GROW IT

Grow it veg boxes delivered to your home
-just add water for and instant veggie garden.
Bravo!

..brown paper packages tied up with string.

The other Day
Tony was running about the street
looking for a wire coat hanger.
A tall older man was quietly following behind him.
The tall man had locked his keys in the car
and asked the General Store for help.
I dont know the rest of the story,
I just went on with my day
roasting vegetables maybe
or weighing up carob frogs .
Tony loves to help, he has tricks at how to do things to help with tricky situations
what ever the method, the out come was success as the tall man drove off .

Then on Tuesday Nada came up to me in the tea house
holding a bunch of orange orchids,
a giant bunch wrapped in brown paper.
"A tall man just dropped these off for Tone,
he was locked out of his car and Tone helped him get in,
aren't they lovely, isn't that just lovely!"
She took them straight across the road to where T lives
I was still roasting vegetables when she came back.
"Well, I think Tony was a bit chuffed about that,
he melted and said, awww! are they for me?! "

What a lovely thing to do!

When you've got lemons.....

My friend just gifted me these two lemons
from her partners tree.
Even though we at the General Store have
access to lots of organic fruit and veg,
receiving fruit from someone's tree is just the best.
Home grown.
Home made.
My friend is going to make Lemon tarts with her glut of lemons.



Once when I was wandering about the streets
with another friend
they said to me;
'What is a neighborhood without a neighborhood lemon tree?
It's the clincher, I know I can move to an area when there is a
neighborhood lemon tree.'



I am sure you have heard of the
feral fruit tree map
If you haven't there's the link
Its a map of all of the fruit trees growing that anyone can access.



And for those of you who dont have access to a local fruit tree,
there is also a great post on Edible weeds
over at Garden Notes For Relocalisation .



This image is from nat's iphone
its small I know but its of a basket of lemons.
They are chemical free and she is selling them
for 3 dollars a kilo
and putting the money towards the vessel the Pelican
and its next project.

It's really true that when you have Lemons-
We can all make Lemonade!

Aurora

AURORA
means Dawn, or first light
it was 'Sleeping Beauty's' name.



There is a penguin at the aquarium called
AURORA
and there is a lovely little girl in the cafe
with the same name.

When she is not colouring in
beautiful french drawings,
she is most likely to be a princess
battling volcanos on her way to cloud land
on a quest to save MARIO
trapped in a castle...!!!

In her spare time
she has breakfast with her mother
at the tea house.



Her mother, when not sailing thePelican
facilitating and researching
or navigating the storm....

is finding aliens in her coffee
that look a bit like rabbits.

When in the store
Aurora and her mother
share wonderful stories
sometimes exciting
sometimes with sad endings
sometimes about their cat called Sufi
sometimes very funny
and always very kind.




P.S If Aurora does not like this post
it shall be removed. X

The Plot

Naturally we sell Organic fruit and Veg
here at the Elwood general store,
and deal with customers anxiety in imperfection
on a daily basis.



If we all took care of
and tendered our own gardens
I wonder if that anxiety in imperfection would slowly dissolve?



I will never stop promoting
Growing your own vegetables.
ORGANICALLY
Even if its just a few small pot plants on the window sill
its the most joyful thing.



So here are some images from 'the plot'
Caroline and I share.
Its about the size of a grave.
Full of life.



When ever I have a spare moment
I am down in that plot
with the parrots, cockatoos and wrens.



Digging about
or just simply sitting and watching things grow.



Everyday
Turning over a new leaf.



Listening and
Looking upward.



All the life in that tiny space!

I relish in the fact that we grow
and pick
and take home
and eat
and grow some more.



Check out the St.Kilda
Veg out community gardens
on the land of the old bowls club
just behind Luna Park
next to the peanut farm oval.

Now they'd have to be the greatest directions ever!

Give us this day..

Today I was walking along the canal and who did I run into
Inga and Max sitting in the sun. (click on their names to read more about them)
Max was stopping people as they walked the path
and charging a surcharge of conversation.
Inga and I talked about bread.

Max's hand rested lovingly on Inga's thigh as we talked,
he interjected with funny comments
and laughed that he couldn't get a word in edgewise.
As he did Inga held his face in her hands
and said,
' Oh I love him, I say to him thats why I married you
and he says to me, but no Inga
I married you.."

We laughed and I asked if they needed our help with the groceries.
They have not been able to get to the store due to Max having a fall.
We discussed what was new and what she needed.
I told Inga, who is from Switzerland,
about the 100% rye bread we have in the store.



It is made by Teresa and her husband from More than food who moved here from Austria.
When they arrived here they could not get any rye bread,
so they started to bake their own.

Inga, who doesn't eat wheat loves her rye bread
but because Max is wheelchair bound
cant always get down to the shop.
Her eyes were huge blue circles on hearing about the rye.

Teresa was in on Saturday sampling the bread,
she is also at the Elwood community market held at the school
every second month.
Teresa is a really lovely woman,
we all really enjoy her bread deliveries.
Holly, who works in the tea house gushed when she met Teresa,
she said ' Oh I wish I could do a life swap with her,
I love hearing about things going well for good people.'



As do we all, and we here at the store
are blessed to be around so many good people
to break bread with.

Ear to the ground.

Most Saturday nights after we have all worked a crazy weekend day
Tony cooks up a lot of the left over Fruit and Veg
and a group of us eat together
and play music.

Sometimes its the piano,
Sometimes its the guitar,
the record player but
often we end up internet V-Jing
swooning over our tracks.

Then we down load our new
or favorite finds and put them on the ipod
to listen to in the store
during the week.

Here is the latest find:



First Aid Kit

an appropriate named duo
fresh and raw and lovely
bit like our shop really!! Heheh!

Catalogued..

A while ago a customer of ours, John from
the Stoneman's Book Room in Castlemaine
generously gave Tony a pile of books.

One of them was this book here:



As he handed the book to Tony
John opened on to the page about cashew nuts and said
'Look at this, did you know they grew like this?'
and the two of them stared at the page in wonder..



How often do we pop something in our mouth
and not fully know what its origins are.
I'm not talking food additives, emulsifiers
and the secret code for m.s.g here.
I am talking about the actual grain, the nut, the fruit
the 'wholefood.'

People often pull out the viles of vanilla beans kept on the counter
and ask with real surprise, 'What's that?'
or don't know that 'flour' is not 'wheat', but a description of the
ground down product that is made from many different grains ie:
maize flour, rice flour, wheat flour, spelt flour, rye flour, buckwheat flour, quinoa flour, soya flour etc..
I think that at least once a week I explain this fact especially
to people hunting for 'gluten free' things,
who gasp when they read ingredients on things complaining,
'but I can't have flour!', mistaken that all flour is wheat flour.
Aside from explaining what gluten is, I show them wheat grain,
I show them what a Barley grain looks like compared oat grain,
what a wheat grain looks like unground.
What quinoa looks like red or white,
what buckwheat and rice look like, rolled, roasted, ground down , puffed or steal cut.

A customer said as we were looking at a bag of rice grain,
just regular old long grain white rice, (organic may I add)
and a bag of organic puffed rice,
'so this is just like 'Rice Bubbles' that you get in the supermarket,
and I answered, 'Yep, thats right, just with out the jingle'.....
(or the chemicals, may I just add here and probably added then)

How much faith we put into marketing and advertising
yet are totally removed from the real source, the fruit, the grain, the nut....

When I make the peanut butter it is to many a Ohh and ahhhh
at the discovery that no oil is added, only peanuts.

It is truly amazing what we can do with whole foods alone
let alone food science and synthetic processing.

Ahhh, The wonder of a single cashew
the little nut found at the end of the cashew fruit
that 'are always a bit expensive'
and we pop into our mouths with out a second thought.

How we take it for granted
with all its healing properties and multiple uses
( click here to see more: Cashew )

We can't all grow cashew plants
but we do have the ability to find out how things grow
what energy it takes to produce things
and get them to the store and eventually to our tummy's.

Thank you John for the book
its on the shelf behind the counter
and is pulled out often.

As ever, all of you are always welcome
to come in and have a flick through some of our books
browse at the products and ask questions..
We love to receive and share information about the stuff that sustains us,
and wonder at how things are produced and grown.
Everyday I have gratitude at the enormous availability and range of foods
we can access with out ever getting our hands dirty from the soil
from which they come.

John can be found at
Stoneman's Book Room
101 Mostyn Street
Castlemaine VIC 3450
Australia

Amalie

It gets busy in the store
with deliveries..


Lucky we have great helpers..


They run about
soooo much...



...they just fall to the ground



Where would we be without


Our falling star Amalie.....!

This Stormy Weather

Melbourne has experienced a
series of big storms
there were many exciting stories..





and on Saturday
Melbourne was pelted again
this time with giant hail
the size of lemons

Again,
there were stories of
cars that washed away
and were dented and smashed.



and of city streets that were flooded,
whooshing people away..



And stories of
skylights that crashed in as
trees snapped in half..




-the Crisis Accommodation Centre
in West melbourne had 51 windows broken
and all the homeless people were evacuated-



We only heard about the damage 2nd hand
our street flooded
like it did last week,
only my bike suffered damage
its brake line snapped..




here is a part of my friend Taiig's exciting story.
It was posted up on the window of his class room
which was thankfully safe from harm.

Warm and Fuzzies...

The twins and their mother Deb sat at the bench on Monday
and drank hot chocolates, which is actually organic cocoa
and milk, with carob buttons and 'sprinkles'..

'You're a good cooker' they told me, at first via Deb,
who drank a pot of chai with rice milk,
and then when the cocoa kicked in they told me themselves.



Here they are showing me 'chocolate faces'
this was before I received twin sized hugs...
which made me all warm and fuzzy, like I had
drunk a hot chocolate too!

The kids are o.k

All in the family

We found this old picture of Georgia
our fabulous naturopath
and her niece Lola
no hang on, not her niece her 2nd cousin,


and a young charlie he is a big boy now
who is Lola's brother
or is it...


Jarrah
Georgia's son


with or without a banana
the resemblance is uncanny
even Laini Charlie and Lola's mum
and Georgia's cousin
can't believe it

Cuplets

Its a funny thing
in the store we rarely see couples together
sure there are a few
and here are two very cute ones,

Aaron and Katie Kate



and Lawrence and Aya straight out of the satorialist



but mostly we see people separately
and its like finding a jigsaw piece
when a couple comes in together
when we have only met them apart.

So it's here I confess
when two jigsaw pieces make a match
and purchase a bag
of chocolate coated almonds together
and leave hand in hand
while
feeding each other Doowa
and niggling over who carries the loo paper,
we turn to each other and
give ourselves a 'oh so they're a couple' look
and smile and say
'sweet' or ' well I never'
and ' isnt that nice' like little old
aunties and uncles...