William Noel Peregrin Ambrose

We’re just recently back from the hospital with our new baby boy, William. The delivery was a little scary, and then having him with us was so wonderful, that I couldn’t help thinking that I need very little else to be happy. If my basic needs were met (food, shelter, warmth, air, etc), and I had meaningful work and Tracey and William to hang out with, then what other things are there that would be critical to having a good life?

In practice, I think I’m exaggerating somewhat. I have plenty of other hopes, dreams and desires, but dwelling on that thought of us sitting around the fire in a little cabin somewhere, little-house-on-the-prairie style, is a most pleasant image. The key here is simplicity.

Simplicity is something that has been on my mind a lot of late. I believe that it’s an important aspect of living a full and happy life. I haven’t quite figured out how strongly we should consider simplicity, as opposed to other criteria for good living, and I also haven’t quite figured out what simplicity means to me, but I’m convinced that it’s important.

I’ve called this post “The Simple Life”, which is of course one of those phrases that is so common in our language that even Paris Hilton uses it. The simple life has come to mean a return to small farming. Now, I love small farming, but I also think that this term is a gross misnomer. Farming and maintaining a homestead is anything but simple. In some ways, it seems to me that the simplest life I could lead would be to live in a serviced apartment in the middle of the city, to program computers all day, order in all my food, and spend my leisure hours sipping gin and tonic on the balcony. However, at the same time it’s clear to almost all of us that modern life has become too complex, and that as a result we have not necessarily experienced the increase in happiness and satisfaction over previous generations which would seem (on the surface) to be the goal of industrialised society.

It’s fairly obvious that a lot of advances of recent decades have not succeeded in making our lives simpler. When the first car came along, we thought “wow, great, now I can get to work and to the market in a fraction of the time that it takes on my horse”. That was true initially. We got to work faster, but then work got further away. Now, we spend more time commuting than before the car was invented. Plus, we have to labour at our jobs for weeks each year to pay for the privilege of having a car, and pay taxes to cover the government subsidised costs of motoring (road construction, etc). Maybe if we had known this all in the beginning then we would have thought better of the whole thing.

Voluntary Simplicity

So perhaps simplicity is about rejecting some of the assumptions which our civilization has made if we find that they make our lives more complex. One famous book in this field is Voluntary Simplicity, by Duane Elgin. This book is actually the result of a survey of people attempting to live a life of voluntary simplicity or frugality. Obviously, what it means to them varies wildly, but it tended to not be far off the images evoked by that phrase, “The Simple Life”. Hard work, frugal living, back to the land.

An alternative viewpoint is provided in Walden, that classic american biographic novel by Henry David Thoreau. Published in 1854, it tells the story of Thoreau’s years living in a cabin which he built by Walden pond, and carefully designing his lifestyle so that his needs were simple enough to meet with the bare minimum of work and obligation. Unlike the respondants to Elgin’s study of voluntary simplicity, Thoreau doesn’t seem at all fond of constant manual labour, in fact it’s his wish to labour far less than those he sees around him on working commercial farms. He eats a very simple diet of bread and rice, vegetables and a bit of dried meat, and he turns down offers such as a door mat, when he considers what it will add to his life in comparison with what effort it might take to maintain. Thereau’s goal then is to remove complexity from his life so that he can spend as much of it as possibly thinking and philosphising, which he believes is a much richer human experience than working hard to achieve small periods of expensive leisure.

Thoreau’s definition of simplicity seems to me to be an accurate one, and his books worth reading, but it’s not the ingredient that I’m looking for in my life. I don’t want to work less, I want to integrate work with my life, rather than keeping it separate as I do when I program computers so that in my spare time I can spend hours at leisure with my family. However, I applaud Thoreau’s thinking in considering each expectation which society places on him and deciding whether it really is making his life better.

A Handmade Life

A very pleasing middle ground is found in the book “A Handmade Life” by William Coperthwaite. This is a very close competitor for my “favourite book ever” at the moment (jostling for space with “A Pattern Language” and of course the Lord of the Rings). Coperthwaite’s philosophy attempts to find a balance between Thoreau’s brand of simplicity and also a conscious attempt to consider the beauty of life. To Coperthwaite, beauty takes into account all feelings that something evokes in you. If you have a beautiful object, but know that it’s made by someone labouring in a sweatshop, you’d be hard pressed to find it beautiful. As a homesteader, Coperthwaite is certainly attempting to live a life of voluntary simplicity, but he occasionally surprises with his attempts to cut unnecessary items out of his life to an extent that I hadn’t considered doing myself.

I’m not really sure what all this will mean to me. I think that part of it is a desire to consider how to live a life with less things, and less time spent doing work which serves no purpose other than to maintain some cultural ritual which gives me no benefit, like mowing the lawn when I find tall and wild grasses more beautiful than cut ones. I’d like to keep simplicity in mind as a design criteria for the house that we build at our new homestead. Like Coperthwaite, and unlike Thoreau, I also expect to use beauty as a criteria for my life as well.

For some closing words on this topic, I’ll quote yet another William, William Morris, one of the founders of the Arts and Crafts movement:

“Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful”

Sometime ago (late 2007), when I first decided to try weaving, I got very excited and jumped online and purchased several cones of yarn. I had no idea about yarn count and so what I thought I was getting was totally different from what I actually got. The end result is that I have lots of cones of yarn that I have no idea what to do with.

The brown on the right has a count of 75/1 (100% lambswool woolen spun)

The natural beige in the middle is 120/2 (I have no idea about any other info any more except that it’s wool)

The blue is 2/18 (lamb/angora/ny/cashmere blend)

Then we have the purple 2/28 (again I’m lost as to what the wool composition is for this one)

Olive green 110/2 (100% Merino worsted)

and finally (not in photo) Black 80/2 (once more that’s all I know of it).

I purchased all those thinking that they would all be “2 ply” yarns (except the brown), all the same thickness etc, just like if I went into the craft shop and bought balls of “4 play” knitting yarn. I had no idea about count and how dramatic an effect on the size of the yarn that would be. These yarns aren’t the strongest either for the most part. I recall thinking that the olive green would be really strong because it’s used in military uniforms, it snaps under the slightest tension of single strands. I think I read somewhere that if a piece of yarn, when stretched makes a “thunk” rather then a “ping” sound, it shouldn’t be used as warp, these go “thunk”.

Now the point of this post is that I really want to use these yarns. I want to justify their purchase and create something with them, I just have no idea what or how. Should I give up trying to use them as warp due to being sort of fragile or should I use double strands? If I used something else for the warp, what would I use?

If any fellow weavers out there have any brilliant ideas, please please please let me know.

A few days ago a friend sent me an email about her labour experience, at the end of it she mentioned “so hearing that Kinglake has virtually been wiped from the map and that there are fires in St Andrews and Kangaroo Ground must be difficult”. I had no idea what she was talking about so quickly jumped online to check out The Age newspaper. I quickly discovered that it wasn’t just the area we had once lived next door to that was being devastated but also the area surrounding my parents property, areas I’d grown up in. I called my parents and they tried to reassure us that they were fine, they had everything under control and the fires wouldn’t come near them. It didn’t make us feel any better.

I don’t want to go into the details of the fires and deaths, it’s too hard and I keep crying and feeling useless so instead I want to leave you with a photo a friend posted on her LJ that I’ve just found very poignant. Koala’s are not friendly cuddly animals, they are shy, they sleep during the day and they have very sharp claws and will protect themselves if necessary. 

There has been so much death and destruction, humans and animals have lost their homes and lives, and most of a result of certain individuals who think fire is fun or pretty or are just simply sick and twisted individuals. 

There are loads of ways you can help if you wish, many more options if you are actually in Australia but even if your not and you want to help you can buy items from the Etsy Oz Bushfire Appeal. All items have been donated to the appeal and so far they have raised over $2000 AUD to help.

Tracey and I have been working on a little project as part of our local Transition Town group for mapping local food. We were at our local Swanson Market a couple of weeks ago with the big map that we’ve been working on.

The map we’ve built is a two-and-a-half meter long terrain model of the area we live in, showing about half of Waitakere. It was built up with layers of fibre board and cardboard, using terrain maps projected from google maps, then traced and cut out. It’s in four parts, with sides to protect the map, which bolt together and sit on a display table.

We could have just used a big paper map on a pin-up board, but the having such a large and impressive looking model is a great conversation starter. When we take it to a market people come up to us and take a look. Then we tell them that we’re putting pins in the map for anyone who grows veggies, even for their own use, or sells local food, makes local food products, or provides garden instruction or tools.

Instead of trying to promote food growing, we’re asking people about what they are already doing. This sort of conversation is much less confronting for people (we aren’t trying to sell anything), and it has real benefits. In one day we collected information for about 40 local growers, and we’ll be visiting the Oratia Farmers Market this Saturday to collect more. Each pin on the map represents a real local resource, and also potentially the start of a conversation about local resilience.

A physical map has lots of benefits compared to some online tool, but it can only be in one place at a time, so we have an online tool as well. When we get home from the market, the information on each “map pin” gets typed up, and appears on this interactive map:

http://maps.transitiontowns.org.nz/regions/waitakere

The software that runs this can be used by anyone wanting to run a similar project. Contact me if you’re keen to try it in your area.

I’ve finally finished the baby blanket I started back in November, pics:

As you can see the yarns aren’t exactly the same WPI, the pink is a little fluffier so it stands out more. I was hopping that after “fulling” it might even out a little but it looks exactly the same, which is fine because I still love it.

I ended up cutting it off the loom earlier then I had originally planned as the warp threads were really starting to give up the challenge and it had reached a length I was happy with. Final measurements are 123 cm, not including fringe (stared at 220cm under tension) x 74 cm (started at 81 cm in reed).

I’m pretty pleased with myself actually. This is my first finished item, warped and woven by me on my 4-shaft floor loom. I’ve learnt a few things from this project, such as taking my time is a good thing, don’t ever use yarn like this again as it’s too fragile for warp really. There are a few alterations I’d like to make to my loom, I’d like to add 2 more treadles and I’d like to get rid of the current tensioning system with it’s huge heavy box and lead weights and move to a simpler auto tensioning system. I’d also really, really, really, like to get sectional beam & tension box for future projects.

I’m extremely frustrated though living in NZ as a new weaver, getting my hands on weaving tools, accessories and even yarns is turning into loads of trouble. I so wish I had a good weaving supplies store that I could walk into and finger their yarns and pick up their tools and really be able to get my sensory information before making purchasing decisions. I’d also really like to be able to talk to people in a shop who weave, rather then the few “craft” or “knitting” shops that just happen to sell Ashford weaving items. Anyways, I do have some rug warp arriving (hopefully) soon as well as some sample cards of yarn so that I can get to planning and weaving up a few more items prior to Sprocket arriving (17 weeks to go!)

We’ve been steadily harvesting food from the gardens, mostly tomatoes and zucchini’s but some greens as well, a few more potatoes, a few peas and beans. The first batch of corn has finished up and the second batch is starting to ripen as we speak. We had to buy-in more seedlings as our seed raising efforts came to naught really, we ended up with seedling trays of weeds for the most part. Part of the problem has been that our glass house has simply been too hot for the seeds to germinate, however, Craig’s parents were here last week (more on this later) and discovered that the glass house actually had roof vents. Ian has fixed them so that we can now open and close them at leisure so our next batch of seedlings should be much happier.

We planted some more silverbeet (Heritage Rainbow & NZ favorite), perpetual spinach, sprouting broccoli, cabbage palm (which I’d picked up by mistake meaning to get cauliflower), rocket and leeks. So our winter brassicas are off to a good start, just so long as we can remember to consecutively sew more of them to cover our winter needs.

But now to the craft

Buffie and I spent a lovely afternoon the other week dyeing some lemon yellow yarn I’d purchased lovely bright colours (pastel’s for Sprocket are a big no-no around these parts).  First we pre-soaked the yarn in cold water with a little soap so that it would absorb the dye more readily.

We used Ashford dyes made up to the instructions and painted them on to the yarn, making sure the dye went right through to the other side.

 Buffie’s rather the creative sort. 

I quite liked the effect of the “bleed” areas and hopped that the yarn would stay with that faded area, it didn’t really work that way though.

In this one there is black and green next to each other, unfortunately the green is REALLY dark and just looks black.

After painting we wrapped the yarn in glad-wrap:

Then we left them out in the hot sun to bake for the rest of the day (this was a little trick I learnt from my friend Rochana, much nicer then all the other boiling and microwave methods I’ve heard of, especially when you can’t use the microwave for food anymore).

After baking I washed out the excess dye and hung the skeins out to dry. It was just amazing to see the yarns spread out and finished like this. Buffie’s spotted one just looked so cool.

Then the final step was to pop the skeins on the swift and wind them back into balls ready to knit. Buffie’s 2 balls (the one on the left was the spots):

And mine:

 

The resulting dye colours were quite a bit darker then we had imagined and we certainly wouldn’t have called the colours “purple” or “turquoise”. We did discover that the “turquoise” and the “purple” when mixed (noted from bleed areas) make a lovely purple colour. I’m going to dye up another couple of balls with the remainder dye to match my first ball (the one on the right) and knit it into a lovely baby’s hoodie from a pattern called Nikau created by my friend Justin Turner (who makes lovely baby patterns) that you can purchase here at her website.

The Nikau

 

Nikau pattern

So far I’ve knitted most of the back

Firstly I’d like to share what Craig and I had for breakfast this morning:

 Everything is from our property. Lemon Grass tea, balckberries, peaches and plums. Yum, yum, yum!

Harvesting:
We dug out our first small potato bed and collected 10kg of potatoes.

On top of that (no photo sorry) we also gathered recently 300g of cherry tomatoes and 1.5kg of mixed money marker & heritage  tomatoes.

I made my first attempt at making cheese. Goat milk feta. The milk comes from our newest contacts who live up the road a ways and own the sweetest Saanen goats.

Craig has decided that all young ducklings are to be called “Beaker”. I would like to report that mum and her (10) ducklings are doing well out in the wilds once more and the Beakers are growing nice and big.

Fruit is really starting to come in now, a few more weeks and we should have a wonderful overabundance of blackberries, plums and kiwi fruit.
 

Further garden bed preparation is cruising along with two crops of seed potatoes now in, along with more tomatoes (roma/egg) and pink hopi corn.

Since this photo was taken the keep-out-chickens fence is also up and managing to keep the chickens out but not the cats.

The amaranth seems to be thriving well and we should soon have some glorious sunflowers opening their giant yellow flowers.

I had an interesting response from someone on my recent pantry post. A few things in her comment sparked my need for this post. This is in now way an attack on Coral or her opinions, it is simply that her comment inspired further thought for me and a need to share some knowledge that I have and others may not.

“i live in the usa… ok… so yeh, i get that ‘we’ consume way too much and that ‘we’ are an import haven of sorts… but i do not personally take that for granted… i love to eat a great variety of foods and i think about other countries as wonderful and to be discovered in any way i can…”

“when i buy a banana i hope it came from Africa… and when i have coffee i want it to come from Brazil…”

“if i buy pasta i would be happy to note that at least the product was inspired by Italy”

“i want to feel a part of the world as a small place after all and that we are all in it together…. we walk on the same soil and share waters from the same oceans and look up at the same planets and stars…. and share the same wind…”

“i love that part of my pantry…. in fact i am going to go check it out just to celebrate the imports…”

Thank you for the offer of grape jelly Coral but I’d much prefer a copy of the recipe to make some myself from my own abundant grapes. I think that their is greater value in the sharing of recipes across the world then sharing of food. I guess it’s part of that “teach a man to fish philosophy”.

So here goes the sharing of knowledge.

Food production contributes to climate change in the form of packaging, transport, processing even marketing. These all require great amounts of energy consumption. The closer to home your food comes, the fresher and less processed it is, the less energy is required to provide it to you
In her book “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” Barbara Kingsolver (et al) points out some startling facts

1) Americans put as much fossil fuel in their refrigerators as in their cars
2) 400 gallons of oil is used per person, per year (about 17% of total USA energy use) for agriculture, a close second to theirs cars
3) Synthetic fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides,  use more petroleum then all the gas gusling machinery put together, more then 1/4 of all farming energy is in just the synthetic fertilizers
4)  ”Each food item in a typical U.S. meal has traveled an average of 1,500 miles!
5) Then there is the energy use for drying, milling, cutting, sorting, baking, packaging, warehousing, refrigeration etc. This comes to more energy calories then is in the actual food!
Just think on this: “If every U.S. citizen ate just one meal a week (any meal) composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce, we would reduce out country’s oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels of oil every week.” Key words here BARRELS & EVERY WEEK! I recommend EVERY person in the USA reads this book.

Climate Change is a fact, polar ice caps are melting, polar bears are resorting to cannibalism because they are running out of ice to live on and thus also seals that would normally sustain them through their long sleep. New Scientist wrote an article on just this back in 2002 so this isn’t new news, it’s old and still we, as a world, are paying very little attention. According to http://www.foodcarbon.co.uk ”The latest reports from climate scientists suggest the trapped heat energy is begining to change the climate of the entire globe. Glaciers in many parts of the world are retreating, extreme weather is becoming more common, rains across semi arid lands are failing, condemming millions to drought and famine.” Have you noticed that the price of cereals (grains) has increased?  If your not up-to-date on the topic of climate change please go to the WWF site here and read up on it.

Polar Ice Cap melt

And one more link for those in British Columbia (still interesting for the rest of us) LifeCycles has some interesting info on food miles, reasons to buy local and a very cool map to show you where you can get locally produced items in BC. Craig has also been working on something similar as part of the Transition Towns movement for our community. 

For a normal western household, food is just about the biggest contribution to global CO2 levels that we can make. You can probably have more success in reducing your carbon footprint by changing your eating habits than by getting rid of your car. Many world leaders are calling for an 80% reduction in our CO2 emissions within the next two decade, and many scientists believe that even this is not enough. Where can we make these reductions that least affect our quality of life? By supporting local food, the idea is that we can quite possibly increase the quality of life in our local community, particularly for small farmers, while making a huge impact on our carbon footprint. Reductions in our fossil fuel use also assist our civilization in dealing with declining oil extraction rates, and in reducing the political pressure which tends to cause conflict in certain oil rich states (particularly the middle east).

I love that I can have chocolate, coconut milk and many other exotic items that don’t grow in NZ. If your life is made richer by the import of exotic items then great, revel in that, but don’t buy tomatoes from Australia if it’s winter where you live, don’t buy something soaked in oil when you can get it organically. We fill our pantries with food from all over the world, not because it’s exotic and we want to be part of the global community, but because we’ve come to expect “fresh” tomatoes in winter rather then feasting on winters abundance. Seasonal eating has been kicked to the curb in a world that is obsessed with getting what you want, when you want it, rather then looking forward to the joys to come.

Coral mentions that she wants to eat pasta that is at least “inspired” by Italy. So do I! That’s why I want to buy it from the italian guys who make it fresh as I watch at the local farmers market rather then buying a packet of dried, or worse filled with preservatives to make it look fresh in a supermarket and imported from somewhere on the other side of the planet. I want to remember that not only is pasta inspired by the italians, but it’s roots also reach back to China – I love our global community and the inspiration it gives me. Life to me is about inspiration, excitement and desire. I want to live in a world of decadence, not a world of excess and destruction.

We purchased 8kg of Roma (egg shaped) tomatoes and set to work turning them into tomato paste.

* First boil a large pot of water
* Cut a cross in the bottom of all the tomatoes
* Place the tomatoes into the pot of water a few at a time
* Once the skin starts to come away from the tomatoes pop them into a sink of cold water
* Peal the skin off the cold tomatoes
* Slice in half and scoop out seeds and cut out hard white core parts

Cooking bit
* Measure how many liters of tomatoes now have, had 1/2 teaspoon of salt for each liter (we ended up with a 6 liter boiler full)
* Boil for one hour
* Get a really tight blender or and wand and (don’t bother with a sieve) and get everything nice and fine
* Boil till reduced to a paste (sticks to the spoon in a clumpy sticky ball), takes 2-3 hours
* Stir occasionally to prevent sticking

Bottling bit (if not freezing)
* When the paste is looking like it’s almost thick enough boil up another pot of water
* Place your canning jars, seals & lids into the water to sterilise
* Remove them from the water once  paste is ready
* Poor paste into jars about 3cm from top and seal with some olive oil before putting on the lids.

Freezing bit (if not bottling) 
* Work out your serving sizes (a mix of 1 & 2 tablespoons is probably good)
* Place this amount into either freezer containers, zip lock bags or ice cube trays (empty trays into bags once frozen)
* Pop into freezer and forget until you need it 

Tips
* Wear an apron as the hot lava bubbles everywhere
* Put a lid on the bubbling lava
* Place a teatowel over your arm holding the stirring spoon to protect from the lava
* I keep repeating the word “lava” because boiling tomatoes is really that hot! 

Summary – We started with 8kg kilo’s of tomatoes, reduced that to about 8 cups of paste. I didn’t boil the paste quite as long as I should have though as I was worried about burning (I’d switched pots 3 times already). We have a horrible electric stove that you can’t make instant temp adjustments too and seems to have two settings, boiling and off.