We went to Bunnings today. Well, to be honest, Bunnings, Aldi and Kmart. They are positioned helpfully together and make the looong twenty-minute drive out to Kangaroo Flat worth the time and effort (tell me you live the good life in a regional city without telling me you live in a regional city!). We needed a small packet of screws, fruit and vegetables, bread and milk. That’s it. We could have bought them closer to home. We could have done that but it would have meant missing out on a trip to Bunnings.
I know I am not alone in my pilgrimages to the great temple of home renovations and the supermarket of unnecessary purchases. I know this from the number of people who disclosed huge department type shops in their movements when Covid19 contact tracing, whether converted disciples of the megastore or secret shoppers we all go to them. Once Ian came back from Aldi smiling proudly at his successful purchase of a violin. He went to buy milk…
Why are these places so tempting? Is it just the low prices? Those prices come with a serve of such deep and abiding guilt in the knowledge that it simply cannot be possible to make these things for me to buy at that price without someone else paying dearly for it early in the production chain. It’s the same guilt I feel when I buy meat for dinner. We have one vegetarian in the house, meat-free from childhood. I have looked at the data behind the impact of meat grown for human consumption compared to plant based ingredients, I know how logical, healthy and environmentally friendly a vegetarian diet would be and yet shake my head at the thought of it and we go on cooking two meals for the family.
Excuses? It’s cheaper. It’s easier. It’s available. I’m guilt ridden.
This has got to stop!!!
Did you ever watch The Good Life? It was a BBC show featuring a couple who decided to quit the corporate world in the 1970s and turn their suburban backyard into a sustainable homestead in the middle of London. They learned how to grow vegetables, husband livestock, make what they needed and barter for the rest. Living frugally and self-sufficiently became the solution to the stress of modern life. I think I caught the bug from them. I want to live the good life! But not with the Leadbetters next door. Mind you, she became a good friend to them and held up a mirror to keep them relatively grounded in a semblance of suburban reality. We all need that person, don’t we? I think I have a few of you out there playing that part!
Not that you have stopped me from dreaming the dream!
I see that perhaps leaning into both home grown and vegetarianism actually isn’t so far from the realms of possibility here at Ardley. The more I write the more ridiculous it is that I haven’t used my produce more wisely and the more disappointed I am in myself. How hard would it be to grow our greens – lettuce and spinach and silver beet – and never buy them from the supermarket ever again? We already do this with eggs. They taste better and last longer and seem so precious for having come from our own chooks. One of my long time goals has been to grow enough vegetables to keep us reasonably fed. I’m not expecting to be able to do 100% of what we need (only because I’m afraid that goal wouldn’t be attainable). Instead I plant, let things grow… let them go to seed and feed the compost and the chooks, and still buy spinach in a plastic bag. This is something I can change with very little effort.
The four wicking beds set up around the clothes line are a bit of work to set up but, my goodness, they’ve proven themselves many times over with their ability to maintain moisture in the soil. In them at the moment are tomatoes, lettuce, spinach, purple king beans and dwarf sugar snap peas. Sharing the space are marigolds, nasturtiums and violas. Mr A loves flowers and insisted they be companion planted. They’re divine. These beds are ideal for growing leafy greens or water guzzling delicacies like corn. I have an urge to plant some seedling trays ready for the first hint of spring..!
Two olive trees stand guard at the head of the path. They fruit prolifically every second year, one gifting us huge black globular olives that could be mistaken for grapes, the other dozens of smaller ovoid kalamata beauties. I have been slack in the pandemic years and have allowed them to fall from the tree but in past years have had a constant supply of bottled lovelies from the tree in the back of the pantry. My Nan gave me a simple olive preserving recipe she had been given by her neighbour, Jeanie. It truly has never failed and takes such little effort that we have produced yummy table olives for over ten years now. Ian sits down and pits as many as his hands can cope with and they are bottled separately. Without the pits in them they smoke up the brine intensely and need extra rinsing at the end of the process but become exquisite additions to pizza and pasta dishes.
If you walk from the wicking beds, between the olive trees and across the concrete that serves Mr M as a basketball court you will come to the chook shed. When Covid19 hit we had just ordered a new group of young hens and so we currently have ten ladies providing us with eggs each day. During the lockdown when we were unable to go out and visit others we found ourselves overwhelmed by a fridge full of potential cakes and quiches and big Sunday breakfasts with nowhere to go! I was seeking out the articles that indicated we were allowed to eat lots of eggs each day and fell back on Jackie French’s glorious description of her grandparents and aunt who ate eggs at every meal.
Great-grandma, Great-grandpa and Great-great-aunt Nan went through at least two dozen eggs a day: fried or poached eggs for breakfast, with perhaps a toasted scone from the day before; pikelets for morning tea; a ham-and-egg pie or egg-and-lettuce sandwiches for lunch, with stewed fruit and custard (which had even more eggs in it than the ham-and-egg pie); sponge cake or tiny cream cakes and laminations for afternoon tea; a roast for dinner (chook preferably), with lots of veg and more stewed fruit and custard of pavlova or ice-cream.
(Jackie French’s Chook Book).
Jackie French’s relatives lived into ripe old age on all those eggs. Right, that’s what we will do, too!
So, here is my challenge for Ardley…
Use something from the garden every day.*
*Eggs are INCLUDED…
Stop buying veges in plastic bags.
Cook two vegetarian meals each week.
Challenge accepted! Will let you know how we go…
Yummm this is making me keen for fresh produce 🤤
Ready to cook with you🥰
In all fairness, it was a very cool violin.
You know, surprisingly, it was!