Not With a Bang

Tags

animals, diet, tldr, vegan, veganism, vegetarian

The time has finally come. I’ve made a decision that’s been looming, threatening, browbeating and generally making me feel bad for years now. 

I’ve decided to become vegan.

I’ve been vegetarian on and off for years – more than half my life, as it happens – and climbed back on the meat-free wagon at the start of 2013. My reasons have varied through those years, based largely on the inefficiency of meat production and the losses of energy in the process of converting plant-based food to meat-based food, and on the improved health I feel when not eating meat. I’ve known vegans for years, too; my best friend at the end of high school introduced me to the concept (and to tofu, thanks Amy) and I’ve had the utmost respect for the lifestyle since then. 

I suppose it’s accurate to say that my move toward veganism started a long, long time ago, back when a friend and I took a road trip down south of Perth and spent a night on her friend’s family dairy farm. I was horror-struck by it. I recall, and will never forget, the smell that assailed me as she and I drove down the track toward the house and farm buildings complex, arising from a massive mound of brewery waste (scroll down), composting and steaming in the cold twilight, that was stored there to feed to the cattle. It stank. Everything within a half-kilometre radius stank of it. The bobby calves were streaked with flecks of it, and of their own and each others’ shit. Ignorant, I asked what the calves were hanging around the house for…and when the farmer told me they’d be gone in a few days (they were only a couple of days old when I saw them) I felt my stomach churn as a slow, creeping horror overcame me.

I suppressed that experience for a long time, but forgetting it was not going to happen. And in the second half of last year, I began to think more about it, and more about the prospect of “giving up” dairy and eggs, and other animal-derived food products. This was around the same time I began reading a lot more, and my reading choices coincidentally fed into this awakening I was feeling. 

Then, about a month ago, I started reading Eating Animals, by Jonathan Safran Foer. Most of the shocking animal welfare facts in it, I knew or feared. But there were other things, too – the disgusting methods of processing chickens (disgusting merely because of their complete disregard for anything remotely approaching food hygiene), the precarious position in which our food supply chain has been placed by the use of intensive confinement methods of animal production, the sheer magnitude of waste (read: shit) output generated by confinement facilities…It was compelling. 

I discussed it with Frog. I was, I remain, and I will always be so immensely grateful for her immediate and unconditional support for my choice, for her enthusiasm in joining me in finding alternatives and new ways of eating and drinking, and for willingly offering herself to the cause within the walls of our home. And so I have Gone Vegan.

Except, it’s not a matter of having Gone. And it’s not a matter of Going, which implies that age-old Australian tradition of “Gunna”. It’s a process, and one I don’t see ending any time soon. Instead of announcing to people that I’ve Gone Vegan, I think I like the term “transitioning to vegan”. I feel it allows me to be making mistakes, and making decisions, and making choices.

Going vegan (or transitioning to, shall we say) might appear on the surface just like the next level of vegetarian, but it isn’t. And that’s not something I appreciated until I was thrown into the middle of it. It’s only been a few days, but I’ve had to defend my decision to keep my cat (what – was I going to evict a middle-aged runt purebred entirely incapable of fending for herself??), I’ve had to accept that my veganism will be fatally flawed as long as I continue to identify as a fibre artist, and just today I had to consider the implications of aquaponics upon a vegan lifestyle. 

It’s complicated. And so it is that I am not Going Vegan, with a bang, but transitioning to vegan, with many, many whimpers.

Garden News

Tags

compost, gardening, harvest, productive, vegetable, vegetables

This is a typical morning’s harvest from our modest little vegetable garden, a week or so ago. The harvest has tailed off now, as the plants tire out and the savage heat of February in Perth tightens its grip. But we honestly have got so much out of this garden – tomatoes, pumpkins, eggplants, cucumbers, beans and herbs fresh whenever we want them. There’s also kale and various obscure salad greens to liven up the usual fare of lettuce, so all in all we do really well out of it.

I hope to keep at least some productivity going throughout the year so I’ve planted seeds of more kale, some roquette, and endive – all flavoursome, versatile leafy greens. To help maintain the garden and work towards a more closed, self-sustaining garden system, I’ve been exploring composting options.

The cubic metre of garden offcuts, layered and interspersed with garden soil and piled up inside a wire cage Did Not Work. This method is no doubt ideal for places where the air maintains a steady humidity level of at least thirty percent…but here in dry old Perth it simply won’t cut the mustard. So I convinced my girlfriend that it’d be great to shell out the funds and set ourselves up with a compost tumbler, a proper one. Finally, the finances aligned and we brought it home last week, in its impressive box.

Frog is good at these things, being something of an Ikea aficionado, so I happily let her take charge and tell me what to do.

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It wasn't all smooth sailing, but before dark had set in, we had a working compost tumbler. Living, as we do, in a ghetto, we applied a bike lock to hopefully keep it from wandering off.
And then I was allowed the honour of depositing the inaugural banana skin! (The next day, I pruned six barrowloads of geranium, gardenia and hibiscus and mulched it all, completely filling the tumbler, but that banana skin was still significant.)


I even quite like the way it looks. I just wish it was waaaaay bigger…or that we had more of them!

Felt Up

Tags

craft, felting, glove, knitting, oven, scraps, spinning

photos by Frog

You know how sometimes you just run up against something that it seems everyone else can do, and for some reason you just…can’t?

For me, that’s felting. Well, there’re a few other things too, like accounting and playing poker, but I have no desire to do either of those things. Felting, on the other hand, is a really useful skill if you’re already a fibre artist, but despite all the dire warnings about washing my precious handspun, hand-knitted items, felting has eluded me.

Until now. Finally, I’ve felted something. Deliberately, even. And it’s a useful something! An oven mitt! I had an old bought one, cotton, with some dodgy polyfill crap in the middle, and it wore out and Frog and I kept burning ourselves. So I decided to do something about that, and made a wonderful, working oven mitt out of scraps of handspun. There was some that was mine, and some that someone else had spun, but it was all handspun.

I started it off with the green at the wrist, but didn’t like the way it was coming out. I ripped it out (I’m becoming good at the zen of ripping as it applies to the process of making something you’re really happy with) and started again with the purple at the wrist, moving to the maroon, red, orange, to the yellow and finishing with the green at the tips. I’m quite pleased with the balance of the green at the fingers and thumb tips.

The different fibres felted differently, too, which was interesting. The merino, spun from top, that made up the bulk of the top of the mitt, where you want the most protection, felted up nice and tight, while the apple-red “New England Blend” (from roving) was more relaxed and gave a jaunty flare to the bottom of the mitt. More merino towards the very end ensure a nice secure finish. All in all, I’m super happy with the result and now I want to try again. It’ll be a doorstop next time.

A Random Number Of Things That Made Me Smile Today

Tags

culture, life, living, nice things, Perth

1. Waking up next to my wonderful girlfriend. This time last year, we were on opposite sides of the country and I was pining for her so much. I’m so lucky to have her in my life. We’re going to be apart for New Year’s again this year, but as I said to her, every day is the start of a new year together so I don’t really mind.

2. Street art. I love street art.

3. Planet Books and Daily Planet Cafe. No doubt I sound like a broken record, but this place restores my faith in the possibility of an awesome sub-culture-inspired mainstream culture. The hipsters haven’t made it awful (yet). It’s still neutral territory.

4. A dog water bowl put out by a thoughtful business on Beaufort Street.

5. Aforementioned thoughtful business also having a great selection of queer culture free press media. (Name of said business is Beaufort St Books. They rock.)

5. My cat. Like me, she’s not at all photogenic, but you’ll take my word for it when I say…she’s adorable. She teaches me about unconditional love, and loves me even after I forget every lesson of all our years together.

6. The possibility that Mt Lawley (where Planet and Beaufort St books are) might be trying to redeem itself.

7. Our garden.

8. Daisies.

What Lurks Down at the Back of the Yard

Tags

compost, gardening, gardens, mulching, organic, seasons

This week’s Mission of the Week was to build my first ever Real Proper Compost Heap. Not like the nasty useless bin thing that was here when I moved in, that you just keep adding little bits to and never get anything out of because it’s really a black hole in disguise; no, this time I wanted to do it right. (I’m not too sure that we succeeded, but hey – we put in the effort.)

This is the site I selected for the heap – down the back (north-western end) of the yard, under the sizeable lemon tree and the sprawling canopy of the neighbour’s Indian Pepper Tree, which is the most wonderful blessing in summer, as it keeps the backyard so much cooler than it would otherwise be.

I’ve been amassing what compost fodder I could, for a few weeks now. It’s mostly palm fronds, unfortunately. I’ve picked a bad time to try and set the heap up, as the garden should have been pruned a couple of months ago, but I didn’t do it then so all I had ready to hand were the leavings of the four hated sodding palm trees with which the north-eastern boundary of the property has been cursed. Then, this morning, Frog and I went around to a friend’s house and helped clean up the eucalypt branches that had fallen from her trees during the big storm front we’ve just had go through Perth. We followed that with cruising the streets of our neighbourhood, and eventually found, in the park around the corner from or house, some nice soft leafy branches that had been brought low by the same destructive winds so we helped ourselves to those, too.

Once we got home, it was time to do the hard work. First, because we built the heap under a couple of large trees, we laid a few boxes down as prevention against invasion by tree roots. Over the boxes, we laid the stripped branches from Amanda’s trees, broken or chopped into metre lengths. This is to facilitate aeration of the heap from the bottom.

To hold everything in place, I bought a wire cage from where I work. It’s designed for garden storage, but I’m hoping it makes an adequate compost bin container, even if I have to put a tarpaulin over the top during the hot, dry weather. I’m hoping, too, that this helps with turning the heap – I plan to just pull it off the top, put it back down next to the existing heap and then fork the material back into the cage.

We quickly ascertained that palm fronds do not mulch happily, unfortunately. I suspect that if this works at all, my compost is going to be sadly stringy. While Frog proceeded to demolish the fresh green waste using the mulcher we borrowed from her mum, I started building the heap, layering wetted-down palm fronds with weeds, garden soil I cleaned from the footpaths surrounding our vege beds, and the freshly mulched greens (as well as hiding the kitchen compost bin’s contents in the middle). Every now and then, I sprinkled a liberal dash of diluted Seasol over my construction, to add the minerals it might otherwise lack.

And here it is! Okay, it’s not the sexiest thing ever, but I’m frankly astonished that we got all that stuff into less than a cubic metre of space. Here’s hoping it does its thing!

Bedside Table

Tags

books, education, non-fiction, reading, real, slower

Some of my earliest memories involve my mother losing patience with me, and admonishing me strongly to “get your nose out of that book and go outside!”. Let’s face it – I was a bookworm. Reading was my escape, my solitude, my possibility and my solace throughout my teen years. But I lost the energy for and enjoyment in it, I think, when I joined the workforce. Lots of things got in the way – drinking, at times, more often the Internet, and more recently, crafting, because I struggle with guilt when I’m doing but one thing at a time.

Lately, though, reading has come back into my life with verve, and I’m welcoming the return of those fanciful journeys and plotting my path through the extensive “to-read” list. I wanted to share my current and recently-finished adventures with you.

As mentioned in my last post, I just finished Down To Earth by Rhonda Hetzel, and it was all I could to to stop myself from turning it right over and starting again from page one immediately. What a remarkable book! Rhonda is Australian, and while that fact struck a deeper chord with me and made me more invested in her story and philosophy than I would have been had she been from the US or UK, it is by no means a bar to someone from outside Australia getting a whole lot out of the book. Her willingness to frame her life in philosophical words moved me, and her unpatronising, open-hearted tone warned my heart. I feel like I’ve known her for years, and her book inspired me so deeply to renew my efforts at simplifying my own life that Chez Chester has been a flurry of activity over the last week, and my mind churns with possibility and impatience.

Currently never far from my elbow is the enchantingly titled The Unexpected Houseplant, by (apparently) renowned US-ian gardening authority and author Tovah Martin. This is one stunner of a book, I’m here to tell you. Kindra Clineff’s masterful photographs elevate the tone of the subject matter to epiphanic levels, and Martin’s humorous, winding prose makes it feel like home. I was overcome by a feeling like I’ve never had before. I felt the need to keep houseplants. There’s a whole world down that rabbit hole, and while I don’t know if I’m ready to embrace all of it, I’m sure as hell gonna step inside the front door.

The mainstay on my bedside table for some months now has been the towering epic of fibre-love that is Deborah Robson and Carol Ekarius’ magnum opus, The Fleece and Fiber Sourcebook. This astonishing tome (word has it, the first in a series!!!!) discusses, in loving detail, various facts pertaining to hundreds of fibre-producing animals found throughout the world. The preponderance of sheep within its pages isn’t a problem for me, as I adore wool – spinning with it, knitting with it, rolling in it… – but there are other animals found in there too, particularly the camelids. The amount and details of information presented varies between the breeds; the rarer breeds and those whose history is obfuscated see less real estate but what’s there is quality, first-hand information. The large-format, glossy book with hundreds of meticulously chosen and styled photos cost me about $40. Even if you’re not a fibre-artist, if you’re interested in sheep, the history of livestock, or the textile industry at all, this book will capture your heart.

Finally, for a little light relief and in an attempt to round out the information-dense books above, I’m ploughing through The Lost City of Z by David Grann. I’m much less impressed with this book than with all the rest, and much less impressed than I thought I’d be. Unfortunately, the book suffers (like so many biographies aimed at the popular and sensationalist public) from the author’s desire to show off just how much research he’s done, and from some desire to flesh out the actual story (you know, the one implied in the title?) with completely irrelevant and distracting rubbish. I’m losing momentum. I really want to be enthralled by this tale of relatively modern-day exploration, morbidly fascinated by the details of disease and privation suffered at the hands of the mighty Amazon forest, and desperate to reach the end of the book so as to find out the answer – did Fawcett find his El Dorado, or not? Instead, I’m considering giving up halfway in and op-shopping the bloody thing. You could say, I’m not recommending this one.

What are you reading? Please tell!

Making The Most

Tags

gardening, self-sufficiency, simple, subculture, subsistence, vegetables

We’re lucky. Even by Australian standards, we’re lucky to live in the house we have. Even though it’s “just” a rental property, and therefore costs us a fortune in dead money every week, we’re lucky.

It’s an older house, double brick and tile, in an older suburb (my research indicates that it was developed in the 1950′s and 1960’s), and sits on a strangely shaped and oddly large block of land. When I moved in, it was planted already with two grapevines, a lemon tree, a very runty and sad apple tree, numerous well-established herbs and two demarcated vegetable beds. A mulberry tree hangs over the fence from one of our four neighbours. A gigantic, sprawling Indian pepper tree shades the backyard, and the hedge that screens our front yard needs no care at all.

I got stuck into that vegetable garden hard when I first moved in. And I did alright out of it; not as well as I had out of the raised bed I’d built at another place, but not bad at all. Emboldened, I went for the second growing season…and that’s where it all went downhill. I don’t know what went wrong. It’s a recurring theme in my life. I do really well at something the first time I try it, and then I’m plagued by mischance and defeat thereafter.

Well, not this year. This year, I have help! Frog is here, and she’s bolstered my confidence again and we’ve got the beginnings of an exciting and productive garden. We planted it out…about three or four weeks ago? We were too keen to get stared to take a “before” shot, but here’s what it looked like upon being planted:

We also put some shadecloth up to mitigate the ferocious summer sun, and I took a photo a week or so ago:

What’s prompted this, you ask? Well, I think it rose out of a desire to do something, together, to be more involved and empowered in our own survival. Reskilling is never a bad thing, and we have a fairly long list of things we want to learn to do (brewing, shoemaking, woodworking, tanning, plumbing…you get the idea). Taking charge of some part of our food supply was the logical first step, of course.

It’s funny, because while I’ve gravitated to this way of life for much of my adult existence, never before has the whole world kind of unified to put things and books and people and opportunities in my path so blatantly as lately. It just so happened that I picked up Rhonda Hetzel’s Down To Earth: A Guide To Simple Living a couple of weeks ago, and it absolutely galvanised me. I loved it. Read it – it’s worth twice the price you’ll pay.

Groundhog Day On The Internet

Tags

bullshit, frustration, futile, lemme in, open sesame

WARNING: Swearwords. I toned it down for y’all, but a few slipped through. They were most insistent.

I don’t know if you’ve heard of Freecycle. Go on, go look. I’ll wait.

Oh, you’re back already? Ah…no, sorry…that was the last chocolate muffin…I just thought you’d be longer…cough…awkward silence

Anyway. I’ve been a member of the Perth chapter for ages. As you can see, if you click on the link, it’s a Yahoo Group. Because, apparently, we’re still living in the early 1990′s. Recently, I tried to sign in to have a look for some canning jars, but was foiled when I couldn’t remember my sodding Yahoo email address. No biggie, I thought – I’ll just join the group again with one of my myriad useless bloody web mail addresses. Clicks “Join This Group!”

Fine, swell, ohlook, there’s a handy-dandy sign-in-with-Google button. Clicks handy-dandy button.

Frowns a little in mild annoyance. Really? This shouldn’t be so hard. Okay, fine, if I must. Creates sodding profile.

Oh, FFS, I’m already bloody signed in! Fine! Clicks button again.

Huuuuuuuuurrrrrrrrrrrrr. Clicks “Sign In”.

What?? WTH am I supposed to do here??? Well, there’s only one button, it must just be a notification screen or some bloody thing. Clicks “Close”.

Ah no. No. YOU ARE FUCKING SHITTING ME.

I’ve done this, like, twenty times, people. I realise this post isn’t my usual high-falutin’, well-written literary masterpiece, and the swearing is a little rich, but seriously. Can I get a little sympathy? I just want to bloody Freecycle!!!!

How Now

Tags

brown, bulky, cabled, cabling, caramel, Cheviot, plying, spinning

I’ve missed you guys. No, really – I have. The thing is, finding the time, and more to the point, the energy, to write about what’s going on and get myself organised with pictures and the like has been really hard since I started the new job.

There’s a few reasons for that. My new job is in customer service, and since I’m not a great people person it takes a hell of a lot out of me every day to be “on” the whole time I’m at work. But I think I’m getting better with it, and I’m sure achieving a lot both at work and at home.

Another factor is the enforced time away from the Internet. That’s made me drift from the jacked-in, connected-up person I was and I’m finding it harder and harder to engage with the Internet of late. I think, honestly, that I like this state of being, but I’d like to mitigate the drift by widening the scope of this blog to include not just the fibre arts, but other things that I’ve been getting up to, and exciting changes and forces in our lives.

Finally, because it’s spring here, we’re working frantically to get the house and yard ship-shape before the Long Hot sets in. Summer, in the dry areas of Australia, is a daunting, endless, harrowing thing, and come the beginning of March here in Perth, I know I’m going to be dragging my carcass out of bed and casting my eyes towards that dusty white sky, muttering and wishing for the reprieve of the moisture-bearing Fremantle Doctor (the south-westerly winds that blow in and cool us down) or even the blessing of a little – just a little! – rain. I’ve lived in hotter places, sure; but the white sand plain on which Perth squats and sprawls is a special, glarey, sun-beaten case.

But enough of that! Today, I do actually have some spinning to show off! It’s a Crown Mountain Farm club shipment (April, Cheviot in “Dune”, since you asked) and I planned to spin a relatively fat, squishy 2-ply.

Well, that didn’t work. Cheviot’s weird, man. It seems lively and squishy, but then turns around and won’t act like a squishy fibre. Then suddenly it’ll feel more like a hairy longwool or double-coat, but when you ply it you get bloom. I dunno. The 2-ply I was getting during the plying pass just did not cut the mustard. I didn’t like how limp, stringy, and skinny it was; so I wound off what I’d plied into a butterfly, then cranked more twist into it…then wound it off the bobbin into a centre-pull ball, and turned around and cabled that sucker.

Plying took a lot longer than I had planned, therefore, as the 2-ply yarn was skinnier and I was putting more twist in than I’d thought I needed. Add the winding off and the cabling, and this baby took nearly all day to ply and cable, so it’s a good thing I like it, isn’t it? It looks like a caramel Jersey cow, so I’m calling it “How Now”. It’s about 123m of 8-9wpi 2×2-ply, beautifully balanced and much squishier than the original plied effort was going to be. I think it’ll make a great weft for a little floor rug or somesuch.

Patience, Grasshopper

Tags

art-yarn, batts, corespinning, corespun, longwool, tailspinning, tailspun

All but the first and last photos are used with kind permission from Frog.

Remember my second dispensation yarn? Well, one skein of it is plied, washed and sat nicely while I took photos of it. I’m not over the moon with how it turned out, unfortunately, as I didn’t put enough corespinning twist into the yarn before I cabled it back against the 2-ply “thread”.

But if you don’t look too closely, it’s still a fun yarn and hopefully will get a chance to be made into something fantastic.

I had a lot of help when I was winding it off the bobbin.

Quality control.

Thankfully, The Maggot left us be while the yarn (Grasshopper) basked languidly in the light tent and I snapped photos of it.