Backfired!

The kids are cooking for the rest of the week after daring to suggest the other night that they'd rather have two-minute noodles than my home-made chicken soup.
I'm not stepping foot in the kitchen this week as a result.

Oh it's not that they can't cook, they're regular little chefs but tonight it took 3 hours and everyone got half serves 'cause the cat stole a whole chicken breast while people were stuffarsing around. 

It's almost 10pm & no one is showered or ready for bed. 

It's going to be a long, lean week...at least I have the soup.

Bigger IS Better

Just a few days before leaving on holidays my heritage 'Traveller' tomatoes started ripening. The travellers or Riesentraube were named as such because they could be torn apart in pieces and eaten a bit at a time for travellers.
My biggest so far is this .350kg!

Glassy Goods

Mason Jar Salads - my new obsession, although I'm still trying to buy some of the damn bottles so it's an academic obsession at the moment.
I love using glass rather than plastic to keep my food so this idea appeals to me. I also believe that making good food look great encourages healthy eating.
So after a frenetic fb discussion and posts flying back and forth (when I should have been cooking other peoples' food) one of my workmates actually showed up at my place of work with her own (mayonnaise) jar of salad.
Very impressive! Now the ideas are flying around inside my head as I wonder through the garden looking at my green snow peas, purple lettuce, yellow cherry tomatoes and red spring onions.
If only I had the jars! I can see a trip to the closest cheap shop is on the cards.

Toilet Humour

Is it wrong to be utterly impressed by a flushing toilet? To feel completely satisfied by the 'shushing' whirlpool behind you as you bounce a door that never quite shuts behind you.
After months of touting buckets of shower water back and forth from the 'not-quite-outhouse' (a toilet squeezed into a cramped tin-walled alleyway that separates house from shed) I'm inordinately pleased about being about being able to leave behind my business to go get on with business?

Now the shower water runs straight onto the almond, mulberry and fig trees and we've seen new fruit as a result of this new liquid bounty.

Sometimes I fear I really do aim too low.

I should put this all in context: Over the years I've become the queen of 'making do' - not quite enough money to keep up the maintenance work, not enough know-how to do it myself, not enough confidence to give it a try and too much pride to ask someone else to help.

This was all exacerbated in my first marriage where HusbandNumber1 was confident he could 'knock it together' himself. Now, to be fair, his intentions were good and today, with the help of YouTube and smart phones, I'm sure he's a whiz in the world of unblocking cracked clay pipes. But, let's just say that that marriage was a bit of a testing ground for both of us and occasionaly we bombed.

I know this because when MyMan talked about pulling up floors at the Shouse I could see my father's face start to twitch. He remembers the last time he was called in to rescue a damsel in distress whose husband had left her, mid-renovations, with a mortgage she couldn't afford and floors and walls she could see through.

As a result, I think MyMan is haunted by an imaginary deadline any time he begins work at the Shouse. When we discovered the leak in our bedroom ceiling was actually some previous tenant's bucket finally overflowing inside the roof, he was up on the lichen-licked tiles before the rain had cleared with a tarp and weighting tires - which turned into shiny new capping one weekend and a paycheque later.

Upon receiving the good news that his 12-year-old daughter was coming to live with us, it took just a weekend and two late nights to re-stump and replace the floors of what has been 'the kids' room' for more than 40 years and at least three families. One ex-tenant - who has children of his own today - tells us that he and his sister would often joke that with both their beds against walls and the floor peaking up between them, they never had to worry about falling out of bed in the night.

But all these little, well let's call them idiosynchracies, just make me love the Shouse more. I feel like an almost-20-year-old again starting out into the world on my adventures.

At the same time, my almost-40-year-old self is reassured by looking over at the clear stretch of land in front of us, with its sea views and connected utilities, knowing that when the adventure wears thin we've got a plan.

I love a plan. I can keep climbing over most hurdles if I have the horizon in sight. Now, if I can just keep up with MyMan and his deadlines we'll all get there pretty damn soon.

First Failure

My corn is an utter failure. Poo!

About a dozen stalks stand proudly over the rest of my garden, silk tufts flickering like flags in the breeze against the horizon. But it's a fraudulent scene because, beneath the layers of green, instead of juicy golden kernels I have anaemic white cobs with pale, pimply surfaces.

I knew this could happen when only a few stalks shot up and then I threw in a few more. There were too few in flower at the same time, too far apart, together with the vicious East Winds this place is named for...well that was just too much for pollination to overcome.

So, corn is my big challenge for next year.

I resolve to plant lots of it, plant it in its own bed (with beans though, of course, and maybe spinach between the stalks - just on principal) and grow it in blocks (not a wavering, broken row like I have this year).

I planted two varieties this (last) year. I'll do the same again next season, but in separate beds.

In the meantime, I'll keep watching the growing cobs in the hopes that SOME pollinated properly. Optimism, after all, appears to be the Shouse watchword.