The Sea Shepherd has launched its 2oo9/2010 anti-whaling campaign Operation Waltzing Matilda and they are already being harried by the Japanese who have employed two security vessels to prevent the Japanese whaling fleet from losing profit (like they did last year, and the year before) because of the Sea Shepherds. The Sea Shepherds have a new super-fast vessel which can only really be referred to as the BatBoat

(if Batman had a boat, it would be this one). Rarr BatBoat!

I think that the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is one of the most awesome activist groups ever. The extent that they go to – putting their own safety on the line in order to keep the cruel Japanese harpoons away from these amazing whales is just… so commendable. I’m so ashamed of the Australian Government and its lack of action with this. The Antarctic Whale Sanctuary is under Australia’s watch. We should be protecting what little is left of its ecosystem. Luckily our Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd has recently said that he will take the Japanese ‘beyond diplomacy’ to stop their illegal activities (whaling in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary is completely illegal) but we’ll see how far that goes. In the meantime, we just have to hope that the Sea Shepherd will fend them off and disrupt their profits. To learn more about the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society click the pirate flag! Arrr!

Image via Wikipedia

Is it just me or are the hot days getting worse? Its around 40C here at the moment and its horrible. I’ve gone and visited my parents (they have air conditioning and a large living room). Its great. It is making me wonder whether I’ll soon need to go out and buy my own air conditioning. Its too hot to work at home right now. I don’t remember it ever being this hot a few years back and I do wonder whether its the result of the ever-scary Climate Change.

Also half my vegetables have shrivelled up and died. Ugh.

By the title of this blog you might be thinking to yourself  “wow, these sound like really amazing organic hair products!” If you’re an Aussie you might even recognise the bottles from your woolworths/safeway shopping aisles… or even from your own bathroom!

Here’s a bit of a reminder anyway:

What’s interesting about these producs is that they have the word ‘Organic’ splashed across the front of them but they aren’t actually certified organic by any of the regulating bodies. They also say they’re ‘cruelty free’ without any certifications to back it up. They are also apparently free from Sodium Lauryl/Laureth Sulfate and other such bad ingredients (despite still containing other “Lauryl” and “Sulfate” ingredients). Their ingredient list is actually really really long. Disturbingly so. The first bunch of ingredients all seem pretty harmless. They usually state that they’re plant-based with helpful pointers like “from coconut oil” to let you know where they got their funny chemical-like words from. However… I’m thinking the casual shopper only really looks at the first four or five ingredients because after that the helpful plant-based pointers dissapear and ingredients like “DMDM Hydantoin” and “Methylchloroisothiazolinone” (which is a LONGASS WORD) start to appear. Even their Fragrance isn’t so great for you.

I took the liberty of running their “normal balance” shampoo and conditioner through the Skin Deep Cosmetic Safety Database to see what would come up. Here were my results…

• Shampoo – Came up with a danger rating of 5 out of 10

• Conditioner - Came up with a danger rating of 6 out of 10

It worries me because the “Big Bad Pantene” has danger ratings of about the same level (on average). Grr. Here I was buying something I thought was going to reduce the load of chemicals I inflict upon myself every day… but here I was merely adding to it!

This just goes to show that I need to read the labels more. And learn more about natural alternatives. I’m in the process of attempting to minimise my chemical exposure. Thanks to Skin Deep Cosmetic Safety Database I also now know my toothpase is also all kinds of evil. Who would have thought! Colgate. Tsk tsk tsk. Luckily I’ve already found an alternative for that. There’s an Aussie company called Miessence that makes great Mint Toothpastes and has a “zero out of ten” danger rating. They also do “zero danger” deoderants. Goodbye Rexona!

I feel better already!

Tristan and I finally got around to mowing and whippersnippering the backyard. Our lawn is infested with Kykuyu grass so it grows FAST. Which means it often gets the better of us and parts of the garden get cut off from access due to the jungle-like growth underfoot. We really need a goat or something but our place is a rental so I’m thinking… no.

Anyway, here’s what it looks like now!

It looked like it was about half the size before. My cats don’t know what to do with all the space. They seemed a little freaked out to be honest. Poor little pumpkins. This photo was taken standing about 1/3rd of the way into the garden so its actually bigger than this. You can’t see but along the fenceline on the left is where our veggie garden is. This merely serves as a reminder of how LITTLE space we actually use for gardening. Sigh.

Our potato patch… it looked bigger before we cut all the grass around it. We’ve finally succumbed and put out buckets, pots etc up off the ground – we kept losing them inamongst the grass. I forgot how MANY pots we had!

Some seedlings can you name them all? Going clockwise from the top right there’s carrots, basil, amaranth, at the bottom right there’s a mystery citrus and the bottom left is another mystery seedling. Looking forward to finding out what they are! Its been sprinkling rain all night so the soil looks lovely, eh. Not the usual Masc0t Sand. haha

Mr Sunflower No.2 is ready to pop! So excited about this, I’ve never grown sunflowers before! Still not convinced that it actually *is* a sunflower but at this stage there’s probably no other possibility. They’ve started bending to follow the sun which is adorable. I’m anthropomorphising plants. Its ridiculous.

And finally my pond. Waterchestnuts and Pondweed. I need to learn more about pond stuff… this is probably a little bit of this house that I can take with me when I leave this city. Sigh.

In other exciting news… I came across this youtube vid about a family that is pretty much doing what I want to do one day… except on a LOT less land. But I guess that just shows that you only need so much space to become self-sufficient. A FIFTH of an acre! Fancy that.

Have a good day everyone! I have my parents coming to visit tonight and we have some exciting news to share with them… I hope it goes down ok. Eeep!

I just collected in a bunch of fresh peas for dinner. Mm, yum yum!

I’ve realised that the best time to bring them in is when the little flower on the top is dying. I think that flower dies pretty much immediately after the plant stops giving the pod nutrients. So it stops growing at that point and after that the outside of the pod starts to go really leathery. Once its dried out then the peas shrivel and taste gross. But I guess that’s when they’re good to use as seeds for the next generation. They look just like the seeds that I grew these pea plants out of. I guess we’ll see next season!

Anyway, here are the peas all ready to go…

Now to research pea-soup!

If your house gets a lot of cockroaches or other creepy crawlies and you don’t want to use chemical bug spray then try spray-on Canola Oil.

One day there was a roach in my kitchen and I grabbed for the flyspray but I actually picked up the canola oil spray by accident! Anyway, so I sprayed the bug with the canola oil and it ended up dead in about the amount of time I’d expect bug spray to kill it! I think the oil gets into their breathing apparatus and they choke I think. Also they’re sitting in this pool of slippery oil so they can’t go anywhere. Since that first bug I’ve used canola oil spray all the time to fight bugs and it works like a charm. And I reverted to cooking with olive oil rather tha spray on canola. Eww.

Also the other thing I do to catch bugs in a trap is to put a dollop of vegemite into an old jar and then spray down the inside with the canola oil so its slippery and they can’t get out. The first roach will be attracted to the vegemite, climb in there and die… and then all the other roaches will be attracted to their fallen commrade! Anyway, I haven’t seen the canola oil thing posted anywhere before so I figured I’d share!

Sorry I haven’t updated in a while. I’m a little snowed under with uni work and we had a couple of British couchsurfers visit as well. They were great. They did heaps of dishes and now I know how to cook meatballs! Its been raining a lot here lately. The last few days have been a bit of a downpour! Which is good because look what happened to my garden!

There’s an absolute riot of shapes. Which is great because the pests that live around the place have no way of finding the food they really want to decimate inamongst the plants they can’t stand. In this pic there’s beans, peas, carrots, corriander, parsley, spinach and some greens for salads. Its at about the right density so that everything can get enough sun and root space, but not so sparse that its inneficient.

Closeup of the peas. They are SO sweet and juicy! I’ve never grown these before and they flowered all these pretty white flowers. I’m really glad I didn’t decide to pick the flowers and put them in a vase because the flowers turned into pea pods! Peas are part of the legume family so once the pods have been harvested I’ll be turning the plants into the soil so it can fix nitrogen into it. Unfortunately most of the nitrogen is in the peas themselves… but I’m getting that!

Hehe. Buddah is happy. I’m finding its hard for me to remember what my garden looks like from week-to-week so taking photos is really helping me remember how quickly or slowly things are growing. And also what was planted where. Hopefully next spring I can refer back to the photos and improve upon my technique. I think this year’s tomatoes will grow a lot better than last year’s because of the experience I gained through my failures last year. My carrots have done better in the month or so they’ve been growing this year than what they did in a full year lastyear!

Othercat relaxing. Its a rare sight. She’s sitting on top of Chestah’s old hutch. Poor Chestah. Sam hasn’t gotten a replacement yet. Not sure if he intends to. Hopefully he does though. I’ve not been able to ignore the sheer amount of extra composting we do now compared to when he was alive to eat our scraps. But yes, the success of this photo is mostly due to my photoshopping skills and not my photography.

Anyway, hopefully a more insightful post soon! Be good, grow stuff!

I just finished watching the developer’s preview of the new google program Google Wave. Its wonderful and I got more and more excited at every part I watched.

If you haven’t heard anything about the protocol yet… its basically like a live document that lives on google’s servers and you can invite people to the document and everyone can edit or add stuff all at once. You could edit the main body of the document or add your own comments wherever you like as little post-it-notes. There are a lot of applications being developed for stuff like twitter, adding in and editing images and flow-diagrams… pretty much everything.

But the thing that really excited me was… if I opened a wave in a lecture theater and then invited all my classmates to the same wave, we could all collaboratively add to the lecture notes and we would have the BEST notes of all time! Imagine, I’d only have to add a sentence or two of what I thought was important and if everyone else did the same we would have all the notes. Its a whole new level of lazyness and efficiency!

Unfortunately I haven’t yet been invited to participate so I can’t try it out tomorrow in class, but I’m sure its only a matter of time. Very excited! And to think… the entire protocol was pretty much designed in Sydney (my city). That just warms my heart, it does

This morning I woke to a bit of a shock (no, not apocalyptic dust this time). Tristan came into the bedroom and said ‘Chestah’s dead’.

This is Chestah… isn’t he cute?

Chestah (his full name was Chestah Draws. Haha. Actually no his full name was Chestah Draws Pictures) was a fabulous contribution to our garden. He ate up all our scrap vegetables and kept the lawn down AND gave us great poopy pellets to put on the vegetable patch. He was also my housemate’s first pet. He was pretty friendly too, really. The cats found him rather uninteresting which was great (one of my cats loved to sit ontop of his hutch) and occasionally we let him out to go run around and hump things. He was housed in his hutch most of the time and we moved it around so he was always on a fresh patch of grass.

Anyway, apparently when Tristan went out onto the front verandah to stretch his knee (which he does every morning because he’s a crotchety old man despite being in his early 20’s), our neighbour wandered over with a plastic bag. She opened it and showed Tristan the dead creature inside and asked if it was ours. Obviously it was poor Chestah. Tristan took the bag and we put it in the shade and called our housemate Sam. Sam was upset, obviously. Also Chestah’s hutch was really roughed up. The bars on one side had been bent as though Chestah had tried to push his way out. Also the two doors on the front of the hutch looked like they had been forced open and there was blood and fur on them. Obviously he’d gotten out by the two doors. Also the lid of the hutch was slightly off. It was all really weird. I wouldn’t have expected Chestah to be so strong! Chestah’s face was all messed up too. It looked like he’d squashed his head when he tried to get out of the hutch.

Also the hutch had some of Chestah’s fave foods in it. Corn is one of his bestest most favourite foods ever! Why would he have been so desperate to get out of his hutch when he had so much corn? Anyway, so it was weird.

Later on, the lady from next door came back. A bit about her… she volunteers her backyard as a shelter for dogs. Big monster dogs. And I have a confession to make. I *REALLY* hate big dogs. I think they are just horrible and my experience over the last 24 hours has more than proved my hatred of them.

And this is apparently the monster dog that jumped the 2meter fence between our yards (FROM A STANDING START) and killed poor Chestah. What’s worse… here’s the description for it on the adoptions website…

Nikita is a extremly friendly dog who loves people especially childen, she also get along with all dogs that she meets. She has also been in contact with cats and is uninterested in them unlike typical Huskies. Nikita needs a home with children and possibly another dog as she is a very social dog and would become bored easily and destructive if left alone all day in a yard. She is also a very good jumper and can easily jump a fence that is just over a metre tall without a run up, so a yard with at least 2 metre tall fencing is required.

The lady has offered to buy a new rabbit for Sam, but he’s a little sad about losing one and isn’t sure he wants another. I’m sorely tempted to complain to the council. She keeps about 5-6 dogs in her backyard waiting for them all to be re-homed. Our last 3 or 4 months have been endless barking, howling, yelping and fighting. A constantly changing array of animals living there. And now apparently these dogs can get into my backyard? What if I’m gardening one morning, crouched down over vegetables and one of them decides that I look tasty! I know I have a bit of a phobia (an incident involving three german shepherds, a tennis ball and myself, aged 6) but I’m not sure what to do now. I want to be outdoorsy, but knowing that these things can get into my yard is going to stop me from going out alone. So should I complain? Should I talk to her? How do I stop these things from getting into my yard? (And no, guns are illegal in the city) Any advice would be great…