Dad's tip: How to seal and protect a wood cutting board used for food

My father told me this great tip for looking after cutting boards.

He loved wood - he built often out of wood, and would usually varnish wood to protect it. He always nagged us if we were careless with water around wood. He told me that with cutting boards, you could protect the wood and seal it by coating it with vegetable oil, such as olive oil. Then you place it out in the sun to cure - and it creates a foodsafe varnish. This would be instead of the usual wood oils such as (non-food safe) linseed oil.

You just do it once in awhile when it wears off.

After I did it the wood was supple and felt beautiful again - as the wood's moisture was sealed in.

Yellow and Stripey Tomatoes grown from heritage seeds (Koanga Institute)

Look at these cool yellow tomatoes! They are called "Yellow Cropper", they are heritage seeds from the Koanga Institute.

There are also stripey tomatoes called Guernsey Island that are very very delicious.

I grew them from their "Tomato - 3 Colour Mix" (you can get Koanga Institute's heritage seeds from NZ garden centres or order them online).

The Koanga Institute was started by Kay Baxter, who wanted to preserve old seed lines that had been grown and cultivated in NZ for many years - brought with settlers as their most treasured family possessions, gumdiggers, etc. Also there are diverse varieties of and colours of Maori veggies such as kumara. (Nowadays you just find very few varieties compared to in the past.) Tomatoes you buy in the grocery store must last longer on the shelf - so they've been selected for long-lastingness or their looks. My tomatoes that sprouted from these seeds were tasteless compared with the Koanga seed varieties. They can be eaten from your garden fresh, so delicousness can be their dominant trait!

How to make your own simple sturdy cotton book bag

In NZ school kids have vinyl pouches to take their reading and workbooks home every day. They don't cost much, but also don't last for long before shredding and becoming landfill fodder. It's actually REALLY easy to make your own out of a sturdy fabric such as heavy cotton.

I embroidered my daughter's bags before I sewed the pieces together (photo below) but it's not necessary. I can picture other kids having sturdy cotton book bags in their favourite bright colour, like orange, or blue, or even pink, with matching colour of bias binding/ribbon along the edges. Just having a well-made real fabric book bag would look great.

The design of the bags is one piece only - with a bias binding sewn around the edges. (I was about to use thick strap material, but a crafty friend stopped me fortunately - so my embroidering was not wasted.) Bias binding is easy to use and light. However, I did notice after that there are a huge variety of choices in ribbon out there in a haberdashery shop, which would be of very little cost - if anyone thought that bias binding was too expensive.


You will need...
Heavy cotton fabric - at least 1 m
Bias binding (preferred) or ribbon
A few centimeters of velcro for keeping the top closed
Scrap of leather or other tough material
Marking pencil (white or dark)
Long ruler or straight edge
White fabric name label
The usual: Thread, needle, scissors
A sewing machine if possible

Step 1: Trace and cut out the one piece shape for the bag. The design of this book bag is one piece - wrapping around the bottom. Draw the bag shape using a white pencil crayon or black marker, depending on whether your fabric is light or dark. Use a ruler to measure and mark straight lines. The large book bag piece is 45 cm long and 36 cm wide, the small bag is 38.5 long and 26.5 wide. Bevel the edges of one end as in illustration above. The bevelled end folds over 9 cm in the large bag and 8.25 for the small. (But I just traced the old cheaply made book bags - it was really easy that way.)

Step 2: Measure and cut binding. Fold the bag piece in half, with the square end stopping where it should, and mark where it should come up to. Cut your bias binding by following around the edge. Piece 1: Along the square edge that goes inside flap lid. Piece 2: Follows the left edge of the bag, and then along the flap, and hten down the right side again.

Step 3: Sew binding along edges. I strongly recommend pinning first. Fold the short piece of binding along the square end first, pin it into place, then sew along it using a sewing machine using an appropriate thread colour. Then fold over the long piece that covers the edge including along the flap and down the other side. Pin, then sew it. Presto, the bag is made! Now you just have to handsew on velcro inside the flap, and a reinforcing piece of leather or other sturdy material (to the outside opposite the velcro. You could also optionally sew on a pull tab.

It's alot harder to describe than it is to make it. If you can borrow another book bag to follow the design, it's really easy.

Shell profiteering climate change in the Arctic

http://greenpeace.org/savethearctic

On 24 Feb 2012, 7 people - including Lucy Lawless, occupied a Shell oil drilling ship to raise awareness about Shell drilling oil in the Arctic - a place only accessible due to climate change (caused by burning of fossil fuels such as oil). 77 hours later, they were arrested - but by that time 200,000 emails [March 4] were sent to Shell Oil by people protesting Shell's profiteering climate change (and also worsening climate change).


Lucy Lawless, NZ:

"I am here today acting on behalf of the planet and my children. Drilling for deep sea oil is bad enough, but to go into the Arctic, one of the most magical places left on the planet, is going too far.

"A melting of the sea ice is a warning to humanity, not an invitation to drill for more of the stuff which caused the problem in the first place.

"And yet Shell claims that they can manage a 90% cleanup of an oil spill in the harsh arctic, and I call BS. An oil spill in the Arctic would make the Gulf of Mexico [oil spill] look like a children's party.

"What Shell is doing is climate change profiteering. We don't have to go to the ends of the Earth to extract every last drop of oil. We've got to smarten up and move to a clean energy economy now."

The Wump World by Bill Peet

There is a book that I have wanted to find for the past ten years. I never thought I would find it, as my memory was a little sketchy - but I actually recognized another of his books the other day, which then triggered the familiarity to his name. Carrying a powerful environmental message, the book I remembered from childhood is The Wump World, by Bill Peet.

Bill Peet worked for Walt Disney, and was responsible for 101 Dalmations and - a personal favourite - The Sword in the Stone. But he also wrote children's picture books. Looking at his titles, I recognize and loved many. (For example, check out Big Bad Bruce. I loved the witch.)

The Wump World was published in 1970. One year later, Dr. Seuss's The Lorax came out, with parallels to The Wump World. Earlier, Bill Peet had also written Farewell to Shady Glade, his first book to carry this critical environmental message.


The Story
In The Wump World, these goat-like animals live on their own grass-covered world. They live under their bumbershoot trees, and are happy.



Then one day, their peace is broken by a swarm of people arriving in spaceships.



The wumps survive below the ground on grassy ledges, drinking from pools of water. (I have such a vivid memory of this picture.)



The people (whom he calls "the Pollutians") cover the world up with roads and cities.



When the world becomes polluted, they all leave in their spaceships to go do the same thing to the next world - having used this one up like locusts.

The Wumps return aboveground when the people are gone - suddenly all had become quiet. There world seems to be gone, all covered with concrete. They look for their stands of trees and grass that once covered their world.


"Just ahead of them was a grassy meadow with a clump of bumbershoot trees, all that was left of their lovely world. 'Wump-wumping' for joy, the Wumps went bounding off the motorway out onto the meadow. Pretty soon the hungry Wumps were munching away on the tall tender grass. Now there was new hope for the Wumps."


I vividly remember this stand of trees - all that is left of their world. I remembered it so strongly for a reason, which is why I am passing it on today. Wisdom from a 6-year old: after I read it to Troy, she sighed and said: “That means you shouldn’t wreck the world. There’s other animals that need to survive too.” But what I loved as a child, as Troy did as well, was that there is hope at the end of the story.



Bill Peet's Inspirationfrom http://www.billpeet.net/

Bill Peet in an interview with E. Edwards, post 1970:

"My wife and I, and young sons, often drove out west of Los Angeles toward Ventura, enjoying what I called beautiful scenery, even though sometimes the hills are rather brown from the heat of summer. The rolling hills with the live oaks, twisting oaks, which I believe are some of the more interesting trees in the world. In recent years as I drive out that way, I notice that the bulldozers and earth movers have been destroying that beautiful country at a rapid rate. These monsters have carved out the hills and cut them up like cake, not leaving one of those beautiful live oaks. I was amazed at the changes. "

"Then I recalled on my last trip back to Indiana when I wanted my young sons to see the beautiful streams and creeks and woodlands around Indianapolis where I wandered as a boy. Those creeks and streams were so valuable to us when we were young because we spent so much time there and there was so much beautiful wildlife. But on that trip back to Indianapolis, I found the creeks were buried, and the land was flattened and the forests were ripped away by bulldozers. There was nothing left of it, just housing tracts. I was so angered by these monstrous earth movers. So I drew earth movers for a while, wondering what I would do with them. They were the villains and I needed other characters to create a story and I also needed a beautiful woodland, a creek, and I called it Shady Glade."

How to clear out the vermicompost (worm castings) from your worm farm (otherwise known as "the regular way")

Hey! I just wanted to say that I finally discovered how to remove vermicompost (pure worm castings) from your worm farm"the slow way" (and also the regular way) .

I found worm farming a great "get back to nature" learning curve, as I used to live in a small place where I couldn't compost the regular way (pile or bin of alternating food scraps, lawn clippings, paper out in a shared yard). It seemed to take me ages to get the hang of it - but now I understand soil and therefore gardening so much better. But I didn't understand why everyone said, "open a layer of your worm farm to the sunlight and they will crawl away", as when I did there were still millions of worms crawling in the layer of the worm farm.

So I would dump an the entire layer of the worm farm into a very large container, fill it with water, and bail out the worms (see my post here). It was very quick, true - but also very messy.

The other day I was speaking to my very precise friend Carol, who also has a worm farm. She mentioned to me that they just crawl about a centimeter down in the layer and you have to skim that depth that the worms have left over and over again. It can take all day.

Eureka! Recently I needed some actual worm castings (not fertilizer water) for making seed raising mix. It was a very sunny day, I skimmed and skimmed, depositing the rich worm casting (looks like wet dark mud) into another bucket. Really, it didn't take that long - about an hour (I would suggest doing it on a very sunny day) - and I actually didn't even need to get my gloved hands dirty.

Now I will have to tell the Kohanga Reo that I had encouraged to worm farm, and had educated with only my "lazy method" (dump layer in water and bail out worms) to clear out the castings that they are suffering in vain...

In summary:
I find the very bottom layer (the draining compartment below the bottom layer) to be the richest depository of worm castings - as there is no food, seeds, uncomposted fibers or rubbish remnants. Mine is always full of worms, and pure castings.

A message of hope

Shane and I went out for a date the other day - pushed out by kind houseguests on Valentine's Day. We hung out by the beach at Maori Bay.

The strange but beautiful screeling of gannet birds circling over their nest rock.

The relief of the sea, with no knowledge of humans.

So much of the world seems in peril - about to be lost. How wonderful that such places still exist.