Burra Maluca

The staff here are volunteers on a site that is free to use. I don't think they should have to do anything!

If you want to say hi to a fellow member in your native language using a site with an English only rule, why not send them a purple moosage?

It ain't rocket science...

I have to admit that this morning I invested in a rather expensive bit of plastic, but hopefully the good it will do will outweigh the harm.

It's a piece of reinforced hose pipe long enough to carry grey water to the furthest fruit tree in front of the house so I don't lose all the figs like I did last summer by failing to keep them watered during the hottest, driest part of the year. It's good enough quality that I'm hopeful that it won't have to be replaced in my lifetime and it should go a long way to enabling me to produce more of own food and reduce the amount that has to be brought in.

We also recently made a willow feeder which will, in a couple of years, start supplying nutrients to all the fruit trees.

Bumping this thread up as I think a lot of people could benefit from the information in this book to improve their food security.

Rebecca Norman wrote:I want to give a call out for perennial scallions, sometimes called "welsh onions" or Japanese negi. They are perennial, and in my experience high producing, and they're much more like green onions than chives are. I mean, I grow and use both.

I've been trying for years to grow Welsh onions here - I currently have about five individual plants in a pot, the only survivors from hundreds of seedlings as most of them don't tolerate the heat here. I'm very, very hopeful that the teeny handful I have will produce seed for me this year and I can start growing a more heat-tolerant strain of them. It's quite a long-term project though and I can pick up pots of growing chives at any supermarket, split them into a dozen or so plugs and they grow on beautifully.~

I also want to experiment crossing welsh onion with leek to see if I can create my own version of walking onions, but again that's a long-term experimental project. In the meantime a chive bed would be a very useful addition and I planted out two dozen plugs last week in the hope that they establish nicely.

My other half found some reduced price breaded chicken things in the supermarket and thought they might be fun so he brought them home. We still had some frozen chunky chips left over from Valentine's day in the freezer, and I suggested that it seemed the sort of thing we would have eaten as kids back in the UK so we broke out a tin of baked beans to have with them and had them for lunch yesterday.

It was great fun, and a good reminder of how our diets have improved since we were kids.

Except for yesterday, of course...

My plans mostly involve taking a deep breath and concentrating my energies on tried-and-true food plants rather than on experimental ones. And also establishing things like a chive bed, which will give me green onions to use for many years to come with no extra effort.

I have several seed-grown young trees like almond and quince that can be planted up on the terrace behind the house where with a bit of luck I can give them just enough care to keep them alive, then they can produce fruit and nuts long-term for me for virtually no effort. Also goji berries and strawberry trees from cuttings, which grow like weeds given half a chance. I have a load of mulberry cuttings which look like they might have all taken, so they can be planted in less-dry areas in the autumn.

A lot of my garden beds got overgrown with weeds last year as my health wasn't up to keeping them clear, so I'll be concentrating most of my energy on planting up the GAMCOD bed and any beds that are easily salvageable, then any extra energy can go towards de-brambling the others. Any brambles that fail to get cleared can be harvested for blackberries. Veggies to plant will include perennial galega cabbage, sweet potatoes, giant radish, leeks, sweetcorn, green beans, chard and various pumpkins.

We gave the fig tree a severe pruning because last year the first crop was mostly wasted because I couldn't reach them to harvest them all. And then I failed to get enough water to it to supply its needs to support the bumper second crop it was attempting to produce and the whole crop failed. I figured that a heavy prune would mean less waste and more figs to eat overall. Then the emphasis is going to be to harvest everything and waste nothing, designing our diet around what we have available. Which might involve a lot of olives!

A bit like the 'stuff the bits in a sock' idea, I crochet little soap bags to put soap bits in when they get too small to be efficient. We have one each hanging in the shower, colour coded. If the amount of soap in the bag ever seems to be not quite enough, I just decide to swap out the bar of soap by the hand basin a bit sooner. They work as pre-soaped body scrubbers.



Here's the tutorial I use.



Edit to add - they make awesome gifts, along with a couple of little bars of home-made soap.

I make my own bar-soap with just olive oil and caustic soda, no smelly stuff at all as I really don't like it. But we also keep a pump dispenser full of dish washing liquid by the washbasin, mostly for when Himself has been working on engines and comes indoors covered in engine oil, and another one in the kitchen, mostly for when I've been sorting meat scraps and have far too much grease and raw meat juice on my hands.

Not only is the liquid dish soap stronger for greasier hands, it means we can use it without getting greasy gunge all over everything else. Both of the pump dispensers are stainless steel and one is twenty years old and showing no sign of wearing out.

Jay Angler wrote: I actually like the square one best of all! However, I was thinking of an outdoor light beside the garage door.

It looks to me like the design was inspired by an old carriage lamp, and I quite agree that it would work well as an outside light by a door. He's renovating his own place at the moment, and will be fitting a new door (used, given in return for a couple of hours clearing up after hours on another renovation site - anyone spot a pattern?) so maybe he'll want to put it there. I can't scrounge all his trophies off him. But I figured he wouldn't need all three chandeliers...

You think that funny square one would look good by this?

And this time he showed up from work with three chandeliers!

I've claimed this one, which looks like it might be converted to an electric bulb fitting from an original oil lamp.



He wants to keep the pink frilly one...



And then there's this one...



The house is being renovated and whilst the woman who is moving in loves them, she's rather short, unlike her husband who keeps bashing his head on them and has learned to hate them. And ultimately they agreed to let them go, so he gave them to my son before she could change her mind.