Rebecca Widds

I bake every week, this is my daily bread, but kept forgetting to take photos! The recipe was from an edition of Grass Roots magazine I got from the library around 2009

This is one of my favourites for baking: Simple Mixes to Save the Day

The Australian website Simple Savings used to have a great recipe collection, including soup mixes Simple Savings which included the "Starving Woolworths" threads about making stuff from scratch to put the supermarkets out of business! It is a paid membership though.

Well I got excited reading it, so that's a good thing!

My only comment would be to fade out the background a bit on the landing page, so it isn't so busy with the other pictures - might make the pictures of the cool stuff pop out a bit more.

Definitely nettles. Any time you think you're eating spinach at my house.. it's probably not spinach!

Nutritious, tasty and free, comes up year after year in my patch.

Dandelions also feature regularly, and both get used in my herbal teas as well as cooking.

Catching the first flush from our shower. The watering cans are 9L, which is 2.37 gallons. So the two bucketfuls were about 5 gallons all up, as they are a bit bigger than the watering cans.
I put them on the roses and the herb pots. The dogs wanted to help, of course!

Oh my goodness, congratulations on all that work! I love roses so much, I'm excited to see your garden in late Spring!

Are they all hybrid teas? Which is your favourite?

I also do chemical-free roses. They get fed with poop boosted straw from the chicken coop. I just planted 13 new bushes at the new place last year!

I think you may be right Jane, as I believe said owner did work on the railway...

Sarah that looks so good! Arches are so pleasing to the eye.

Thekla that's such a great idea, I hadn't thought of trading them for stuff or labour! I really appreciate your suggestions, thank you.

Spent the whole renovation budget on getting the foundations and roof redone - we are on a DIY budget now, or a "save and wait"! I really like to upcycle and there is always lots of wire and mesh at the local dump so I was thinking of gabions. The examples here have been great to get me thinking, I'm very thankful for this thread.

I was considering an outdoor kitchen with a rocket stove already, so the gabions could make a great base for benches for food prep.  I could put it on the south side of the house so it's not just a heat trap in summer (I'm in Australia).

Water is a big limiting factor out there too so I'll revisit my books to see what I could build with rocks that could conserve/better harvest water from rain and dew.

Sorry, I should have been more clear. The house is my grandparent's old house, in the country village where I grew up. I know the land well and the oldies nearby have known me since I was a baby!

Instead of saying "no idea" I should have said "we've had lots of ideas but none of them seem to make sense other than that we were told by the neighbours he was given the material for free and just liked it". It's black rock that is not local, it's something you would buy from a landscaping or road building place. They are in rectangular blocks with railway sleepers for edges that mean to walk through the yard you effectively have to go through a maze.

It's on very flat land on a large village block in a very dry climate.  It's hot for much more of the year than it is cold.

I'm an ecologist so I know it provides habitat, I will be leaving the ones that aren't in the way of using the yard, and aren't right next to the back door.

Great thread, very helpful!

My project house has several "beds" of these rocks. I have no idea what the past owner put them in for, but in a hot climate they add way too much heat too close to the house, and make every type of building and maintenance more difficult as you have to clamber over them. I just knew Permies would have some ideas as to what I could do with them - I was sure they could be a resource for some purpose!