Letters from Wetville

Tonight, buoyed on by my reading about animal fats a la Sally Fallon et al, I made potato and pumpkin wedges in dripping. I used pumpkin as well as I opened the fat looking bag of spuds and found only three left. Anyway I usually chop up spuds and other root veges and toss them in olive oil, put them on the roasting dish and put them in the oven on 200 (celsius) until they taste good. Tonight I put the dripping in the oven while I chopped the veges and then tossed the veges into the liquid fat. They tasted divine. I need to buy and keep dripping for just this purpose. Much tastier than the olive oil version. And better still, if we have peak oil a la the apocalypts, beef dripping is a local food (I got mine from Jonesy the butcher, who I still love). I don't think it is possible to grow olives in a bog. Today my trademe parcel arrived. It is Writing at the Kitchen Table by Artemis Cooper, a biography of Elizabeth David, a woman who was famous in my mind from reading Engli...

These are not pictures to sell real estate by. If you are looking for gardening blogs to make you ooh and ahhh and feel inspired, then you are not on the appropriate page. Nevertheless, a little story in pictures. Part of a story because blogger only likes me to upload five pictures at a time and the egg timer is nearly out on time spent away from my children. The photograph above is the current state of the area between the driveway and the garage. We first cleared it nearly three years ago. Before then the entire space you can see was so cluttered with overgrown trees and shrubs that nothing else grew for lack of light. Then a friend lent us her mulcher and chainsaw and Favourite Handyman chopped and cleared and mulched and generally worked wonders and I grew some pumpkins the following year. Last year I added globe artichokes and strawberries but the overgrowth and the poor season precluded more pumpkins. The experiment with letting the wild blackberry produce fruit for us ...

One skirt completed. The heavy drape works very well standing up, but I've discovered that it also works to my disadvantage when sitting down as it falls heavily to each side rather quickly. It only cost me the price of the thread and I managed to solve all my sewing machine challenges myself. I also noticed that I was learning from previous mistakes when I did the sewing so I'm quite pleased with myself. Maybe I am on my way to being a grown up seamstress (which isn't my favourite word, but 'sewer' is worse) after all. I have also managed to solve the challenges of the camera. Last week we got a new (to us, second hand in every other sense) computer for me, and now I can download onto my own computer. The old one was so memory-poor that I didn't risk saving photos to it or the final tiny shards of memory would disappear forever. The electricians came and made our house safe. It took them all day. Brighid spoke in awed tones of 'The Electricians'...

Linda Woodrow's Permaculture Home Garden is one of my all time favourite gardening books. First I wore out the library's copy and then once I was kindly gifted a copy of my very own, I read part of it every day for weeks until I moved slowly into fixes weekly and then monthly. Thanks to Woodrow, I knew we had to have chooks. Chooks have indeed been a marvellous addition to our home. I do know now that Woodrow must live somewhere without our wind, as we learnt quickly that a geodesic chook dome was not practical here in Wetville. After two spring winds have decimated our poultry palace, we opted this time last year to build a much more solid, sturdy, permanent structure. Totally worth the effort, as I'm sure recent weather would have toppled a less study poultry palace once again. Another of Woodrow's messages regards covering all soil with plants at all times. Empty garden space is an invitation to weeds and she deals with this by raising almost everything in ...

I had a few days off from thinking about the politics of food but it does seem to catch up with me with lightning speed and here I am again. When I heard about the Labour Party's proposed policy to remove the GST on fresh fruit and vegetables earlier this week, my first thought was about compliance costs. On my next blog surf I noted similar concerns from Homepaddock . Only Homepaddock goes further (I like her writing but I tend to be opposed to her politics) and quotes Bill English's attack on the proposed policy. Here is the original link with English's comments. I link to that because in it are some figures which don't make logical sense to me. Quote no.1: The $250 million annual cost of the move, divided among all New Zealanders, is worth, on average, just over $1 a week - less for low income earners and more for high income earners. This seems plausible from the outset, but the following does not fall into line with it: Quote no.2: The Tax Working Group las...

Happiness. Holidays. The electrician visited yesterday and indeed the extent of work to be done is extensive and promises to be expensive. The trip to Nelson or Kaikoura which I was planning will have to wait until 2011. The sun came out this afternoon and Brighid and I went for a bike ride to feed the pony and bask in the sunshine and for me to be bossed around. Genetics. I've been longing to make something, something which is more lasting than sandwiches. Or indeed than any food. I'm over thinking about food for a while. I'm still knitting away at my purple cross-over cardigan and given that one day I will finally be wearing it not knitting it, I idly looked for inspiration for my next project. This lovely top on ravelry appeals. It looks flattering to a larger bust whereas the patterns I find in the wool shop for summer knitted tops seem routinely designed for the skinny model with tiny boobs. But really, who am I kidding? Some people are knitting that top in ...

A lot of my thoughts tonight are about domestic violence. Previous stories are flooding back and the horror both real and futuristic is on my mind. I remember at eleven, somehow learning about domestic violence (not at home, it was a non-subject at home where my parents created a home of innocence and naivety which I now, as a parent, understand) and deciding that I would never give anyone a second chance if they hit me. I've never had to test the strength of my convictions on that one. I'm unsure whether to declare gratefulness because a body safe from the violence of others is surely a basic human right, not an extra blessing? I remember my first encounter with a story of sexual abuse, of incest. Not in a book; I knew everyone in the story. I remember trying to come to terms with the mother of the abused wanting to cover it all up. I still haven't come to terms with that. I remember learning of another mother. Her daughter had broken ribs from her son-in-law. ...