http://aristophania.com/

Yay! A domain at last! Please update your bookmarks and I’ll see you on the other side!!

But this is awesome:

And I guess its why we bother with the driving! Its weird, living so far east, you have to drive for ages to get out of the city. Luckily we have becautiful ocean closeby. Tristan and I went to the beach the other day just to have a bit of a relax after a stressful day at uni and it was so nice. Except for people bringing their f**** dogs onto the sand when its not allowed! But the rest was lovely. I think I’m getting a little restless, it’ll be good to get away for a couple of days over Easter.

Tristan and I got engaged a few months ago too. We’re so happy and so’s our family. Not looking forward to organising the wedding itself… but at the same time I am? It’ll be an interesting one. Pretty freegan. Of course.

So I’m in the final year of my degree now. Which is playing havoc with my free time. It means my garden looks like this at the moment:

I can never seem to get on top of the kykuyu grass and STAY on top of it. I turn my back and wham, I can’t find the vegetables I was growing for all the grass. This is one of the reasons I’m looking forward to gardening in Cooma. Their grass is this weirdass colour and vegetables will stand out from it. Not like this stuff. It camoflages everything.

On the bright side, that massive pumpkin vine is not existing entirely in vain;

Its bigger than anything I’ve ever grown before, and its not ready yet! Imagine that!

Also my autumn crop of basil is happening. It actually started happening without my intent so there ya go. Self-seeding basil. Who’d have thought! Maybe its the mulching I’ve been doing? But as you can see, the mulch is pretty thin on the ground so maybe not…

Also, I’m really really REALLY excited to announce a brand new venture. I’m finally going to get into the homemade cosmetics business and start selling some products. Massage oils, moisturisers, soaps… that kind of thing. So being a typical architecture student, the first thing I did was design the logo;

Which in my opinion is beautiful! I’m super excited to get started, its just a matter of finding the free time to order the ingredients and actually make the stuff! But I’ll link you guys up when its done.

So far, I’ve gotten the water from my sneaky supplier in Cooma. Its well-water of the highest order and its waiting sealed up in pretty glass bottles till the time comes for exciting cosmetics making!

That’s sort of it with me at the moment. I haven’t really had much to do except university stuff. I can’t WAIT till I graduate and hopefully get a job in Canberra so I can begin my long trek southward. Exciting!!

But for now… my cat seems to want something. I wonder what…

(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!

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

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!

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’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!

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!