Autumn is coming up with roses

Autumn has blown in early bringing abundant rain. The garden made a sudden recovery from the long hot summer, and the roses, which I had fed with something called Black Gold, burst into bloom. The long months of  mulching and buying in water, twice using the water and bucketing it out  to stressed plants, was rewarded. I even welcomed the purple and mauve  bracts of buddleia, not my favourite shrubs, but they survived and bloomed.  Despite my Evil Knee, depleted bank account and the weather, the garden is alive and flourishing.

I learned so much about resilience and perseverence from the garden.

The stone embankment we built eight months ago, using recycled blocks found in the paddock,  has ground cover roses tumbling down it, annuals, fuchsia, natives grevillia  and miniature agapanthus. Strange combinations which I have never attempted before. I am growing plants that are strangers to me, because I lived in the mountains for so long or in its shadow. This climate is bewildering.

None of this would have happened without my family allowing themselves to be recruited to work on parts of the garden. Ben will tolerate a small discrete project for a specific reward. Linda the gardener comes for a few hours each month, and  then there are various local characters who have come in to do jobs that others might regard as silly.....building a chookshed gate from a 100 year old iron bed base ($50 labour only), tearing down a 130 year old dunny to build paths, retrieving iris and ground cover plants that had strayed beyond the boundaries.



I am discovering the sympathetic local nurseries, as well. I went out the Drayshed Nursery at Blayney where Jen, who built her backyard business from scratch,  agreed to dig up and pot her own Acanthus Mollis and Big Ears (stachys - the big eared variety) and sell them to me in swathes for $100. My physio has recommended another small nursery where the plants are acclimatised, unlike the chain stores that import them in from warmer, watter places, only to die here. My physio encourages me to not feel ashamed for needing help in my garden, and so we move on.

I had just started looking for a water diviner when the farmer who owns the 1200 acres around us, told me his father divined a 3000 gallons per hour water source for the gravel pits about a  mile from here. He gets other trusted diviners to check his work befre the borer is called in.   A bore would solve a lot of problems, if there is actually water beneath us, allowing us to plant a new orchard, and bring the alpacas onto the site for breeding.

My ambition is that in the next five years (before I retire) is to create a low-bill living situation: enough of our own water to avoid cartage, solar power, more chickens, more fruit and vegetables. I only buy meat because everyone else in the house eats it, but I would much prefer to raise a few lambs and take them to the abbatoir at Oberon....only $45 per animal and months of meat. Oddly, the kids won't eat any animal that they have named....so we never chop the head of Eggless and his mates.

For years we have lived with partial sufficiency, drifting back to convenience because it's not about radicalism.  It's not about money either, but merely enjoying the fruits of one's own labour,  consuming less, making more, cooking from scratch, reducing the anxiety of a dollar driven lifestyle. We all find the money for the things that are important to us. This week, having decided I would rather continue spending money on the garden than a $700 suit for work, I found a brand new TS jacket and shirt in an op shop, the tags still attached, $15. I've stopped dyeing and cutting my hair, and I am only  having a pedicure and toenail paint  job  for summer. These are big concessions when you have a job that makes demands on your social profile, but I think I can look okay for an old girl without the big budget.

It's really good to discover that even with the limitations of an Evil Knee, I can grow a potato crop (they're up!). My veg garden is limited, but productive. No onions or carrots this year, as they need a lot of bending and shovelling. But  I've moved my other veggies to pots close to the house, and even the beans and grapes are wrapping themselves around the side verandah. The rhubarb and spinach appreciates being picked and soon sprouts fresh leaves. I think I will build raised beds right next to the house rather than struggle down the slope

 Saturday morning breakfast is my own tomatoes, lunch is my own spinach with fetta, and dinner will probably have a rhubarb and apple crumble. Saturday is cooking day, so I make meat mains using the butcher's good meat - he tells me where it was fed on grass only, not far from here. I make two or three meals, and make up my own lunch boxes. Juliet spends the afternoon cooking custards, cakes and cookies.  I'm going to teach her to make French lamb shanks and Baroque beans.

My big concession to consumerism this year will be the purchase of a digital camera - these pictures from my Iphone just don't do justice to the landscape. 

By the way, this place is now officially called FarOut. The sign is up on the fence, and people will remember it and use it locally, as they do with all the property names. Although I flirted with "Charlotte Vale Farm" it was too much of a mouthful and slightly inaccurate for 2 acres carved out of 1200. We had the FarOut sign made before we moved here, and it was a shame to waste it. The name came from the fact that everyone asked whether the place was far out (of town) and the remarks of several sons, who when told we had bought another small acreage, said: "Far out." When I was working in Cambridge I learned that one of my heroes, Israel Zangwill, had lived in a  house called Far End in the UK. It seemed a very down market name for the home of someone liked Zangwill, but memorable.