Eat Local Challenge Day 5 and 6

Day 5

Holy Smoke!  I love tropical climates!  This morning we had a Ninja smoothie of half a papaya, a quarter pineapple and a banana each!  This is Liquid Love!  The Taste of Sunshine!

Liquid Sunshine

A morning of lounging at the pool, soaking up Vitamin D – bliss.  We decided to treat ourselves to a lunch at MamaCitas, the on-site Mexican restaurant.  After pouring over the menu for some time, consulting the waitress at length, calling the chef and appealing to him to cook up a rice dish with some sauteed veggies – impossible!  The menu at these big resorts are set, and they cannot rely on local veggies, as ingredients need to be available all year round, so THEY IMPORT ALL THEIR FRUIT AND VEG!! Shocking!  With all the subsistence and market farmers here in Fiji, apparently the fruit and veg availability is governed by the weather, so it is more reliable to import food rather than change the menu!  That was a shock!  We left feeling frustrated and also, VERY VERY hungry!

Back to the unit we rushed, and I hastily rustled up a quick meal of rice pancakes – one with local cheese from Suva (112km and mango chutney (from Lautoka- closer than Suva).  2 other pancakes with butter (from same Suva dairy- 112km from Nadi) and drizzled with honey (from the Highlands of Ba in Fiji- 62km from Nadi).   We brought a jar of honey with us from New Zealand, but it was of course, confiscated at the airport on arrival!  Silly us!  
I also chopped 2 bananas in half, lengthwise, drizzled my NZ powdered milk over, with a knob of butter and the remainder of the rice batter I poured over the top.  I nuked it, due to the urgent appeal of our growly tummies – wow!  We were blown away by our inventiveness and the flavour of that simple meal!  Stunning!  We will definitely repeat that!

Rice pancakes and papaya

Banana, rice and honey dessert

After all that sweet food, we are treating ourselves to a drip filter coffee from Lami (in Suva), well within The Zone!

Evening Meal:

Rice and a good veg stew with local canned tomatoes, onions, eggplant (crazy-cheap here!) and some garlic and ginger – all local, within our zone.  We shall have to catch the WestBus tomorrow (even tho’ it is  Easter Monday) and replenish our supplies.  An Indian maintenance man, Atish, who has just fixed our blind cord, told us he comes from the Highlands of Ba, where our honey is sourced from and that the fruit market will be closed on Monday, but sellers will still sell from stalls outside. 

Challenges:

We really miss having our usual treats – biscuits (wheat) and snack foods (many with wheat or imported ingredients).  We did spy a buja mix in the store, with rice and locally made – seems a good option now.

We keep on reminding ourselves: to stay in The Zone!  Sounds like a Zombie Apocalypse movie!

Highs:

We thought back to the time we stayed in this resort before, and happily ate at MamaCitas, completely oblivious to the fact we were eating imported food!  I wonder how many other guests would ever toss a thought to the origin of the food in their restaurant meal.  We are pleased to discover this, through The Challenge.

Day 6

Liquid Love

After a smoothie (papaya, banana and pineapple), and our usual morning drinks, we set off for our timeshare presentation  (yep, we were obliged, due to using a timeshare voucher which cost us $99 for 5 days).  That took the whole morning (as it seemed to be a great idea and we asked far too many questions) and then we returned to our unit to rustle up some lunch.  Life Before The Challenge would have seen us grab a couple of pieces of toast, cheese, tomato or some such ensemble.  Staying in The Zone requires a lot more thought and resourcefulness.  I first boiled then baked some potatoes in coconut oil (olive, our usual taste in oil, comes from Italy, so we went loco and bought coconut – not my favourite oil to cook with – but then it’s not called a Challenge for nought!).  A carrot cut into sticks, half an avo with salt, course black pepper and lime juice as an accompaniment, local cheese slices and a sauce made with local tomato sauce, garlic paste and lime juice.

The verdict – delicious!  Amazing how we can be satisfied with such basic foods.

Soaking up some Vitamin D at the end of the day, looking over the ocean and reading a book – what a great way to spend holiday time. 

We treated ourselves to an evening meal at Bulaccino – a restaurant just 10 minutes walk from our resort.  We had cassava wedges with spicey chilli and garlic, pumpkin soup for me, dahl soup for Mike (we had to decline the garlic bread accompaniment - blast!), and a side dish of spinach cooked in coconut milk.  Total cost – F$38.20.  They initially charged us for only 1 soup before we pointed out their mistake. It is tricky eating out for non-egg-eating vegetarians, add the 200km zone restrictions and staff are left scratching their heads in bewilderment! Before leaving NZ, we discovered that Bulaccino supplies much of their veggies from their own certified organic farm, so we contacted the owner, Eileen, and asked if we could visit the farm.  She was most generous and offered to collect us from the restaurant and give us a tour of the farm!  So we have made arrangements to connect on Wednesday.  Tea and bed.

Challenges: 
Very difficult to eat out at a restaurant, as a vegetarian with egg allergy.

Extremely difficult to eat out at a restaurant, as a veggoe, and eating in The Zone.

Highs:

We are still alive.  There is still plenty to eat, even if it is limited, and we have to prepare all of it!

We met an Indian Ice Cream Parlour owner, who offered to make us chocolate muffins with rice flour!

Our maintenance man Atish, has offered to get his wife to make us a local vegetable curry.

One of the staff has offered to bring us breadfruit for breakfast on Wednesday!

Eat Local Challenge Day 3 and 4

Day 3

Breakfast:

Smoothie:  2 Monty's Surprise apples, 2 red apples,  20 feijoas roughly, 2 golden kiwifruit all blended with 1 cup water - locally grown in our backyard.

Mid morning snack - 1 carrot each (Hawkes Bay - 28km out of zone).

Lunch:

Googled rice flour pancake recipe:

1 cup rice flour

2 Tspn baking powder

2 tspn egg replacer (Mike allergy to eggs)

3 tspn sugar, 1/2 tspn salt

1/2 cup hot water

1/2 cup milk

Blend and fry in little oil

Great!  Can be used as sweet or savoury pancake

We had a visit from Ben and Sarah, the French couple living in Katikati, who have generously offered to work in our garden in return for fresh organic food.  We shared a bag of feijoas and some apples with them, they will collect fruit a couple of times a week while we are away, to help our young German helpers consume the plentiful supply.  We shared a smoothie and lemongrass tea (all from the garden) to celebrate our impending holiday.

After lunch, we had a cuppa tea, a final pack and hit the road to Auckland.

Driving 2  1/2hrs  to Auckland, we discuss how we both miss having lollies to chomp – a mini sugar rush to take us through our day.  I have packed Road Food – some of our previously dehydrated apple rings.  We have a few pieces and feel the fruit sugar rush – not quite as satisfying but still good.  Mike actually says he feels better for the limited selection of food we have.  We usually have a far greater variety of food in our daily diet.

I had brought a selection of fruit for breakfast but only a small stash of veggies – in case we need to make something.  Providence!  We plan to stop and buy some cheese – Auckland should have some supplies that come within the 200km zone – alas, alack and woe!  It is Easter Friday!!  We discover the bustling hub of shops and supermarket near the airport is deathly quiet.  Not a shopper in sight, save some frustrated consumers who sit in their cars, as if willing the stores to open as they wait.

We find the airport motel has a microwave only – anyone who knows me knows my suspicion and dreaded fear of the nuclear-irradiated food cooker!  We have no choice!  It’s use it or go hungry.  There are no shops open – so I assembled all the veggies, chopped them with the terribly blunt motel knife (my pocket knife is tucked deep within the belly of my hold baggage, so I hack up 2 courgettes, some beans, 2 tomatoes and sprinkle with tamari sauce and juice of a lime (all from our garden) – irradiate the hell out of them, halve the avo and olives I brought, in case of emergency, and we soak the 5 rice wraps.

Our humble motel-assembled meal

Once assembled, we feel a little more chipper, the appearance is peasant-like, but the taste is the stuff of royalty!  We hungrily devour our simple meal, giving thanks to the blessings of home-grown food!  And to think we had thought longingly of cheese, or even an Indian veg curry for our pre-holiday treat!  Amazing how simple foods can sustain and even delight you when you are hungry and have no other choice!

Locally sourced-veggie rice-flour wrap

A cuppa tea before bed will have to suffice for dessert.

Challenges:  

• Missing those lollies!  We did pack some jelly beans before our hasty decision was made – it is in the bottom of Mike’s luggage – Hmmmn, maybe we should unpack and retrieve them!  They are listed as being made in Auckland.  
• We are trying to drink less cups of black Ceylon tea, and supplement with herbs from the garden.  Bay leaves – 6 in a pot of water, bring to the boil and add a teensy dash of honey.  I think it has anti-bacterial properties and anti-cancer properties.
• Lemongrass tea – a 6cm piece chopped up in a pot of water, brought to the boil and sweetened with a smidgeon of honey – rather a nice lemony-snicket-tasting tea. It is an anti-fungal tea, as well as a stress reducing tea, lowers cholesterol and is also anti-inflammatory.

Planted some lettuce the night before we left, so we have salad ingredients to come home to.

Day 4

Woke at 4.30am in motel, had our usual morning hot drinks – 2 coffees for me, 2 teas for Mike.  I chopped up the fruit I brought from our garden, 1 Monty’s Surprise apple, 8 feijoas, half a pear.  Put them into the 2 Ninja cups (we bought a Ninja blender for the Challenge – figured we are staying 5 nights at the Tanoa Hotel and we negotiated free breakfasts which usually cost F$15 each, so that would have been F$150 for us both for 5 days – so we went and bought the travel-light Ninja blender for $100 as the Tanoa does not have a self contained kitchen, and we will blend some of our meals rather than cooking.

We ate our fruit salad at the airport, and shared half a left-over carrot.  I felt a little lightness of being, with no carbs, so we stopped at an Asian outlet and bought Made in New Zealand Milk biscuits – it was just what we needed!  There was no actual area listed.  We bought some Allens Mackintosh toffees – also just listed as Made in New Zealand, but I suspect there are some imported ingredients used!   We snacked on a cup and a half of Chilian guavas I picked before leaving home.  On board the plane, we snacked on half a Ceres raw fruit bar (made in Auckland from imported ingredients - the food miles would be as long as my arm for that little bar!).  What we had not realised was that Fiji Air provides breakfast for all on board, so being egg-free veggoes, we declined the cooked egg option and had a Made in New Zealand fruit yoghurt and a small pottle with 2 bites of pineapple and papaya – origin unknown.  Possibly a tropical location.

It is a little tricky travelling with this 200km radius food rule, but it makes life a little fun too – figuring out what is okay and what is not.  We were picked up by a friendly Indian taxi driver Narayan, in Nadi, who kindly took us to the Vodafone store to sort my internet toggle (so I could keep up with The Challenge!).  At first they kept on coming up with a firewall, so sent us off to a PC shop to help us, they figured out that all was fine, so back to Vodafone we went to get the toggle set up.  It took some time, until they finally figured out that they hadn’t changed the time or country!!  So now all is fine and I am back online!  Sort of.  Can't seem to load any of our photos - shall have to do that later. 

I found the Shrine of Existence – a local fruit and veg market – a veritable Aladdin's Cave of Splendiferous plant foods!  I was in Heaven!  Unfortunately, I could not carry all that my heart desired (we abhore plastic bags and try to use our small re-usable shopping bags), but I managed to purchase green sweet bananas, guavas, eggplants, half a small pumpkin, carrots,  pineapple, ginger, 4 papayas, avocado and limes and a large coconut which we drank straight away!  All for $25!  Such is life – pleasure and pain!  The pain of travel and the digital world, the pleasure of tropical heat and tropical fruit!

We were still feeling light in the stomach, with so much uncooked fruits, so we bought some street food – suggested to us by Narayan; 2 potato-filled rotis, and 6 pea flour gulgans (or some such name) – basically fried spicey pea flour balls.  They went down a treat – though we felt a little overcome by the sudden overload of wheat and fried foods!  Apparently Fiji has NO grain grown here – much of the packages state that it is the Product of Fiji – but Narayan explained it has simply been processed here – e.g – Product of Fiji Rice – is rice from Australia or Vietnam, de-husked and packed here.  So our wheat rotis, though made here – were sadly not a grain of Fiji.  So that snack cost us plenty food air miles (not sure where it comes from, possibly India, at a guess).

We are staying in a well-appointed, self-catering unit in Wyndham Worldmark Denerau.  In the afternoon of our arrival, after settling into our unit, we realised we will not be able to cook much since we don’t have the basics – oil, onions, spices and water!  So we caught the WestBus to town, which seems to be mostly to ferry all the resort staff back and forth, instead of catching a $10 taxi, it costs us $2 on the bus.  We were warned that on Sunday and Monday all the shops are closed for Easter, so we rushed off at 3.30 and were back at about 5.30 for a quick dip on the pool before our dinner.

Tonight, we shall dine on the flesh of our drinking coconut (good source of protein) and papaya and guava.  The smell is driving me wild!!  In fact, I think that’s why the average Fijian family has so many children – this local food is clearly aphrodisiac!! 

Challenges:

Mike is complaining that he needs more carbs, so a milk biscuit does the job of grounding us!  Travelling creates challenges which are difficult to control.  We look forward to having an onsite restaurant meal tomorrow, with local foods.

REAL FOOD, feel it, smell it and taste it!!  Alive Food!  Oh, Fiji, we love you!

Day 2 of Eat Local Challenge

200km Eat Local Challenge

Thursday, 2 April, Day 2:

Breakfast:

Today I started my day as always, 2 organic coffees in short sharp succession, to clear the sleep cobwebs.  Mike had 1 Rooibos tea and 1 Liquorice tea.  None of our morning drinks fits the 200km zone but we think they could fit the 5% condiments percentage.   Then our breakfast consisted of a smoothie mostly from the garden: 2 Monty's Surprise apples, 2 red apples, 24 feijoas, 1/2 lime, skinned and 3 golden kiwifruit (locally grown).  As previously mentioned, we have house guests, hence the big quantities as we share this with them.  It was really sweet and delicious.

Feijoa mid-morning snack.  1 coffee for myself.  I needed it!  Last day of term!

Lunch: 

We had leftovers from last night's raw food spring rolls - grated carrot, kohlrabi, green herb sauce, shredded red cabbage, raw food mayonnaise and home-grown olives, with half a locally grown avo each.

As an afternoon snack, we had a home grown fig, a carrot from Hawke's Bay (28km out of our radius) and black tea, milk and honey (latter 2 sourced from within our 200km.

Gem squash, gherkins in ACV, green herb sauce and rice salad

Supper:

I cooked some rice, poured the juice of 2 limes over it, a generous knob of Tararua butter (Auckland), salt and ground pepper.  Into that I chopped several home-grown or local sourced vegetables - capsicum, carrot, kohlrabi, parsley, basil, cucumber, courgettes and 1 Tbspn home made Apple Cider Vinegar.  I also made a little side dish of sliced home-grown gherkins (I never did get to pickle them) in a little ACV, steamed  home-grown squash with butter and leftover raw green herb sauce from yesterday.

For dessert, I sliced some Monty's Surprise apples, layered them in an oven-proof dish, blended some feijoas with lime juice and drizzled that over the apples, then sprinkled a cinnamon and sugar mix over the top before baking for 45 minutes.  I should have added 1/4 cup water to make the apples softer, but still, with Tip Top ice-cream (made in Auckland), it was really quite yummy!

Challenges:

I like that lolly treat 2 -3 times a day and really miss that, as I think the Pascal lollies just don't seem right to be having, not sure?

I miss not having wheat flour or spelt flour to bake treats with.

Not sure if we can keep this challenge up over the next couple of days as we travel to Fiji.  If I had more time to plan, perhaps I could have thought of some good local snacks to take - as it is, we will take Ceres (Auckland-based company) Trail Mix and raw food bars.  They are made and packaged in Auckland, but using all imported ingredients.  Too bad, but don't want to add more stress to our travel.  

Having to pack and blog - hmmn, pressure!  I normally write a travel diary - this time round, I will be taking my bulky laptop, so I can blog - that will be a challenge too!

Highs: 

Yay!  Tomorrow we will be leaving our home, garden and cat in the hands of our German helpers and driving to an airport motel so that we can leave for Fiji on Saturday morning. 

Looking forward to sights like this!  Taken in July 2013.

Local Fiji food: street vendors....

Definitely think we could survive on such heavenly local Fiji food!!!

Fijian Kingfisher - can't wait! 1 more day to go......

Sunshine!!!!  Bring it on!

200km Eat Local Challenge

30.03.15  Monday:  Mike and I have just recently signed up to the 200km Eat Local Challenge.  Eeek!  It runs for the month of April, which starts in 2 days time.  

Who we are: Mike Green and I (Gizelle) live in the Bay of Plenty on a 900m2 piece of land in the middle of Katikati, Bay of Plenty.  We grow about 80% of our food in the warmer months and about 50-60% in the cooler months.  We are passionate about living sustainably, and try to implement efficient waste management systems in and around our home.  Mike is an account manager for an organic food company (what else??  With the surname Green) and Gizelle is a kindergarten teacher, and qualified reflexologist.

Yours Truly, the Green Team, fooling around in the tuk tuk
 advertising The Second Best Marigold Hotel movie at Bay City Cinemas!

What the 200km Challenge means, is that we have to watch what we eat, making sure that most of the food we consume comes from within a 200km radius.  So from Katikati, we can eat all the way up to Auckland (167km), and all the way down to Taupo (176km).  Sweet!  There should be enough between these two points to keep us alive for a month!  We are vegetarians, so we should be able to get our daily dose of veggies without needing to go out of our 200km zone too often.  A quick look at the online map  shows us the radius we can consume from - oh bother, wonder if they grow chocolate in Te Puke?!

But hang on, what about bread, milk, rice, tea, coffee, salt, pepper, etc.?  Hmm, well, we are allowed to eat 5% spices, condiments etc from further afield, I think my two cups of organic coffee (addict) will have to come into that percentage of consumables.  We are also allowed to choose just one grain from further afield.  Since not much grain is grown in New Zealand (we made inquiries), we decided on rice, from India.  Lots of carbon miles there!

Remind me why we are doing this?

Right.  To see where we can reduce our carbon miles food footprint and rethink our buying patterns possibly, for the future!  And it sound like a bit of fun!  We can obviously eat foods from further afield, but have to record our food mileage which no doubt may actually amount to  massively-huge air-miles!  It certainly will be an interesting journey.

We have just had a very busy weekend, with 3 separate events at Kati KaiWay, so in between, I worked furiously to preserve some of our current end-of-season foods as we may not have them in 2 weeks time.  The trouble there is that we are heading to the sunny shores of Fiji at the end of the week for 2 weeks, and yes, we are taking our challenge there too!  So we will have to find local Fijian food.  We wanted to have a wider selection of food for when we get back, so  I made feijoa puree - not a problem there - scoop them out into a pot, boil them, blend them and bottle the puree.  Easy peasy.  No mileage going on there. No other added ingredients. 

Bottled Beetroot, Apple Syrup and Feijoa Puree

Not so easy when I decided to bottle our newly harvested beetroot - 5 tspn sugar (Not within zone), 1/2 cup apple cider vinegar (from Rangiora - definitely further afield than our designated zone @ 960km) and salt.  But the salt is from the South Island - and we are allowed 5% condiments.  I made apple syrup too - but needed to add 1/2 cup sugar (again - more sweet miles than allowed).  I did however, manage to dehydrate apples for some sweet snacky treats.  Zero miles there.

Even though our apples have coddling moth, we still use them.  There is plenty good flesh if you work around the collywobbles!  This great little peeler/corer/slicer cost $5 at a garage sale!  Yay for pre-loved, discarded affordable goods!

Apple rings in the dehydrator, to be turned into yummy sweet snack foods.

We Love a Good Challenge - Bring it On!  We start on Wednesday.  I will be blogging the weekly challenge, for the next 4 weeks, as part of our record keeping.

Wednesday 1/ 04/15

Breakfast:
Usual 2 cups of coffee for Giz, 2 cups of tea for Mike - 1 Liquorice, 1 sage tea.
(We are including these in our 5% rule)

Fruit Smoothie: 2 Monty's Surprise apples, 12 feijoas, 1 cucumber, juice of 1 lime and some frozen peaces - All from our own garden.
Huge amount fruit used due to having 2 house guests to share it with.

Nice, but won't do the cucumber again - it was a bit past it's Best Before date!!

Lunch: 
Giz: Pre-made rice (our chosen grain) in the morning, when cooked, added 2Tbspn home-brewed Apple Cider Vinegar, 2Tbspn Grove Horopito Infused Avocado oil (from Te Puna, just down the road), with a chopped small tomato and cucumber from the garden, and 8 olives - home-picked and cured.  
Mike: feijoas and figs from garden

Sustaining, tasty - if hadn't been in a rush, could have added a few more veggies and herbs to my rice dish.

Afternoon snack
2 feijoas (garden)
Mike and Giz - 1 cup black tea with milk (Rotorua - organic, untreated) and honey (Opotiki - within zone)

Evening Meal:
As we have guests, I made a raw food spring roll meal - consisting of raw grated carrots from Hawkes Bay (28km out of radius), grated kohlrabi (from garden), shredded red cabbage (from Onion Place - local grower), a green sauce (whizzed in blender - parsley, basil, courgette, 2 silverbeet leaves and juice 1 lemon - all from garden), 1/4 cup Avocado Oil, salt (ours is Ceres salt - from New Zealand), mayonnaise (Tonzu tofu - Auckland, lemon juice, 1 tspn home made Dijon mustard, salt and 1/4 cup Avo oil), leftover rice from lunch, broccoli (from Onion Place - locally grown) and rice wraps (chosen grain).

Greens from the garden

Auckland tofu

Avo oil from Te Puna

Evening Meal - DIY Raw Food Rice Wrap Spring Rolls

Our challenges: I usually like a mid morning and late afternoon lolly - but not sure if they are kosher - even that they are Pascals.  We argued about the tofu - locally made in Auckland - but we are sure the beans would have been imported, so how far do we trace back? 
Q: If we go for a bite to eat at a restaurant, do we need to check every ingredient, even if it is local ingredients?  
We also realise we will use up a tonne of Avocado oil - and that's not cheap!  No more cheaper olive oil from Italy.  
We had a farewell shared lunch at work today - there was nothing I could eat!  That's a challenge!

Our highs:
I am a kindergarten teacher, it is nearly the end of the term, with lots of cleaning to do(1 day to go) and it was an exceptionally busy day, my 2 relieving teachers had to go home for sickness leave, so I had to organise relievers for relievers ...... yet I made it through the day - and not only that, we made it through our first day of the 200km Eat Local Challenge!  We go to Fiji in 2 days.  Yay!  Life is Good!

Happy Helpers

Shanti, Lazy Cat.  Not the best Helper.  But cute!

I have always wondered about communal living.  Not too sure I could actually live in a commune but the aspect of shared work and reward has always appealed to me.  The next best thing to committing to living in a commune, is to invite travelers into your home and the perfect platform is through the WWOOFING network or HelpXchange.  Having signed up, we have access to an international array of helpers, with a diverse set of skills, background and expertise.  Recently, we have had a raft of travelers contacting us and asking if they could stay.  The hard part is turning them away, and over the last 3 weeks I have had to turn away at least one a day!  It is amazing how many travelers are visiting New Zealand, and all willing to help out!

Recent Harvest

We grow enough food for 2 families, achieved through hosting helpers who get on with 4-5 hours per day, of helping around the garden and home while we are at work!  In return, we offer them a accommodation and food.  They have access to free WiFi and all the food they can eat!  We are picking beans, cherry tomatoes, plums, apples, pears, courgettes, beetroot, rhubarb, Daikon radishes, kohlrabi, capsicum, squashes and peaches at the moment!  Plenty to share!

Sieving old paint to remove the skins or dust

A couple of weeks ago, we had a request from a Dutch/Kiwi couple.  Seeing that she was a graphic artist, I thought of a job we had been meaning to tackle for some time.  My daughter recently moved out of home into a flat and her once-was-a-teenager room was looking tired and in need of a new lick of paint.  Perfect!  Now we had help to do just that!  Amber and Ross arrived knowing the task ahead of them. 

We went to the local hardware store and were shocked that 4L of paint could cost $150.  Being a Frugal-Scrooge, I declined their offer to sell me the expensive house-paint.  My husband was a little concerned, whatever would we do?  No worries, I reassured him.  I would create some paint for the job, using what we had in the shed!

Rusty old tins, needed to have their lids prised off with pliers, and then sieved to remove the rust and bits!

Off to our garden shed I trundled.  Rummaging through all our old leftovers I scrounged off a commercial painter some nearly 10 years ago, I prised off their rusty lids and proceeded to pour them through an old sock, into an old paint bucket.  My only requirement was that it had to be water-based paint.  A litre of pink (yugh), a litre of yellow (mmmn), 100ml of dark grey and a few scrapings of cream.  I was unsure of the result.... Beige?  No!  Pink?  No!  Peach?  Not too sure.  So I gave it a name; Strawbeige!

The end result..... Strawbeige!

Our willing workers were a little unsure of my colour but optimistically set about the task and like Trojans, they covered every blimp, scrape and pencil drawing (yes, a legacy of bored teens).  Then Amber was given her next challenge: to create sumptuous lotus flower stenciled images on the feature wall, ala-Bollywood style.  Of course, I have a little Gaudi-gene in me!

She crafted the perfect lotus stencil and then proceeded to painstakingly paint all the images by hand!  Love it!  As our daughter took her bed, bedside table and dressing table, we are planning to buy a double bed for the room so that our children and their partners can stay in this romantic Lotus Room.

Ross and Amber, our painting fairies!

During March Sustainable Backyards programme which runs in the Bay of Plenty, we hosted an open home.  One couple who came through were a lovely French couple, Ben and Sarah, who live and work in Katikati.  They kindly offered to come over on the weekends and help out in the garden - why?  Because it is seemed like a nice place to hang out and learn stuff, they said.  Well, true to their word, they arrived last Sunday and we spent a social 2 hours working side by side.  It was so lovely that we have thought we could maybe do this social gardening project where people such as Ben and Sarah can come into an established garden to help out and take away fresh organic food as payment! Co-operative gardening.  I like that idea.

Ben and Sarah pulling up all the spent squash vines.

Happy helpers in the garden

Ben and Sarah were so happy to harvest all the squash and courgette flowers as these are apparently sought after in French cuisine.  They took a bag of fresh organic food and a bowl of flowers away with them.  A couple of hours later, Ben arrived on our doorstep, with half a bowl of battered, fried flowers for us to eat!  What a fantastic cultural experience!  They were yummy, BUT there is NO WAY I would have the time or inclination to fuss over battering flowers to eat!!  In my mind, a zucchini has a lot more flesh to bite into than a flower!  

Sustainable Backyards Open Home and Garden Tour; guests check out our new compost bins.

Visitors take a little respite from the sun and sample grapes and Chilean guavas.

We are lucky to have had another happy helper, Sky, from the UK, who tended to our virulent backyard weeds.  So without all our fantastic helpers over February and March, we would be Headless Chooks running back and forth trying to get everything done in one day a week!  Well, actually, we still sometimes feel like that anyway!

Sky

I am working on an idea to feel less like a Headless Chook..... but more on that later.  Watch this space....
PS.  We just got bees!! yay!

Mural Town, Mural Home

We live in Katikati.  Mural Town.  So when a mural artist and his girlfriend emailed to say they would like to come and do a helpxchange at our place, I didn't stop to think twice.  Of course, he could create a mural in the time they were here!  J (for Jonathan) Muzacz is a truly talented young American mural and tattoo artist currently travelling around New  Zealand with his beautiful Japanese girlfriend Yuki.  

First we chose a wall for the mural.

My Ideal World

In my Ideal World:

Everyone would grow their own backyard vegetables and teaching children how to grow food would be mandatory in all schools

Councils would plant fruit trees in reserves, among the natives and exotics

Roadside verges would be planted with fruit and native trees - food for people and birds

Councils or governments would set up subsidies for solar energy generation for home owners installing their own power generating solar panels, encouraging people to be mini-power stations.

Farmers Markets will continue to supply locally grown, organic food and not be subject to the Food Bill

Local councils would offer reduced rates for people setting up grey-water systems, composting toilets and rainwater harvesting systems.

The Food Bill would be scrapped to protect people's rights to eat the foods they choose to eat (local and organic) as opposed to passing a business-driven law which encourages corporate greed, and food and seed ownership and monopoly (yes, MonSatan)

Funding would be readily available from the Government (our hard-earned monies, really) for programmes like EnviroSchools, which focus on Sustainable Education, rather than on a country's Military Might.

All family units would invest in someone learning the art of healing, so as to better take care of it's own members instead of relying heavily on the Medical System to fix all our problems (most of which we caused ourselves through bad diet or lifestyle choices).

Home-owners would scatter-sow bee-fodder in their gardens to encourage and protect our busy little workers who help grow our food.

My Ideal World.....  Well, My World is just perfect, the way it is!  I keep tweaking it as I learn and grow.  Ideal.  Like the bumble bee above, I was fascinated by how huge he was while he was so intent on foraging, that an unwanted caress simply sent him off to the next courgette flower, where he carried on gathering pollen to his hearts content!  Ideal, really!