Recently, a new local friend, Kaydee gave me some beautiful small ripe lemons.
I’d been wanting to make some salted lemons so they seemed perfect for a smallish jar of those. Salted lemons are used a lot in both Middle Eastern and Indian cuisines.
On the weekend, I judged them ready. I was going to a social gathering that day so I took the lemons out, scraped away the flesh*, and put the preserved rinds through my blender to make a salted lemon paste.
(*some people use this part too…but it didn’t taste very good to me. I did use it to clean the inside of my sink before I put it in the compost.)
I know my friends are busy people and I figured the preserve was more likely to be used if they could just scrape out a bit with a spoon rather than having to take it a lemon, rinse it and finely slice it.
Even a small jar of preserved lemons makes a lot...too much for our household to get through in the six months they last. So it was helpful to me to have some people to share it with.
This is how it looked blended & before I labelled the lids.
Something I’ve learned from attending Crop Swaps is that making signs is super helpful. Then anyone interested can just take a photo of the sign and the gifter doesn’t have to answer the same questions many times.
So here’s the little note I made when I put the containers of lemon paste on the table to be shared:
I think he’s kind of a nature-writer’s writer, in that not many people seem to have heard of him yet his way of life and his nature writing (he only published one book in his lifetime, ‘Waterlog’ and two were published post-humously) are seminal in their influence on writing and eco-memoir, kind of like how people say about the Velvet Underground that they weren’t very big in their hey-day but they influenced thousands of people to become musicians. Nature writer Robert McFarlane remembers him here.
I’ve learned about the fascinating back story of Caspian Sea Yoghurt, because my friend Bev gave me some of her starter. It’s very easy to make, no heat needed, it ferments whilst just sitting out on the bench.
I’ve now made my first batch and it’s so good! It has a mild, sour flavour that is very satisfying. I’m a convert.
I op-shopped this vintage-looking (not sure if it is, though) cushion which I just love and have been enjoying gazing at.
If it IS handmade, the embroidery is so detailed and beautiful. Check out those french knots in the centre!
I’ve been making variations of this winter tonic each morning, but I often throw in a garlic clove (doesn’t taste great but excellent for gut health and immunity) and a kiwifruit as well.
I’ve been watching Wolf Hall and loving the costumes, the intensity of the wranglings of the court and Mark Rylance’s incredible, nuanced performance as the lead character.
This brief but darling song is so sweet and captivating. I confess I’ve been adding it to various playlists for years now, but I just don’t tire of it.
An exciting new resource for vintage imagery free of copyright
Public.Work is a very cool new resource for sourcing copyright-free vintage imagery which you can use for creative projects. It’s really nicely designed and fun to use.
A painting which I saw in real life back in 2023 which has stayed with me
In 2023, I saw this painting, ‘Merville Garden Village near Belfast’, by English artist, Stanley Spencer, at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery when I was down there for an event at the Dunedin Readers and Writer’s festival for ‘A Forager’s Life’. (I wasn’t new to Stanley Spencer. I’ve read books about him and admire his work a lot so it was a real treat to see this IRL.)
I looked at it for a very long time. It’s even more beautiful in real life. It resonated for me as someone who likes to lurk around marginal spaces and does a lot of gazing over back fences and sideways vistas. On the Dunedin Public Library website they say of the painting,
‘Painted on-site while Stanley Spencer stayed with his elder brother Harold near Belfast, this painting compels us to emulate what this great British painter loved to do: climb up and peer over at ‘ungetatable’ places. (…) he brings the richness of the everyday to our attention. (…) The unpromising view is full of promise.’
That latter sentence captures so much of a forager’s approach to life!
Something to watch: a peaceful, inspiring tour of the Mahara Sculpture Garden in Coromandel
I’ve added it to the list of places I’d love to visit in the Coromandel. (Holidays are tricky for us with a disabled (now adult) kid who can’t cope with being away from home for more than a couple of nights…but I trust I will get there one day.)
A rebel 74-year old living off-grid in England
Speaking of potters, I enjoyed this article on World of Interiors about a potter, George Upwell, who was still living off-grid at age 74. I love the photographs of his simple, artful house and rebel spirit. (This article was first published in 2013.)
(Please comment below if you have any suggestions for the affordable art part of my digests. I’d love any leads from you.)
This simple and beautiful lino print of our native eel, by Carrie Dingwall is just $40.00. There’s only ten available, so if you share my love for eels, get in quick!
Today, my son Willoughby and I weeded, pruned, fed and mulched the raspberry patch. There’s something about doing tasks in deep winter that are about looking ahead to summer eating that make me feel so satisfied.
We also planted a weeping Kowhai and some more kawakawa…slowly trying to add more native plants to our small urban garden.
I hope your weekend is a pleasing mix of attending to tasks, resting and topping up your inspiration cup.
(Above: today’s bounty from a little wander around my own garden.)
Do you buy sprouts, bags of mesclun mix or microgreens from the supermarket?
Winter is a great time to find volunteer (‘weed’) microgreens, or young greens, around your garden or local park for FREE!
Because of winter’s rain and damp, the young weeds will be beautifully bright green, healthy and not heat-stressed.
To share some likely contenders with you, I took a walk around my small urban yard and here’s what I harvested.
I took care to only harvest volunteers/weeds and nothing that I’d planted intentionally. (Violet grows like a weed in my yard.)
The trick is to just harvest the young leaves, or the tips in the case of the dead nettle.
These wild ‘microgreens’ can be used in a salad, or chopped and sprinkled on top of soup, or in sandwiches, or blended into a smoothie…the same as you would use supermarket or homegrown microgreens.
I numbered the plants for ease of ID-ing them:
Nasturtium leaves. These are peppery in flavour so great in salads and on sandwiches, not so great in smoothies.
Dead Nettle tips. Great stand-in for lettuce.
Young violet leaves and flowers. Use in salad or cook as your would spinach.
Young ribwort plantain leaves. Important to pick the young ones as the older ones get stringy. The young leaves have a nutty flavour.
Chickweed. Such an enthusiastic garden volunteer. Use the young growth and chop finely.
Young dandelion leaves. These add a nice bitter element to a salad or sandwich. Not so great in smoothies.
Oxalis (known in the UK as ‘wood sorrell’ and the USA as ‘sour grass’) Has a sour, lemony flavour similar to sorrell. Use just a little at a time as it contains oxalic acid. Treat it more like a herb than a main vegetable.
Young mallow leaves. Mallow (also know as ‘Malva’) is a much-used vegetable in Middle-Eastern cuisine and parts of Italy. You can make dolmades with the leaves in place of grape leaves, making it useful during the winter when there are no grape leaves about. Young leaves are good in salad or cooked like spinach.
& of course, these plants have medicinal properties as well, (most plant food does.
I hope this inspires you to have a close look at what might be growing in your own back yard and save yourself a little money (or time) by eating some of the weeds around you.
Let me know in the comments if you have any questions.
(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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
*
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.
(Above: a blazing nasturtium in the vege garden. I’m grateful for their bright faces on these gloomy winter days.)
I bring this to you from a late-afternoon energy lull. Does anyone reading suffer insomnia?
Over the last month, I’ve been wrangling with insomnia which hasn’t been much fun. If anyone has any suggestions, let me know. (Currently at bedtime, I take a valerian/hops/passionflower potion and rub my feet and legs with Magnesium oil which used to work a treat but recently, not so much.)
Enough about me! how are you?
Here’s a bunch of random good things for your weekend:
A sweet poem
I have a surname that people frequently struggle to spell, but it’s not as intense as the surname of this week’s poet, Amy Nezhukumatathil. Amy’s work is sensuous, at times humorous, she knows the natural world and writes it with great attention. I very much recommend her poetry.
But this week’s poem is slightly different from her usual style. It’s a found poem which is comprised of fragments of letters from high school students who are studying her poetry for their exams. (Note the misspelling of her name in the poem’s title.)
It’s affectionate and funny. I could feel the collective stress of the poor students rising up off the words.
A beautifully-written essay about a painful subject
Well, that’s because unlike the Wizard of Christchurch -who is mainly a satirical figure- Rosie is a real wizard…although she would never make that distinction (‘real’) herself.
Real wizards are very modest.
Rosie has written a beautiful, meandering, thoughtful, honest essay called Precariat Blues about the pain of losing her latest home (another rental sold out from under her) and about precariat housing (and living) generally.
From Rosie’s essay:
‘Chop wood, carry water, by all means dig. But if you rent, I would advise applying your effort to things you can carry with you when you go. Never forget that you stand to lose your labour. Human ingenuity is bonsai’d by the learned helplessness of tenancy. This pinching out of side-shoots is maybe the greatest tragedy of what renting does to a person’s soul.’
Because she’s a real wizard, she makes a very sad subject beautiful. You’ll read it and possibly feel sad, mad, bad, but also so glad that you read it…because it really is phenomenal writing.
I really hope Rosie publishes a book of her essays one day.
One would be beautiful…or if you have more than $50 to spend on art, you could have a pair…or a flock! They’re like a contemporary take on the classic flying duck wall ornaments.
This live version has a vibrant, compelling quality. Plus, if you’re watching as well as listening, it’s soothing to watch Ben noodling away in his music room surrounded by his beloved musical instruments.
In the kitchen: three ways to eat onion weed
Did you know you can eat onion weed? It’s particularly succulent and good in winter and spring in New Zealand and it’s SO easy to find….a ‘Foraging 101’ kind of plant.
Here’s a beautifully-produced video from local weeds-loving, vegan chef Anna Valentine on four ways with onion weed.
She shares a mayonnaise, a super salt, a salad and a tempura which use the bulbs, stems and flowers of onion weed.
An article about the world of miniatures
There’s something so hugely compelling about tiny things.
Once, a friend bought me a miniature bok choy plant made of resin because ‘I knew you’d love it’. She was right, I do.
I bought my Mum a miniature Victorian copper kettle for her recent birthday because I knew she’d love it. She does. It’s now sitting on her dresser.
I googled where to buy cute miniature things in New Zealand. I’ve always dreamed of having a green Aga stove and from the In Miniatures shop, I could have one for just $29.00.
& something very, very, very silly to finish
Last night I had insomnia so after lying in bed staring into the dark for two hours, I eventually gave up on trying to sleep, lit the fire and opened Youtube.
The first thing the YouTube algorithm suggested was a video where comedian crafter, Ash Bentley, knits herself a ‘cursed outfit’. I was skeptical, but also wired and tired so I watched and, oh my goodness, it is worth watching Ash’s reveal of her cursed crafting effort.
Trust me, it’s worth it. It’s a horror and she’s a crack-up.
(Given I mostly watch foraging, permaculture and ‘slow life’ Youtube, I have no idea why YouTube suggested this to me…but I’m not mad about it.) Gosh, I love a silly side-quest.
*
The weekend ahead: I’m trying to do something of a midwinter-clean, like a spring clean but in winter. My fantasy is that we won’t need to spring clean because I’m going to do so much over July and August that I will land in September all sorted and fresh. Clearly the kind of thing us Virgos daydream about. In spring I’d rather be in the garden than in the house.
At the moment, this looks like a pile of boxes and supermarket bags in the hallway floor spilling over with the recently-culled.
If I have friends visiting while such piles are lying about, I always invite them to mooch the op shop pile before it heads off to the op shop. Already I’ve re-homed some clothes and some books. Happy friends and less for me to cart to the op shop. Hoorah!
So this weekend, I’m going to carry on with a bit of that. Last weekend I tackled my wardrobe, this weekend, it will be our bookshelves. Might be time to give some books the chance to be read and enjoyed by other people instead of gathering dust here. Not every book is going to be one that you re-read, right?
I have a pile of shiny, new permaculture magazines from the library to read. Our library is so great in the variety of magazines they get. I can’t believe there are multiple permaculture titles to mooch.
It’s Palmy Crop Swap weekend and so I’ll head off to that on Sunday with some succulents I’ve potted up and some of my herbal tea to share.
That feels like enough ‘might do’s’ for the weekend. I like a ‘might do’ because if at the last minute I feel lazy and don’t do any of it…having a rest is a great use of a weekend, too.
I hope there’s some resting, some cheerful eats and some fun in your weekend.
(Above: F and I like to have fires in the backyard, whatever the weather. A recent violet dusk.)
Does it feel to you like the weeks are whizzing by? Friday seems to come around faster and faster lately. Here we are again!
I’ve had some lovely feedback for these Slow-Small Media digests. Thanks to everyone who has been in touch. I’m so glad you’re enjoying them. I really enjoy ‘foraging’ for things to share with you.
I was new to Arthur Russell until I recently watched this fascinating documentary about him. (I love music documentaries even if I don’t know the subject. I find a lot of new-to-me music this way.)
If you’ve been reading these Friday digests since the beginning, you’ll probably know by now that I love nature-based songs, or songs that reference growing food and tending gardens. This beautiful soft song references a corn field:
‘Will the corn be growing a little tonight
As I wait in the fields for you
Who knows what grows in the morning light
When we can feel the watery dew.’
(I add one carefully-considered song per week. You can find the whole playlist here. It’s nice to listen to on a weekend morning.)
Pesto is one of the best ways to ‘sneak’ weeds into your family’s diet if they are weed-resistant. They’ll never know once it’s all blended up and on pasta or some crackers. (Other good ways are soups, smoothies and quiches.)
Something to watch: a fascinating wild honey bee conservationist making beautiful hives from wood and rushes
In the UK, Wild honey bee conservationist and carpenter, Matt Somerville, has designed a beautiful, natural, handmade hive habitat and over the last 14 years has installed 800 (!) for the wild bees. No honey is ever harvested from these hives – they are installed just to support wild honey bee biodiversity.
This beautiful 12 minute film about Matt’s work is inspiring in terms of how much of a difference one person with a big passion can make. I so appreciate that he wanted the hives to look appealing as well as being beneficial.
Some sweet, sweet cakes that are food for the eyes only:
They come in under the $50 budge for affordable art and although you might argue they are toys not art, I’ll bet most of them are purchased by adults and then perched on bookshelves and desks…which means they are qualify as works of art. 😉
Aren’t they adorable?
‘This is the best domestic perfume: an ode to the humble onion
This poem reminds me how good poems are all about looking at things, even humble things, very closely and being curious about what’s to be found there. Over the years, I have written poems about garlic, pasta sauce, my bicycle, and many other tangible things.
An Anarchist Gardener’s Club on Substack!
I think I know who the writer is behind this fabulous ‘Anarchist Gardener’s Club’ on Substack…
“We will cultivate whatever we can. We will grow flowers in the cracks. We will seed bomb every desolate corner of the scrub land. We will enjoy a brew and a biscuit as we do it.”
Count me in!
*
I’m always overly-ambitious for how much I can fit into a weekend.
Here’s my ‘might-do’ list for this weekend.
-make kimchi. We got a beautiful cabbage in our CSA box and it’s calling to become kimchi, I think.
-plant the dahlia bulbs I dug up and divided two weekends ago
-work on my poetry manuscript some more
-do some food prep ahead of the week -mostly washing and chopping vegetables- so we are more likely to eat them in salads and stir-fries
I’m grateful to The Spinoff and editor, Hera, for selecting the poem. It was great fun for me to see it on The Spinoff on Friday and to see what image they had selected to go with the poem.
I wrote the poem last summer. I had a good spell with poetry over the summer and, after a while of feeling like I was wringing out a dry rag when trying to write poetry, suddenly a whole lot of poems tumbled out in a rush. It was a good (and relatively rare) feeling.
It meant that a poetry manuscript I’ve been fiddling with for over ten years (!) is much closer to completion now.
I was able to ditch some poems I wasn’t 100% happy with (I call them ‘the weaklings’) and replace them with some of the stronger, new ones.
(Above: bush canopy in the Rangawahia Reserve.)
I also wanted to share an older but previously unpublished poem.
This was commissioned years ago for an anthology about New Zealand’s endangered species. Each poet was assigned a topic. My assigned subject was the Manoao Tree (Silver Pine).
Sadly, the book project didn’t eventuate so I thought I’d share the poem here:
Manoao
Small, sensitive, the cleanest of the grassy greens of the understory single leader, forest pine
too many years of mistaken identity growing in the shadow of all that a Kauri can be
rainforest supporter prone to sudden collapse like all things humble, misidentified, or hard to see
human desire-lines walk wide past the subtle glow in long rows of gloaming extroverts
If we were better, we’d take the time to thread the eyes. of this graceful relict.
(Above: low winter sun through some crops gone to seed at the Awapuni Community Garden.)
Hi lovelies,
Jeez, another week of scary news in a world gone mad. I hope you are faring okay and doing plenty of sensory, nature-based things off screens to give your nervous systems a chance to recover.
Winter calls for an encounter with ‘a Wild God’
Long a favourite poem of mine, I went looking for a shareable version of ‘Sometimes a Wild God‘ by Tom Hirons and saw, to my delight, that you can both read it and listen to it being read by the author here. There’s something about listening to poems read by their authors which is really special.
This poem speaks to that longing inside us to connect with nature’s raw wildness…how that raw wildness is no joke…and it also has such a great ending. A modern classic, I think.
Song for the week
This week’s song is gentle, evocative and sounds a bit like Nick Drake. It’s ‘Crow’ by English ‘folktronica’ band, Tuung.
As a poet, I can’t fall 100% in love with a song unless the lyrics are thoughtful and interesting. The chorus for this song are so good:
‘And we bide our time And we shed our skins And we shake our bones And we sink like stone And we crawl through mud Til we reach the sky And we bide our time.’
I especially like the photographs. What great seasonal fun.
Make a liver-cleansing, iron-boosting tonic from a much-maligned weed
Most people I talk to are unaware that yellow dock, a plant loathed by many, is a powerful medicinal plant.
When I did a live-cooking event at the Womad Festival last year, one of the things I made was some wild seedy crackers which had yellow dock seed in them which I foraged.
Lot’s of weeds are a bit of a pain, it’s true (hello, tradescantia, hello, convolvulus) …but so many weeds are edible or medicinal. I feel like re-learning all of the offerings of local weeds will be an important passtime for the coming years.
Here’s to the humble dock plant: mineral-retriever with it’s deep taproot, generous-seed-offerer, cleanser of livers and booster of blood.
This week’s affordable art: Whakangā
This week’s affordable art is not wall art, but an artful object, a meditation tool, a little something perfect for the wintery months. This would make a beautiful gift.
(Above: photo borrowed from the Creative Hive NZ website.)
From their website: ‘This beautiful Whakangā set is the perfect addition to your wellbeing with 21 small beeswax candles and an exquisite artisan ceramic kawakawa leaf holder.’
I think it qualifies as ‘art’ and is very reasonable at just $35.00 for the set.
This is such a thoughtful product. The tiny candles are made to burn for twenty minutes; just long enough to take a break or meditate. A friend of mine has a set and the candles are so very small and sweet.
How to make a Wild Food Map of your neighbourhood
This is a great article from Milkwood Permaculture on how to make a wild food map of your neighbourhood. I haven’t done this but I’d love to. If you have younger kids, it could be a fun activity to get them involved in over the school holidays?
As well as great instructions on this project, this article has a handy list of links for online community food maps at the end, like Falling Fruit a global map of crowd-sourced information about public fruit trees. It’s very fun to type your address into it and see what’s within walking distance of your house. You can add your local knowledge to it, too.
Something chill to watch: a Brixton folk artist’s beautiful house and studio
He’s a vibe, and I loved seeing his house and studio. His house is beautiful as is his art. I also appreciated how much he talks about loving being at home. I think since the pandemic, many of us feel the same way, hey?
(I lived in Brixton a zillion years ago when I was on my travels. I found it such a vibrant, exciting suburb of London.)
This manifesto gave me some solace this week. I love manifestos. I think most things I write end up being thinly disguised manifestos; I can’t help it.
I’m going to print it out and stick it on my fridge.
This weekend my oldest ‘baby’ turns 25. Quarter of a century!
(Above: the oldest baby when he was 4. A favourite pic.)
I spent my 25th birthday dancing at Duckie London – a queer club night that’s still going! But I started off the night straddled across one of the bronze lions of Trafalger Square in London, drinking straight from a 1.5 litre bottle of Absolut vodka. Classy, aye? (I wasn’t always the quiet homebody I am now.)
It’s funny, because I remember clearly thinking back then ‘I’m going to climb up here and get on one of the lions…because then I will always remember what I did on my 25th birthday’ …and it worked, I do!
Anyway, there will be birthday celebrations this weekend and no doubt F and I will have a tipple of whisky and contemplate the bizarre passage of time.
Hope there are sweet, calm things in your weekend, too. x
I think Matariki is my new favourite holiday. Long before it was made a public holiday, I used to grizzle that New Zealand needed another public holiday in winter as it was a long stretch from (then) Queen’s Birthday in June until Labour Day in October.
& because, as a pākeha, it is a new holiday, I’m really enjoying that we (my family) are creating our own celebrations for it: inviting friends to share kai and reflections, and focusing on rest.
I was hoping for a cold, wet weekend so I could be lazy and give some attention to my teetering pile of delicious library books…alas, (hello, climate change?) our winter here in the Manawatū seems to come later every year. Spring is the season I brace for…here our springs are mizzling, windy (we have a phenomena known as ‘the November gales’) and cold. So the weekend, while chilly, was also sunny…which meant I had to get out into the garden.
I did some satisfying chores that I only get to when the urgent business of harvest season is over: I tidied my junky heap of garden pots and paraphernalia into virgo-level neatness again. I cleared out the greenhouse, pruned and fed the fruit trees, planted more comfrey around their bases, dug up the dahlia bulbs. It was satisfying work that called for an afternoon tea of cinnamon pinwheels and a big pot of homemade masala chai (none of that syrupy nonsense.)
(Above: just the Edmonds date scone mixture but rolled out, spread with fruit mince and sliced into pinwheels instead of dates.)
Gardeners are always thinking a season (or more!) ahead. My winter food garden is all planted now…not too much to do. (Having said that I planted rockets seed and more broad beans on the weekend.) So now I’m dreaming ahead to summer flower/herb beds, by digging up clumps of perennial herbs and flowers and dividing them. I’ve been getting very inspired by urban rewilding books I’ve been reading (more on that in another post) so I’m eyeballing the little bits of lawn we still have and wondering if I might turn them into weedy spaces full of self-maintaining weeds and ‘wild’ flowers …for the pollinators and birds.
It takes a leap deeper into wildness and unruliness which can have a mixed response in an urban setting…and yet is so important for urban biodiversity as central city housing gets denser and more and more gardens are lost.
So, I ended up not being as lazy as I’d hoped for Matariki/Winter Solstice weekend…but it all felt good, a healthy-busy…not a pushing-hustle. Dreaming into summer is a kind of rest, I think.
& I know we’ll get plenty of stormy, frigid days in spring.
(Above: a wintery table top and typical scene in our whare.)
Mānawatia a Matariki!
I hope you have a restful, peaceful day ahead for this special holiday. Today’s digest is Matariki themed. I have some friends coming over for a huge pot of soup and some sharing from the heart.
A ‘Matariki banger’
To get us rolling, here’s a sweet short (4mins) documentary about the making of a new Matariki song:
‘When Professor Rangi Matamua, Rob Ruha, Troy Kingi and Kaylee Bell link up — we get a Matariki banger.’
(For northern hemisphere readers, Matariki is the Māori New Year in Aotearoa/New Zealand. It happens around the winter solstice when the the Matariki star cluster, known in English as the Pleiades or Seven Sisters, is brightest in the sky. The names o the stars in Māori are: Matariki, Pōhutukawa, Waitī, Waitā, Waipuna-ā-rangi, Tupuānuku, Tupuārangi, Ururangi, and Hiwa-i-te-rangi.)
A beautiful essay about brief but strong connections, grief and lessons from a marae kitchen
This week she published this essay. I loved how she conveys the fun but tough environment of the marae kitchen.
I’ve done a bit of time in marae kitchens myself and you learn fast to keep your head down, get on with any work assigned to you and stay outta the way! It’s also where all the good stories and gossip are…and the place to be, really.
A couple of recipes
Given it’s Matariki, here’s one for traditional Māori Fry Bread
It’s kind of like a doughnut…but it can be served savoury or sweet.
I’m intrigued to try the crispy kawakawa. Frying sage leaves in butter is an extraordinary thing so I imagine the kawakawa would develop a similar spicy umami.
The delight of hearing Hone Tuwhare reading his poem Papa-Tu-A-Nuku
National treasure Hone Tuwhare died back in 2008. He read his work aloud with such spice, intensity, joy.
It’s worth listening to for his ‘aaah’ before ‘we love her’ which doesn’t appear in the printed version of the poem.
A beautiful story about a Kapiti teacher who guided his students to hand build a Free Kai Cafe for their local community
Teacher, Adi Leason wanted to engage his teenaged students in something meaningful; hands-on learning that would result in a community asset. Here’s the story of their project.
This song, Polytunnel, by UK folk singer Richard Dawson, is so spare, simple and sweet…with his vulnerable, slightly off-key singing. It’s all about the joys of gardening an allotment and community spirit.
Please take the time to watch the video. It stars various members of his allotment and is a sheer joy to see all these happy, connected gardeners. I hope you love it as much as I do.
(Listen to the whole slow-growing Slow-Small playlist here. It grows at the rate of one song per week and will keep growing for as long as I write these digests.)
(Above: kumara soup + feta, smoked trout cream cheese dip with carrot sticks and nuts.)
Keep warm, beauties.
Eat soup, find your gratitude, take some time to reflect on how you’re doing at this mid-point of a fast-moving, nerve-rattling year. x
Helen Lehndorf 