Giving Christmas Trees

(Image borrowed from the Oxfam website)

I just placed the order for our Christmas tree from Oxfam.  It will be delivered for free somewhere between 12 & 15 December by volunteer drivers of 4WD club.  You can too if you live in metropolitan Melbourne.  Check them out.  Maybe you could volunteer as well. 

By buying a tree from Oxfam you will help them to provide long-term solutions to people experiencing poverty and injustice. Good one.

Beautiful fresh potatoes

Ok, do you remember when I decided to try planting potatoes in a tyre on top on concrete?  With newspaper on the bottom & just some compost...

Well, finally the plants have died off, so I decided to do a treasure hunt on the weekend to see what I could find.  To be honest, I wasn't actually expecting a lot.  I was beginning to think that the potatoes were all rotten as well because it has been so hot here, so you can imagine my excitement when I came across all of these little beauties!

This was just one tyre's worth of potatoes, I left the other tyre for the boys to do their own treasure hunt (much to their glee!).  So all in all we were left with double this amount of potatoes, by only planting 10 seed potatoes in 4 tyres on top of concrete.  We neglected it for the 4 months that passed, and were well rewarded.  The taste is quite different to the bought ones - better, sweeter, tastier, more solid.  We were eating by the bucket load.

Do the math and you'll see that it really is worth planting your own potatoes, even if you live in the inner city like I do! (you just might want to plant more if you have a bunch of hungry kids like I do ...)

Lessons to be learnt from rubbish

We just had our hard waste clean up this weekend just gone & I was really excited as it was a great way to clear out some of the crap that had accumulated around the edges of our life that we really didn't need anymore. We always try to be very careful with our decisions on what we purchase, we barely buy new, unless we really have to (knickers & food etc), and only buy when we really have to (the decision process, "do we need it, or do we just want it").

When we are getting rid of things, we look at their reusability, is there someone else that can use this, can we pass it on, op shop it, change it & reuse it, or is it past it? If it is past it, then out it goes.

So, that is how we got to have a bunch of stuff for the hard garbage. Not many people would pick up stuff from our pile, however, regretably there were a few things that I did put out, that probably could have still had a bit more life in them. I did put them out thinking that someone might chance upon them & take them away. They did not. They have now gone to landfill.

So on Saturday morning, I woke to the sound of the garbage truck scraping the old trolley that was ugly, but had really good wheels still (just took up too much space in my laundry) being broken & squashed, & my bubble burst as I imagined my muck becomming a blob of landfill that would never go away. I realised that I could have done better - with that & with other things.

• All of the metal could have been taken off things and taken to metal scrap yard.
• The timber - I am not sure, but maybe some of it could have been used be a salvage yard.
• The chairs might have been picked up by someone on Freecycle.
• The window frame could have gone on Freecycle too.
• The shopping trolley really should have gone to the op shop, the wheels were great, the handle great, it didn't even need new vinyl, I just didn't like the colour of it.

The only positive was that the table frame was picked up by someone - my neighbours across the road. They will hopefully make a top with it a little faster than we didn't (it has been waiting for us to do it for 3 years!).

We live, we learn.