Travelling Well

One of my great joys about our journey, is seeing the joy in our daughters being when we get out and about picking free food. Its a stark contrast to her reaction to having to be dragged along to the supermarket which unfortunately, we do alot more often.

picking berries at our secret spot

Blackberries for eyes

While walking along Union Jack Creek, today, we came to where the water course ends, and this is a spot where she loves to let her imagination free. Often looking for gold,  Or finding some rock that might have a fossil in it, or as she did today, picking blackberries for a little picnic. Along the way, I noticed the proliferation of Bullrush,  Something I know was a staple indigenous food and can be eaten, but I am yet to try. There is also a proliferation of onion weed along this creek in the cooler months.

Despite having potentially edible plants all around us, on we went to the supermarket. While standing in the checkout queue,  with my pre packaged bags of lettuce, I mused on the absurdity of our food system. Things produced in mass quantities, and shoved into our fridges and cupboards as if through a funnel.  Everyday, millions upon millions of people living this way. We live this way, and if we are honest, I thought to myself, despite our best intentions and efforts, maybe we like living this way. Its easy to get discouraged about living differently, but you can only start where you are. What ever you do that is curbing your engagment with a consumptive society, is a good thing right?

So we picked a colander full of blackberries, and about a kilo of apples on the way home. Thats where we are starting. It gives us alot of joy and nourishment to do this.

The other thing that gives us, and me in particular, some nourishment, is our ability to produce compost from all our waste. I've written about this before on my other blog. But today, we started another "cook" using the litter cleaned out from the chook pen, some mown grass, a couple of buckets of kitchen scraps chopped up, the cleaned out waste from the pond, and a couple of shovels full of  wood ash from our fires. This is one of the things we are doing best at the moment, and as we keep doing it, we can only get better at it.

our kitchen waste about to be chopped

We all worked in the garden this afternoon. Ginny was pottering and planting some beans, snow peas and garlic, I was preparing the compost, and child was swinging on a gate. Which I told her off for, and later thought better of. What can be more important to a childhood than swinging on a garden gate? We try and do everything with love, but we arent perfect. We get it wrong sometimes.

 One of the core tenets of Permaculture principles that I love, is to observe.  I do this often in our garden and have done since we began planning it. Reflecting and absorbing its lessons. We observe our own actions, plans, and what effect we are having on our landscape.  I know I dont do everything right, but what would I learn if I had to have it all worked out, before anything was undertaken? I learn by doing. We observe, even our own lives to see where the things we love and are good for us lie, and how to cultivate them and nurture them so they bare more fruit. And we observe the areas that dont seem very sustainable and can be improved.  One supermarket we went to today gives us joy and nourishment as a family and people aswell as our bodies. The other saps our resolve, our resources and our energy. Giving us only a short term solution that forces us back to its sick unhealthy clutches again and again.  We know this. But, as I read this morning, it is better to travel well, than to arrive.

Better to travel well than arrive