Slow-Small Media for the Weekend #12 

(Above: recent pot of echinacea flower tea. I love watching flowers and herbs steep through a glass tea pot.)

How was your wintery week? 

Somewhat counter-intuitively, winter is the time to be planting fruit trees so that they have time to establish roots and resilience before the heat stressors of summer.

Do you have any spots in the garden (or in a large pot if you’re renting) that you could plant a fruiting tree? 

Last weekend we planted an omega plum tree. It will (eventually) hang over our front fence in the hope that passers-by can enjoy some fruit also. In 2020 we planted a Luisa Plum in a similar spot.

To be honest, it’s meant that we haven’t had many plums off that one because people have picked most of the fruit within reach…but that’s okay…it’s why we planted it there. Eventually, the trees will be big enough that there will be plenty for us and everyone else. 

An Australian man using YouTube to Plant a Forest

Speaking of planting trees, if you will oblige me by giving this video your attention (it’s just 12 minutes long), your ‘watch’ will contribute to backyard adventurer Beau Miles planting trees on both his own land and other farms in his area, in Australia. 

I follow Beau on YouTube and when I first watched this video last week, it only had a few hundred views and at the time of writing this it is up to 237, 000 views! 

(Like I said last week, I love random side-quests.)

Affordable Art: Studio Soph Tea Towels

(Above: image borrowe from the Tikitibu website.) 

I love the bold wittygraphics of New Zealand artist and designer, Studio Soph. 

Many of her products are outside the $50 cut-off for ‘affordable art’ but she has a fantastic range of tea towels which retail for just $25 each. 

After all, what is a tea towel but a large rectangle printed surface? With the right presentation, a tea towel can be wall art! Either gun-staple it over a cheap canvas from the op shop, or sew hems to slide pieces of dowling into, or just pin it to the wall as is! 

She has lots of great tea towel designs, but I particularly like this ‘Bird in Flight’ design, available at Tikitibu.  

(If you’re new here, I hunt around the internet for affordable art. ‘Affordable’ means $50 NZD or less. I believe everyone should be able to access art and beautiful things for their home.) 

Something inspiring for your eyes – a street artist paints bee swarms on urban walls to bring attention to the plight of the bees

I love these urban street swarms by Louis Masai.

What a fantastic way to get a message across. 

Poem: The Potato by Joseph Stroud

What I enjoy about this poem is how a simple encounter with another person (and a potato!), a small exchange, becomes a deeply embedded sense-memory for this poet. 

Here’s an excerpt: 

‘I met a farmer who pointed the way—

Machu Picchu allá, he said. 

He knew where I wanted to go. 

From my pack I pulled out an orange.

It seemed to catch fire 

in that high blue Andean sky. 

I gave it to him.

He had been digging in a garden, 

turning up clumps of earth, 

some odd, misshapen nuggets, 

some potatoes.

He handed me one,

a potato the size of the orange

looking as if it had been in the ground

a hundred years…’

A poem about people exchanging crops with a message of gratitude for the simple things? 

Yes, please! 

This week’s song

This song, ‘Dirty Mattresses’ by Canadian duo, Mama’s Broke, evokes such melancholy in me. The lyrics seem to be about a very relatable wrangling with privilege and failing people. 

This opening lyric 

‘I’ve crossed a hundred rivers today

And did not feel a thing…’

really gets  me every time. How flying in planes, over mountains, over rivers, is such a miracle, and such a privilege…and yet we so often ‘don’t feel a thing’ about flying any more. If anything, it’s seen as a major hassle to be endured to get where we want to be. 

I love their harmonies, their future-ancient sound. All of their work is beautiful. 

(You can listen to the whole Slow-Small Media Playlist here on YouTube. )

A  yummy and bright soup:

Where I can, I like to promote New Zealand food writers because we have many excellent ones. 

Seeing the produce, writers and food photographed in recognisable New Zealand contexts really fires me up to get out into the vegetable garden and get cooking.

I really enjoyed the recent book by ‘Reckless Foodie’, Tracey Bennett. 

(Above: Photo borrowed from Tracey’s website.) 

It’s shot by my clever wild foodie/photographer friend, Sophie Merkens. See more of the gorgeous images from book here on Sophie’s website. (& Sophie has a very exciting book of her own launching later this year. Stay tuned for more on that!) 

I enjoy recipe books which are focussed on bright, colourful, fresh vegetables, and Tracy’s book delivers on this. 

Carrots are often sidelined as a vegetable, but their sweetness means a soup that is mostly carrot has a beautiful, refreshing flavour. Here’s a simple and gorgeous carrot soup from Tracey’s website.

Another option I like to make for a carrot soup is to cook it with indian spices and then in the last few minutes of cooking, blend in a cup of cashew nuts. It’s spicy, creamy sweetness is reminiscent of a korma sauce, but in soup form. 

‘How to walk away from Empire‘

If you’ve been feeling a bit low from how things seem to be crumbling around us at a frightening pace, go and read this short and heart-lifting essay by Nicolas Triolo.

It gave me solace this week. 

Here’s a taste: 

‘The moving toward is the whole point. 

Toward family, toward one another, toward abundance. Let your body’s movement abandon lines. Those lines are the way of empire—extracting, penetrating, demanding, colonizing, ripping, and now, dying.

Embrace nonlinear meanders, worshipping a circumference held together by a center of unknowability.

Because another world awaits, is remembered in the shape of a field, a meadow for which there is no label to monetize, no body to exploit, no peak to bag.

As things die, they also begin anew, becoming something far more curious, rounded, and life-affirming. To walk away from empire means to walk toward a different shape. 

Firepit, egg, seed, eye, sun, wheel, Earth.’ 

-Nicholas Triolo 

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Have a good weekend, everyone. 

Try not to be busy.  Keep it simple.

Eat some good soup made by someone you know in real life.

Lie on the ground and look out of the window at the sky.

Keep going. 

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