Enough whimsical fuckery about goats and good times…onto some serious shit! MILKWOOD PDC!!! For those of you who don’t know what a PDC is (and I was one of you up until a mere few months ago)…it’s a Permaculture Design Certificate. What is Permaculture, I hear you ask? Well, as I can’t quite yet put exact words to paper with a sufficiently decent response, you can find the technical definition here. In my own personal opinion however, it means designing systems for permanent human culture. This sentence in all it’s short and sweet glory implies that the way we are living right now is impermanent – simply put, the majority of us don’t live sustainably and at some point we will have to admit that we are headed for self implosion if we don’t make drastic changes. Permaculture is about more than sustainable living though – it goes beyond sustainable to suggest that we should not only sustain ourselves but create an abundance of sustenance and not only that, but in terms of agriculture, it should be regenerative, that is, to improve on what came before it (i.e. soil quality). So…I took the plunge and committed to two weeks on a very remote farm near Mudgee where I camped out (Me! Camping! I know!), using humanure toilets and fire-powered showers very happily with 23 other willing participants on what I feel has been another stepping stone in my path towards a new way of life. It was an intensive two weeks of classes (both classroom based and practical) from 8am until dinner (630pm). Followed by washing away the day’s dirt and then either awesome conversation around the campfire or hardcore study, depending on whether you were a nerd like me or not. Then a slightly fitful sleep thanks to a multitude of factors – the gale force winds, the torrential rain, the persistent coughing of the sheep in the field next to us or simply the uneven ground. But who’s complaining? Not me!

The most inspiring part of the course (and it’s pretty hard to narrow down), were the lecturers. Nick Ritar runs Milkwood with his wife Kirsten Bradley and they have a sweet little dude of a son called Ashar. Nick is a former IT programmer and artist and now currently teaches PDCs as a way to make an income from living on a non-producing farm. Jesse Lemieux is a Vancouver native with years of experience mainly in bio-solid management and forestry. We also had the privilege of having Darren Doherty drop by to lecture on keyline design for a few days, and what an amazing few days they were. The most inspiring thing about these guys and the way that they lecture is that they have spent time doing numerous jobs in various industries and have all managed to come to similar conclusions about how we should be respecting the Earth more (but in a totally non-hippie type of way), and this in turn has lead them all to careers in Permaculture.

Before starting the course, pretty much everyone who signed up was under the impression it was going to be two weeks of gardening. Not so much! We actually did very little practical work, considering that we had an entire Bill Mollison (the founder of Permaculture) text book to get through. Each day we covered roughly a chapter and even then I think most of us felt like we skimmed through it. What a huge amount of invaluable information. In a nutshell, and at a very simple glance, we covered concepts and themes in Permaculture design, pattern understanding, climatic factors, water harvesting and storage, soils, earthworks, and aquaculture and finished up with “strategies of an alternative global nation”. For anyone who is interested, a more insightful way to summarise the ethics of Permaculture can be found in Bill’s foreword:

“The world can no longer sustain the damage caused by modern agriculture, monocultural forestry, and thoughtless settlement design, and in the near future we will see the end of wasted energy, or the end of civilisation as we know it, due to human-caused pollution and climate changes. Strategies for necessary changes in social investment policy, politics itself, and towards regional or village self-reliance are now desperately needed, and examples of these strategies are given (in the design manual). It is hoped that this manual will open the global debate that must never end, and so give a guide to the form of a future in which our children have at least a chance of a reasonable existence.”

Inspiring, right? As was the course. I recommend that anyone who has an interest in nature, gardening, proper consumption of resources or just plain decency do a PDC – you won’t regret it. Besides the amazing overload of information I got to come home with (NB: you will be tested on this information!), my fellow PDCers were among the finest people I know. Not a dirty hippie in sight (ok, maybe one or two – ha!). But mainly just people from all walks of life, trying to find a better way than they know about now. Overall, an amazing and exceptional group of people who I feel will be in my life for a long time to come.

For more information on the PDC I did, you can go to: www.milkwoodpermaculture.com.au.

Oh, in the event that you are wondering about the good ol’ bucket of legs at the top there? Billy the Bushdog prepared those sheep personally – farm raised, killed and eaten, exactly the way it should be. I told him I don’t currently partake in, I just document.

So my bro has been a vego for some years now but committed to the Vegan lifestyle last year and hasn’t looked back. I thought in order to convince my parental units that we are actually worth keeping as children, I would attempt to make an entirely Vegan Christmas dinner. My Dad thought this was blasphemous and stated a number of times that “I built my dream home down the coast so I could eat big fat pigs here for three weeks over Christmas and you are ruining my dream Katharine”, as well as the always entertaining “I didn’t defend this country so we could eat tofu. I defended it so we could eat animals. Sheep and cows, predominantly”. That aside, he loved the shit out of all I had to offer that night (could have also had something to do with the fact that he snuck a ham leg onto the table).

My menu consisted of:

Vegan cheese and bacon potato skins (greasy and delicious!)

A peanut and lentil roast with mushroom gravy

Steamed cauliflower and broccoli with Vegan cheese sauce

Maple glazed brussel sprouts

Rosewater poached fruits with pistachio icecream

and Vegan creme brulee

a vegan good time was had by all!

New Years cheer followed shortly after our lovely and stress-free Christmas (I’ve worked out you can avoid family breakdowns and all forms of stress by simply banning my mother from the kitchen). Mark and Sal ventured down to the coast house with us where we all chipped in to prepare an omnivorous New Years dinner. I made corn chowder and veggie burgers (traditional!) and for dessert an amazing apricot and berry cobbler. I say amazing as I expected it to be average, but surprised myself by raising the Vegan baked goods bar (please note the bar remains in an ever-fluctuating state).

My very best friend Sally (say with slightly sarcastic tone) seemed to think that the fact that I am into baking and karate was some sort of hilariously ridiculous situation that needed to be made fun of, so her and Mark drove three suburbs over to purchase me some ninjabread men….I think they thought I would be offended but I love the shit out of these radical little dudes. Shame that the end result could never be destined to look like the ones on the package…..

So that was nice relaxing time that didn’t involve anything particularly farmy or goaty….we did get some outdoor action though…my dad had wanted to swim from the jetty in Narooma around to the beach on the other side of the bridge. Apparently not having the inclination to do it himself, he made us feel bad for having been boozed the whole holiday and forced us to come with him. Sally got sunscreen in her eyeball and complained to Mark the whole time, who reminded her constantly that she was dragging him down (from the boogy board that was keeping them afloat), Dad snorkelled off amongst the sting rays and the fishing lines and I realised that the ocean isn’t as scary as I had once thought. Although it is still pretty scary.

Sorry for the severe drought in the desert landscape of my blog posts dear readers!  In between working an average 50 hour week spread amongst four jobs for the last four months, awaiting the arrival of my French friend and preparing to move to Melbourne, I didn’t find the time I usually make for blogging efforts. Apology! So…a few minor updates of the goings on since the end of last year before any real news or anything of interest at all….

Verity and I bombarded Ash at the RSPCA after she had advised me that they have GOATS there….bring on the goaty good times….

My father had some time off over the Christmas period. He once asked me how he could be “less one dimensional”. I replied that usually people do this by getting “interests” or “a hobby” and then investing some time into these things to mean your life is not all about work. I’m not sure exactly how much time he has since invested into obtaining more dimensions, the only thing I do know is that perhaps he reads my blog occasionally. I know this because when I arrived home one day before Christmas, there was my father, with a massive grin painted on his face, and an array of vegan baked goods that he had personally made (I assume as he had nothing else to fill his time with?). You have officially added three more dimensions to Alan….(1) the ability to bake both vegan and (mostly) edible products without instruction from Patsy, (2) being amazing and (3) presentation skills. GO DAD.

So for anyone who wonders why I don’t feel the urge to sit in an office all day….this is one of the reasons….

Meanwhile, my new boss is lovely and takes every opportunity to teach me something new…like how awesome Mother Nature is, in that she creates radical things like this passionfruit flower….I didn’t tell him, but I think I already knew Mother Nature was pretty awesome….

Working in a nursery does make me think I might want to study Horticulture at some point, so I’m going to meet the universe half way and enrol in a Permaculture Design course in Mudgee for two weeks in February. If I am honest, I wanted to do the course anyway. I’d heard a lot about Permaculture in Portland (best city in the woooorrllld!) and also that it was invented and developed in Australia, so what better place to do a course run by the founders of Permaculture?? I went to a lecture at the ANU the other night by Joel Salatin and although he didn’t shed light on a whole host of things I didn’t already know, he was an amazing public speaker and super inspirational. His goal is to feed the world through regenerative agriculture and I think he’s onto something there…one interesting point he raised is that people don’t go hungry because there is not enough food…they go hungry because 50% of the world’s produced food goes to waste before it can be eaten….deteriorating while being moved thousands of kilometres, reaching it’s use-by date on the supermarket shelf or sitting in trucks at checkpoints in war zones. Pretty sad. So I guess the question is, what are we going to do about this?

So I had to go through the painstaking process of job applications a few weeks back. I didn’t want to go back to the restaurant for a lot of shifts – it seems to be the story of my life – so I thought that before I decide upon my next plan of attack for life, I would get something random to bulk out my working week…well, something random certainly came along! Initially I had applied to a café and to a nursery (as a delivery driver – how nice would it be to cruise around listening to triple j and hang out with flowers all summer?). The guy at the café basically said “come here now” and the nursery manager said “do you have any experience in retail? Because I have advertised for a horticulturalist/merchandiser at one of our stores”. “Well, that’s great, except I am totally clueless about plants”. “At this point, I don’t care”. So, here I am, working full-time as a merchandiser for a nursery. It’s awesome! I make the store look pretty, hang out with the flowers and get bombarded with questions I don’t know how to answer….meanwhile, I took on one shift at the cafe, so add this to the restaurant and the reception gigs and I pretty much booked solid…but feeling pretty good about it…

Props to Annie (pictured with her arse in a box here….nice!) who I worked with on my first day…she’s a radical little lady who just graduated from Interior Architecture in Melbourne and is going to work over the summer here before going to work on a cattle ranch in Western Australia. It was nice to meet someone I had some things in common with. I mean, when you tell people that you have a background/degree in design of any sort and then mention that you voluntarily worked on farms for 6 months, had the time of your life and are more than a little obsessed with goats, they generally raise an eyebrow. Not to mention the amount of eyebrows raised by people who regularly see me in heels. But Annie didn’t raise an eyebrow…she has the same kind of background and is probably headed down the same path…the one where you grab life by the balls and lead it down with you.

SO…..sorry for the delay in postings my loyal followers! I estimated not long ago that I am currently working 65 hour weeks on average, so no time for blog updates apparently. Said 65 hour work week comprises four different jobs in order to pay off the thrashing I gave my credit card over the last few years…I think they call it “responsibility”. Me no likey. More on new jobs later. Meanwhile, the Vegan cupcake extravaganza continues with my most successful batch yet! Coconut and lime! Yeah baby! I knew they would look cute – wasn’t sure about the taste….BUT…best ever!! The coconut was creamy, the lime tangy and the combination out of control…these are a new favourite, for sure!

So I’ve taken to cooking for may parents a lot lately…something to do with my Mum being interested in Veganism for health reasons and my Dad being told he is in the early stages of Type 2 Diabetes. No good! So a while back, I decided to make a Mediterranean-style gnocchi – check it out….

Around the same time, I made a quinoa and lentil curry. I got the recipe from www.fatfreevegan.com….the only thing that I can say sucks sometimes about Vegan cooking (and really, the only thing), is that because as a general rule, recipes are adapted from a recipe containing meat or dairy, or any number of other things that Vegans probably don’t eat…they often get it…well, wrong. Not always, but I have to say my fail rate is pretty awesome. This particular recipe was obviously adapted from a much creamier recipe that was full of fat and whatnot and when I put it all together…well…it was basically just some vegetables and some lentils. Not what the picture of the recipe (obviously off the original website!) illustrated. So I ended up adding some coconut cream and curry powder and turned it into a curry. Voila! Disaster averted…I guess my point is (I know, it’s so hard to pinpoint sometimes)…that there is always room for error in Vegan cooking but you just have to be resourceful and keep at it….it usually turns out to be ammmaaaazzzziing!! On a side note, I have been off grains for about five days now and I feel ridiculously energised….with all the hours I have been working lately, I had a bit of a meltdown last week and wasn’t handling it all whilst dealing with shitty energy levels…I went into Deek’s (grain free bakery in Canberra) one day for lunch and saw this poster that said “recharge your batteries!”, “increase energy!”, “feel awesome!”….in regards to giving up grains (but suggesting that you replace them with other, lower G.I. carbs such as quinoa and chia to up your energy levels)..so I thought…hhhmm…that’s what I want to do, right? So I did it. I won’t go into details of what I have been eating, but let me tell you, that I don’t feel hungry, except when I know I should eat, and Deek’s totally delivered  on their promise…my energy levels are totally back up. Check me out, I have to work at 8am tomorrow and I’m blogging at nearly midnight. And I know I’ll be fine…don’t think I could have said that last week. What I could say last week is how amazing my Vegan macaroni and cheese turned out (for the second time!!). Cheese you say! But how?? Pretty simple actually. White sauce, spices, nutritional yeast….amazing. Even my father, the cheeseaholic claims it’s totally edible. That means Vegans give it five stars.

So, I am thinking about starting a Vegan cupcake stand at my local markets. This doesn’t necessarily mean that I will actually follow through with said plan (as with most ingenious ideas I come up with), but it does mean that I will have to cook batch after batch of scrummy cupcakes to test out whether this could be a viable business plan or not. I made my first two batches the other day – both lemon, one coloured with faux cochineal, which I think may have scared some people off a little. Upon returning home with only a few of the second batch left, I said to my lovely new housemate Philly – “I made cupcakes for you today!”. “I made cupcakes for you today!”, was her ecstatic reply. What a dream relationship. Housemates that cook cupcakes for one another, uninstructed. I have to tell my avid readers that both types (mine lemon with lemon frosting and Philly’s chocolate and coconut with strawberries) were amazing and murdered equally as fast…..now all I need to do is come up with the perfect name for this perfect cupcake business…..’DD cups’ perhaps? Or maybe the slightly more appropriate ‘Double V cups?”…..

Got this recipe from Chloe Coscarelli who, coincidentally, is my new hero and the first ever vegan winner of cupcake wars (on the food network, which, if you don’t have Foxtel/cable, you may not have had the pleasure of watching). It’s a vegan base with a white bean paste with butternut pumpkin, spinach, apple and caramelised onion. Super amazing! Not surprisingly (to me), it went down a treat with the meat eaters that I served it to also…tomorrow…vegan cupcake experiments! Yee ha!!!

So, when anybody asks me why I decided to embark on my recent WWOOFing journey, they usually ask questions like “Did you grow up on a farm?”, “Have you always had an interest in farming?” or “Do you want to own a farm eventually?”….no, no and uh….maybe! But to truly answer the Why of it…I have to trace it back to the last four or five years that my parents have been visiting Tuross. Tuross is on the southern coast of New South Wales (for anyone who hasn’t been here), and although surrounded by water on one side, the other side offers rolling hills, an array of farm animals and a general feeling of being in the country. Whilst searching for their perfect retirement property and eventually finding and building on it…..our family probably visited Tuross…well, too many times to remember. During this time, I started to feel a strong affiliation with the countryside. What was going on here? I had never felt like this before…it had always been my dream to move to a big city, join the rat race and move into a studio apartment that I would be ecstatic about even being able to accommodate a single bed. My mother had ridden horses all her life, up until I was about 14 and at no time had I wanted anything to do with them. With horse rides came responsibility (not to mention the cleaning up of horse shit and the potential to take a huge hoof in the face). So what had changed? I’m still not sure really, but I think it had something to do with the clean air, my newly developed fascination with goats and a general desire to live somewhere other than the concrete jungle. So there you have it – Tuross is the reason I decided to go on this journey and the fact that those feelings were genuine made the journey what it was – life changing. My parents now have a lovely little piece of paradise here and we headed down this past weekend to celebrate my Mumina’s 52^nd birthday……rolling hills and horses here I come…..