And if days aren’t filled with things you love, each second of them, from the sunlight shining through the blue glass on my right, the warmth of the stove on my back drying my hair, to the feel of the old wood under my hands as I type (my desk is an old one from a bank with that golden black splodginess of very used wood and I love it)…and now I’ve lost the plot of the sentence except to say perhaps that life is very short and it is tragic to waste even a second on emptiness.
And here endeth the first lesson…
July 29
All warmth, all moisture sucked out of the air, and blown to who knows where…
A soup day; we mostly seem to be eating soup for lunch now. Whatever is in the garden, peeled and sliced and seethed till soft in olive oil, which is the best way to bring out the flavour by caramelising the veg first – this doesn’t just cook the veg, it changes their flavour and makes the soup much richer. After this initial cooking in oil or butter, just cook the veg enough to make them tender – too much cooking makes a bland soup.
I boil any old chicken carcasses when we’ve eaten the meat and keep the jellied stock in the fridge or freezer to add to soups. But these soups can be made without stock – the soups just aren’t as meaty.
Basic Bottom-of-the-Garden Soup
Take whichever of the following the wombat has left you in the garden:
carrots
beetroot
parsnips
celery
tough winter lettuce
parsley
parsley root, well scrubbed
olive oil or butter
stock or water
Add them to a generous dash of olive oil or butter in a pan and cook slowly until they are tender and the scent fills the kitchen. This may take 30 minutes or 10 minutes – it depends on how many veg you have, how chewy they are and how big the pan is. Add just enough water or stock to cover, cook for a further 10 minutes, then mash or blend. Serve hot with buttery toast or hot bread.
Carrot Soup
No, carrots haven’t magically appeared among the devastation that used to be the carrot patch. I’ve been buying a few to keep us in carotene till next summer and also because I hate to think what carrot-deprived wombats might do to the doormat and garbage bin, not to mention my pots.
2 cups chopped carrot
1/2 cup chopped onion
4 tablespoons butter
chicken stock (must be homemade)
a little chopped parsley or coriander
Seethe the chopped carrot and onion in butter till tender. Add just enough chicken stock to cover. Simmer 20 minutes. Add the parsley or coriander and serve hot.
This is my favourite soup.
August 1
The creek is almost dry again, even in the cold weather. Down by the bridge it’s just thin channels seeping through the sand, with thin green stripes to show where it once flowed. Up here it’s still slipping between the rocks, but every day it’s lower and the ground is harder and the trees droop from dryness and the cold.
Chocolate wombat has decided it’s time to be fed again. He stands with his nose to the door till we come out, looks at us suspiciously, sniffs the carrots even more suspiciously, then starts crunching. He is only really friendly with E. They rub noses sometimes. Maybe they recognise shared characteristics: they are both single-minded and dedicated to their food.
Every morning the frosts are deeper, ice patterns like spiders all over the car, the dam’s frozen, with cattle snoozing by the edges waiting for a drink. Then the sun slides down the valley, and you can see the ice melt as it passes and the grass steams for maybe ten minutes and the stalactites drip from the trees.
August 7
The Wisbeys have lit the first of the frost fires – cut-off barrels of wood smouldering under each tree, lit to save the setting fruit from frost. Frost is worse when it’s dry. The smoke sifts up here early in the morning. Down in the valley it is a choking cloud, sitting right above the trees and held there by a layer of cold air, like driving into a white world, then suddenly leaving it again as the road rose.
August 8
I happened to be watching Three-and-a-half’s rear end as she munched through her oats this afternoon when I saw a nose between her legs, a pink nose…
The nose inched out further, was followed by two eyes, an almost hairless face, just turning grey with fuzz and then a foot. And then it stopped, peering at the world between its mother’s legs. Three-and-a-half realised something was wrong and promptly sat down thereby, I suppose, forcing Junior back into the pouch.
I gave her another carrot and she nested it between her paws, gnawing happily.
August 9
Little Pink’s nose poked out again today, peering down at the paving as though it wondered what it was. Bad Bart arrived. Three-and-a-half promptly bit his neck; when that didn’t deter him, she backed into him, forcing him back with a muscular bum (there’s nothing to bite on a wombat’s bum; it’s all bone and hair).
August 10
Warm air mooching down from somewhere, you can just taste the first of spring. My fingers are twitching, wanting to plant seedlings but at least by now I know to restrain myself. Nothing will grow yet, the soil’s still too cold, the seedlings would just sit there and sulk till December. And besides, it’s crazy to plant much if there isn’t going to be enough water.
I realised today it’s been about twenty-five years to the day since I planted my first vegetable garden (in Queensland, where you can plant much earlier than here). The carrots didn’t come up at all; the beans grew three inches then were eaten by beanfly. I tried tomatoes next. At least nothing ate them. They didn’t grow much either. I didn’t realise you had to feed your plants if you wanted them to feed you.
So I studied – everything I could get my hands on – gardening books and Department of Ag pamphlets and research reports. Then the avocado trees on the farm where we were staying began to die.
It was phytophthora cinnamomi – a root rot. All the avocados in the area were dying. It took six months of research to discover that what the Department of Ag had been saying was good for the orchard – feeding with sulphate of ammonia, overhead watering, ploughing and weeding – were exactly the right conditions to make the root rot thrive.
It was a good introduction to farming and gardening – to learn that what is officially ‘good’ isn’t necessarily best. (Twenty years on, no Department of Ag would give the advice they gave me then – many of the ‘radical’ farming ideas of twenty years ago are commonplace now.)
By then I was hooked. I knew that growing things – and studying growing strategies – was what I wanted to do with my life.
That was only part of the dream.
The other part was mostly cliché – a hand-built house, a cow in the front paddock, an acre of vegetables and a couple of kids by the creek and a pantry full of jam and bottled apricots and a husband drying his gumboots by the wood stove. And we’d be self-sufficient.
Well, that marriage failed (and gumboots stay outside). I’ve decided that cows are decorative but someone else can do the milking and the butter and cheese making. I’ve even given up bottling, mostly. Bryan and I are still finishing the house – and like most owner-builders will probably still be finishing it in another two decades – we seem to add a room every eighteen months.
We were self-sufficient for a while, E and I – from poverty, not from choice. My income from the odd article covered rates and pre-school fees and that was about it. Actually we lived and ate quite well, but it was a strain I don’t want to have to face again. There was always the worry about what would happen if I got sick – and then I did. And a bed of ripening corn and tomatoes are no comfort when you have pneumonia and need to stagger down to harvest them.
I’ve been lucky in the people I’ve spent the last twenty-five years with – like the elderly neighbour down the road. Jean was in her seventies when I was in my early twenties. She had the sort of classic cottage garden that’s grown fr
om seeds and cuttings, not from pots from a nursery. She’d learnt ‘self-sufficiency’ back in the depression, except it wasn’t called self-sufficiency then; maybe thrift – it was what you did to survive.
I remember the first meal I had at Jean’s – vegetable soup (from the garden) and roast Indian Game fowl, and boiled new potatoes and golden beetroot and three sorts of beans and fruit salad for dessert with cream from the cow on the hill, then sponge cake for supper, made with eggs from the ducks that ate the snails under the roses (the roses grew from her brother-in-law’s prunings) and more cream and passionfruit and fresh raspberries – all grown by an elderly woman in a garden about the size of a normal suburban block.
Jean grew almost all her own food then – and illegally sold butter and cream and eggs and garden surplus – and she pressed cuttings and seeds on me that now form the basis of my garden, while she’s moved to a tiny unit in town.
Jean taught me that it’s easy to be almost self-sufficient – all you have to do is plan and plant. It’s the next jump that breaks your back – trying to grow it all.
I know that we could live on what we grow here – or even from the bush around us if we had to. I’ve gone through the stage of making our own rope from wonga-vine fibre, my own perfume from the garden, our own shampoo and dyes and paper. Sometimes we drink our own tea – or our own ‘coffee’ (of one sort or another). It’s fun to do it sometimes. It gives you confidence to know you can if you have to. It makes life richer. But not when you’ve trapped yourself and can’t afford anything else.
I think the other person who taught me most was Smudge, the first wombat I ever lived with.
I learnt to watch the bush with Smudge. I learnt to question gardening and farming lore. I began to wonder why the broom and blackberry invaded our orchards but stopped at the fenceline and didn’t penetrate the bush; why a wild peach tree kept fruiting year after year, while the books said you needed to prune to get a crop; why an unfertilised wild apple tree fruited in half the time it took the cultivated ones in our orchard; how a hillside of helichrysums flourished without the soil being dug to receive their seed. I learnt to pattern the way I grew things – and to some extent the way I lived – on the bush around me, not on the standards that I’d been taught.
Smudge also taught me how to sit back and watch the bush and just enjoy the early morning sun.
Thoreau advised distrusting any enterprise that needs new clothes. I learnt to distrust anything I couldn’t explain to a wombat. This isn’t oversimplicity – everything can be reduced to its effect on people, animals and the world around. Sometimes reducing things to wombat terms makes you see them more clearly.
Dreams change. I’d hate to be stuck in the dreams I had twenty years ago. (In twenty years time I’ll probably smile at the dreams I have now.) Not that the dreams have changed radically – they’ve just evolved.
What have I learnt? Perhaps just to look at things differently – as though the windows have been washed – and not to take for granted the images I grew up with, of the good life or the good garden or farm. I’ve learnt that things change – that humans are subject to the same laws as lizards and fruit-fly and ants, though the time scale is slower, that no matter what we do ‘this too will pass’.
I’ve learnt to put my hands on the soil and feel the rhythm of the world – and if it’s just my pulse that I’m feeling it doesn’t matter.
I’ve learnt to rely on growing systems – biological ones not mechanical ones wherever possible. I no longer dream of having a tractor in a neat shed, or of getting bulldozers in to clear the blackberry. Things that grow will change – like dreams. Machines don’t. If you buy a tractor you’ve trapped yourself into farming in the way that tractors make possible – if you buy a rotary hoe or mulcher you’ve trapped yourself again.
Growing things change with circumstances – they adapt. Machines don’t. I suspect we’ll all need to adapt and re-adapt and keep adapting in the next two, three, six decades.
What else? Keep planting. Plants are the best investment you can make. Banks give you – what? Twelve per cent interest? A young tree will double every year – and crop for a century and give you seedlings into the bargain.
I also learnt that you don’t have to farm to make a living in the country – in fact farming the land may be a bad idea. Sheep and humans and cattle are the real weeds in Australia – too many of them and they destroy too much. It’s better to cherish the land and enjoy what it is than try to change it. Just keep a small intensive patch to grow what you need – and harvest the rest like a wombat or Aborigine instead, giving as much as you take away. If you need to make your land productive, sell coppice firewood or a few fence posts, or farm emus or tourists. But don’t feel that you have to farm to justify your land.
I learnt that growing your own doesn’t have to be hard work. Our garden supplies most (not all) our fruit and veg – with about ten minutes work a week. Most of the work we do in our gardens is unnecessary. Weeding just makes bare space for more weeds, pruning just means we have to prune next year and add more fertiliser to make up for the growth we’ve taken; most of the fertiliser we give our plants disappears into the water table (and does it no good at all). Most mowing, trimming and tidying are for the neighbour’s benefit, not the garden’s. Somehow our culture has decided that it’s the job of humans to care for growing systems, rather than just let the gardens take care of us. It’s the Adam and Eve fallacy – now we’re out of the Garden of Eden we don’t dare let ourselves back in.
And – don’t try to be self-sufficient. Self-sufficiency was a nice dream. It led me to a good life, though not the one I expected. I learnt that I loved growing things – even if I didn’t make my living selling them, even if I didn’t grow everything I needed. I know that we can live by farming, if we have to – but experimenting and giving stuff away is much more fun. I always felt a bit like I was selling my kids whenever I got money in exchange for peaches or avocados – and as no money ever compensates for things you love, it seemed much simpler just to give them away.
Go as far along the self-sufficiency road as you feel comfortable with. When it stops being fun, stop. That way you won’t lose the joy of growing things.
Anyone who has ever watched a child’s face as they fill a basket of oranges or as they disappear to spend an hour in the raspberry beds, or who has let a child watch the progress of a seed as it becomes a vine and sprouts large melons – and who then lets the child pick it, all their own work – will know there is something very basic and very good about growing your own. This is, after all, what life’s about – food and shelter, life and death and growing things. There is no better way to contact this than in a garden.
I, like all humans, am part of the earth. To work it, watch it, live within its rhythms – is, for me, the deepest satisfaction.
Happy birthday, garden.
August 14
More frost fires, spheres of smoke in cold dry air. The men look half asleep on the motorbikes or on the ladders pruning the last of the trees. They have to get up when the alarm rings around 2 a.m. or, as Noel says, lie there awake anxiously wondering how low the temperature will go. Last year a lot of the early fruit was lost to late frost. There’s still the gauntlet of hail and drought to face this year, without the earliest loss of all to cold.
Little Pink sniffed the grass today, leaning out of his mother’s pouch. For a moment I thought he might take a bite; but he didn’t, just nuzzled back into the warmth.
If he gets too bold Three-and-a-half sits on him, which doesn’t seem to hurt him, but it does stop him exploring.
Pudge attacked the garbage bin at 2 a.m. We ignored her. I am not feeding a fully grown wombat at 2 a.m. She has no sense of time.
August 15
Another clear cold day, so crisp it seems the air would shatter; the world has the pale clear colour it only gets at winter’s end. There are perhaps fifty bowerbirds hopping round scavenging the last of the lawn’s grass seed
and threatening each other over the last of yesterday’s lunch crumbs on the garden table, or pecking at the giant marrow wedged in the crutch of the crab-apple tree. They’ve been pecking there for months. When one marrow’s finished we put out another. The currawongs guzzle it too and the smaller birds when there are no large ones to bully them away.
The hills are drying out. The trees on the ridges are paler now, only the ones in the moist gullies are still blue-green. The trees have thinned, too, so you can see vistas through them that I haven’t seen since the last big drought, with flashes of hard orange soil underneath. On the dry slope the ground crackles like cornflakes, inches deep with flaking bark and brittle leaves and twigs and fallen branches, as the trees draw into themselves, casting off their surplus, waiting for rain.
I remember the last drought here, too clearly. Wombats driven mad by mange and thirst, stumbling down from the dry ridges, frantically digging in the damp sand in what once had been the creek; and one wombat that thrashed its head against a granite boulder time after time, insane with mange and drought, and pain, so the white bone showed under the blood.
There was no grass. Not even dead grass. Just a blank grey brown. And even tears seemed a waste of moisture, sacrificed to a dry blue sky.
It’s too soon to have drought again. Not a bad one, please, not yet. The last year has been dry but not desperate. It’s rained just enough for survival when we’ve needed it.
It’s too soon since the last bad drought. Just too soon.
Year in the Valley Page 25