Guest post by Nicola Chatham: finding Flow in your veggie patch

"So, what do you do?"

Don't you love that ques­tion?!! I never know how to answer. I've been prac­tis­ing being more con­cise and inter­est­ing, but what I usu­ally say is…

"Well, I do two things. I'm an artist and I exhibit my work in Mel­bourne and Bris­bane. And I help peo­ple grow organic food with a blog and online train­ing course."

What I really do though, is chase 'Flow'.

When I was 18, I began prepar­ing my port­fo­lio for art school. The trou­ble was, I was ter­ri­fied of mak­ing marks on a page. I'd pretty much lost my cre­ativ­ity when my par­ents divorced three years ear­lier. It just fell away, prob­a­bly some­where with my joy and sense of safety. Return­ing to art was like court­ing a lover who'd rejected me. Painful. Full of doubt. Fear I'd be rejected again. "You're not good enough, you can't do this," I heard whis­pered over and over in my mind.

So I found a men­tor. He was an older artist. Worldly. Way­ward. Mys­te­ri­ous. Fun. Temperamental. He showed me how to put my ego aside and just dive in. Exper­i­ment. See what hap­pened. Don't take it per­son­ally. But do show up. Make marks. Put the time in. Don't run in fear of fail­ure. And don't take it so seri­ously – like my life depended on it. Because it felt like it did.

Sur­pris­ingly, I found an amaz­ing thing. When I did as he said (had a glass of wine and sat down to draw), I touched on an expe­ri­ence that has woven its way through my life ever since.

Flow :: Pres­ence :: Bliss :: Groove

"When­ever there is enthu­si­asm, there is a cre­ative empow­er­ment that goes far beyond what a mere per­son is capa­ble of." – Eck­hart Tolle, A New Earth

Pro­fes­sor Mihaly Csík­szent­mi­há­lyi calls it Flow. Bud­dhists call it Mind­ful­ness. Eck­hart Tolle calls it Awak­ened Doing. Joseph Camp­bell calls it Bliss.

Twyla Tharp calls it Groove. In her book The Cre­ative Habit (which I love, and highly rec­om­mend, by the way), she says:
"A groove is the best place in the world. It's where I strive to be, because when you're in it you have the free­dom to explore, where every­thing you ques­tion leads you to new avenues and new routes, every­thing you touch mirac­u­lously touches some­thing else and trans­forms it for the better."

Ever since those days prepar­ing my port­fo­lio, I've wanted more flow in my life. For me, flow is when time takes on another qual­ity. You're so absorbed in the task at hand, it feels like time doesn't exist.
But flow doesn't just hap­pen in the fine arts. Flow exists in prepar­ing a gar­den bed. Trans­form­ing lawn into abun­dance. It can be found in a well-stocked gar­den shed. And a box of your favourite seeds.

Flow vis­ited me this week­end in the veg­gie patch.

Time flew. The world didn't exist out­side of my imme­di­ate environment. I didn’t have a plan. Instead, one action led to the next. I pulled down the old Mada­gas­car bean, like shed­ding an old self image. The abrupt naked­ness of the bam­boo teepee shocked and excited me. I pre­pared the ring of soil around the base with nitrogen-rich green leaves and weeds, then lay­ered com­post, and finally hay soaked in molasses and water. Then I parted the hay like a skirt and planted snow peas.

It was all good. I went out­side to check my hand­i­work at 9pm and the naked teepee, with her new upside-down skirt, glowed in the full moon.

Flow.

It can catch you unawares. But only if you are pre­pared and show up.

• Put on your gloves.
• Get into the habit of com­post­ing (so it’s ready, when you are).
• Find your­self some seeds to play with.
• Go out­side.

Nicola Chatham is an organic gardening teacher, permaculture designer and contemporary artist. Her Grow Organic Food in Pots course starts next week and enrolment closes in just over three days. I'm happy to promote and recommend Nicola's online courses because her first course, the Abundant Veggie Patch System, which I paid for, has transformed my garden and my way of thinking. I love her approach. I've enrolled on Grow Organic Food in Pots (especially as Nicola is covering worm farming this time) and would love for more people to join me! If you want to read more about Nicola's online course, pop your email address here and Nicola will send you all the details.

Joining in with Rachael's Garden Journal.




Working with nature

It doesn't take much nowadays to get me excited about the prospect of a few hours in the company of other adults (excited beforehand and then I fall asleep, huh?).

A council-run composting and worm farm workshop. Riveting, don't you think?

Well, it was. Even more riveting was the fact they were giving away free compost bins and worm farms. What a fabulous thing for a council to organise.

The local CWA hall was packed on Wednesday. Full of people who wanted to learn and go home with a freebie for their garden. The room had a beautiful energy about it. There were people – like the gentleman sitting beside me – who kept an immaculate lawn but knew nothing about composting or worm farming. Others had tried to compost in the past but ended up with a sludgy mess and gave up as a result. Surprisingly, I was one of only three people who use a compost bin and keep a worm farm.

I feel quite confident about composting now, having done Nicola Chatham's online gardening course earlier this year. Our worms do their jobs well, and even though any niggles I have about harvesting the castings will get covered in Nicola's next course*, I went along because I knew I'd learn something. I'm in my element when I can delve deeper into something that inspires me. It's why I ask lots of questions. It's the one thing people always say about me...

Anyway, aside from feeling very sad at one point when it was pointed out that over a third of everyone's bins is made up of fruit and vegetable scraps filling up our landfills, and how all this needless waste gets converted to ozone-depleting methane, it was a worthwhile morning.

Here are some notes I made for you.

• Composting is really quite easy. The reason why people give up is they add too much nitrogen-rich matter (kitchen scraps, fresh lawn clippings, manure, mushroom compost) and not enough carbon, or poor layers (newspaper, brown leaves, dried grass, hay). I follow the 2:1 ratio for layering – 2 parts carbon to 1 part nitrogen or thereabouts. I keep it in mind, but I certainly don't lose any sleep over it. As long as there's enough carbon in there, your compost won't turn smelly or wet.
• If you fill your compost bin right up (the way I do it, layering with as much variety as I can get my hands on), and you turn it, say, once every 10 days, you will get beautiful rich compost within 10 weeks. How exciting is that?
• If you just want to add your fruit and veg as you go from the kitchen, you'll still get to make 'food' for your soil; it'll just take longer. Always finish with a carbon/poor layer which will keep any flies at bay.
• As for worm farming, you don't need to go and buy one of the expensive kits. All you need is a polystyrene box or two. I might be making one of these myself to extend our little worm family. (I promise I'll try and get out more.)
• You generally start off with around 1000 worms. You can buy worms in garden centres or get some from someone with an established worm farm. Or get your little tikes to harvest worms from the garden – they don't need to be special composting worms. Ordinary earthworms will do the job just as well (according to the workshop).  
• Worm juice, which is actually their pee, is liquid gold fertiliser. Just dilute with water to a ratio of 1:10 and it'll make your garden (and your indoor plants) very happy.

Luca and I spent the next day starting to fill our third (freebie) compost bin. We cut down the last of our winter broccoli and cauliflower and tore them all up ready to go back into the next cycle.

I came home that day and looked at my worms in a slightly different light, now that I know a little more about these spectacular creatures' anatomy and how they breed.

I discovered melon is one of their favourite foods, so that day they dined on melon skins and their usual banana skins. I made up two watering cans of diluted worm juice and drizzled one lot over the tomatoes and basil, and the other can went over my leeks to perk them up after the aphids almost got them.

I love working with nature. I really do.

Do you like composting? Do you skip in the garden knowing you're turning waste into magic? Do you squeal with delight when you turn that tap on the worm farm and it all comes gushing out?

Perhaps you think I ought to get out more too?





*I'm joining Nicola Chatham for her next course on organic gardening in pots. Nicola's also covering worm farming – yippee! I'll post more details soon, but you can get her free Organic Veggie Patch Kit here in the meantime. 

The good stuff

I'm still in survival mode.

And after reading what sounds like very good advice on parenting toddlers (actually, parenting full stop), I'm thinking I should try harder. Ditch the lazy 'battle-it-through' and adopt a more understanding approach. Except that I'm very tired.

So I'm not very patient at the moment. Which isn't so great for understanding a child's perspective. It looks like I'm back where I started.

Working out what is going on, deciding on different strategies and putting them into practice... well, it's draining just thinking about it.

But it's what I will do. Eventually. I'm not one for leaving things to sort themselves out (although I should sometimes). I over-think and I analyse to death. So I'll work it out. Even if by that stage he's a teenager.

In the meantime, we're just pottering.

Quietly, I always hope. But very noisily, in reality.

While I pottered the other day layering vegetable scraps and newspaper shreds in the compost, Luca asked to pick some kale.

Truth is my heart sank. Not because he wanted to pick kale, but because Kian was hovering. Kian copies, like any sibling does. But he does everything more wildly.

I had visions of Luca picking a few leaves, then Kian pulling out all the kale from their roots. Thinking that was tremendous fun, he'd move onto the spinach and lettuce and within a minute, it would look like a whipper-snippered mess.

It was nothing like that, of course.

Luca snipped. Kian watched.

A bit of kale. A bit of spinach.

This is the best bit: I suggested making a juice out of it. And we did.

A juice of kale, spinach, banana, frozen berries, lemon, bee pollen and maca powder.

I have absolutely no idea what the bee pollen and maca powder do. I just know it's good stuff.

Thanks to Nicola Chatham, I'm not only growing all of these glorious leaves on a patch of concrete by my washing line, but because she introduced me to Jessica Ainscough, aka the Wellness Warrior, I'm making juices I probably never would have made.

They drank the lot.

Kian, my fussy little eater, who throws food across the table, who kicks his plate in disgust...

Consumed. And. Enjoyed. Raw. Greenery.

It was a lovely moment.





Grateful for contrasts

This word is on my mind. The more I've thought, the more I realise I'm a bundle of contrasts. My life is a life of contrasts.

It started when I thought it funny how Luca was a textbook routine baby and Kian was carried in a sling and we co-slept.

Then I thought about my views on medicine and natural living. I've always sought alternative therapies and treatments to anything. And yet I had an epidural with both the boys.

There are little things like how I hate noise. (OK, who likes noise?) I mean, I'm so sensitive that I'd prefer a tea towel dangling permanently over each and every cupboard and drawer in the kitchen to avoid that sound of wood on wood. I like quiet. Silence. But I'll have you know the drums are my instrument of choice. A drumming friend at school taught me the basics and I've been hooked ever since. (A pie-in-the-sky dream of mine has been to do what I do by day, and be a drummer in a cool little band by night.)

I crave solitude. I love parties.

When we first moved to Australia, we lived amongst barefoot hippies. I ran a cake stall at the organic markets and Graeme sweated it out in people's gardens. Then we moved to a place where Graeme worked in the city and we made friends with big-time corporate families.

We didn't really fit in either camp to tell you the truth.

Too mainstream to be radical and too radical to be mainstream.

I've lived a life where talking to boys was forbidden. A life in a strict private girls' school in Cairo where you are pulled up and punished if your hair tie isn't brown or black. I've lived another in a mixed public school in Kent amongst girls who did a lot more than kissing.

Straight-A student and maths graduate becomes a food writer working from home.

Used to loathe getting dirty in the garden and doing any kind of work out there. Now I've designed and built my beds, planted pots and am growing lots of green goodness. And I quite like getting my hands dirty.

None of this is surprising. I am, after all, a product of another contrast: a harsh Egyptian father and a soft, warm English mother.

I love contrasts. I love all the irony. Life is very real with contrasts. Don't you think?

And I get to see a much much bigger world (literally and figuratively).

Hence why I'm grateful.

Linking with Bron at Maxabella Loves who makes me laugh.


Have you noticed the button? Yes the big button up there on the right. The one with the cool changing text. I'm so excited about it. Go on, see where it takes you... 

P.S. Don't forget to enter my giveaway.




Alpaca poo and thyme in a bath

The garden has come a long way since we built the first two beds in October. And so have I.

I came across Nicola Chatham late last year. We had already built and planted our beds using the no-dig gardening method. I discovered that being in the garden, for Luca, really fills him up, and it was so easy being with him.

And although we did have some success with greens and a beautiful tomato glut, plus great fun with our worm farm, I was still very lost. And I found the whole process very frustrating, because I was thinking of gardening purely in terms of results. In fact, I'd have been quite happy for someone else to do it all, so that all I'd have to do is pick what I want for dinner.

But that's not what gardening is about. Besides, I wouldn't have anything to teach the boys. Gardening is work in progress. It's a journey. And honestly, I only learned this a matter of days ago when I got lost out there and realised just how much it has to teach me.

A big part of this transformation is down to Nicola's Abundant Veggie Patch System*.

Nicola Chatham

I love how Nicola doesn't promise self-sufficiency.

She got me with that word. Abundance. Such a great word. We all want abundance.

I learnt all about permaculture basics, and found the concept of zoning fascinating. I've since moved my greens to the right zone!

I learnt how to do a sunshine study on the house and work out the best location for a veggie patch. How to design a bed and get the dimensions right. Where to get materials and do everything on a budget.

This is what I've found wonderful about the course. There are so many lessons weaved into it.

Suddenly, I started looking out for people dumping their rubbish on the side of the road. I found several great buckets and a baby bath to use as a planter, and I picked up a compost bin and plastic pots at garage sales nearby.

One place we decided to build a bed was on a slab of concrete. We used tarp to line it, drove out into the country to collect a load of bricks (thank you Freecycle), then Luca and Graeme spent one afternoon chipping away the mortar and lined them up.

Voila!

Through the course, I learnt that you can make your own soil, and crucially for me that it was all about carbon and nitrogen.

I don't know about anybody else on the course, but I loved the whole layering of the carbon (such as newspaper, brown grass cuttings, hay) and nitrogen (such as chicken pellets/horse poo, green leaves, fresh grass cuttings). Yes, I've heard mention of nitrogen before and people say to dig in manure, but until now all the advice has been a bit wishy washy.

Anyway, I found bags of horse poo by the roadside for 50c a bag, collected newspaper, all our grass cuttings, pruned trees and bushes in our garden for the green foliage (remember, nitrogen!), and bought other bits and pieces such as hay, mushroom compost and molasses.

Once you've put all the layers in and wait for a week or so, you can start planting straight away.

Layering the garden bed

Soaking the hay in water and molasses

Meanwhile, we got a few little surprises from the beautiful mushroom compost that we bought from Kim Margin...

We also made our own compost using the same recipe. The boys got shredding indoors, then soaked it in buckets, layering it with chicken pellets, horse poo, mushroom compost, hay, greenery, and vegetable scraps from the kitchen. 

A second bed by the garage next to our chilli plants 
and blueberry bush (well, bush by name, not by nature;
it's a stick in some soil at the moment with a fancy tag),
ready for some brassicas to go in. 

Still lots of room for more plants in the 'concrete' bed. 

Strawberries went into pots on Mother's Day, and we cleared some room for them to sit in the sun all day.

The kale is loving it here. Drilled a few holes in the bath and in went 

mint, thyme and tarragon. Also in pots: 

oregano, more tarragon (I can never have enough),

Vietnamese mint (thanks Nicola!), rocket,

basil, parsley and coriander.

Spinach, chamomile and spring onions on the left. Our old bed (right) isn't being neglected. 

Luca and I have just planted broccoli, cabbage and cauli, plus peas, marigolds and wild rocket.

Even as I sit here, I can see the leeks that still need to be planted (a fiddly job that keeps getting left to another day), the carrots, lettuce and watercress. I'll wait for Luca, because it's his garden too now.

Picking up alpaca poo in the Yarramalong Valley (sorry can't resist one of Graeme's jokes here: what is Kian saying when he's straining? al-pac-a-poo.... Geddit? C'mon, not even a little laugh? I'm still giggling at that one weeks later)...

Anyway, where was I? Yes, we're doing lots of things for the garden at the moment, and I'm glad to say I haven't visited a garden centre or DIY chain once. Driving out to farms for poo (why do I like poo more than manure?), borrowing a wheelbarrow from a friend to load bricks, shredding the paper, screeching the car to a halt with the boys in the back for a big black container....

I'm writing this down so it cements it for me. Gardening is as much about the doing, as it is about the harvesting. So while I have moments where I would love to have Jamie Oliver's gardener chap from Jamie At Home carrying bunches and baskets of organic goodness into my kitchen (doesn't everyone have that dream?), I'd probably be missing out on a whole load of life lessons.

This is still the very beginning of my gardening journey, but I feel I'm on the right track now. It was the perfect course for me to get me on the path of creating abundance. (So thank you Nicola*).

Because the goal that I've set myself is to have a kitchen garden I can be proud of within a year. All I have to do is learn to enjoy the getting there. 

* Nicola has a rather lovely free newsletter called Sprout that you can sign up to on her website. That's how it all started for me funnily enough. I got to know her that way and when her course came up, I had to do it.