It’s nice living in bubble land. The other day whilst reading a book and enjoying a coffee, my ears were taking in the clearly audible conversation of two older ladies. As a naturally softly spoken person, it takes effort to project my voice across space. Other folks, well, they have something of a gift, and may indeed have been Shakespearean stage actors in a past life. What’s more, the hard to ignore conversation of the two ladies centred around the fact that because they existed in their happy retired suburban bubble, they’d not realised how hard some people were doing.
For well over a decade, Sandra has been shopping at a fresh food market in one of the more socially and economically disadvantaged areas of the big smoke. It’s not all that far from here. When I was a kid, there were a lot more fresh food markets, and I remember walking to the Prahran market with my grandmother who was pushing the shopping jeep. We’d check out each of the stalls and buy stuff from here and there. In those days, there was no such thing as a disposable plastic bag, you’d drop the produce into an expandable stretchy bag, fill the shopping jeep to its brim, then walk home again.
Anyway, the fresh food market we frequent nowadays is a bit smaller. The vibe though, is much the same with individual stores where after so many years, you’re known to the stallholders. The reusable bags are a bit different nowadays, but seem to last as long. I’m told by a reliable person that the Vietnamese bakeries in the nearby area produce a most excellent bánh mì, which is a mixed meat and vegetable baguette. So good and definitely worth the trip, although for some odd reason this tasty treat has always been untested by yours truly due to scheduling issues. Hmm.
Recently with grocery prices for basics, you know, things like coffee bricks, rising to unprecedented heights, we’ve been testing different supermarket suppliers so as to see how these items are priced elsewhere. You’d be amazed what a person learns doing that investigative activity. As they say, if you live in the jungle, best to know the paths, and have a decently sharp and heavy machete. You never know when an economic beastie needs slashing.
Whilst Sandra was in the area of the fresh food market, as well as nabbing a decent lunch (which I wasn’t a party to, just sayin…), she checked out a local supermarket which had not previously been ventured into. The prices seemed reasonable, and two bricks of coffee were nabbed at $36 each, rather than the more local price of $48 (for 1kg / 2.2 pounds). It was really nice that behind the checkout cashiers there was a wall of photos of the locals. A form of community art, there must have been at least 150 photos. Isn’t that nice and all community minded and stuff to represent the diverse people living in that economically disadvantaged area?
Except upon closer inspection, the photos were security footage of the nice folks shoplifting.
For all I know, the activity might be quite common. A few years ago I observed a lady, in maybe her mid fifties, shoplifting at the local supermarket. Out of curiosity I took note of the get away vehicle, which was a rather expensive looking large Toyota four wheel drive, an inconspicuous choice given their prevalence in the area. The incident made me wonder what economic circumstances would lead a person into making that choice. None of the possible stories seemed all that great to me.
There’s a lot of hardship out there, yup. The DOGE public service slashing activities of the new US government is probably being watched closely by the local politicians. You can kind of discern that is going on because our heavily indebted state government ($180+ billion and climbing) recently announced they’d sack 5% of the public service staff. A rather arbitrary number which presumably did not include themselves! Candidly, I’d wondered whether they’d taken note of the caning the state ruling party had received at the recent by-elections. As a fun fact, a semi-regular commenter (who shall not be named) lives in one of those areas, and probably has some rather pointed views from the street level.
Not to bang on about politics, but there is an Australian federal election due sometime over the next three months, although nobody knows the exact date. The present opposition party is also looking across the Pacific Ocean at our allies, and has announced similar policies to cut the public service. That biggerer national government is something like $1 trillion dollars in debt (and climbing). Honestly, the number is so huge that my brain has trouble grasping the reality. Unsurprisingly, the slashing policy is enormously popular.
Heck, with such free and easy the-biggerest-spending-of-all practices sending coffee brick prices sky rocketing, I feel like slashing the public service. Probably not a fun experience for the people being slashed (and trust me, both Sandra and I have been on the wrong side of that story in the early 1990’s), but it will cut everyone else some slack. There’s a public service mob which I can think of that duplicates another mobs functions and fees, and I’d happily put them out of their misery. How did it get to this? And are we the public and thus the debt holders, getting value for money?
What sustainable looks like, is living within one’s means. Forecast rainfall for March doesn’t look promising. And with it being near to the end of summer, our water reserves are closely monitored. If we use up all of the water, there’ll be no more until it rains again. Running out of water would be a bad thing. So water isn’t used freely like there’s no tomorrow, because we have to consider the future. That’s what sustainable looks like.
Maybe over the course of this year, we’ll add some more water tanks. Those big plastic reservoirs aren’t cheap though, but they are an investment in the future. When I was a kid, people used to tell me that the only reason to go into debt was to purchase an asset, like say a house. Other than that, they’d tell me to do without, and the old timers were right too. Shame people have forgotten that message because the thing with debt is that it at some point in the future it will come to bite you in the backside. And who’d want to be bitten there?
At the tail end of another summer heatwave, it’s hard to recall that earlier in the week we had to run the wood heater. The outside temperature on the coldest day barely passed 12’C / 54’F. For someone used to the summer weather, it felt freezing. At least none of the plants – even those in the greenhouse – required any watering that day. Then the weather got hot again. My brain hurts!
The final step in the concrete staircase project was poured on a cold day. Unfortunately the soil around the top step has to be built up slightly so that it presents a flat surface to a persons feet. No point creating a trip hazard. We just have to get the soil from somewhere, and that job will be done over the next week or two. There are a couple of options for the location of the ‘somewhere’ source, but we’re not sure yet which it will be. Oh, and there were twenty four steps created for the project.
The rabbits, deer, wombats, or whomever it was, began digging up the potato tubers this week. With that menace in mind, we decided to harvest all of the remaining three garden rows of potatoes.
A garden fork was used to lift the uphill and downhill edges of the soil in the rows. Then we’d sift through the loosened soil looking for tubers. Our best performing variety was King Edward, followed by Kennebec, although the latter variety produced much larger tubers. In total for the four rows, we harvested about 41kg / 90 pounds of spuds, although could have produced a better yield on a number of fronts. There’s always things to learn.
The economics of the story don’t make a lot of sense because at the harvest yield the commercial value of the crop would be about $80. The seed potatoes cost about $42 originally, and the fertiliser for the four rows was around $160. Plus the stainless steel garden fork broke a tine. Mind you, the garden rows were new, and much of the mineral fertility will remain in the soil. The garden fork is a write off though, which doesn’t assist the story. It may have hit a rock or an old tree root.
Anyway, digging the potatoes out of the soil was a fun activity in the cool summer sunshine.
Given the cost of the seed potatoes, next season, we’ll replant the best of this years tubers. In the past we’ve been a bit slack with that selection, but no longer! Our minds are focused. The potatoes are all stored in sealed tubs packed with dry sugar cane mulch. The tubs themselves are stored in a cool and dark location. It’s hard to know if that method will keep us supplied in potatoes during the winter months, whilst supplying quality tubers for next season.
We’ve already begun cooking with the fresh potatoes, and the taste is excellent for all of the varieties we’ve grown.
The four rows where the potatoes were grown were cleaned up and restored.
Next year we’ll probably grow pumpkins in those beds. Always wise to practice crop rotation, which is not something I’ve thought much about in the past. The pumpkin vines will have a lot of room for expansion. The fencing surrounding that enclosure will hopefully be extended in height soon and thus be more deer proof for next summer.
A day was spent mixing and spreading around a trailer load of compost-like material. As usual, a lot of additional bags of soil minerals and a huge amount of coffee grounds were added to make the end product more suitable for vegetables. The power wheelbarrow is used to move the material about the farm, but all of the mixing and spreading is done by hand.
During hot nights, the door to the dogs room has to be kept open in order to let in fresh air. It’s not ideal to have the dogs running around the house at night, so I fabricated a steel barrier to keep them confined to their room. We’d been using the original barrier for a while, but it has some rather sharp edges. I’d not want to cut my hand on the barrier, or have one of the dogs smoosh their face into it. In these enlightened days, people have forgotten basic first aid and vaccinations against tetanus.
The barrier was quite sturdily built and even the steel fly wire is very strong. The edges are just a bit unsafe. So fixing it was a good job to do in the shade on a hot day. The rough edges were cut, and a new end section was welded into place. The steel fly wire was pop riveted more securely. The rust was ground back and then sprayed with metal primer paint.
At the fresh food market, Sandra picked up a large box of tasty plums, and they were bottled (canned) into a dozen glass jars.
We’d also been busily dehydrating the tomato harvest. The hot weather really speeds that process along.
This week’s video…
In breaking produce news:
The triffid like monsters which are zucchini, have begun to grow rapidly in size. One day there is a tiny fruit, the next a monster has taken it’s place.
Many of the grape varieties are slowly becoming ripe. One variety shows signs of a minor fungal blemish, but we’ll see how that turns out.
Onto the flowers:
The temperature outside now at about 10am is 12’C (54’F). So far for last year there has been 95.8mm (3.8 inches) which is up from last weeks total of 94.8mm (3.7 inches)