Autumn at Home
A glimpse into our homegrown, homemade, homeschooling life
A side effect of a deep connection and alignment to the natural world is the heightened influence the seasons have on my mood, energy and aura. I’m feeling really autumnal at present. My brain is digging over what feels like piles and piles of compost, sifting through thoughts and ideas and musings and wants and longings and needs and to-dos. I keep finding myself trapped in an introspective mindset, my focus continually being tugged inward. I appear ‘checked out’ as my husband noted last night, without meaning to be. How can I explain that by forces unseen I’m being pulled to ponder on all that summer has gifted me, now that my frenetic creativity energy has waned. I’m ruminating on this season of life’s harvest, wondering what to consume, what to preserve, what to bottle and what to freeze, what to share and what to hoard, what to let go of freely and return to the earth.
This process feels timely and necessary. Autumn offers both the opportunity to reflect and to plan. To strip down and pare back for a quiet, restful winter so I may bloom again come spring and fruit abundantly in summer. I know this in theory, but I’m feeling it in my body this year. I’m being summoned to stocktake whether I want to or not. To fight this urge is futile, so I surrender. To mulling over and dwelling on and sitting with questions I have no answers to. As I accept this surrender, I feel a surge of gratitude emerge.
I’m grateful:
To have a little space and time to ease myself through these feelings. That even when overwhelmed by it, I feel so bloody lucky to being living this life.
To have a garden with a gigantic list of tasks to attend to but that feed us and nourishes us.
To have a house that never looks clean but always feels homely.
To have curious, boisterous, perpetually hungry, messy, rambunctious, creative and inspiring children to care for and share my days with.
To have a husband who sees me, supports me, challenges me, infuriates me, inspires me, collaborates with and embraces me.
To have fabric to sew, wool to knit, books to read, pencils to etch, pens to scribe, coffee beans to grind, seeds to sow, flowers to pick, jars to fill, eggs to collect, weeds to pull.
I’m grateful for it all.
Homegrown
Putting spiritual harvests aside, the crops we have abundantly reaped of late have been quinces, tomatoes and pumpkins. Our quince tree has proved itself worth it’s weight in literal gold, a reliable giver of both gorgeous blooms and delicious fruit for a second year running. Plucking the glowing orbs amidst the golden evening light barefoot feels about as close to being in the garden of eden as you can get.
Harvesting all together has become a beautiful family ritual. There is something magical about lifting the veil of a fruit tree net to at last feel in your hands the treasure you’ve been patiently waiting to ripen. Before me as I type this, two Rainbow Lorikeets hang upside down from bowed quince tree branches, nibbling on the fruit we intentionally left to share with our feathered friends. Not long before an Eastern Rosella was at the same task, all whilst our chickens roam freely around the base, gobbling up the tiny morsels the wild birds drop or discard.
There is no such thing as waste in nature and none of our gathered quinces were left to chance. The bulk of our haul was transformed into jam by my preservationally gifted husband. Not surprisingly we’ve already polished off a whole jar of this fragrant, floral delight. I also whipped up a quince crumble and delivered a small box full to a friend.
All our tomatoes and pumpkins this year were self seeded. After my heirloom seedlings failed to survive the springtime snail armageddon, I was relieved to see little green shoots arise from our homemade compost which we filled up our front garden beds with last year. And they went gang busters! Luck of the draw meant no control over the varieties which flourished but we haven’t bought a tomato in months and I don’t see us needing to buy a pumpkin for months to come.
This weekend we went to town on our front garden - as well as decimating tomato town and ripping out the pumpkin patch, we dug out the last batch of spuds and a full beds worth of half-eaten, rat nibbled beetroots. Inspired by
and her sage gardening words, we then proceeded to spread six stock bags full of horse manure through what will be our main winter veg beds.The children have been nightly raiding the carrot patch and popping the last of our backyard cherry tomatoes in their mouths. The zucchinis are long gone and so too the leafy greens, but there are new lettuce & spinach seedlings on the way, and plenty more seeds to plant in the coming weeks including broccoli, coriander, kale, silverbeet, peas, onions and always more parsley.
Our stone fruit trees are shedding their skins in preparation for hibernation but our citrus trees are just waking up. Our beloved lemon tree is holding hundreds of about-to-turn-yellow lemons, tiny limes, mandarins and blood orange bulbs are pleading for rain to help them swell.
A few weeks back my beloved permaculture group helped weed and prune our large perennial herb garden and this has opened up lots of pockets for new plants. My husband has been bitten by the herbal bug these last months and has been devouring books and teachings on herbal medicine so we are really excited to flesh out our medicinal plantings in this space when time and money allows. We are lucky to have inherited so many established herbs already such as rosemary, lemon verbena, sage, oregano, lavender and mint but we would love to add echinacea, chamomile, nettles and more.
The long-term design of our garden is always evolving and shapeshifting. I’m leaning into the Apply Self-Regulation and Accept Feedback principle of permaculture and this is emphasising the need to keep moving the majority of our annual food crops into our front garden. Our visually beautiful backyard grid of beloved apple crates are coming to the end of their life cycle. The soil is spent, the linings have sunk and the timber is crumbling. They are no longer able to produce healthy, hardy crops and it’s time to begin phasing them out. How we will tackle this and what we will replace them with is uncertain, but also exciting. In an ideal world, where both time and money were no object, I’d enrol myself in that PDC (permaculture design course) that I’ve been fantasising about completing for years and dream up a gloriously abundant, site specific food forest. One day, in another life season, I hope I can.
Homemade
As well as all things quince in our kitchen, we’ve been baking muffins, bread, bagels, flat breads, biscuits, tarts, scones and our weekly Friday night pizzas. My almost six year old made pastry from scratch almost unassisted the other day like she’d been making it for years, propelled and guided by a children’s baking book she borrowed from the library. As always, I’m humbled and in awe of what young people are capable of creating when given time and space to simply follow their interests.
Soup is what I’ve been craving and filling our freezer with - tomato, minestrone, pumpkin and my daughters favourite ‘broccoli’ soup, which is actually just potato, leek & kale (no broccoli in sight) but the name stuck when she was little and so ‘broccoli no broccoli’ soup is always on hand in our house.
I’ve always loved soup, since I was a little girl myself. My dad fondly tells the tale of little me being presented with a giant bowl of veggie soup at a roadhouse on our way from somewhere to elsewhere, thinking there is no way I would be able to get half way through it, yet polish it off I did and even asked for more. My dad is a great soup maker himself, growing up I loved the comfort to be found in a bowl of his pumpkin soup or pea & ham. Another favoured soup I can still taste, and that’s making my mouth water as I write this, is my nana’s vegetable soup. She would cook the buggery out of it, and I suspect she added a small mountain of salt too. I loved slurping on the chunks of melt in your mouth celery and overcooked pasta pillows.
To this day I love slow cooking a big batch of soup, one that sits on the stove top imbibing its chosen flavours for hours at a time. The smells that fill the house as it simmers and the gentle tremor of the pot lid rattling and bubbling. A slow cooked, slurpy, nourishing bowl chock full of veggies has to be one of my favourite forms of culinary hedonism.
Despite the descent into cooler days and longer nights, I’m still creating on my sewing machine and yet to pick up my knitting needles. Most recently I stitched a top for a girlfriend’s 40th to match a skirt I made a few years ago and my daughter and I together transformed a pillow case pouch into a treasure bag for nature walks. My mending bag is overflowing though, I haven’t been prioritising time to attend to the many holes and tears that need patching, but I’m aiming to get to those soon. Breathing life into much loved garments using visible mending techniques is something I really love to do and something I want to do more of to personalise the clothes we wear and already own. To be able to create what I covet instead of buying it fills me with immense satisfaction and pride. Sewing is a humble lifeskill that I’m passionate about passing onto my own children.
Homeschool
This term we’ve completed two units from For The Love of Homeschooling’s Nature Study Club - Rivers & Streams and Nature Signs & Survival. We’ve been members for almost a year now and we love having this woven into the rhythm of our weeks. As unschoolers, it’s probably the closest thing to actual “schooling” we do and as it’s all about nature, I am all for it. That and the fact my daughter absolutely loves it too. We all get so much out of these month long immersions and I’m amazed at the ways the topics ripple out and show up in our day to day lives and outings.
Just this morning we began the Harvest unit (I love bringing seasonality into our learning) and fresh as a daisy out of bed at 5:30am my daughter is coaxing me from my own slumber to please do nature study with her!
In addition to nature study, the other constants in our week this term have been farm school, co-op outings, permaculture playgroup and ballet lessons. In between these pillars of our week we’ve read lots of amazing books, made plenty of art, listened to hours of podcasts and audiobooks, dabbled in some loose piano lessons with Dad, baked, gardened, explored and played.
My son and I have been enjoying one-on-one bush walks together in different wild places where we live on the Peninsula on the day my daughter is at farm school and these are something I really treasure. My little nature boy is so content outdoors, he’s the sort of kid that needs open space and freedom to move his body and interact with the elements. He’s never happier than when he is chasing his chickens around our yard or climbing trees at the local park or rambling in rockpools and splashing through waves.
When I originally felt the all-consuming want to home educate my children all those years ago, I had no idea of the sort of little people they would grow into being and what their personalities would be like. It’s safe to say I have two very different children with quite differing needs and yet as if by conscious design, I see how our unschooling lifestyle benefits them both so immensely. I see my scientific, artistic and sensitive daughter thriving with lots of down time to imagine, craft, create and wonder. I see my adventurous, active, joyful son so happy to be spending his childhood outdoors, untethered, wild and free. And I see me, a mother becoming more alive, more awake, more connected to every thing and every one, embracing a simple yet radical way of life.
I love this! How special that sense of home is and all that it holds.
I also love soup, a big veggie soup is up there with my all time favourite foods. And can completely relate to having children that are so different to each other and how home education has evolved so much from what I initially thought it would look like but it’s been absolutely perfect for my individual children and our needs. What a magical life it is in so many ways even through the day to day normality! 💗
What poetry there is in having a pile of holes and tears to mend while new creations are unfolding! And what lovely pumpkins and quinces you have. We're almost exactly opposite to you in time of year; our planting season is just beginning, and I'm nose to the earth many mornings searching for peeping sprouts.