2nd week in Macksville
2nd week in Macksville
Here we are, 2 days before Halloween in a place that doesn’t celebrate this candy-ful holiday, digging up garden beds, building fences, and planting seeds for summer produce. It’s quite strange. Speaking of holidays, since I arrived here in Australia and began shopping I constantly see signs of, not Halloween, not Thanksgiving, but Christmas! It was mid-October and I was listening to Jingle Bells in a discount store.
On television they have started commercials advising safe driving during the holiday season (Christmas): “No ‘Drink’ Driving!”
As much as I hate being in the presence of a television blaring obnoxious commercials, I am sometimes impressed with certain commercials. One example:
Country Energy, the big energy company, advertising Green Energy, which you can choose to pay $1.50 extra a week and consume Green Energy in your own home, without having to buy your own wind tower or solar panels. How cool is that???
En route to the beach town 11 kilometers from Macksville, there is a sign promoting water conservation, paid for by the government, not the Green party.
This past week Mary and Keith were away visiting friends and family so we had time to learn to call this home, and not a vacation cottage. We took care of the chickens, feeding them their porridge every morning at 6:30, scattering seed for the local ducks, birds and turkeys, and later collecting their eggs. We accomplished many things, one of which was learning my way around the kitchen and recuperating my normal kitchen creativity. After collecting 4 fresh eggs (this time I had to reach under the lovely hen keeping the eggs warm!), Jacinta and I made some oatmeal raisin macadamia nut cookies. This little girl loves playing with me in the kitchen, I wonder what child wouldn’t like washing her hands every 3 minutes, digging her hands in the batter, squishing the eggs and butter, licking sugar off her fingers and digging out raisins to munch on. The variety of color, shape and size of the shells and the dark orange color of the egg yolks continue to amaze me.
Matt, Jess and I all worked quite a bit in the garden this week. Matt spent time building fences to guard the land from the chickens and the neighbor’s cows, digging ditches for a water pump and digging holes as we planted our first three trees…orange, macadamia and coffee. We now have two garden-able spaces: one small flat garden next to house which is now completely ready for seed and has tomato and sunflowers seed already in the dirt and a large orchard garden on a grassy slope situated between the chicken coop and the pond.
Preparing the small garden was a bit of a pain because we wanted to build a “no-dig” bed. This involved spreading shredded paper, then hot grass-clippings, then mulched lucerne hay, then…..picking up cow manure by hand from the neighbors land and spreading it over the hay. We did not have the energy to collect enough cow manure, so later on in the week, I dug out 4 wheelbarrows full of good compost dirt from the “chook” pen, and then 4 more loads from random spots on the property and spread them on top of the cow manure. THEN….it was time to fence it in and plant. During all of this laboring, Jacinta usually found something to do, either chasing chickens, digging up dirt with her baby shovel, filling up containers with my dirt and throwing the dirt back on the ground, searching for treasures amongst the sticks, pulling shredded paper from the bottom layer of the garden bed, pouring water on the plants, kicking the ball to the dog, or….napping peacefully in her cozy crib inside.
The orchard garden is the newer of the two and will NOT be a raised bed. As you might guess, we could not possibly collect that much cow manure, dig up that much soil, or pay for that much hay. For the time being, this approximately 1600 square foot garden has 3 trees planted, a fence to block off the cows, and a teepee made from barna grass (bamboo-like tall grass grown right here) which will soon allow a passionfruit vine to climb and Jacinta to play inside. Matt and Keith will soon hook up a water pump to make use of the pond water as nourishment for the new trees and veggies-to-be in this garden.
There have been some impressive rain and even hail storms over the past week. When people talk about hail “the size of baseballs,” it does exist! It ruins cars, crops and hurts animals and people, but boy, watching it from the comforts of your own home, it’s beautiful. I can’t believe that stuff shoots out of the sky and comes down so hard. The water has been good, our water tank is almost full, everything is green, flowers are in bloom, but unfortunately I don’t have many veggies benefiting from the rain. I am still awaiting my seed order. I’ve seen a few gardens in the area with tomato plants two feet high and pumpkin vines getting ready to fruit. Ideally, I’d have planted back in September, but that’s quite alright. I enjoyed having another mid-western autumn, spending time with my family and enjoying the harvest season in my home country.
Matt and I are trying to take Jess on nightly walks and bike rides to visit the nearby horses and cows. She can “nay” and “moo” like a pro. Her chicken sound is that of a monkey, she’s a bit confused, but she can say chicken. She eats ground macadamia nuts in her oatmeal, loves kiwis and bananas, and has started eating peanut butter sandwiches. She even had her first taste of Vegemite!!! She can run down hills without tumbling, but it sure makes us nervous. Her affection for holes is still strong: every hole we dig for a tree, she gets in and tries it out first. While feeding the birds, she throws most of her allotted seed down the hole near the bird baths. Everything in its place, right? She has slept through a few nights now, but still wakes up at 6am every morning.
Today Jacinta turned over a new leaf…she willingly left my side in the orchard to go with her “pop” (Keith) to get a drink, up the hill and inside the house. In actuality, it was the verbal promise of a cookie that did the trick. How wonderful though, here is the picture: Matt is digging a trench, I am wrapping leaves around the teepee and Jess is playing around the base. Pop offers a trip to get a drink and she looks wary…I say, “Pop might give you a cookie,” and her face lights up! She walks 20 feet to Pop and holds her arms up to be carried. She goes up to the house and returns happily 20 minutes later with Grandma and Pop with a blanket and basket of toys.
My driving skills are improving, it’s beginning to feel normal to drive on the other side of the road. My old rule “You’re doing it right if it feels wrong,” no longer applies. This is a small town though, and I’ll keep it simple for a while, no driving in bigger cities. My bike riding skills are also improving, but whoa, there are real hills here! Matt used to marvel at my inaptitude in shifting gears, and now I understand why he could do it and I couldn’t.
I met a bunch of nice ladies at the Macksville playgroup on Thursday. What a beautiful sight to see 20 kids between the ages of 3 months and 5 years all playing in the backyard of the family center. They were scattered throughout the yard, some playing in the tiny baby pool, mostly half naked because they’d forgotten their bathing suits and are not near as modest as Americans. Some crowding around their gabby mums, the fruit bowls and cracker plates, others digging heartily in the sandbox, a few sitting in the craft shed playing quietly alone, some climbing the tree or the playground, but ALL wearing sun hats and covered by a shade cloth. This is a great thing, Australians are very sun conscious and have figured out that it’s easier to shade play spaces than spread on sun block every 2 hours. The ladies were really nice and open to chatting with me and filling me in on community information. I met one woman who invited me to visit her garden next week and another who is going to bring me some of her husband’s pumpkin seeds (because she doesn’t want to eat any more pumpkin herself). Jacinta was in heaven, finally amongst children again, after the 2 months in limbo missing her baby friends like Otto and Iris. Her infectious giggle made everybody laugh and her mommy proud. I plan to go every Thursday and learn a little more each week.
Today Keith took us to a big garage sale, we’re off! We’ve officially begun the rummaging process. Soon the boat will arrive and we’ll have more stuff than we can handle. We’re still doing quite well without all of our belongings but it will be nice to see certain things again. We’re in a new place with lots of exciting challenges. The weather is getting warmer every day, it seems to be in the eighties and makes digging very sweaty work, but still rewarding. I am anxious to get more seeds in the ground.
That should be it for the update, quite wordy I realize. Oh well. Daylight savings will spring us forward tomorrow as 6am will come quickly. Farewell loved ones.
We miss you all.
Here we are, 2 days before Halloween in a place that doesn’t celebrate this candy-ful holiday, digging up garden beds, building fences, and planting seeds for summer produce. It’s quite strange. Speaking of holidays, since I arrived here in Australia and began shopping I constantly see signs of, not Halloween, not Thanksgiving, but Christmas! It was mid-October and I was listening to Jingle Bells in a discount store.
On television they have started commercials advising safe driving during the holiday season (Christmas): “No ‘Drink’ Driving!”
As much as I hate being in the presence of a television blaring obnoxious commercials, I am sometimes impressed with certain commercials. One example:
Country Energy, the big energy company, advertising Green Energy, which you can choose to pay $1.50 extra a week and consume Green Energy in your own home, without having to buy your own wind tower or solar panels. How cool is that???
En route to the beach town 11 kilometers from Macksville, there is a sign promoting water conservation, paid for by the government, not the Green party.
This past week Mary and Keith were away visiting friends and family so we had time to learn to call this home, and not a vacation cottage. We took care of the chickens, feeding them their porridge every morning at 6:30, scattering seed for the local ducks, birds and turkeys, and later collecting their eggs. We accomplished many things, one of which was learning my way around the kitchen and recuperating my normal kitchen creativity. After collecting 4 fresh eggs (this time I had to reach under the lovely hen keeping the eggs warm!), Jacinta and I made some oatmeal raisin macadamia nut cookies. This little girl loves playing with me in the kitchen, I wonder what child wouldn’t like washing her hands every 3 minutes, digging her hands in the batter, squishing the eggs and butter, licking sugar off her fingers and digging out raisins to munch on. The variety of color, shape and size of the shells and the dark orange color of the egg yolks continue to amaze me.
Matt, Jess and I all worked quite a bit in the garden this week. Matt spent time building fences to guard the land from the chickens and the neighbor’s cows, digging ditches for a water pump and digging holes as we planted our first three trees…orange, macadamia and coffee. We now have two garden-able spaces: one small flat garden next to house which is now completely ready for seed and has tomato and sunflowers seed already in the dirt and a large orchard garden on a grassy slope situated between the chicken coop and the pond.
Preparing the small garden was a bit of a pain because we wanted to build a “no-dig” bed. This involved spreading shredded paper, then hot grass-clippings, then mulched lucerne hay, then…..picking up cow manure by hand from the neighbors land and spreading it over the hay. We did not have the energy to collect enough cow manure, so later on in the week, I dug out 4 wheelbarrows full of good compost dirt from the “chook” pen, and then 4 more loads from random spots on the property and spread them on top of the cow manure. THEN….it was time to fence it in and plant. During all of this laboring, Jacinta usually found something to do, either chasing chickens, digging up dirt with her baby shovel, filling up containers with my dirt and throwing the dirt back on the ground, searching for treasures amongst the sticks, pulling shredded paper from the bottom layer of the garden bed, pouring water on the plants, kicking the ball to the dog, or….napping peacefully in her cozy crib inside.
The orchard garden is the newer of the two and will NOT be a raised bed. As you might guess, we could not possibly collect that much cow manure, dig up that much soil, or pay for that much hay. For the time being, this approximately 1600 square foot garden has 3 trees planted, a fence to block off the cows, and a teepee made from barna grass (bamboo-like tall grass grown right here) which will soon allow a passionfruit vine to climb and Jacinta to play inside. Matt and Keith will soon hook up a water pump to make use of the pond water as nourishment for the new trees and veggies-to-be in this garden.
There have been some impressive rain and even hail storms over the past week. When people talk about hail “the size of baseballs,” it does exist! It ruins cars, crops and hurts animals and people, but boy, watching it from the comforts of your own home, it’s beautiful. I can’t believe that stuff shoots out of the sky and comes down so hard. The water has been good, our water tank is almost full, everything is green, flowers are in bloom, but unfortunately I don’t have many veggies benefiting from the rain. I am still awaiting my seed order. I’ve seen a few gardens in the area with tomato plants two feet high and pumpkin vines getting ready to fruit. Ideally, I’d have planted back in September, but that’s quite alright. I enjoyed having another mid-western autumn, spending time with my family and enjoying the harvest season in my home country.
Matt and I are trying to take Jess on nightly walks and bike rides to visit the nearby horses and cows. She can “nay” and “moo” like a pro. Her chicken sound is that of a monkey, she’s a bit confused, but she can say chicken. She eats ground macadamia nuts in her oatmeal, loves kiwis and bananas, and has started eating peanut butter sandwiches. She even had her first taste of Vegemite!!! She can run down hills without tumbling, but it sure makes us nervous. Her affection for holes is still strong: every hole we dig for a tree, she gets in and tries it out first. While feeding the birds, she throws most of her allotted seed down the hole near the bird baths. Everything in its place, right? She has slept through a few nights now, but still wakes up at 6am every morning.
Today Jacinta turned over a new leaf…she willingly left my side in the orchard to go with her “pop” (Keith) to get a drink, up the hill and inside the house. In actuality, it was the verbal promise of a cookie that did the trick. How wonderful though, here is the picture: Matt is digging a trench, I am wrapping leaves around the teepee and Jess is playing around the base. Pop offers a trip to get a drink and she looks wary…I say, “Pop might give you a cookie,” and her face lights up! She walks 20 feet to Pop and holds her arms up to be carried. She goes up to the house and returns happily 20 minutes later with Grandma and Pop with a blanket and basket of toys.
My driving skills are improving, it’s beginning to feel normal to drive on the other side of the road. My old rule “You’re doing it right if it feels wrong,” no longer applies. This is a small town though, and I’ll keep it simple for a while, no driving in bigger cities. My bike riding skills are also improving, but whoa, there are real hills here! Matt used to marvel at my inaptitude in shifting gears, and now I understand why he could do it and I couldn’t.
I met a bunch of nice ladies at the Macksville playgroup on Thursday. What a beautiful sight to see 20 kids between the ages of 3 months and 5 years all playing in the backyard of the family center. They were scattered throughout the yard, some playing in the tiny baby pool, mostly half naked because they’d forgotten their bathing suits and are not near as modest as Americans. Some crowding around their gabby mums, the fruit bowls and cracker plates, others digging heartily in the sandbox, a few sitting in the craft shed playing quietly alone, some climbing the tree or the playground, but ALL wearing sun hats and covered by a shade cloth. This is a great thing, Australians are very sun conscious and have figured out that it’s easier to shade play spaces than spread on sun block every 2 hours. The ladies were really nice and open to chatting with me and filling me in on community information. I met one woman who invited me to visit her garden next week and another who is going to bring me some of her husband’s pumpkin seeds (because she doesn’t want to eat any more pumpkin herself). Jacinta was in heaven, finally amongst children again, after the 2 months in limbo missing her baby friends like Otto and Iris. Her infectious giggle made everybody laugh and her mommy proud. I plan to go every Thursday and learn a little more each week.
Today Keith took us to a big garage sale, we’re off! We’ve officially begun the rummaging process. Soon the boat will arrive and we’ll have more stuff than we can handle. We’re still doing quite well without all of our belongings but it will be nice to see certain things again. We’re in a new place with lots of exciting challenges. The weather is getting warmer every day, it seems to be in the eighties and makes digging very sweaty work, but still rewarding. I am anxious to get more seeds in the ground.
That should be it for the update, quite wordy I realize. Oh well. Daylight savings will spring us forward tomorrow as 6am will come quickly. Farewell loved ones.
We miss you all.
posted by Matt & Shana & Jacinta & Genevieve Henry at
10:41 PM
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