Highly Social Hermits

Sharing some inspiration from my friend Corrie Hamm's page - http://highlysocialhermit.tumblr.com/

"She's Alive... Beautiful... Finite... Hurting... Worth Dying for" movie

About 5 minutes - watch the whole thing. Says alot in 5 minutes.

Put together by Vivek Chauhan, with the Sanctuary Asia network (www.sanctuaryasia.com), using footage from Yann Arthus-Bertrand's film Home.

Xanthe White's Organic Vegetable Gardening book (NZ)

I first saw this book reviewed in Good magazine. I really wanted it but hadn't mentioned it to my husband. He surprised me with it as a gift for my birthday! It must have been featured as a new book on the shelves - but still, how's that for connection?

I am sharing Xanthe White's Organic Vegetable Gardening book (NZ) as I've been using it for a year now - and it really is an awesome book, long term. At first I loved tips such as, if there is a place in your garden, perhaps even in cracks where you are always pulling up weeds, why not use that place to plant something you would like instead, as it obviously is a good place to grow something? Marigolds to discourage pests, the importance of mulching and not leaving soil naked, especially the older your plants get (nature keeps soil covered), not using plastic weed mat (because it would be like wrapping clingwrap over your skin) also come to mind.

Xanthe documented her garden for 1 year (it's a month by month guide), planning and building it at the beginning - 4 square brick raised garden beds with gravel between (discourages snails from walking on it, and creates a clean area to work from). She wanted to have nasturtiums growing along the edges of the paths as her mother did. I still want to put gravel between my raised beds!

There are many great ideas and thoughts about gardening in the book, but also a guide for each vegetable, and guides for various pest control issues and so on. I always refer to it. Just yesterday I discovered the idea of keeping seedlings safe from pests by placing plastic milk or drink bottles with the bottom cut off over them like a mini greenhouse. (Very important, as I have now found.) Also full of lovely rich and earthy gardening photos.

Rabbit Stew and a Penny or Two: A Gypsy Family's Hard Times and Happy Times on the Road in the 1950s by Maggie Smith-Bendell (Review)

(Originally published in England as Our Forgotten Years.)

After watching My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding (reality TV show documenting the current descendents of gypsies and their culture), I really wanted to know about the original gypsy culture I had always heard about. I always loved the idea of living in a caravan in a nomadic life, around a fire at night. I yearned for this, especially I think growing up in the modern Canadian city of Calgary. Although I was lucky enough to go on camping trips, and even driving holidays with my family where we slept and drove in our large van - I know there was something in my blood that yearned for what was out there in the world beyond my own settlement.

This book is awesome. Maggie grew up living the old "gypsy" life (but they called themselves Travellers - only house dwellers called them Gypsies), travelling in a horse-drawn caravan with her family.

Note: There are 3 groups Maggie identifies - her own was the Travellers of Romanic origin, Irish Travellers, and New Age Travellers (people who no longer want to be house-bound). Her family picked hops and peas for farms with other Travellers during those seasons. It wasn't an idyllic life, it was a rough life with lots of hard work - but they got to live in nature, and although they were often given a hard time by the house dwellers and police they were free to roam as they wished. They had different ways of making a living depending on the season, others were making pegs or selling flowers. They carried their Romany culture with them. They were often unjustly discriminated against - although knowledgeable about many things, most could not read or write so their story has not been heard until now.

Here is the description from the back of Rabbit Stew and a Penny or Two, and I really can't improve on it:

Born in a Somerset pea-field in 1941, the second of eight children in a Romani family, Maggie Smith-Bendell has lived through the years of greatest change in the travelling community's long history. As a child, Maggie road and slept in a horse-drawn wagon, picked hops and flowers, and sat beside her father's campfire on ancient verges, poor but free to roam. As the twentieth century progressed, common land was fenced off and the traditional Gypsy ways disappeared. Eventually Maggie married a house-dweller and tried to settle for bricks and mortar, but she never lost the restless spirit, the deep love of the land and the gift for storytelling that were her Romani inheritance.

Maggies story is one of hardship and prejudice, but also, unforgettably, it recalls the glories of the travelling life in the absolute safety of a loyal and loving family.

I like this photo of Maggie best for how it shows her character in her features. At married age - the two biggest boys are hers - sitting with her sister Holly and her two young children.Maggie is currently a tireless advocate for Romany Gypsy families, helping them get planning permission to live in their own way on private sites. Before this, they owned their own land but were unable to stay on it due to planning permission - or they lived on poor, unhealthy government sites built over landfills, or cemeteries (unthinkable to the deeply spiritually connected Travellers). There is now a network of people devoted to their cause, slowly improving slowly to reflect the needs of those who live in houses that move, as well as those that don't.


Maggie in one of the traditional caravans she keeps on her property in Somerset. Photo: David Mansell (http://www.guardian.co.uk/

I feel that Traveller people - similar the situation of native North American peoples - have something essential to pass on to us that we now desperately need; something they have retained that we have lost. Are our lives better now in a world where machines do the work of people? We - as in our parents, grandparents and great great grandparents - have exchanged our lives outside with the birds and animals and trees (and hedges and mist) in the natural world for a life of greater ease. We were fleeing the hardship and roughness of living on the land - a life I will never fully know the reality of, it's true. But at the same time, what have we lost? I can only imagine - but Maggie knows.

And why were gypsies socially stigmatized? Was it because they still wanted to live on the land, when the rest of society was leaving it?

Rabbit Stew and a Penny or Two is available as a paperback, but also an e-book (Kindle), and even as an audio book. It's published by Hachette Littlehampton (littlebrown.co.uk).

"Like the old song says: if I can help somebody with a word or a song, then my living will not be in vain." -Maggie Smith-Bendell


Gypsy Videos

Real footage of Travellers in the 1930s:



A kushti video made by some young Travellers(kushti means good):



An old Traveller song:

Making Jam (is easy and fun)

I was nervous to make jam for the first time (as it is with anything new). We inherited two wonderful plum trees when we bought our house, and they've finally come into fruit. I had a feeling of anxiety about not being prepared and wasting their harvest!

However, I scanned in a really good article about the basics, scanned the old-fashioned low-down, and the still currently used manual. I've come up with my simplest method.

The biggest point is to just do it - today standards are so high, that it takes the fun out of everything. Cut up fruit, and boil it with sugar. Pour into sterilized jars. It's really fun!

And after you do it just once or twice - it's simple too.

Sources: Good magazine, Aunt Daisy's Cookbook, Edmonds Cookbook

STRAWBERRY JAM
2.7 kg (6 lbs.) cut up strawberries (obviously without top end with green plant - cut in half)
2.3 kg (5 lbs.) sugar (original recipe calls for 2.7, but I want to be healthier)
Juice of 2 lemons

Water: There is no water added in this recipe. It's weird but the strawberries reduce down and release their water!

Pectin: Some fruits have natural pectin - like apples, and strawberries. So, no additional pectin is needed.

Sterilizing: First, STERILIZE YOUR JARS - 5 to 6 jam jars with bands and dome lids per batch of jam. I used Perfit Utility Preserving Jars (NZ). You can reuse jars you've bought jam or pasta sauce in - but to guarantee long storage, use proper canning jars with bands and dome lids.

First wash the jars with hot soapy water and rinse. Then boil the jars themselves in a large pot, covered over with water, for 5 minutes (lids too if reusing jars).

Put boiled jars in the oven which has been preheated to 150 degrees Celsius. Keep them there until jam is ready to be poured in. Put the bands in there too. Take the lids and place them into a container, ready to have boiling water poured on them just before you need them.

Boiling: Put strawberries in a really huge pot on your stove. Measure out your sugar and put it beside you. It's true, the recipe does not call for any water. Just the strawberries in a pot. As they heat, they will "melt" and all the water will come out. Turn on the burner to Med heat. As strawberries melt, add sugar and stir. Dissolve the sugar until it's all added. Then, TURN UP THE HEAT. ALL THE WAY, AND BOIL LIKE MAD. Watch out for small burning sugar solution meteors though, especially at first. A bit landed on my bare arm, and left a singe mark the exact shape of the drip. BOIL FOR 15-20 MINUTES. Test the jam to see if it's "set up" (is less runny) for the exact time. Near the end of boiling, add the juice of 2 lemons.

Pouring and Sealing: This is my parent's method, from home in Canada. Pour jam up to about 1 cm from the top - up to the rim. Making sure the rim's surface is cleaned of any jam, you place a sterilized dome lid - I poured boiling water on it first - onto the jar. Then screw on the band. The hot jam's vapour pressure forces the air to leave the jar, and the jar is vacuum sealed.

Look how much sugar!

STRAWBERRY & PLUM JAM
2.7 kg (6 lbs.) cut up plums and strawberries, any ratio
2.3 kg (5 lbs.) sugar
Water - if mostly plums, add 1 cup water. If mostly strawberries, none.
Juice of 1 lemon

Sterilize your jars and lids (as recipe above). Put cut up fruit (and water if any) into a big pot. Cook on medium heat until fruit is soft, adding sugar a cup or so at a time. When sugar is dissolved and fruit is softened, turn the heat up and BOIL LIKE MAD for 15-20 minutes - test. Just before you take it off, add the juice of 1 lemon. Pour and seal (as in recipe above).



PLUM JAM
2.7 kg (6 lbs.) cut up plums
1 1/4 cups water.
2 kg (4 lbs. 8 ozs.) sugar (don't remove any sugar or it will be bitter)

Pectin: With plums, you can leave the stones in as the mixture boils, then remove them as they rise to surface. Apparently it helps the jam to set. Alternatively, just use "jam setting sugar" or add pectin. (I chose the jam setting sugar for zero waste reasons - pectin was only available at the grocery store in a plastic package.)

Sterilize your jars and lids. Put cut up fruit (and water if any) into a big pot. Cook on medium heat until fruit is soft, adding sugar a cup or so at a time. When sugar is dissolved and fruit is softened, turn the heat up and BOIL LIKE MAD for 15-20 minutes (test). Pour and seal (as above).

Coal mining in NZ article: "Labour against lignite plans"

by Alan Wood
NOV 8 2011 / Fairfax News

The original article can be found here:
http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/industries/5923402/Labour-against-lignite-plans


Solid Energy's lignite development plans in Southland have come under fire from the Labour Party which sees wood or biofuels as being the long-term solution to fuel needs.

Labour spokesman for the environment Charles Chauvel, however, was less opposed to existing mining operations run or being ramped up by miners including Solid Energy and Bathurst Resources on the West Coast but did not want a start to lignite development.

Chauvel released Labour's policy to protect the environment on Sunday. Yesterday, he added that Solid Energy should not proceed with Southland plans for lignite-to-liquid fuels until technology to capture and store carbon emissions was available.

He said the natural environment helped define Kiwis, with expats for example returning home to bring up kids.

It also supported tourism and the food industries.

A spokeswoman for Solid Energy said the state-owned enterprise did not want to be drawn into political debate, but it stood by a previous statement relating to its plans to fit in with environmental concerns.

Taking full responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions was a key consideration in all Solid Energy's lignite developments and the company would look at options such as offsetting carbon emissions by biosequestration (planting more trees) or purchasing carbon credits, or capturing emissions.

Carbon capture and storage is said to be an expensive technology still at an experimental stage.
The coalminer is looking to develop new technologies including turning huge amounts of lignite resource into transport fuel and urea.

To take the plan forward, Solid Energy has bought Southland farmland in order to control 1.5 billion tonnes of lignite.

Chauvel said Labour did not think it was appropriate for a government or SOE to spend money on developing lignite when that would "blow out" carbon emissions and lead to climate change.

Chauvel said any plan to grow trees to offset carbon emissions would also face enormous constraints. "Basically you'd have to plant the entire South Island into forests to create a carbon sink to make up for what it would do to emissions from processing that dirty brown stuff under Southland."

The party viewed the export of mined coal, in already consented activities, as a less serious problem, and did not have anything in its policy to ban such mining, he said.

Labour had a plan to ramp up renewables such as geothermal power to create jobs and answer fuel needs. "In transport we're going to get emissions down by 40 per cent by promoting job rich industries like rail, coastal shipping and public transport."

Biofuels, including the use of wood waste as a biofuel source through yet-to-be commercialised techniques, would answer New Zealand's need for fuel, Chauvel said.

Environmental lobby group Coal Action Network welcomed Labour's stance, saying it was a major step in the right direction. "Labour has clearly taken on board the message that mining up to 6 billion tonnes of lignite that lies beneath prime Southland farmland will lead to many billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions and also devastate the land, rivers and air of Southland," Network spokesman Tim Jones said.

The Network was also opposed to mining plans by Bathurst Resources coal project reserves in the Buller region.


- © Fairfax NZ News

PYO - Pick Your Own (fruit) in Auckland

Hey - we picked our own! (Massey Orchard, Auckland.) I must admit it wasn't just for the children. I had just read about making your own jam, and I wanted practice. But it was a really really great family activity. (And zero plastic container waste was involved!)

They should call it "Find your own" though, not pick your own. Most of the fun comes from trying to find the ripe strawberries amidst the plants. It's a challenge!

We picked two moderately full boxes, as you can see above. They weren't cheap - it came to $80 (NZ).

But it was worth it.