Slow Living 2012 - January (belated)

This week I popped in to visit Christine over at Slow Living Essentials - I have a lot of Lovely People to visit in my Favourite Blogs List and not enough time to visit them all as often as I'd like, so I have to ration myself around you know! Anyway, she has started up an on line journal and challenged the rest of us to join in and record all the little positive changes that are so easily forgotten about as we go about our daily lives.
I have decided to tag along ........ after a bit of deliberation .......
Will I be diligent in posting? We'll see....
Will I have done enough positive things in my month to even have anything to post about? Maybe...
Is anyone interested anyway? Perhaps....

I often feel that I don't accomplish enough of anything that's really worthwhile, so having to wrack my brain (and my photo's) to remember what I did achieve each month and then making a list, can only be a good thing. Right?

So, here is the original idea at Slow Living Essentials and below is my list of achievements for the month of January 2012

Nourish -  we have been eating so much of our own garden produce that I am often quite giddy with delight!! Due to moving interstate and renting for a while, we haven't had a garden for a few years so it's just too exciting to be eating fresh homegrown, organic food again! This month there have been peas and snow peas, spinach and lettuce, bandicooted potatoes, garlic (harvested in Dec, so not sure if that counts) fat Spanish onions, turnips and the first tender zucchini's. On the sweeter side we had red and black currants, plums - both our own and foraged ones, luscious strawberries and juicy rhubarb. And of course lots of fresh eggs from the girls!
I'm thinking now that we have certainly been very well nourished!!

Prepare - you are probably sick of hearing about my peas but I have to mention them again...... I froze 7kg's of peas, so we'll be self sufficient in peas for quite a while! We went blueberry picking and froze about 14kg's........ and I made a lot of plum jam!!

Reduce - now thats a bit harder to remember but I can think of a couple of things. There were the cot rungs that we repurposed for seed markers and to hold the polypipe hoops up for bird netting. (which I've just discovered were first used in Dec but we have made more, so maybe it still counts!) The plum seeds leftover from jam making were put to good use in some little felt bags for play.

Create - I've been crocheting a lot of dishcloths out of cotton yarn that I've picked up at op shops here and there. They crochet up so quickly and make me feel like I've achieved grand things! There was also the driftwood trivet sourced from the beach. In February I will be making a note of the things I've created because I'm sure there have been more....!

Green - I'm not really sure what to put here. I re-use the odd plastic bags we get for rubbish bags, but mostly use those recyclable cloth bags for shopping. I go op shopping a lot - but maybe that should come under the Enjoy heading ;o)

Grow - the garden is growing zucchini, beans, tomatoes, potatoes, lettuce, beetroot, spinach, carrots, radish, cucumber, basil, kale, rhubarb, onions and some pretty flowers! And looking at this list is oh so very satisfying - I see them in the garden but reading the list is still a surprise!

Discover - I've been reading a Christmas gift, "Gardening South of Australia" by Steve Solomon so that I can understand the Tasmanian gardening year a bit more! "The Complete Root Cellar Book"was one I borrowed from the library but I have to be honest and say that I only flicked through it and handed it to the Best Man, who, I'm happy to say, was quite taken with the idea......... after the extension, the poly tunnel, the cubby, the fencing, the.........!!

Enhance - I bartered a bag of frozen peas in exchange for a bag of fresh beans. Not sure about this one so I'll need to be a bit more aware of how to go about this 'enhancing' business!

Enjoy - I have love, love, loved the January break from lessons!! We have had over 3 months off due to our holiday to the mainland and have just started our morning lessons again last week. January was the most relaxing month though - holiday over, Christmas over, and a whole month just to do as I please....... well, more or less!

So, there you have it. Perhaps not as much as some people, perhaps more than others, but either way I feel quite good about my life in January! And I also think that I'm going to quite like seeing this written account at the end of each month - it will be nice to have all our endeavours collected together in one place to wonder at and feel proud of!!

It's not too late to join in - how about it? If you don't have a blog (so you can brag to world about it!), what about a small 'real life' journal just to record all the little things that are so easy to forget, yet make you feel sooo satisfied when you look back on them.