The wide ranging experiences of someone who lives in the Australian bush in a knocked together tin shed with a heap of animals and still manages to hold down a job, study full time and raise a family.
You may have noticed that I have changed my pages (the tabs along the top of the blog) so that they take you straight to my Etsy and MadeIt stores. I have added links to my stores for one simple reason; I am trying to sell stuff.
This year, due to funding cuts in the education department, I only have one day per week work (and full time study) which makes it hard to pay bills (something most of us are familiar with) so I began casting around for an income stream that would allow me to stay home (studying, gardening, crafting and blogging) and would make enough to pay the mortgage. I came up with selling my crafting efforts online.
I am selling my hand made knitted items, home spun wool, hand made soap and herbal ointments.
Please have a look at my wares so far and let me know what you think; I am looking for ways to improve my shop (and I love to read peoples comments).
Hand knit finger-less mittens made from recycled acrylic yarn
Hand knit and felted tote bag, made from pure wool.
Home spun cream coloured Suffolk wool
Home spun Merino wool
Homespun white cotton
Hand made vegetable oil soap in a hand knit cotton bag
It's the beginning of autumn (planetarily speaking) so the cicadas have gone, but I keep finding shells on the trees around the property and it brings the hot days of summer to mind every time. I love to hear the songs of millions of cicadas in the trees on a hot summer day; it reminds me that every season is short lived.
A while ago I found a recording of crickets slowed down (on the net of course) and it sounded like a choir, I wonder what cicadas slowed down sounds like?
There are about 2000 species of cicada world wide; 220 of them are found in Australia. They have a really interesting and mysterious life cycle; spending years (up to 14 in some species) living underground sucking sap from the roots of plants and emerging in the summer,when sap flow is high, to sing, mate and be eaten by hungry birds and animals. They seem to be emerging earlier each year to me and an article in the Blue Mountains Gazette backs up that observation, stating that planetary warming is resulting in big changes in insect behavior.
Around our humpy the emergence of cicadas in the early summer coincides with the hatching of insect eating birds like the black faced cuckoo shrike, butcher bird, magpie, satin bower birds and many others. The blue faced honey eater gets it's food from nectar plants (as the name suggests) and fruit for most of the year but just before they lay eggs they eat large amounts of insects (to boost their protein levels, which boosts fertility) and they feed their young on insects too. The emergence of the cicadas fits in neatly with the beginning of the blue faced honey eater breeding season. I have also seen (only once) a koala eating cicadas like they were chips (absentmindedly but constantly feeding them into his mouth). I think that cicadas provide a huge boost in protein for many birds and animals at a time when they have young or are breeding and that makes them a very important part of the ecosystem.
A few days ago a friend of mine gave me a little bag of hair from her Meremma dog to try on my spinning wheel (Thanks Lynn). Today I tried it out.
Using dog hair to make yarn is not a new fashion; ancient people made good use of the hair shed by pets and working dogs to make yarn for knitting and weaving cloth.
This little bag of hair was a joy to work with, easy to comb, easy to spin and so soft.
This one tiny bag of hair made many meters of yarn.
The hair out of it's bag. It is so soft I could fondle it all day.
I spread it on the comb
After several combings (from one carder to the other), the roving is ready to go.
When you take the hair off the comb it becomes a fluffy batt.
The batt is then rolled into a roving ready for spinning.
It spins a smooth, strong yarn.
The resulting yarn (or single ply) looks like mohair but is much softer.
I have enjoyed this little bit of spinning. Now I will be asking my friend for more hair from her dog when she combs her so I can finish the rest of this reel and ply the single with wool to make a skein to knit a hat.
Glossary reel; the piece of the wheel which stores the finished spinning. single; a single strand of spun fibre. Several singles are combined to make a yarn. ply; twisting/spinning several singles together to make a yarn. Two ply is made with two singles, three ply is three singles and so on.
This week a local family bought us a baby bird; he had fallen or flown from a high nest and was being menaced by their dog. If he had been fully feathered we would have advised them to leave him in a high tree to be reclaimed by his (no doubt worried) parents. However, he is not yet fully feathered and has made no attempt to fly in the three days he has been here.
Meet Teal'c; the Black-faced cuckoo shrike
Teal'c is a Black-face cuckoo shrike , who are not cuckoos or shrikes. They are omnivorous birds, although they mostly eat insects. They live in bush country, suburban garden and farm land.
This little boy (we think), is currently in a cage through the day and in a heated box at night. He is being fed on balls of insectivore mix and meal worms along with any stinging flies, beetles and worms we can find. He is fed 'on demand'; as his cage is in the house, we can hear him call us for food. He is a delightful little boy who will eventually grow up and join the local populations that frequent the bush around our house.
Today I decided to add a new section to my blog; local insects and animals. Every so often we find an unknown insect or animal around the humpy and it causes a rush towards the book shelves and the computer to find out what it is and what it does. From now on I will add the results of these research missions to my blog (partly so I have a record of what we have already researched, as I suspect we have looked up some things more than once and forgotten the results).
Today's bug is.......the black flower wasp
My youngest daughter captured this photo of a black flower wasp on the lantana.
Haven't they got pretty wings.
My youngest daughter was fascinated by the lovely blue colour of the wings and by their solitary nature. According to the CSIRO these wasps are solitary wasps who are responsible for pollinating many Australian natives (and a few exotics too) they lay eggs in caterpillars to reproduce. So many Australian native insects tend to be solitary, I wonder why they have evolved this way?
Given the worrying drop in the bee population of the world, I think it is important to encourage other insects who are capable of pollinating our food crops, or we may find ourselves very hungry. While the black flower wasp is known to pollinate mostly native plants, there is so little research on them that they may also play a large part in pollinating high nectar food plants like pumpkin, melons and marrow.
They enjoy high nectar plants and undisturbed mulched areas, so make sure you have some of this habitat in your garden and you will have these delightful wasps to entertain you and help control Caterpillar populations.
Today we are celebrating Lammas; the festival of first harvest, or the bread feast.
At Lammas we harvest seeds from our crops; an activity filled with symbolism. When we harvest seed from our crops we are reaping the rewards of our labors during the season (if I hadn't planted, weeded and carried bath water to the silverbeet all summer, I wouldn't be harvesting seeds from it now), we are also gathering the hope for future seasons (I will plant the seed I harvest to grow more silverbeet).
The song 'John Barleycorn must die' is a song about the yearly cycle of grain growing...symbolically.
This year we made a bread man to share and harvested the corn we planted in the sacred garden at Ostara. We also made some corn dolls to be buried with the corn when we plant it next Ostara.
Corn dolls are a really old tradition/ art from our various ancestors; making a doll from some of the harvest gives the spirit of the grain a place to live until it is planted again. They also make a sweet little decoration for the altar.
At last we have restarted work on the long planned five star pit toilet. It has become increasingly urgent for us to have a new toilet hole (the old one is getting uncomfortably near the end of it's usefulness).
Over the previous month or so we have all had a go at digging the pit deeper and wider, and it is almost deep enough at last. Today my (fairly reluctant) partner and eldest daughter were chased outside to begin building the framing for cement frame that will support the floor over the pit. Once the cementing is completed we will lay the floor over the pit (two sheets of really thick ply wood with a hole drilled in one), organize a pedestal (of some sort), put up a temporary shelter and it will be usable. The building part will be put together over the next six months or so.
The start of the frame for cement 'stem walls' to hold the floor up above the moisture and stuff.
The finished frame work, ready for cement.
The two sheets of ply for the floor,
Nothing to do with toilets, but our baby guinea fowls have grown up enough to be out in the yard with their mum.
Everyone watches the cement mixer go around and around and around and...
Six or seven mixes later.
It's almost full.
Smoothing out the top.
All done.
Roady (the butcher bird) fancies himself a building inspector.
Last minute touch ups after the dogs and sheep have inspected the work.
We admire our work as the sun goes down.
The next stage is to dig some more out of the pit (the deeper the better) and to begin the building of the toilet. I look forward to it.
Just updating this post with a photo or two of the recent digging.
The hole is now 1.4 x 0.8 x 0.9 m; a tiny bit over one cubic metre of hole (I think)
My eldest daughter busily scooping out gravelly soil.