The ants have started trekking through our house and the letterbox.

A small shower of rain passed through yesterday. One of only two rainfalls in the last two months. Mind the gap between the soil and the pots. The red dust storms with their iron rich topsoil from down south have kept us out of the garden. At least that’s our excuse, the weather has been very erratic lately.

I’m trying to appreciate the bindi patches and yellow dandelions. Thankfully it’s nearly the end of swooping season.

But sometimes you just need to get back out there. Yesterday between light showers and predicting the optimum wet clothes hanging on the washing line time, we did a few odd chores. We topped up another bed and pulled off all the old canes of the passionfruit vines.

Our grass is beyond yellow and now mostly dust sticks. Our legs grew itchy as we sorted out our baby cherry tomatoes into bags of unripe greens and healthy reds for chutney making.

Big M dug up the remaining potatoes and proudly filled another shoe box.

Only the parsley and silverbeet are thriving.

I have recently been reading books on longevity and incidentally discovered that organic gardening plays a large part in their secrets.

The Blue Zones book covered centenarians from Nicoya, Sardinia and Okinawa. These people ate what they produced in their home garden, supplemented by staples. They avoided processed food, and ate a predominately lean semi-vegetarian plant-based diet.

The Okinawans’ from Japan eat lots of turmeric, garlic and mugwort and fresh, organic vegetables. Food that is packed full of nutrients and antioxidants. Every day they spend some time outdoors and therefore receive a good level of Vitamin D. They were found to be active walkers and gardeners.

Costa Ricans over 100 follow a low calorie, low fat, plant-based diet, with huge quantities of fresh tropical fruit.

Healthy at 100 book follows in a similar vein. The Abkhasians eat a large quantity of fresh fruit and vegetables form their home garden. While in Vilcabamba, they eat a mostly vegetarian diet based on whole grains, seeds, beans and nuts along with fresh fruit and vegetables.

Gardening can help to relieve stress and involves frequent low-intensity movement with a full-range of motions. To top it off you get fresh organic fruit and vegetables which may lead to a longer life.

	The Blue Zones By Dan Buettener – Good introduction and easy reading, although recommendations are on the conservative side. Blue Zones website.
	Healthy at 100by John Robbins – A well researched look at four cultures with the healthiest and longest living people. (He is the son of one of the Baskin-Robbins founders). Typically promotes a plant-based vegan diet. Healthy at 100 website.
	The Okinawa Program and The Okinawa Diet Plan by Bradley Wilcox and co - The original book on centenarians, diet and lifestyle, based on the Okinawa Centenarian Study.

Confusion in the garden. All the broccoli bolted straight to flower. Things aren’t going to plan and it has been frustrating us.

The heat has been uncharacteristically prickly for winter, and we’re still hanging out for some rain.

Perhaps we’re being too hard on ourselves trying to work full time and become self-sufficient in only a year. We’ve made so much progress already and learnt how to grow a variety of different produce, such as: beans, cabbage, capsicum, choko, corn, eggplant, jam melon, kumquart, lemon, lettuce, passionfruit, pumpkin, rhubarb, rockmelon, shallots, squash, strawberries, tomato, and watermelon.

We sat down and discussed how we were going to get past our little hurdle (which at the moment seems monumentous). It’s just a blimp as we are nearing the pointy end of our self-sufficiency challenge.

Note: For those forward-thinkers out there (the ones who have probably already bought most of their Christmas presents) the gorgeous full-colour 2010 Permaculture Diary and Permaculture Calendar have just been released.

Everyone keeps commenting that we skipped spring and went straight to summer with 30 degree days and a heatwave in Brisbane. I’m hoping that all this hot air will be followed by some decent refreshing rain.

The ever faithful passionfruit and choko have stopped bearing. 

We pulled out all the onion and shallots as they were covered in black bugs. The neighbours sprayed their weeds and grass (probably with Roundup) a few weeks ago, and ever since we’ve had a lack of ladybugs.

Buds and flowers are starting to appear. We have four ruby red flush roses and all the citrus are flowering. We also have some figs forming.

We harvested the remaining cabbages (5.3kg). They were starting to get ravaged, by what I though was hungry possums, but ended up being just a collection of caterpillars.

It was very exciting to finally pull up the first row of potatoes. They filled up a shoebox and weighed in at a healthy 4.5kg.

It turns out the unknown greeny-yellow citrus was a lime. So the other tree must be the mandarin.

Don Burke has come out swinging at the humble parsnip after Donna Hay (Australian’s Martha Stewart) published some recipes in the local rag. Yesterday legendary Margaret Fulton came out defending them. We love them roasted, but probably not every week.

I know many people dislike Brussels sprouts. I agree, they taste terrible when they are boiled to a soggy death in water (as do most vegetables). I can eat them roasted or stir-fried in soy sauce. Don also has a distaste for chokos, which I can sympathise more with. I’ve never liked mushrooms – they taste like dirt to me, and sometime they make my throat all tickley. I suspect I’m intolerant to them. I didn’t like olives growing up, but I love them now. Although there is a world of difference between the salty black ones on a cheap pizza and good quality plump olives. I know broccoli and cauliflower are disliked by many people, but because these vegetables are sprayed 16 times I wonder if it’s not the pesticide taste they don’t like. Organic ones tastes a thousands times better.

Why do we develop these prejudices against such a harmless vegetable?

My grandmother had an extensive garden around her house. She grew most of the fruit and vegetables she needed, without any fancy equipment or fertilizers. At her place, I have my first memory of eating fresh peas straight off the climbing bushes. She also grew beautiful old-school cottage cutting flowers, including chrysanthemums, freesias, daisies and daffodils. Whenever my dad would visit, he’d bring home a generous bunch of flowers for mum.

My dad had a vegetable patch for awhile while we were growing up. I don’t recall helping out, but I do remember having to begrudgingly top and tail the home-grown green beans. At least I was better at that job, than when I was in charge of cutting up the strawberries for dessert. Dad used to joke, “One for the bowl, and one for the mouth.”  

Some other resources for gardening with kids:

• Oudoor Kids, A Practical Guide for Kids in the Garden by Jamie Durie
• Kitchen Garden Cooking for Kids by Stephanie Alexander who began the Kitchen Garden Foundation
• Outdoor classrooms - a handbook for school gardens

Another quiet lazy weekend in the garden. We’ve had a couple of cabbage already, with Big M remarking that you can tell an organic one by all the live caterpillars tucked in the leaves.

Brisbane had it’s yearly Ekka without the usual strong westerly winds. Instead we had a flash of rain on our day off.

One of my red tulips has poked it’s head up. I was expecting the petals to come up closed and then open into their characteristic bowl shape when they have matured. One of the King Edward yellow daffodils is also flowering in the front yard.

We were chatting with our neighbour who unfortunately had their white picket fence spray painted with green graffiti tags. He commented that the days had started to warm up and remarked that we went straight from winter to summer in a week. The clover coming back was a sign of spring for him. Big M uses the leaves returning on the frangipani tree as his guide.

We have picked the unknown citrus that was green and is now going yellow. We’ve decided the only way to finally decide what it is, is to taste it. Will it be a lemon, lime or orange?

Our grass is turning yellow from the lack of rain. Any one know what type of bird this is?

If you remember our last lot of beans had rust on them. Low and be hold our current beans also have rust on them, so they will need to be removed and thrown in the wheelie bin so they don’t reinfect any other crops.

I’m going to instigate a no-spaces rule in the vegetable beds. I’d like to make use of all of our available pots and containers for growing fruit and vegetables to meet our goal.

We have two hoses - an old green short one and a new silver kink-free long one. We tried to use up the last of the water in our tank to flush out any dirt or debris. Not all is lost as we still have mains water. Since the long hose doesn’t reach far enough from the house tap to the beds I have had to heave a plastic 9 litre watering can over.

I went back to trying to fill up a bucket using the short hose attached to the tank, but I couldn’t get a drop out. So Big M attached the long silver hose and trailed it down the slope. He cleverly used gravity to trickle fill up a few buckets. Alternating between two buckets and the watering can and using team work we managed to water everything edible. The soil in all the beds has cooled down, but now the tank is empty.

The internet has been invaluable for finding information about growing edibles. Many times a simple google search will provide the answers needed. There are a number of forums you can join to discuss your gardening successes and issues:

• Aussies Living Simply
• Homegrown
• Kitchen Gardeners International
• You Grow Girl forum

I tend not to talk about food online – just print off recipes and ogle the illustrations. I have way too many recipes in my “to cook one day” folder. I do like these food communities:

• Is my blog burning? – lists upcoming food challenges
• Recipezaar

Any others?

If being a tri-athlete is the most expense sport to participate in (because you need to buy gear for three sports), I can only argue that gardening is one of the least expense ways to spend your spare time. 

When we were looking to buy a car, we were tossing up between the smaller, fuel-efficient Echo and it’s bigger brother Corolla.  We were discussing size of the car boot with the dealer, and he joked that there was plenty of room for shoe boxes and shopping. Big M said that actually the boot would need to fit a bale of hay or bag of mulch. I smiled and explained that “I spent most of money on gardening”. He thought that it would be a less expensive hobby than his girlfriends’ mall trawling.

I have recently discovered our local flea markets have a great selection of natives at from $2 each. There is also a guy there who sells seedlings (8 for a $1) and gold shrapnel priced herbs.

How do you save money in the garden?