The corn has come and gone!

I come to you at 11pm with a belly full of garden produce and a heart full of joy after an evening spent with the Murphys, our organic farmer friends. It has been a good week. After the waiting for corn, we tore into the first ear and shared it among 4 people. The next night we each had an ear of corn. Yummy! Fresh corn off your own stalks lives up to its reputation and more! It is so wonderfully sweet, not at all floury, even raw. Jacinta prefers her corn right off the plant, no messing around with heating and cooling. She tears off the husks very well saying, “cohng,” and bites in as soon as she sees the golden seeds bursting through. Each day or night we ate a little bit and after a week of corn heaven, it’s gone. I have tried to plant a little bit every few weeks, but now I know I must plant all the time. Some of the cobs were very cute little things, others had been interrupted by hungry baby cows who munched off the top of the plant and then created a cob of corn which had every 3rd kernel developed, the rest flat, white and tiny. Other cobs were just like the ones you buy in the store, but tasted better. The caterpillars found their way into a few ears, and the grasshoppers took 2 ears entirely and left the rest alone. I suppose this was our offering to nature in return for some yummy corn. We will plant a lot more if we can get it in before the heat diminishes in autumn.

Although Matt was not overjoyed at his lack of paid work this week, Jacinta and I were! He had one day of work at the bank on Thursday, but worked here on the land and in the house for the rest of the week. Other than enjoying Jacinta’s playfulness and attention throughout each day, he found time to continue preparing the future shed site by cleaning out Keith’s daughter’s stuff which was being stored in this spot. The things we find around the place never cease to amaze us, the variety, the quantity, the random mix of stuff. For example, in this pile we cleaned up some lumber, a cast iron bath tub, twelve 15 gallon water jugs, a pile of fossils, 200+ plant pots, a bag of foam pieces, 3 buckets of tile, 2 crates of green glass bottles, an immense iron grid, 2 huge water tanks, a pile of chicken wire, 10 old cement wash tubs, a refrigerator door, a whole lot of slugs, and so on and so forth. Then there was a huge amount of lantana, a non-native noxious weed brought over from England, to be cleared out. It had grown over about a third of this pile. (It smells like sweet fruit and is quite pretty though.) He built a new closet in the bathroom, mowed the lawn, and mulched a huge pile of brush which he had cleared earlier in the week. We also came up with a new plan for an addition onto the house which will be easier and more practical.

One problem which is more present in the summer is that the trees block off our access here in the house to a breeze. One reason we are clearing out trees is to allow more wind to cool us off. Other reasons for clearing are either to get rid of non-native species and to make more space for garden. My friend Michelle and I are planning a large potato and root vegetable garden and have decided to do it on the slope of the dam where the soil is rich and the potatoes can grow down the slope. This will entail a bit of work, first clearing,  then dragging all of the brush to the mulcher, then terracing the land so that rain will not wash everything down into the dam. With Rory, Michelle’s 3 year old, and Jess in tow, our meager efforts to begin clearing were just that. So Matt and Keith went in and began the attack on non-natives with machetes, successfully bringing more of a breeze up to the house. This is the beginning of the potato garden and a whole new world of which I am completely knowledgeless, terracing.
It rained a fair bit this week, again. It is said that February is the most dangerous bush fire month. January is typically very dry, so this rain is acting as a lovely preventative measure. Thanks Creator/God/Earth, whoever’s in charge! We are still eating beans, more cherry tomatoes, herbs, corn, and watching the melons grow. The trees seem happy with their mulch and are also enjoying the rain. We have a mango tree now! Fruits which you can hope to eat when you visit one day are apples, oranges, blood oranges, mangoes, nectarines, pears, plums, lillypillies, passionfruit, lemons, limes, mandarins, macadamias, coffee (??), and avocadoes. All of the sunflowers, save one, in the teepee garden are so heavy that they don’t follow the sun, they look down at the ground instead. One tall proud sunflower follows the sun, it’s about 8 feet high and has a beautiful scarlet runner bean vine encircling its thick stalk, it’s covered with red little flowers. The king parrots have come back and are now eating out of our birdfeeders. The baby chicks are growing, of course, and now try to escape when we feed them each morning. In their little mansion is a wide wooden ladder leaning up against the back wall, for the chickens to climb up and sleep at night. I don’t know how Otto, Iris, Ben Jr and Divozzo Jr get to the top each night, but they still sleep under their mum’s bum on the top rung! It’s amazing!

I have no complaints this week, after my whining last week. The heat has been less intense, no need for a spa every 2 hours. I was able to use the oven more this week as the sun gave us a break and made space for more cooking. I’ve made tortillas a few times now which I love doing. It brings me back to Honduras where I learned tortilla making on a clay wood fired stove from Dona Ena.  Mexican/South American food is not well known here. I had to search high and low to find black beans. Voila, I now have some and have even tried planting store bought beans (uncooked, don’t worry) in the hopes that I won’t have to drive 45 minutes to buy them each time. I enjoy evenings if I can work up the energy to move after laying down with Jacinta. I have no reading energy for some reason, and did no night gardening this week. Now that I have finished knitting for Lecia and Ben’s baby I am trying to write real letters in return for all of the beautiful cards that we received for Christmas.

Jess thinks she’s in charge now, perhaps it’s because she can express her desires with words.  She is very forceful using the word, “Sit!” now. When she wakes up at 6:45 and goes to her little table to munch on peanuts and raisins, she sits in one of the little chairs and looks out the window, sometimes silently and sometimes naming everything she can see. She gets lonely after a while and whines at me to get out of bed, bringing me a chair, putting it up on the bed and yelling, “Sit!” We like to sit on the bottom rung of the chick’s ladder and watch them scratch after their morning feed, but sometimes I’m ready to go back up to the house and have tea. On these days when I neglect our little morning sit, she goes and sits down and yells at me until I sit down and join her. She stands on the veranda watching birds eat the seed she has just spread and calls out, “seed!” She points to the bucket of seed when she wants me to carry it calling out, “bucket.” Jess is really using the word, “carry” now, but I’ve worked up the courage to tell her, “no, walk.” She points at things in the kitchen and names them, “salt, dough, toast, avocado.” She loves getting a hold of pens, but knows that they are “no-no’s,” so as she’s saying pen or paper and writing on herself, she is also chanting ”no, no, no.” She wakes up in the middle of the night thirsty and says, “water,” has a drink and goes back to sleep. She walks into a sunny patch of ground or a hot plank of wood and says, “sunny.” Tonight when looking at the moon she said, “shiny,” that was so beautiful. It is a full moon tonight, we saw it rise out over Justin and Melina’s farm. It will be a full moon in about 10 hours for you all. Enjoy it and know we are (were??) looking at it with you. We miss and love you all. Good night.