So am I dedicated, to growing, both my self and my garden. No wonder then, given this connection, that in the wet, quiet months, where naught but weeds will grow, I find myself questioning this aspect of my character. Alright, I find myself outright hating the cold miserable soil, wondering what the fuck I’m doing out again in the bitter numbing cold, when there is rare beauty to tracked down, strange wonders and humour that shakes the very belly existence.

So it was that being accompanied by my friends and housemates into the garden was a rare pleasure. And the eggs only tasted half bad,

when Adam proceeded to show my Grandmother how to suck ‘em. Well anyway it was good to see him out doors, even if it it was only to demonstrate his new compost making skills, as gained in a two week course doing a Soil Food Web course in Lismore. Still the compost needed doing and semmes A1 was the man for the job. it was nice to have some friendly banter out in the garden, briefly.

A gardener’s life is a solitary one after all…

I refer here particularly to the medium sized, spindly branches left from the goat fodder once the resident Caprines (Bette, Tans and the newly foliarly initiated, Chops) have stripped them of leaves. Last season I chipped the whole lot on wet days (a good undercover job for precipitous weather), this season I’ve tried my hand at char – twice, and have found the process failing in a number of respects- 1. The twigs are still a little green 2. This means that a huge amount of acrid smoke is given off 3. The drum I am using for the burn doesn’t quite seal 4. The amount of char produced in a burn is about one eighth the volume of twigs 5. Much of the char that it does produce is not properly burnt, and so the char is fairly woody, rather than char-y. The benefits of char burning are as follows – carbon sequestration, labor saving, not using fossil fuels and I have processed it such that there are 1-2 in thick sticks perfect for getting a roaring hot fire going in the combustion stove, and probably in the future cob stove to built in the Tea-House. Still I am concerned that burning the wood now

So I have serviced the chipper in preparation for a good stint of chipping which has a number of good points – it renders the wood easily decomposed, it gets rid of all sizes of branch upto 3 in thick, it gives me something to do when it’s pissing down rain. Bad points; burning fossil fuel, air pollution, noise pollution, the need to wear safety gear, after two or three hours, it does very strange things to your brain, namely a shuddering effect to nerves and eyesight. And the 3in + pieces are perfect for stoking up the combustion stove nice and hot inside.

So I’m torn, caught in the throws of a Permy dilemma. Ultimately I just want the bloody stuff to break down into usable carbon that will happily cart essential nutrients and trace elements up the roots of me plants. I don’t want to fuck the climate, and I don’t want that lignin in the woodchips pinching all me precious Nitrogen from me soil. I reckon I’ll chip on for a while and work on a better burner when I’m ready…

One of the major winter undertakings is the construction of a hot compost, a job involving some nuance, as layering of materials is necessary to ensure a good decomposition and that the appropriate ratios (C:N:P) are maintained to get a good even pH. In the photo below I am upto the manure layer. I am also using wood chips from spent goat fodder and green weeds from the garden, this is the time for weeding as so little is active and it meens that gradually I can prepare all of the garden beds for planting in spring.

So this is ‘Chops’ and he is the recipient of half our milk production here at the property now, after some dubious nosing, Bette has rather taken to little Chops, and he has got himself a surrogate mother!!! Dave and Su don’t know, and it is perhaps arguable whether or not they would be in favor of the idea, but hey something as small and cute as that deserves some room here on the ol’ homestead.

Tans is unimpressed (note the pee stain behind her on the gangway – a sure sign of goat disgruntlement).

The wee tacker searches for a teet on my knee.

‘The black streak’ – Chops flies after anything moving, in search of teet.

So the name Chops is something of a fail-safe, this way i can get attatched, but theoretically I should never forget that really he is a meat goat, there is an outside chance he could become a sire at work, but I’ll see, mature male goats are a serious undertaking! I understand that they attempt to infect everything within nostril distance with the acrid scent of their own urine, a scent that they female goats go bananas for.

Left: Tan

Mother of Bet. She is nomally every friendly, but sometimes naughty and try to eat Bet’s food. She is always hungry.

Right: Bet

Tan’s daughter. Usually, she is a chicken, quieter than Tan.

Although she is always grabbed her food for Tan, she sticks to her all the time.

They produce beautiful milk for us everyday.

They are always together:-)

My house is the recently completed tea-house. A new addition since the 2005 publication of the Melliodora e-Book. While I was sitting writing and contemplating (as ya do), i got to thinking about the design of the pad – It is a pad, no other way to describe it and seeing as I am for the time being, a bachelor, it is a bachelor pad. It took a long time to build, done in Permaculture style, by David and one of his mates, with locally grown and milled, sustainably grown and harvested timber (largely redwood from a water board plantation here in Victoria – a model perhaps for sustainable forestry in catchments and riparian zones), at ever stage along the way Dave and Su would spend hours lying around in the house frame or on the verandah dreaming of which way what would go, what colours where, and a miscellany of other details of which I am now perhaps largely oblivious to, the tea house being complete and wholly occupied by yours truly.

So the design process was as extended as the building and I’m certain that Dave and Su would have thunk it out to the nth degree, so why then is the space under the stairs so poorly capitalised on? And why are some nails sticking out? Why did David totally downplay the tea-House’s potential as a Zone 1 seed? These among other niggling questions… lead me to think that the tea-house deserves it’s own chaper in the Melliodora saga (as published and available through Holmgren Design Services – www.holmgren.com.au).

So lets begin with the name – The Tea-House, which is it’s stated name, it is not, it seems, a cabin, nor a bungalow, nor a shack (love or otherwise [see my other blog]), it is a tea-house, somethng like a hybrid of the Aussie style cottage and a Japanese tea-house, but more on that later… The main house here is Melliodora (named for the Yellow Box gum – Eucalypt Melliodora) and so is set a precedent for botanical references, and so besides being disposed to give character to the generic, I found it useful to draw a parallel between my existence here and that of my more than humble abode. So what am I doing here? Well I’m doing a million and one things, drawn in all directions of this fine community of Hepburn by as many passions desires, values, ideals and beliefs, sometimes manically trying to make order of all the threads with which I weave and sometimes trying to remain unwoven by one of the many causes I seem to have attatched myself to. So between my part in the day to day running of the property and my community commitments, I found myself like the seed on the outside of a cherry ballart (or Native Cherry – exocarpus cupressiformis), unformed, full of potential and hope for the future, the next generation of an less and less obscure fruit. And so I christened the Tea-House “Exocarpus” – For herein contained is the nut on the outside!

Till next time Cybertistas…

~~~

It’s the end of the fruit season, and just about everything except a few apples we picked today, and the odd orange is finished. Except the feijoas. They’re still coming on strong.

If you don’t know about feijoas, you should. Along with persimmons and tamarillos, they’re one of the great late fruiters of the temperate climates. Originally from South America, they taste a bit like a guava (but better than most varieties), a full sweet sour flavour and a slightly grainy texture. Ours are much bigger than any others I’ve seen, getting up to almost the size of tennis balls.

They’re pretty labour intensive to preserve though. Unlike tamarillos they don’t hang around and stay ripe on the tree for months. And the skin is a bit astringent and bitter, so you’re better off peeling them if you want to stew them.

Last week I spent a couple of hours peeling, while simultaneously making a rooster soup, and then to my horror watched myself put rooster meat into the wrong pot. I picked most of it out, put the meat in the intended soup pot (which benefited from a bit of a fruity undertone) and tasted the other result. Nothing goes to waste here. The result was, as Aya says, “challenger”. Actually, not exactly bad, a slight chickeny taste in your breakfast stewed fruit. Not exactly easy eating either. A lean mix of rooster flesh filaments floating through the feijoa pulp. Aya found a small feather Seb didn’t fully pluck out. But we’re the gastronomic avant garde here. Recipes are mere launching pads to unchartered territory. Show us a rule, and we’ll fry that rule in beer and buckwheat flour, eat it with a side salad of cognitive dissonance.

So anyway we ate it, even Aya, so steeped in the rules of Japanese cooking traditions. But we did not eat it all. The above pictured bottle has been left amongst the other preserved fruits, several rows back, in the basement, to be discovered by future caretakers. Will they they marvel at the meaning of it? Will they dare open it? Will they taste it? Will they declare it sweet or savoury, or will it defy classification? Will they even be able to see it, just as we fail to notice so many things fantastical, amorphous and unclassified? Will it collect dust, a rude and repellant object, its contents unthinkable?

Confronted by the unclassified we so often choose ignorance, or risk falling into those swirling waters between the crusted and calcified atolls of codified human knowledge. We cast this chicken feijoa off into that sea. A haunted feeling fills me as I think of it’s cold, dark depths and the unknown wonders within them.

~~

There are old mushroom hunters, and their are brave mushroom hunters, but there are no old and brave mushroom hunters.

– some old wisdom Seb spouted.

You don’t want to get your mushroom identification wrong, not if you’re modern hunter gatherer geek primitivists like us. The Death Cap, Amanita phalloides, doesn’t actually come with a skull and crossbones birthmark. And if you eat one your initial symptoms will be no worse than a moderate case of influenza with the shits. Then, cruely, you’re likely to experience an apparent recovery and so perhaps not seek medical help. But the recovery will be brief. The Death Cap’s toxins are about the most deadly in the natural world. You’ll likely spend several final days in great pain as your liver slowly liquidises. And if you’re one of the lucky 40% who survive ingestion you’ll still never drink Cuban rum again. Not a fate you’d wish on anyone.

While it has been recorded in Melbourne, the Death Cap, introduced to Australia sometime in the 1960s, has not yet been spotted in central Victoria. Of course it’s not the only one to be wary of. Of the estimated 100,000+ species of Australian fungi only around 15% have been even cataloged, and indigenous knowledge about edibility has largely been lost.

And yet fresh mushrooms are delicious, high in vitamin B12 and other nutrients, and a wonderful free food source. With just a little bit of knowledge we can harvest certain easy to identify species safely. The last few weeks we three rooster milkers have picked kilos apon kilos of glorious mushrooms of several varieties, making mushroom-yogurt dips, pasta sauces, breakfast fry ups and delicious soups.

A lot of this has been since Aya and I, along with our friend Sam and m’lady Annie went along to Alison Pouloit’s fungi ecology workshop at the Daylesford Neighborhood Centre. Alison is a fungiphiliac hero, the workshop an inspiration. Her interests are a mix of ecological (she has a background in research ecology), gastronomic and cultural. She’s also a great photographer and we saw some extraordinary organisms up close. Then we took off to the forests to pick mushrooms before a three course cook up.

Before the workshop, I’d been a bit disappointed in my mushroom gathering efforts here in Hepburn Springs. I had been picking hat-load upon hat-load of Field mushrooms down at my friend Di’s ‘permaculture forest‘ in Leongatha. But here in Hepburn Springs there are just so many poisonous Yellow Stainers around, and so few Field mushrooms. The Yellow Stainers (Agaricus xanthodermus) look quite similar, especially as they age. At a young age it’s possible to tell them apart. The Yellow Stainers tend to be bright white, squarer in shape, smell a bit chemically or inky, and stain a bright yellow when bruised. To the right is a picture of classic looking one. But not all of them look so distinctive or stain so brightly.

One thing I wanted to learn from the workshops was what are the subtleties about telling the Yellow Stainers and field mushrooms apart? Well apparently it’s very difficult! Their spore print (a common way of distinguishing mushrooms) is no help. In fact, Alison avoids picking Field mushrooms almost altogether — which is the only species most of us pick! The symptoms of yellow stainer ingestion are not deadly, but very unpleasant apparently — stomach cramps, vomiting and diarrhea.

It’s more than compensation though for lack of Field mushrooms to be surrounded by a bounty of pine mushrooms: both Slippery Jacks (Suillus luteus) and Saffron Milk Caps (Lactarius deliciosus) both of which are introduced species, symbotic with pine trees — which is what you’ll find them next to, around late autumn.

Slippery jacks are a bolete — which means that instead of radial gills like a Field mushroom, they have sponge-like gills. Slippery jacks taste rich and delicious. Apparently some people don’t like the texture that much. But I think it’s wonderful melty goodness, especially if you pick the firmer ones.

In wet weather they are covered in a layer of shiny slime. The underside is a pastel yellow in the younger ones, darkening brown a bit with age. Many have darker tops than the ones pictured and they are often the most tasty ones, if you can find big but firm ones.

The other pine variety we’ve been eating is the Lactarius deliciosus or the Saffon milk cap. These guys are a bit less tasty but visually very pretty and have a firm texture which can take a lot of cooking. In fact they’re very complimentary with the Slippery jacks in a fry-up, absorbing some of the flavour and providing some textural juxtaposition. They produce a bright orange milk when squeezed which oxidises a greeny colour after half an hour wherever there is bruising. The stem is hollow and contains some fluffly white flesh.

Both Lactarius deliciosus and Suillus luteus have symbiotic mycorrhizal relationships with conifers. Mushrooms, of course, are just the fruiting body of often vast underground fungus networks. In mychorrihizal relationships, the tree produces simple carbohydrates, sugars and proteins (akin to flour, sugar and eggs — like “cookies or cakes” as Elaine Ingham points out). It excretes these substances out of it’s roots, where they are taken up by the fine filaments of the symbiotic fungus. There’s a complex chemical language which exists between them, and the tree can actually put in a request to the fungus for particular nutrients. The fungus, adept at aquiring such nutrients, goes and gets them, often from places beyond the reach of the plant’s own root system, and gets paid off in cookies. A mutually beneficial exchange. Truly awesome!

There are many more edible mushrooms such as Shaggy ink caps, Parasols, and many other species just worth marveling at. While out picking, Aya and I found this last week — the most enormous mushroom I’ve ever seen. (And we’ll presume poisonous.) It looks a bit like an unusually large Omphalotus nidiformis – a species which glow in the dark! Unfortunately it was growing under a street light so I never found out if it glows.

Before eating wild mushrooms, get a hold of a good Australian field guide, Alison recommended a few including Bruce Fuhrer’s A Field Companion to Australian Fungi.

~~~

So there’s 19 fowls, 7 geese, 3 humans and 2 goats. To break it down a bit further that’s actually 7 roosters and 12 hens, which is entirely too high a rooster:hen ratio. The excess roosters have formed a renegade band who live on the outskirts of Chookcity (an advanced integrated permaculture chicken facility). Throughout the day they raid and ravage the lovely eggbearing lasses. It is our sad duty to diminish this ratio by way of consumption — killing and preparing roosters is not exactly something we have had much experience with. Throw in to the equation the fact that winter is the goats ‘hot’ season, and you have hell with a beard on.

Well that’s perhaps not to portray this situation from the fairest of perspectives… You see where we are, a 2.5 acre property known as Melliodora in Hepburn Springs, is one of the world’s best documented permaculture sites. It was set up by Su Dennett and David Holmgren and their family over the last 21 years. David is the permaculture movement’s co-founder along with Bill Mollison. It’s a beautiful place: a passive solar mudbrick house surrounded by vege gardens, sheds and orchards. We’re near by healthy mineral springs and plenty of bush land. And it feels like the drought has broken, at least for now.

Dave and Su are away on tour until October, teaching permaculture in South America, and meanwhile we’re here caretaking. We milk the goats, feed the geese and chickens, make the compost, weed the garden, make the cheese, fix the fences, bottle the fruit, chop the wood.

On this blog you can follow us as we figure our way through the next few months. And if the story follows any kind of respectable narrative tradition we’ll be positively transformed by the challenges, and get to kiss someone with our mouths open at the end!

As we learn useful stuff we’ll post about it, so we can remember what we did, and maybe you can learn something too.

So who are we?

Aya, 26, “deep ecologist, sustainable girl.” From Hiroshima. She likes Adam Sandler movies. She doesn’t like spiders. Or chickens.

Seb, 23, the exocarpus – nut on the outside. Monsteria deliciosa in the middle. Whatever that means…

Adam, 32, recovering geek.