Diabolical Clay

I have finally decided on the spot for Mum’s garden. I had to think about it a lot before I was happy with the position.

The first spot that I had chosen was always going to be too hard to protect from wallabies and possums and it was just far enough away from the house so that I wouldn’t have watered it as often as it needed.

Mum had a stone birdbath in her garden and when we were cleaning out Mum’s things prior to putting her house on the market, the spouse brought her birdbath home. For a couple of weeks it just sat in the middle of the yard, empty and waiting.

I worried that it would get knocked over or broken, so I asked David to move it down closer to the house so it would be safe and this is where it ended up.

The birdbath sat there in front of my frog ponds and neglected flower garden, for a few more weeks.Slowly I began to feel that this was the proper spot for Mum’s garden.The spouse erected a climbing frame for me and David rolled over some tyres for easy planting.

It is not easy gardening up here in the hills. We have severe frosts in winter and sometimes a few inches of snow as well.We are in a low rainfall part of the state and we have just come out of a horrible drought.Everything is generally brown, parched and crunchy by January and the  garden has to survive on the water I bucket out of the shower and washing machine.

The soil here is sandy bush soil on a rocky sandstone base, the soil repels the water rather than absorbing it and to say that gardening is challenging is a bit of an understatement.

But,I am an optimist and we have been gardening here for twenty years now so I have a fairly good idea of what will survive. I have my system for the ornamental garden down pat. I use tyres, old metal bins, baths and kiddies clam shells as garden beds and frog ponds and it all seems to work.

Normally I make the soil for the tyre garden by mixing together sheep poo and mushroom compost and half filling the tyres with it. Then I add a bag of potting mix and plant into that. Then I top dress with a layer of compost made at the local school farm. Finally I finish off with whatever straw or hay is available for mulch.

This time though I used bags of “pot luck poo” from the school farm, potting mix and powdered cow manure. I haven’t been able to find any decent mushroom compost locally and what we have found has been earmarked for the vegetable garden.I will have to wait and see how this lot goes without my favourite ingredients. I like mass plantings and so as well as the grape vines to climb over the frame I have put in an Italian lavender, penstemon, globe pumpkins, a giant sunflower and some petunias.

This year has been very wet. The drought is well and truly broken, everywhere I look the grass is thigh high and it is very easy to forget that it isn’t always like this.The roses are the best I have ever seen them and this is mainly because the wallabies have plenty of feed elsewhere and haven’t needed to eat them.

The spouse has been very busy up here getting ready for the bushfire season and I have just been grumping about the place building gardens and trying not to think about Christmas. We live in a very flammable part of the world and I have to keep that in the back of my mind as I plant out Mum’s garden.

It isn’t getting any easier going down to Mum’s empty house but I went down and raided her garden while the spouse mowed her grass. I dug out the Sweet Williams that were the last flowers mum planted and I have potted them up ready to share.

Mum’s friends have given me some plants and I am going to plant a red leucodendron and a white diosma in here. There are heaps of daffodills and irises in here already. I just need to pull out the grass and add some more manure to give the soil a bit of a boost.

So this is what I have been doing all December as I try not to think about Christmas.

If you walk around the corner from this photo you come to my kitchen garden.

This is protected from the frost by a roof of laserlite and finally after twenty years of struggling against the frosts I can grow capsicums and cucumbers.

And this last photo just makes my fingers itch. I have just cut back a crop of broad beans from here as well as pulled out a heap of old silverbeet plants.I used one of the precious bags of mushroom compost to give the soil some oomph and I will plant bush cucumbers in here later on this week..

I have just given the occupants of this garden a really hard prune. Two wheelbarrows full of clippings went down to the chooks.Normally I would freeze some silverbeet just in case, but I have just discovered Kale and it just crops and crops and crops so I don’t have a shortage of fresh greens for the table at all. Here is the kitchen garden after my big tidy up.

And here is Amy’s happy hen.

Dust off the barbies people it is time for a lambfest. Organic of course.

Apparently sheep are the cause of our global warming problems. The little woolly buggers are burping tonnes of methane into our atmosphere.

… if the methane produced by Australia’s 80 million or so sheep was reduced by just 10 or 15 per cent in the next decade, it would have “a substantial and also a long-term impact on our greenhouse gas emissions.”

All those climate sceptics in the Liberal party should be rubbing their hands together with glee. It is sheep that are the problem. Not the great big polluting industries at all. We dont have to worry about reducing our emissions.We can stop calculating our carbon footprints. We can just keep on merrily consuming away

All we have to do is get rid of the sheep. Or stop them burping at least.

Now where is that mint sauce?

The ceramic blog, A plate a day is calling for submissions for it’s 300th plate.

Bowls and platters are allowed. So these are the bowls, platters and plates that I am going to submit.

This is ‘Requiem for a tree’  a shallow bowl made in response to the accelerated destruction of the old growth forests here in Tasmania.

Handbuilt nerikomi, celadon glaze, reduction fired to cone 10.

This is “the dead albatross” shallow bowl. Made in response to Chris Jordan’s photographs of the albatrosses of Midway atoll.

Hanbuilt nerikomi, oxidation fired to cone 10

This is a small side plate. Thrown. Surges bay shino, trailed black glaze decoration. Oxidation fired to cone 10.

Friendship platter. Handbuilt. coloured slip decoration. Oxidation fired to cone 10.

Handbuilt platter. Slip trailed decoration. recuction fired to cone 10

Thrown plate. Shino M1 glaze with black vitreous slip as glaze over. Reduction fired to cone 10.

Yesterday we attended a memorial service conducted by the palliative care people.

While we were waiting for the service to start I looked around me at a sea of faces. People of all ages who were there because someone they loved had recently died. You could feel the sadness in the room and we were all silently sitting waiting for the service to start.

The service opened with a short prayer and someone read a poem. A little girl across the room from me started to cry and her tears set me off.

My husband sat beside me openly crying. My son sat on my other side, holding my hand and keeping himself rigidly under control. My daughter looked ready to shatter into a million pieces and my grandmother quietly wept.

As I sat there with tears streaming down my face a woman smiled at me through her own tears and I wondered who she had lost? I wondered if it will always be this hard? Will this ache, this longing for my Mother always be so strong?

Two hundred and twenty names were read out but I was only listening for one.

The exhibition went really well and all the work looked lovely. Veronica took lots of photos and I will post some of them here once Von has edited them.

This was my first exhibition where the work was actually for sale. I sold an albatross bowl and a bottle on the night and I was pleasantly surprised at the level of interest in the albatross bowls.

One young lady came up and told me that my artist’s statement had really moved her and I wished that I had gottten her details because I would like to make her something.

I learned a lot from this exhibition and it was very interesting watching how people reacted to my work.

I think that I will always have problems with pricing my work as my natural impulse is to just give it away. I need to find a balance between the two and this is where ‘The Spouse’s” influence comes in to play. All our married life together he has watched as I give everything I make away. From jars of pickled onions to dead albatross bowls pfft out the door it goes, I wanted to give an old mazda sedan away once but “the spouse” wouldn’t let me.

I think it will be the same with my work, “The Spouse” reminds me that it costs money to produce and that I need to recoup my costs at least. I know he is right.

But…

Come one, Come all. The opening is tonight and you are all very welcome to come along. The more the merrier.

Veronica came into the gallery when we were setting up on Monday and took these lovely photos. She is a clever girl that one.

I need a robotic stunt double to do the morning shift for me.I am sick of saying the same things over and over to my teenage son.If I had a robotic version of myself, I could take a nice little holiday and give my vocal chords a much needed rest.

Robo-Mum could be programmed to stand at the doorway of my teenager’s bedroom repeating, “Get out of bed, get out of bed now!” every five minutes from 6.45 am to 7’15.

Then Robo-Mum would casually follow the teenager to the bathroom door and start repeating,”Move away from the mirror, get into the shower” from 7.20 to 7.30. Once the water had been running for 5 minutes, Robo-Mum would start chanting,”Get out of the shower.That’s long enough and my personal favourite, Do you think water just falls from the sky?”

Still stationed at the bathroom door Robo-Mum reverts back to the, “Move away from the mirror” cry at 5 minute intervals until her tune will change to the more frantic chorus of, “Hurry up, breakfast is ready,you are going to miss the bus.”

Robo-Mum will be skilled at juggling all the normal morning demands and wont even bat a robotic eye,when informed that the teenager needs some obscure item from deep within a Brazilian rainforest cave for a science project right this minute. Robo-Mum will just magically pull the obscure item out of her arse along with unlimited amounts of ready cash.

I doubt that David would even notice that I had employed a robot to do the repetitive hurry ups, the clean your teeths and the you are going to miss the bus, phrases that I  say eleventy billion times every single fucking morning. Aaaaaaaaaaaaarggggh!! He might be a tad surprised at the money out of the robots arse trick though, because I am sure he thinks it grows on trees.

It has been very busy in the frogpondsrock household lately. Well to be be completely accurate I should say, The Spouse has been very busy, while I have just been jumping around, hugging myself with excitement and being a bigger nuisance than normal.

I am getting two eight week old piglets in early January and I am drooling with excitement. The thought of home grown pork has me skipping with happiness. Whilst for some strange reason all The Spouse can do is groan loudly and mutter phrases containing key words such as, bloody women, hard work, enough to do and no idea.

Two piglets squeeeee!!! I will keep you posted.

We went and picked up three new chooks last weekend that were offered on freecycle. The Spouse groaned and muttered about bloody chooks, shitting everywhere,whilst I promised fervently that I would remember to lock them up every night. The spouse then muttered something under his breath about not making promises I wouldn’t keep. He does a lot of muttering, that man.

These three older hens are used to being handled so it will be lovely to see how Amy interacts with them. My resident hen is very skittish and runs away and hides in the bush, when anyone other than me approaches her. So I am really looking forward to having some tame hens about the place again.

Last night there was a brief expose on 60 minutes revealing the horrible conditions that our pigs are kept in. Whilst I thought the expose was rather tame, I was really pleased that the plight of the pigs had been taken up by the mainstream media.

I firmly believe that the way we can change the world is by thinking about how we spend our money and making informed choices as consumers.

Plastic kills albatrosses. Simple answer, stop buying plastic bottled water.

Pork farmed in horrible conditions. Stop buying cheap supermarket pork.

It is working for the battery farmed hens. A major supermarket chain recently announced that they would stop selling eggs from caged birds. We consumers did that, by not buying battery farmed eggs it became economically unviable for the supermarket to stock them.

Small communities seem to be leading the way with Bundanoon becoming the first town in Australia to ban plastic bottled water.

Coles bay, a Tasmanian seaside village banned plastic bags ages ago. I really think that it is just a matter of us slowing down for a minute or two and thinking about the consequences of our own buying actions.

Help End Factory-Farming at AnimalsAustralia.org

Help End Factory-Farming at AnimalsAustralia.org