is exactly what you need it to be.

Love is love,

Kate

xx

#home

overgrown

so they know we are home

we missed this

shakshuka with our eggs and tomatoes 

practising her spoonfest skills

making a magic wand

We're home!

And it's the strangest thing but most of the time I feel like we've always been here.

Even though we've been away for three whole months, even though we've walked the streets of London and Rome and Paris and Tel Aviv, even though we've seen the Mona Lisa, we've shopped in Oxford Street, we've stayed in an Airbnb right next to a blue domed church in Santorini, and even though we got lost in a down pour in Sienna, now that we're home - we're home.

Everything is so easy, so comfortable and so familiar. I know exactly where the toilet is even when it's dark, I don't have to search for the cutlery drawer, the washing machine automatically uses the setting I like and I get to sleep in the comfiest bed in the whole world.

Our home smells like the forest that surrounds it, like the fires in the cooker and in the lounge-room and like the laundry that I've just hung out. (I can't tell you how relieved I feel that our home does not smell like a dead mouse in the wall or like mouse wee in the pantry like I'd feared, phew!) Our home is ridiculously quiet. Quieter than any other place we've been. If you close your eyes and listen carefully you might just hear the sound of the bore water pouring into the house dam, the song of a bird calling to its mate or the hum of the fridge. Home tastes like the shakshuka Miss Jazzy made over the fire last night, like a long waited for farmer Bren coffee and like juice made from everything we can find in our overgrown garden. Home is familiar, it's part of me.

Home feels like we've never left her.

But every now and then, usually when I'm doing the most usual thing, our adventure comes rushing back to remind me. I'll be knitting the last few rows of a pair of socks when I suddenly remember the kitchen of the Tuscan villa where I first wound the wool and cast on. I'll be walking to the door to let the dog in when I'll trip over a bag of damp bathers from the swim we had in Hong Kong just hours before we left for the airport. I'll catch sight of Miss Indi's I love Italy pyjama top and remember the cute little shop we bought it from in Rome. And I'll look at my instagram feed and see that someone has liked a photo of an impossibly beautiful beach we swam in on the Greek island of Crete.

For those split seconds I am back there, I am hurrying to wind the wool to get out of the cook's way, I am floating on my back in the warm pool in Hong Kong looking at the sky and wondering how long it'll be before I swim again, I am hurrying the girls up in the souvenir shop so we can go and eat yet another spaghetti pomodoro and I am running over the burning hot sand and jumping into the deliciously cool water of the Mediterranean sea.

And then I'm back home getting another log for the fire.


Does that make sense? I apologise if it's a bit mooshy. I have a horrible cold and I feel like my head is filled with marshmallow.

But I do look forward to blogging a bit more regularly now that we're back. I'd love to fill in some of the blanks from the last three months and if that fails then I'll be happy to record this time of landing and finding our feet and moving forward. I'm a tiny bit considering a photo and a paragraph post a day in October, but with going back to school and two birthdays and all the planting and weeding, I'm not sure that would be so wise.

Nevertheless, I will be seeing you soon.

I hope you are happy and well and loved.

Kate

xoxoxoxox

monday musings x

The season is changing. There's still warmth in the afternoon sun but the mornings and evenings are icy. The school holidays are over. The quinces are all cooked and bottled and shelved. The beans have been dried and jarred. The washing only dries inside. The wood-fired cooker stays on. There is a big bowl full of feijoas on the kitchen table. The girls pack beanies instead of sunhats in their school bags.

We have spinach and kale and lettuce growing in the garden again. The outside tomatoes are slowing down and the ones in the poly tunnel have only a little while longer. We're eating soups and stews and pies for dinners. Every bed has a blanket tucked up on the end. The freezer and the shelves of the pantry are full of summer goodness. Every day I try to spend about 15 minutes splitting wood.

Yesterday I sprained a little muscle in my foot driving far, far away and now I have to ice it every few hours, brrrr. We've been talking and learning and are about to start playing with bio-dynamics. I can't remember how I dress to stay warm and comfortable in this cold. I'm so pleased I picked up so many dry sticks for kindling over the past few months. At night we're watching sneaky episodes of Girls while our girls are asleep.


Right now farmer Bren is out planting the very last of the winter veg. It might be too late for things to grow, but it will rain tomorrow so it's worth a try.

I've got a pastry shell blind baking and am trying to write a magazine article. I feel like I need to hurry up to get everything done before getting the girls.

I've started a Facebook page for Foxs Lane. I resisted for so long but now I love it over there. Why don't you pop by and say hello.

Oh and thanks for all your wonderful feedback on the motif meditation. I'm so excited that so many of you are keen to join in. I think we'll make an instagram hashtag and a weekly link-up here. Do you know if you guys can post to my Facebook because that might be fun too.

So tell me peeps, what're things like where you are?
What are you wearing/baking/making/growing?

OK, I'm off - as Willy Wonka says - So little to do, so much time. Strike that, reverse it.

Big love

xx

home is where our kitchen garden grows....x

We've been away for three weeks.

And now we are home.

All morning we've been weeding, thinning, planning, planting, harvesting and breathing it all in.

Our hands are dirty, our hearts are full.

There's an Indi and Bren baked carrot cake in the oven and some carrot juice on the cards.

Holidays are ace but coming home is best.

Home is where our kitchen garden grows.

xx