Category Archives: Garden

#105 Revisit Yindyamarra Sculpture Walk

Time seems to stand still during a pandemic.

Early September arrived, and I realised with a shock that it was the first anniversary of losing Ziggy, my quirky little whippet. It seems like only yesterday.

More disturbingly, it hit me that without Ziggy, I hadn’t been on many of our previously shared outings for a whole year.

Time to:

#105 Revisit Yindyamarra Sculpture Walk

This walk was one of our pleasures, displaying wonderful indigenous sculptures in rambling bushland nestled between the Murray River and winding lagoons.

When it opened back in early 2015, I detailed the artworks in blog post #26 ‘Explore Your City like a Newcomer’.

In 2018, another sculpture was added:

But a lot can happen in a year, especially if your back is turned.

To my surprise, several of the gravel paths have now been sealed,

Then …………………………………………………………………………and Now

(And doesn’t different weather change the mood!)

there’s improved signage

and additional, stunning new sculptures along the way.

*Leaving our Mark* by various members of AlburyCity’s Wagirra Team

*Trio of Kookaburras (guguburra)* by Peter Ingram

And if you like the look of these photos, I can assure you that the real thing is so much better. Don’t wait a whole year to return.

#102 Learn to Arrange Flowers — in an Ikebana Style

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Almost everyone has a special skill, although sadly, many of us don’t acknowledge it.

Praise someone who can sing in tune, and they’ll shrug and say ‘anyone can do that,’ but for those of us who are pitch imperfect, that’s just not true.

In a similar vein, people who can arrange flowers to look effortlessly gorgeous don’t understand how some of us struggle to coax a single rose to stand up in a narrow specimen vase.

So a recent opportunity to

#102 Learn to Arrange Flowers — in an Ikebana style

with a group of friends was too good to pass up.

Ikebana is the ancient Japanese art of flower arranging and is governed by 7 Principles: silence, minimalism, shape & line, form, humanity, aesthetics and structure.

As we were good friends teaching ourselves how to cut and measure and determine correct angles using videos and Youtube demonstrations, you’ll understand that the first Principle of Ikebana went out the window in no time.

But we embraced the concepts of minimalism, of using simple shapes and lines (based on a triangular pattern) and eschewed busy-looking, heavy, symmetrical Western designs with gusto.

Just as pleasing was discovering that the small metal, spiked flower base many of us found at the back of our vase cupboards—

is a specific device used in Ikebana called a kenzan.

While I know the designs we created are not true examples of Ikebana (hence I’m calling this blog post in an Ikebana style) we were thrilled with the results, marvelling how creating an elegant flower design doesn’t have to be a daunting task after all—even in the middle of winter with sparse pickings.

Another bonus of this activity was discovering a hidden flower growing among my narcissus in the back garden at home.

Called an Erlicheer jonquil (not an obscure Latin term, but named because it’s an early-flowering specimen guaranteed to cheer you up in winter!) it’s a new favourite.

I’m imagining a mass planting of this fragrant beauty in my front garden next year!

#97 Explore Ways to Cook … Parsnips?

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Every home gardener knows it.

One year, you produce crops so lush, so abundant, so profuse, that you’re convinced your gardening skills are unparalleled. Then the very next year, you can almost hear the whispering coming from the garden as the veggies declare, “It’s my right, as a living, growing seed, to deprive you of my bounty this year for no apparent reason.”

And so this summer, the zucchini plants refused to flourish (I know! Who can’t grow zucchini?), the eggplants lay down their drooping arms early, and the sugar snap peas refused to be either sugary or snappy. Only one garden bed flourished while my back was turned.

And this is why I find myself forced to:

#97 Explore ways to cook … Parsnips?

Months ago, I threw some newly purchased seeds into an empty garden bed which then appeared to stay dormant for so long that I forgot I’d ever planted anything. Imagine my surprise when these lush leaves appeared, seemingly by magic:

It was parsnips! Purportedly a winter vegetable, it had decided to grace my garden bed—no, take over my garden bed—with summer produce.

So what do you do with a glut of—parsnips?

It turns out you can make several delicious dishes, beyond the well known roasted parsnip.

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The easiest dish to cook is from a recipe sent to me by a friend when I put out the call for parsnip help. Called Parsnip Puff, and featured in an early Beverley Sutherland Smith cook book, my friend had scribbled the word ‘great!’ by the side of it, which is always a good sign.

Not only does it taste richer, creamier and more flavoursome than plain old mashed potato, it even looks yummier:

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Buoyed by this success, I moved on to the ever reliable, ever moreish parsnip chips.

Just peel a parsnip with a vegetable peeler until it’s been reduced to a pile of shavings, then drop these into a pan of sizzling peanut oil until they turn golden. Drain on kitchen paper, sprinkle with salt and try to stop yourself devouring them in one go. So delicious.

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But why restrict yourself to savoury recipes? What about giving Catherine Berwick’s parsnip and maple syrup cake a try? Honestly.

It has a 5 star rating from 194 reviews, which is very impressive, but more importantly, it charmed my friends over the festive season:

It even freezes (if it lasts that long)!

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But there’s no point keeping parsnip all to itself.

This zucchini slice from Taste (4.9 stars from 822 reviews!) can be raised to a 5 star rating with the addition of a grated parsnip (and carrot) in the mix. If you have fresh golden eggs directly from a friend’s chickens, it will end up looking like this and keep you going in snacks for… ooh, at least a day:

I’m now sold on parsnips, and plan to grow them again next year.

Although I fear they’re already out there muttering, “If she thinks she’ll get an abundant crop like last year … tell ‘er she’s dreamin’.”

#96 Uncover Historic Secrets in your Own Back Yard

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Some years ago, I volunteered to clean archeological remnants that had been uncovered during the extensions to our local art gallery, MAMA. Every broken pottery piece or metal item that was unearthed had to be carefully cleaned and catalogued because it represented a glimpse into our history.

Discovering that one generation’s discarded items are a later generation’s history lesson made me wonder what secrets my own back yard might yield.

#96 Uncover Historic Secrets in your Own Back Yard

In this venture, I was helped immeasurably by the chickens who scratched around and inspected every square inch of soil, every waking hour, with forensic detail. Pretty soon, I was picking up small archeological scraps daily, wondering how I could have lived there for twenty-five years and not noticed the veritable treasure trove at my feet.

So I washed and dried every small discovery and carefully stored them all in a pottery dish protected with glass.

It’s amazing what you can find … if you look

When the archeologist involved in the MAMA dig returned recently to our LibraryMuseum to tell us about her work and share the fascinating history the items revealed, I asked her about my own small finds.

She shook her head.

Of very little interest, she suggested gently. To anyone.

I might have guessed.

… sigh …

But it was still fun to sort through the detritus of a past age in my little quarter-acre block and see what it revealed.

One of my favourites was the old metal soldier with no head and badly damaged legs:

I imagined some little boy playing with him for hours and being heartbroken when he was lost.

Then there were a few loose marbles found separately over several months. Did these roll away from my imaginary friend as well?

A glass stopper was eventually reunited with its bottle neck:

and there was the usual assortment of patterned crockery chips:

But the most exciting find was a 1910 ha’penny with King Edward VII’s profile on it:

I wonder what a 1910 ha’penny would be worth now, taking into account inflation?

But all these trivial bits and bobs from the past were trumped during a recent visit to my sister’s back yard in Sydney’s inner west.

For there, in all their prehistoric beauty, were what could only be described as dinosaurs.

I give you:

TWO brush turkeys.

Just hanging around an inner suburban back yard as though they belonged.

Beats chipped crockery any day.

#89 Make Maggie’s Dried Mandarin-skin Powder

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There’s a lot to love about Maggie Beer. Her warmth, her charm—which I’m assured by people who have worked with her, is utterly genuine—and her taste buds.

Especially her taste buds. If Maggie says this ingredient goes perfectly with that one, you can believe her, and if you have any doubts, just buy me a tub of her Pheasant Farm Paté for a demonstration of how happy her flavour pairings can make someone.

So when a recipe in her recent cook book, Maggie’s Recipe for Life—a compilation of recipes aimed at reducing the chances of Alzheimer’s and other lifestyle diseases—called for dried mandarin-skin powder, I simply had to make this ingredient for my pantry.

#89 Make Maggie’s Dried Mandarin-skin Powder

Now this is where Maggie sometimes challenges her adoring fans. For example, her recipe for the delicious-sounding eggplant, tomato and feta salad begins with the words, ‘Some years I grow up to six different varieties of eggplant in our garden’.

Of course you do Maggie, but did you know that the rest of us consider ourselves very lucky if a bog-standard Solanum melongena bush gives us two or three eggplants?

So it was no surprise to turn to the back of her book for the dried mandarin-skin powder instructions to find this:

Oh Maggie, Maggie. What if we don’t have a ‘very old, very reliable bench dehydrator’, or even a very old, very unreliable one? Or indeed, any dehydrator at all?

So it looks like I’ll have to trust Maggie’s taste buds, accept that dried, powdered mandarin-skin is a worthy creation, and channel her thoughts to come up with my own method.

The first step, of course, is to grow at least two varieties of mandarin tree. Foreseeing this need, several years ago I planted both an Imperial and a Satsuma mandarin tree. The former produced pip-laden, dry, shrivelled fruits that weren’t worth the space they took up in the garden. But the latter? Deeply orange in colour, sweet as pie, not a pip to be found, easy to peel and abundant. Simply delicious!

Here are the steps to preparing mandarin skin for its journey into powder, what I like to call, ‘respecting the fruit’ by utilising a ‘head to tail’ approach.

Peel the mandarin so the skin remains in largish pieces:
Devour the fruit segments
Gently scrape away the white pith from the skin. The end of a steel vegetable peeler works very well. It doesn’t matter if it tears a little.
When you’ve finished, they’ll look a bit like this
Store them in the fridge until you have enough to spread evenly on an oven tray
Pre-heat your oven to low (90-100ºC) then place the prepared skins on their tray in the oven for 35-45 minutes. Keep an eye on them so they don’t burn. They should look like this at the end of drying:
When cool, pulverise in a whizzer till they have the luxurious appearance of gold dust
Indulge your senses with the heady aroma of limonene, more glorious than saffron, more functional than real gold dust
Store in airtight container
And sprinkle on breakfast cereal or desserts to re-capture the aroma of your mandarins for months and months.Magical!

#87 Plan for “The Year of Living Safely”

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The longer I’ve lived, the more the years have merged into each other, especially since ceasing work.

So if you were to ask me what I got up to in, say, 2013, I really wouldn’t have a clue unless I checked my photos and bank statements.

Today, I’m taking the bold step of predicting that in the future, not one child or adult living on earth at this moment will ever forget what they were doing in 2020.

My generation has been lucky enough to miss a World War, and life has been mostly smooth sailing for us. That is, until a novel Coronavirus reared its ugly little genetic parcel of RNA and decided to inflict Covid-19 on the world.

Time to

#87 Plan for “The Year of Living Safely”

It’s going to be extremely tough for so many people, as jobs dry up, money disappears into the ether, and our lives are physically restricted. But maybe we should be relieved that no one is dropping bombs on us, there are unlikely to be food shortages, and no mastermind is trying to exterminate an entire race or entire religion. Even if we have to stay home for a year, if we help and support each other, we can probably muddle through somehow.

Remember,

Planning for the next however-many months of my life at home has made me realise that the past 7+ years of writing this blog has been the perfect preparation. Embarrassingly, I’ve discovered that my life in retirement has been almost entirely home-based. (I saw a meme once that suggested the trajectory of your life is determined by the song that was top of the hit parade in your country on your 14th birthday. Mine was Tom Jones’ Green, Green Grass of Home!)

So rather than re-invent the wheel, I’ve prepared a reminder of some of the fun and frivolous (and generally inexpensive) activities previously featured in this blog. As we’re urged to restrict our shopping, a few of them may need tweaking, but they’re all amenable to this.

A few other ideas spring to mind now, such as ‘Learn how to cut your own hair’ or ‘Move the furniture around to pretend you’ve renovated’. But I’ll leave other, more qualified, people to give tips on exercising-in-situ, virtual travel and the best books to read.

Meanwhile, stay safe and please, for the sake of our wonderful health professionals, as well as all our fellow travellers, stay home!

#84 Hold a Sustainable Kris Kringle

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Sometimes, in the face of a wilfully stupid government that leaves you feeling powerless, all you can do is quietly undermine them.

So with large tracts of the east coast of Australia now alight with unseasonal bushfires and a government still intent on promoting coal and coal mines, I’ve channelled my anger and frustration into a small act of defiance this Christmas.

No big buying spree to prop up the economy, thanks all the same, Mr Treasurer. This is the year my group of friends decided to

#84 Hold a Sustainable Kris Kringle

So much better than the usual exchange of bought-at-the-last-minute ‘stuff’.

The brief was simple:

◊ Make it
◊ Bake it
◊ Pick it
◊ Plant it
◊ Re-cycle it
◊ Re-gift it
◊ Re-use it
◊ Re-design it
◊ Re-purpose it

And here are the ideas we came up with:

A re-purposed hand towel sewn into a clever shower mitt, together with a bar of perfumed soap:

2. A re-gifted book on ‘green’ drinking and eating

3. A Garden Box full of goodies, including freshly laid eggs:

4. A jigsaw puzzle the original owner had completed more than enough times:

5. A Gift card promising a home cooked meal, with no expiry date!

6. A re-cycled novel by Ann Cleeves (who writes the Vera series) presented in a Christmas-card decorated bag:

7. Cards of assorted sizes printed on a home printer from photographs taken locally by the gift-giver:

8. Bonus cosmetics received after placing an order for regular cosmetics:

Every aspect of this Sustainable Kris Kringle was perfect: the pre-planning, the collating and especially the exchange of such personal gifts at our breakfast gathering.

The vote is that we’re definitely doing it again next year.

With apologies to the economy, of course.

Image of Christmas Trees (at top of post) is my lettuce, having bolted in the pre-summer heat. [sigh]