Last Saturday

Ross at home

Last Saturday, between eating his breakfast and planted this year’s potatoes, Tom’s much-loved Dad died suddenly. We loved Tom’s Dad dearly and will miss him greatly. Right now we have good and bad moments, spend quite a bit of time moping about and reminding ourselves that he has died because it just doesn’t seem quite right.

Blog readers will remember Ross for his guest blog and his long comments that were more like personal emails. This one and this one are particularly good examples. We’ll miss those comments, and the Election Night commentary and our best picker on blackberry day and a million other things but I feel lucky to have had such a terrific father in law.

A fish and a bicycle

Something's fishy

When I was about eight I clearly remember my Mum saying to me, ‘you’re such a feminist that when you get married I bet you don’t change your last name.’ Well yeah, I thought. I’ve already got a perfectly good name – why would I change it?

At art school I did a lot of work about glory boxes, marriage and the evils of domestic chores. But honestly? These weekends spent making craft for Craft 2.0 and seeing Tom potter in the garden and reading blogs like this one make me want to jet back to the 1950s pronto and spend my days making stuff and baking.

Of course, that’s because I have a choice.

I’m selling at Craft 2.0

Tom’s suitcase glasshouse

Yesterday I completed another gardening project – turning a suitcase into a wee seed raising glasshouse.

You can see how it all went down here or just marvel at the finished product below.  Or do both – you deserve a treat.

~ Tom

Magic compost heap

Em and I already have a couple of compost bins that live by the garage and are fairly run-of-the-mill food scrap affairs.  They’re perfectly good but in my heart of hearts I’ve always hankered after a compost heap like my Dad used to have when I was a kid. 

Dad’s compost lived at the back of the back yard and was constructed out of fence posts and corrugated iron in a very adhoc, blokes in sheds kind of way.  I have no great love of corrugated iron but had read that old shipping pallets made a good structure for a large open style heap.

Last week Em gave me a newspaper clipping that her friend and workmate Patricia had photocopied for me – it set out how to make the perfect heap by layering carbon, nitrogen, animal waste and lime in a strange kind of gardening trifle.  This sounded pretty good to me so after lunch today I decided to have a bash at it.

With the help of some free pallets from RD1, some $4 a sack horse crap from up the road, grass clippings from the lawn and some old straw we had lying about, I turned this hitherto lumpy patch of pseudo lawn into this combined garden alchemy set and paternal tribute.  I managed to make three and a half layers of straw/grass/shit/lime and just need to find something to cover it over with so it can get nice and warm.

In other garden updates – beetroot were indeed the next cab off the ranks in the sprouting race (mix those metaphors) and have now been joined by cucumbers, tomatoes and even eggplant!  I’ve planted out two kinds of peas (sugar snap and snow-pea), baby carrots on a special seed tape (highly recommended) and some thyme, all straight into the garden.  Tomorrow I’m hoping to get some coriander and basil on the way and find a piece of perspex for my next seed raising experiment.

~ Tom