First tomato

A more-than-annual tomato plant (ie. still alive from last summer) has fruited already, and the first ripened today. I have heard that in my hemisphere we are lucky to get ripe tomatoes in time for Christmas, but I guess that doesn’t count Grandpa plants! (I staked them up off the ground a couple of weeks ago so don’t seem to have any earwig issues; it was warm from the sun and beautifully intact.) Here is a “phone pic” of it:

a new season begins

a new season begins

I have also for lunch (is this getting too bad telling you my lunch? I hope not, it’s in here for the environmental/social statement) a chick pea patty from the local Farmers Market. I was already enamoured with the Farmers Market. Now I am also reading “Animal Vegetable Miracle” by Barbara Kingsolver (you can get it at amazon.com, that’s where I got it), and have been reminded that for every calorie we intake of food, it has taken 10 calories of fossil fuel etc for the transport, packaging, middle persons, etc. So I am trying to buy food locally a little bit more.

Best of all fruits, vegetables and wonder to you,
Meg

Market preparation not stalling!

Hi there Oh Great Breathing Wonders of the World!

I am excited about my first stall with my new Art Cards next week. Being my first market with this product I am unsure how many to make so am making several hundred and also taking order forms for if I run out. That may of course turn out to be overkill, but better too many than too few I guess!

Amongst all the preparation, I have somehow managed to carve out time (haha) to almost finish carving out the lino block for the Autumn Fairy. I have brilliant new Micador lino tools! High quality, with lovely adult-hand-sized handles and SHARP! A whole lot of physical tension associated with carving lino just disappeared.
The lino block (is she an angel or a fairy? stay tuned..) is almost ready to have a trial print. That’s exciting too. I am quite in the mood to do a Christmas Fairy next, for Christmas ’09 of course!

Incidentally, just bought a diary for next year, which showed me in black and white the extreme likelihood of 2009 being followed by 2010. Wow. Note to self: Don’t look at 2010 forward planning page of diary for a couple of months.

Adelaide readers, I would love to see you at the Goodwood Christmas Market next Saturday, 9am-3pm. Come say “Hi!”

Take care,
Meg

Fruit, the recycling of junk and progress of art

Hello fellow earth dwellers!

In our part of the world we are coming to the tail end of the loquat (first fruit) season, and moving into the berry ripening season. I have a fence-full of beautiful gradually ripening Youngberries. Yum!

Beside the road I picked up someone’s old junk to become our new junk. It’s a strong mesh stapled (strongly) to (strong) stakes. It will be perfect for the raspberries to be affixed to next year when they are bigger, and hopefully weighted down with fruit!

In Art in Progress news I am carving the Autumn Fairy at last! you might remember I had to start over cos the design wasn’t right. I think this second attempt will be much more flowy (suitble for a fairy in a windy season).

Be well,
Meg

Mammalian fund-raising

Movember - Sponsor MeI want to walk amongst men with moustaches and people with bald heads or coloured hair. Go for it you excellent people!

The mo-wearers are raising money for Prostate Cancer Research [link removed, broken] and Beyond Blue (raising depression awareness) by growing mustaches throughout November…hence MO-vember. After I donated I got the cool widgetty thingy. How do you spell mostache anyway? (Have taken out widget link as it wasn’t working, and left a link to Mo-vember itself… Join in if you are able)

The shavers of head/colourers of hair are raising money for research into curing leukaemia/lymphoma/myeloma by gathering sponsors. World’s greatest shave…Shave for a cure

These possibilities are available to us for fundraising because we (humans, mammals) have hair!!!

Take care of each other,
Meg

Live people, we are live!

Dear internet friends,

I have just uploaded my ArtCard shop site! Do you wanna see? Do ya? Do ya?

Here is the link (come back after!): www.tangerinemeg.com/artcardshop

Useful constructive feedback welcome! It’s just new and bound to have the odd typo or whatever. Hopefully nothing huge! I was at a friend’s house earlier, and it seems that its appearance varies on different browsers, but I guess it’s pretty close (the content is the same, just the borders, type sizes and colours don’t hold true).

I got the text written by a professional copywriter: Rebecca Leigh, Freelance Writer (co-incidentally also Australian, although we didn’t meet but communicated, worked and paid via internet). She is very good at what she does, and also easy to work with. (Naomi from Itty Biz recommended her to me).

After setting the site up I admit to laughing like a crazy person when I discovered how to make the little Tangerine Meg flower appear in the address bar! I felt like I had the Internet Secret of the Universe.

So THAT’s what I’ve been doing!

Hope your week has been good,
Meg

Stoked! (Chuffed, pleased)

Hey co-travellers-of-earth! I hope you are having a happy weekend.

I have been working on setting up my Card Shop site: organising e-junkie buttons, shopping cart and shipping settings. The reason I am stoked is I have just figured out how to give free shipping to orders over 9 items…without accidentally giving 100% discount on the whole order or some other unwanted variable possibility. If I have a “re-seller” badge on the site, I can personalise my shopping cart page with my own banner. I am still reading about further customising of the Thanks page etc. While I was trying it out I discovered if people want to pay by credit card (cos I couldn’t pay for my trial order with my own PayPal details) they can do that too, by not logging on to PayPal, but instead going around it and keying in their address etc.

My brain jumped over a little mountain! Extra stokedness as I didn’t quite beleive I would be able to work this out when I went to bed last night, but it seems morning brain can do what night brain can’t do. Hooray!

Incidentally, great news about Mr Obama!

Good health, and May the Force be with You,
Meg

Stop and smell the sweet, sweet wisdom

Greetings to you, patient fabulous blog friends!

Just wanted to let you know the roses are a-blooming like crazy. Their perfume beckons as I run by, sometimes convincing me to stop and smell them. Classic. The jasmine is just finishing and the honeysuckle is in full bloom. Lucky for me I don’t get asthma etc. (Should I mention our recently flowering street trees had a pungency verging on the yuck?)

I read a blog a few weeks ago about trimming blog-reading time by subscribing to just a few that you really like and getting them by email instead of RSS reader. I thought about it. I like my RSS reader. My interpretation: put my 3 must-reads at the top, delete a whole lot and leave 28 (or so – just few enough that no scroll bar appears!) that I am fond of for when I do have a bit of extra time. And not to feel obligated to read every bit of every one, especially if they are a bit long or not on the same track as me that day. Fair enough! The point is to enjoy and learn, so I have decided to lose the guilt about not getting through all of them.
I like blogs. For me it’s like having a wise friend tell what they have been learning and thinking about. I feel the same way about good self-help books. Blogs are good-sized little chunks of human shared wisdom.

Hey, I’d better tell you those top 3 blogs: Seth Godin (of course), Dave Rendall (Freak Factor – also essential inspiration) and Naomi Dunford (Itty Biz – marketing wisdom I can understand). All are unique and interesting, and have a positive impact on my thinking about the world.

Fear be free and love be settling, (thank you to a wise real-world friend for that guiding wish),
Meg

Seedlings, seeds general gardening news and Tricicle 20

A warm welcome today, blog-friends,

I will plant later when it’s cooler outside, but am excited just to have in the house (purchased from our local Farmers Market) some new dear little vegetable seedlings. I will list them, as they are heirloom (some of them) and interesting:
Money Maker Tall Tomato, Carmello Tall Tomato, punnet of mixed lettuce, Butternut Barbara Pumpkin, Burpless Tasty Green Cucumber, Black Pearl Eggplant (Ahoy!), Zucchini Black Betty (Bambalam) and Zucchini Houdini (not sure where that one has got to), Basil (Cinnamon), Joi Choi Pak Choy and Planters Jumbo Rockmelon. In addition to which last week I purchased “Giant of Stuttgart” climbing bean, Oregon Sugar Pod Pea and Mesclun lettuce Mix seeds, and was given sunflower and Coreopsis seeds.

Here is my phone pic of the goodies:

box o' potential

box o potential

I am going to try a slightly different way of watering the vegies this season. Instead of using just the dripper line (I don’t think the holes are quite frequent enough) I am going to build up some edges of soil to keep the washing water (enriched with bokashi) in areas. And to make sense of that I will plant in groups. I was inspired by a friend who is doing something similar.

Good news the (new, specialised) Almond Tree that almost carked it whilst I was away, is picking up now with the application of TLC (lots of bucketed water), and will be ok.

If you like physical comedy at the theatre, and you can get to Tricicle 20 when they are in your home area, go for it! They guaranteed a laugh every 10 seconds, which they got, and which is a lot in a no-interval 1.5 hour show! It was very well done, it really was FULL of laughs. I guess they had be practising for a long time but it was as if it was done for the first time freshly in front of us. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Have a happy day,
Be great, be you.
Meg