Mid Winter feast

It was time for our Mid Winter feast last Friday: the nearest weekend to the winter solstice. It has become a tradition for us to have friends over for a meal to celebrate the end of the time of the shortening of the length of days,and the start for the days to get longer again. 

The menu this year started with wine and nibbles -home made dukkah and dips, followed by roasted lamb with parsnips, cauliflower cheese, baked pumpkin and a herb salad from my garden.

DD made the dessert: rhubarb and apple crumble with custard.

There were plenty of candles to encourage the light to return! We decorated with evergreen trees and some of my belsnickles. 

We dragged the furniture out of the lounge room and brought the dining table in, so we could extend it and make a long table for our guests. 

We missed some of our friends, who were not able to be with us due to sickness or family obligations, but those who were able to come had a good time I think.

It is our tradition to give a bag of produce as a gift when the evening is over. This year's bag had a jar of preserved limes from our garden, some kaffir lime leaves and one fruit, a jarrah soap dish made by DH in the workshop (we added a cake of soap to it), and a jar of DH's marmalade. 

My quilt is finished!

My Citrus Harvest quilt is finished! 

It is bright and cheery. 

Quilting finally gets some time!

Did you hear my sigh, as I finally sat down to sew this weekend? It had been too long -too many other priorities, so that my poor yellow quilt was languishing, and the list of 'quilts to make before the end of September" seemed quite impossible.

My DH encouraged me to get some slabs of time -we usually split the housework and shopping, but he did the shopping on Friday so I could get started, and did the housework on Saturday so I could get some more quilting done after my volunteer roster at the asylum seeker agency.

There is some big news about my quilting too - I HAVE JOINED THE WA QUILTERS!  I have been attending their exhibitions and following them on FaceBook, so when they said there was an open night last Wednesday- and it was quite close by- I took myself off to see what it was like. In all the years I have been a quilter (about 8 now) I have never been in a group, apart from the classes I took to start off. I joined online groups, but never in person. 

 I think I might join the community quilting sub-group, and see how I go. 

Free motion quilting adds such lovely texture! 

A friend asked me about bread recipes - I have added these two to my "from my kitchen" page. 

I took a walk in the winter sunshine during my lunchtime last week -over past the cement factory and the marshalling yards to the much nicer part of East Perth where I walked along a little brook and enjoyed the antics of the birds splashing. 

I hope for a peaceful week -as I have now finished the quilting, all I have to do is the binding on the yellow quilt. Hopefully it will be done by next weekend and I can then feel a bit more up to date! 

World Environment Day -Connecting with nature

It is World Environment Day today, the 5th of June, and the theme is "Connect with Nature". Maybe the reason they chose this theme is that we need to go out into the environment, enjoy it and notice its changes, if we are to care for it and protect it.

Vandana Shiva coins the term "eco-apartheid" when she writes: “Separatism is at the root of disharmony with nature and violence against nature and people. Today, we need to overcome an eco-apartheid based on the illusion of separateness – the separation of humans from nature in our minds and lives. This eco-apartheid is an illusion because we are part of nature and Earth, not apart from it. Read more here 

One thing I really love about living simply is that it gives me time to do that -to walk on the beach as I did today-the picture above was taken this morning at Sorrento, or to take pictures of the unique flora in this part of the West Australian landscape. The picture below is an acorn banksia, or banksia prionotes, a native to this region.

When we grow our own food, we are much more alert to the changes of the seasons and the needs of living things to be in a clean, cooperative environment. Below is our seed raising set up.

This weekend we have been setting up wicking beds for herbs close to the back door, using recycled olive barrels.  This bed gets a lot of western afternoon sun, and nothing we grew really thrived, apart from the citrus trees. We do put up shade sails in summer, but it wasn't possible to get enough water to the herbs. This set up will fix that, we hope.

I have 4 more like this to do. Each one holds 2 bags of blue metal as the reservoir of water (holds about 18 litres each) and then there is a shadecloth barrier before a bag and a half of compost.  The plants grow towards the reservoir of water, and there is very little evaporation to contend with. We top up the reservoir through the stand pipe, and there is an overflow valve to let water out if it rains and the plants are in danger of drowning.

I like the idea of using these olive barrels in new ways -re-purposing them rather than have them find their way to landfill.

When we grow our own food, we are much more aware of waste and freshness.

This is a picture of a rustic veggie pie I made with my own short pastry and herbs from the garden.

Finally, I thought you might enjoy this clip from Australia's CSIRO: beautiful location, important scientific work monitoring the changes in atmosphere over time.

Cape Grim Station: Measuring atmospheric composition since 1976

https://youtu.be/QuKLht9ffVM