We have a huge cold front coming in, just sitting off the West Coast, and are scrambling to get ready for the gale-force winds, torrential downpours, cold and hail forecast to go on for the better part of four days. The gales arrived this morning, the deluge is coming overnight. Brett and I finished some …
Falling Off, For Nerds
To Isaac Newton, with love. 😉 Just a little aside about falling off horses. Using Newtonian physics, we can break down the fall into a horizontal component and a vertical component. Horizontally, the rider continues in the direction taken at parting from the horse. In the absence of atmospheric friction and gravity, the rider would …
Magazine Articles – June 2019
In newsagencies this month I have articles in Grass Roots No.253 (Podcast Pandemonium) and in The Owner Builder No.213 (Low Waste Building Site). Podcast Pandemonium is an article aimed at the less technology-savvy part of the DIY / self-sufficiency community, not all of whom have grown up with IT, and not all of whom understand …
Red Hot Sunday, January 2014
(In Praise of Farm Dogs Everywhere) The day was red hot, and you could tell it would be a scorcher at dawn. The sun stung like a bluebottle at 8am, and the birds were silent. Horses and donkeys queued up at the paddock gate for fly veils and release onto the common, which is surrounded …
The Garden Of Edam
In the beginning, there was the void. And God said, let there be cheese, and there was cheese. God saw that the cheese was good, and made more cheese. And behold there was Gouda, Wensleydale, Gruyère, Cheddar, Camembert, Mozzarella, Havarti, Parmesan, Feta, those little BabyBel things, and all manner of cheese. And God created man …
Burning Days
The following piece was written in order to allow readers to walk in our shoes as we engage in cool small-scale mosaic burning of the sclerophyll bushland in our 50ha on-farm conservation area in the autumn while also juggling the 10ha smallholding on which we grow much of our own food using organic and permaculture …
Christmas Chemistry
It’s Christmas, it’s Christmas, the Pudding is flatFlatter than the mat on which the cat satWith a consistency of Blu-Tack to the power of threeMethinks that someone forgot to add the NaHCO3Never mind, it’s time again for the carols to singThe reindeer bells are ringing, let them ringRudolf’s nose is red, and resplendently soToo much …
Music Reviews Get Curiouser And Curiouser
I’m not a music critic. I trained and worked as a scientist, and from my late 20s on taught university-entry Biology, Geography, Physics, Chemistry, English and English Literature – because Hermiones exist in the real world. Since our tree change hitting 40, I write in public spaces and run a small organic farm on the …
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Flower Memorials
May 2018 The week after the chestnut mare was put down last November, the veterinary hospital sent a card and a packet of wildflower seeds – now that was a great idea. When my Arabian mare was buried back in 2014, I’d wanted to plant a beautiful tree on top to mark the spot, but …