To-day, I raced The Cold Front and won

Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) is a sneaky disorder.  It sneaks up with the weather.  It affected me when I lived in Melbourne. Now, I live in Ballarat which is colder and wetter.

My neighbour's beautiful fruit blossom

coming over my fence

We have had winter for four months - and I am well and truly over it.  SAD has affected me severely in recent weeks.  I am a girl from the tropics and I don't believe I have adapted to the climate after eight years in Victoria.  Ballarat is very cold. I now refer to visits to Melbourne as visits to the sub-tropics.  The cold and the rain keep me indoors.  A few years ago I had a serious health event brought about by cold - cold in a heated room with me in a fleecy dressing gown.  In addition, I also suffer from Raynaud's syndrome.  

To cut a long story sort - I feel imprisoned in a gloomy, rainy winter. I feel liberated in warmth and sunshine.  Adding to my frustration is a garden which needs attention but I can't get out there.

Bearing all this in mind, this morning was a pleasant surprise.  I woke up at 6 a.m.  My house is well-insulated - sufficiently to make a difference of a few degrees between inside and outside temperatures.  So if, by a wintry chance, it is comfortable inside and there is no need of heating - externally there can still be a breeze straight from the Antarctic. This morning, however, I put my head out the door to find the morning warm, comfortable, the extreme winds of previous days were no more,  and the lightening sky didn't seem to indicate any precipitate interference.

So I got stuck into the garden.  

I have been in the house just short of seven months.  A March arrival didn't allow one to do to much in the garden.  Forays over winter have been hit and run.  But I had plans. 

 The lavender planted in Autumn is beginning to take off.

Candytuft has just been planted between the lavender bushes

 - and there's a rose behind.

• To-day, I pulled some remaining weeds from the lavender bed, planted some candytuft in between, and added a red rose recently purchased from the market at the Ballarat East Community Men's Shed.  And there is room for another rose.  
• I planted out salad onions (shallotts to a North Queenslander like me), which had come from the same source, in a wooden planter box that I had once picked up from footpath hard rubbish in Melbourne.

The French Currant -

it would me nice if mine grew up to look like this

• I repotted the French Currant purchased from the Friends of the Ballarat Botanical Gardens just over the way from where I live.  It is growing at a rate of knots.  I have a few cuttings snitched from a French Currant in the grounds of the Ballarat School of Mines.  I think they may be striking so I will be keeping an eye on them.

My eight-year-old Oregano

• I repotted a recently purchased Thyme.  Me and Thyme don't travel well together and are prone to misadventures.  I want herbs like my Oregano (see above).  I have been growing it in the same galvanised metal tub for eight years.  It dies back in Winter and rebounds beautifully in Spring.
• Between the Lavender bed and where I positioned the shallots in the wooden planter box, there was sufficient room for a new bed which I dug and into which I placed some mini-roma tomatoes from last season.  Later, I will plant in other beds mini-roma seeds and black russian seeds I have brought from Melbourne.  I loved the mini-romas last summer.  They have a 'take over the world' mentality and proved quite hardy and a frequent cropper. 
• I believe in feeding the soil before planting. We cannot grow good crops of nutritious food unless we first feed the soil and feed it as well as we would ourselves. I have had worm pots positioned in the garden beds.  When I came here one could dig into the soil and not find a worm.  That is no longer the case.  This morning, I fed more sheep manure into the beds.  

And guess what happened.  While I had the precious time of one hour of warmth, clearness and a lightening sky, there came the sound of rolling thunder.  A little later came spattering drops of rain.  Now we have had rain since about 8 a.m.  My manure is being rained into the soil.  The new plantings have the encouragement of rain.  And I think I can honestly say that I beat the cold front which is transiting across the weather-maps of south-east Australia!

Rocket & Rake

The rocket is going elegantly to seed -

over a lengthy period of time with 

lovely yellow and brown flowers

Springtime in Ballarat

Just want to record for Networkers 

how beautiful spring can be in Ballarat, Victoria.

These pictures were taken at the Visitors Centre

near Gillies Street at the

Ballarat Botanical Gardens.

Wombat Park Daylesford in all its autumn glory is open to-day.

Marvellous Open Garden to-day

at 

Wombat Park Daylesford

Autumn is a wonderful season in which to visit Wombat Park

See you there to-day.

Celebrating Lohri with the Sikhs

I am off this afternoon, with Sikh friends, to celebrate Lohri - 

a Punjabi agricultural midwinter festival..

To Networkers everywhere - the richest blessings of the Christmas season & peace and justice for the New Year #christmas #peace

From Drop Box

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The Digital Story of Nativity - (or Christmas 2.0) #Christmas

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Thanks to Vegetable Vagabond

for drawing my attention to this

Food & politics: Tony Bilson and The Intervention: Evelyn Bilson and her Christmas Pudd

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Picture from here

There's nothing like mixing politics and food.  My Aunt Bina used to mix her Marxism with interior decoration and dressmaking.  Thanks to Cheryl and Michele for passing on this letter of protest from well-known Sydney chef, Tony Bilson, to Jenny Macklin the Minister responsible for the horrors of the Intervention.  

As well, I am taking the opportunity because of the Season to pass on a recipe for Christmas Pudding.  Behind every great man is a mother and behind Tony Bilson (Bilson's)  is his mother Evelyn who makes the most wonderful Pudd.  I have Evelyn Bilson's recipe from the Good Living magazine of The Sydney Morning Herald of Nov 23-Nov29 1999.  The recipe was republished at a reader's request from Good Weekend sometime in 1995. I make Evelyn's Pudd and highly commend it. Tony is serving the Pudd on his Christmas Lunch menu at his wine bar number one.  

So first, Tony's letter; then Evelyn's wonderful Pudd. BTW, the links inserted in the text are done by me.

~~~~~~

----- Original Message -----

From: Tony Bilson

To: jmacklin.mp@aph.gov.au

Sent: Saturday, October 30, 2010 3:19 PM

Subject: Indigenous Racial Disrimination Act and NT Intervention

Dear Minister,

I write as an extremely concerned Labor supporter of many years standing.

I have been working with the One Laptop Per Child organisation and other activities including a dinner in Parramatta to celebrate Indigenous culture at the time of Govenor Macquarie.

My time spent with the Yolngu in Arnhem Land and on the homelands has given me the highest degree of respect for the complexity and moral strength of their culture.

I am currently involved in two programs to try to promote their culture in a contemporary context.

One is with Professor Bob Holman of Columbia University NY who will be coming out to Australia to work with Yolngu poets and musicians to formulate a celebration of Alan Ginsberg's time spent with them in 1972 for the 'Ginsberg Year' next year. From this collaboration will emerge a celebration to tour here and the USA.

Secondly I am doing a small Australian cultural/trade festival in Dhaka, Bangladesh for two weeks in February featuring new music from Yolngu musicians.

At the same time I have been working with financial benefactors to provide training at the highest technological levels to allow the production and export of high quality food products from the community at Yirrkala.

My wife Amanda and I attended last night a screening of the film Our Generation, produced by Sinem Saban and Damien Curtis and were shocked by the proposals of the 'intervention' and the suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act.

We had previously been totally unaware of the campaign of falsehoods used to justify the intervention policy of the previous Liberal and Labor Governments and the cynical misuse of accusations of systemic pederasty to justify this inhumane and socially destructive policy. We now know these accusations were totally without foundation. A lie of Goebellian proportions.

We appeal to you in the strongest possible terms to abandon this policy and to institute a genuine dialogue with Indigenous representatives of the communities so as to guarantee theintegrity and continuity of their culture.

If you have not seen the film I ask that you do so as a matter of urgency. Here is the link : www.ourgeneration.org

Please Minister do not let our nation be further shamed by these proposals to treat our Indigenous peoples and cultures with what may be a final blow to their very continuity - in a word, genocide.

Yours sincerely

Tony and Amanda Bilson

~~~~~~~~~

Picture from here

Evelyn Bilson's Christmas Pudding

(serves 12)

Ingredients:

1 and 1/2 cups suet

3/4 cup plain flour, sifted

1/2 cup almond meal

4 cups soft breadcrumbs

1 cup white granulated sugar

1 teaspoon mixed spice

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

4 and a half cups mixed fruit (raisin, sultanas, currants, figs)

1/3 cup mixed peel

1/2 cup stout

4 eggs

2 tablespoons marmalade

1 lemon, zest and juice

1 fresh tart apple, grated

4 tablespoons of rum or cognac

1/4 cup plain flour, sifted.

Method:

Rub suet into the flour and add remaining dry ingredients.  Mix well.  Add stout, stir in eggs and add marmalade.  Add lemon zest, juice, and apple and finally the rum or cognac.  Let stand in a cool place overnight for the flavours to amalgamate.  Take a wet pudding cloth (use a 75cm square of unbleached calico) and wring it out.  Sprinkle liberally with the extra flour and place the pudding on top.  This helps give the pudding a better skin.  Gather corners and sides of the cloth around the pudding and pull tightly to give it a good, round shape. Tie tightly with string about 2.5cm above the top of the pudding to allow for expansion.  Steam pudding in a bowl sitting in boiling water in a large saucepan for 4 hours and then hang it in the pantry for at least 2 weeks, until Christmas.  This pudding must not touch anything. In hot weather, it is better to store it in the refrigerator. 

~~~~~

Women's Interfaith Network and National Council of Jewish Women celebrate Chanukah

Chanuka Interfaith Celebration

promoted

by Women's Interfaith Network, Melbourne.

Junitta's autumn glory: to everything there is a season - turn, turn.

Junitta has sent me pictures of autumn in her garden in Southern Gippsland. Beautiful Junitta. Everything is blooming and showing off beautifully this year - all because we have had good rains. How different from 2009 with the killing bushfires, torrid heat and winds, and dry, dry, dry.