My green-living winter preparations

Winter can be a time of huge power bills, wet clothes and a barren garden. Here's what's been going on in our house to minimise these problems.

Garden, i.e. what are we going to eat all winter?

We are so lucky in New Zealand to be able to grow our vegetables year-round, and it's perfectly possible to provide all a family's green vegetables from a standard back yard garden. It doesn't take consistent hard work, just short bursts of it - and good timing.

Here we are on the last day of March, and my brassica plants are pathetic. I wish I'd taken my own advice.

Last year in a burst of pride at my accomplishment I wrote a post on How to create a garden that feeds you all winter. Key to this is starting early (as in February, ideally) with sowing seeds. The February heat usually brings a swarm of white butterflies with their brassica-devouring caterpillars, so seedlings must be covered or be destroyed. Ignoring my own advice, this year I let my first lot of seedlings be destroyed.

Cut up milk bottles make seed labels and containers.

Sitting containers in a tray makes it easy to
water from underneath by putting a cm or so
of water in the tray. That way the seeds aren't
dislodged by a stream of water from above.

I then got organised and got my seed raising shelves into action. That's an old mosquito net protecting it, and a net curtain works well too (think garage sales, church fairs, op shops to source one).

As I write on the last day of March, grabbing seedlings of your favourite brassica from a shop or market is the best bet for New Zealand gardeners - any seeds sown from now on are unlikely to reach your dinner plate until spring. The plants need time to grow to a decent size before cold weather and frosts slow them down.

I'm having trouble pulling out our summer crops to make room. We are still flooded with cucumbers, zucchinis and beans, not to mention grapes and feijoas. Sowing a crop of Yates Freezer Slims bean seeds in late January was a smart move. They are in full flush right now, and have turned out to be Very Good Tucker (according to us AND the snails; fortunately the snails mainly like the leaves) - more than adequate payback for pushing a few beans in the ground and keeping them moist for a few days!

Freezer slim beans behind alyssum, which I planted for
beneficial insects in spring. It just keeps flowering.

The tomatoes are blighted now, however, and we're getting just a few to keep us going. They'll come out in the next few days, making room for more brasssica seedlings with a shot of compost.

One of my favourite brassicas is Cavolo Nero kale. I love its flavour stir-fried with oil and garlic, and the way its leaves aren't too crinkly, because the crinkles attract snails. A farmer's market is a good place to find the seedlings, because the supermarkets don't seem to be on to this superfood veg yet.

There are plenty more greens-producing tips in the How to create a garden that feeds you all winter post. I recommend it for your bank balance and good health.

Speaking of which, here is the basis of my winter anti-virus soups. That is, the old-fashioned type of anti-virus.

I so enjoyed the butternuts that I bought from the Hamilton Farmer's Market this winter that I kept some seeds. I sowed one next to a compost bin and let it sprawl over the lawn and fence (it was meant to only be on the fence, but it is a free spirit and I was too soft on it). I have five large compost-fed butternuts to look forward to. One is growing on the neighbour's driveway, but they appreciate the importance of these things, being vege/fruit growers and chicken-keepers themselves.

Free warmth

Firewood, firewood, firewood. We always keep an eye out for people felling trees, and piles of unloved wood. We have about three years' worth stashed about our property now, all for free (apart from the trailer hire and some petrol or electricity to fuel the chainsaws for the big cuts). Sometimes I do the finding, but mainly my husband does the grunt work - and it is a lot of physical work.

This warmth not only heats our house, but finishes off the clothes drying. We also heat water for hot water bottles and do a bit of cooking on the top of the woodburner.

Dry clothes

I love the clothes lines under our carport to keep our washing out of the rain! It faces west, where the prevailing wind and afternoon sun comes from.

In winter I often just hang big things there (towels, sheets, etc.) and put the other things on our clothes drying rack. It can sit outside during the day and be brought inside at night. After spending a night in the room with the woodburner, everything is beautifully dry.

Do you have any prep-for-winter tips?

A little trouble with a chicken's bottom

If you are missing the chicken-keeping posts that used to appear here, fear not, they are still coming! See them at my dedicated NZ chicken-keeping blog, www.keepingchickensnz.com. There's also a Keeping Chickens NZ facebook page here. You don't need to be a facebook member to see it.

One-Wattle, a favourite chicken featured in the post mentioned below.

My latest chicken post is on a little adventure I had recently rescuing a favourite chicken who was having trouble getting an egg out.

Send your mind somewhere

The public library. Isn't it a fantastic place? Every time I walk in there - which is at least weekly - I get a thrill, as if I'm walking into an enormous bookshop where all the books are free. And I am! The only catch is that I have to return them. Our bookshelves at home are full to bursting, so that's a good thing.

This post is, of course, in the thread of thriftiness as a path to being a healthy, wealthy eco-warrior. But besides all that, a lifetime's worth of reading is just pure pleasure.

I recently saw reading described as "an enjoyable, even ecstatic experience" on the Mighty Girl website. The point of the article was actually to say that reading makes people smarter and nicer. That is not, of course, why many of us retire to bed to enter another delicious world. We don't always manage to keep our noses out of our books during the day, either, even when we've got chores to get on with.

The slogan of our local library is 'Send your mind somewhere'. Earlier this month mine traveled to seventeenth century Iceland, in the form of Burial Rites by Hannah Kent. Oh goodness, I loved it. The beauty, the toughness, the fascination of it. It's based on a true story of the last woman to be executed in Iceland.

I also ventured to a certain Scottish castle over the last year, and as a result adored the Harry Potter series. I strung them out over a year because I couldn't bear to think that one day there would be no more of the series for me to read. I've coped quite well, though.

Each night Anna and I are tripping to nineteenth century America in the form of the Little House on the Prairie series. We've been amazed at Ma making head cheese out of the head of a pig, and at the family having trouble sleeping due to nocturnal Indian war cries (which turned out to be part of a plan to kill the white settlers! - well, some of them did have a horrifying motto: "The only good Indian is a dead Indian").

I have read elsewhere that the series, which was published in the early 1930s, was part propoganda. Laura Ingalls Wilder's daughter, who edited the books, believed that the government had started meddling too much in people's lives. She turned her mother's memoirs into fables that showed their pioneering forebears as independent, capable, optimistic and incredibly resourceful - in short, thriving without government intervention. That is, apart from when the government drove out the Indians. They were pleased about that little intervention. (Sadly my forebears weren't much better in that respect.)

It's these adventures of the mind that keep me, and indeed our whole family, going for more, more, more books. Pure, free, enriching pleasure.

The Mr. Mustache Man guide to buying less stuff

I'm often struck by how never before have humans had so much stuff. Our planet is oozing with discarded electronics, plastic, clothing, etc. It's draining our bank accounts, polluting the planet and cluttering our houses. It's time I did something about it!

When it comes to buying things, Mr Money Mustache reckons that your bottom line should be this: if you can't afford to retire, you can't afford to buy it. (Mr MM retired in his 30s.) Hardcore, eh? There are exceptions, he admits - groceries, power, etc.

I use this pot almost daily to cook, and  I get a little thrill every
 time I see how my husband repaired it with prunings from our
 garden. What a man. Sorry ladies, he's taken.

You'll still be living a great life, contrary to what advertisers would have you believe!

That is, unless buying and having stuff is what makes you happy, in which case you'll have realised by now it's a pretty short-lived buzz, so you'd better get a bit more Buddhist (or Mustachian) about things.

The reason it won't knock your happiness levels is this: compared to most humans who have ever lived, we westerners live in extreme luxury. But because we're all doing it, it's hard to remember that. Do you have running water in more than one room of the house? A separate bedroom for each child? So much food to eat, and so little physical work to do, that you can grow a jiggly belly? WOW, we live better than kings and queens used to!

Below are the kind of questions Mr. MM asks himself before making a purchase. Some of these are thrown in by me. Maybe they'll help you one day.

1. Will it be a lifelong burden? i.e., contributing to that pile of once-wanted stuff that fills our houses then sits in the landfill for centuries.

2. Will it help you consume less stuff in future? Can it be repaired when it wears out or breaks (like the pot above), or will it be a less expensive/more environmentally friendly substitute for something else? e.g. a bike will help you use your car less.

3. Can you borrow it, make it or get it secondhand instead?

4. Can you delay the purchase? (In the meantime you'll probably decide your dollars have more important work to do.)

5. Consider who made it, and where and under what circumstances was it made (i.e. were components mined from under rainforests, did its production pollute the land or water, did it use slave labour) - are you willing to pay for such activities to be carried out? Your dollar is a vote for yes. (I conveniently don't apply this rule when I buy second hand.)

Obviously you will buy things. At this very moment I'm looking for a second hand violin for my son, and, damn it, the girl needs new undies, and they are one of the few things I won't buy second hand (I buy these). But I plan to use this list to stringently vet my purchases. I can see that retirement stash growing already.

Biking will make me green, lean and wealthy

As anyone who's spoken to me in the last couple of weeks knows, I am very taken by Mr. Money Mustache's blog on financial independence, health and happiness via living an intelligent, frugal and physically active life. He's a bit of a greenie, too.

I guiltily suspect the reason that I think he's so great is that he thinks like me. Ha! Except he does so more clearly, and he's thought about a few things I haven't. Plus his writing is eloquent and very funny. He swears a bit, too, although in quite a thoughtful way.

As this photo shows, I have taken on board his thoughts about the benefits of bikes over cars. This post of his on it is hilarious; a favourite quote from it is this: "When I see a car ease into a parking spot, I always run to assist the driver with getting out into their wheelchair, but I am stunned to find that they usually have working legs after all!"

Allow me to be pious about my cycling set up. The bike cost $5 at a garage sale a few years ago, and it rides as well as any other bike I've had (that's not saying much though). The helmet and rash vest were a couple of bucks each from our local dump shop.

The greatest thing about this is that no one is ever going to steal this pile of rust, so I don't have to lock it up! It came with a lock, but I don't know the combination.

I'm loving the free feeling of riding a bike. What amazes me most about it is how fast I get to places. Sometimes I'm sure it's faster than a car, because I don't have to find a parking place and walk the rest of the way to my destination - I cruise right up to the door, lean my bike against something and walk inside. No lock, no fuss.

As for the 'lean' part of the title: well, it's obvious, isn't it? I'm using my food energy instead of fossil fuel energy to move myself around.

My next post will be on Mr MM's guide - and my guide - to buying less stuff, which is of course a cheaper, more environmentally friendly and clutter-reducing thing to do. It's all green, lean and wealth-making around here.

Why we've gone solar - photovoltaic power in NZ

They aren't pretty from the back - although I quite like them from the front - but there is a great beauty to photovoltaic panels.  We had twelve installed on our Hamilton roof just before Christmas, and they were switched on in early January (the delay was due to a wait for an electrical inspection).

The cost 

Just before we signed up for the panels, the main electricity companies dropped the price they pay to homeowners feeding power back into the grid. The drop was huge. We already knew, then, that this might not be a money earner for us.

The system cost $12,000 for a 3 kW system. Others will pay less for the same; we had the most difficult type of roof (concrete tile on one part, and tilt mounts on another) which hiked the installation fees, and we chose a more expensive microinverter system that cost an extra $2,000. Blame my house vanity for that. I didn't want the huge box that the cheaper string inverter system required in the house. (It can go outside the house if you have space near the switchboard.)

Our motivation

Despite the price, we decided to put our money where our mouths are, and chose not to think too hard about how quickly the cost would be refunded to us in the form of cheaper electricity bills (the payback period). If we think clean local electricity generation is a great idea, then we need to support the industry. If everyone stopped having systems installed because it didn't pay financially, the companies would go out of business. The great thing about solar panels is that they are on your roof where everyone can see them - you are advertising your principles. (Fortunately ours face the road.)

Plus, my husband loves them. He feels the same way about our panels as he does about his stack of firewood in the shed, and lying in front of a roaring fire on a cold winter night.

How we manage our electricity use

We had a short honeymoon period of having an old electricity metre that was wound backwards when we were generating more electricity than we used. It was brilliant. We even watched it continue to wind backwards when we switched on our heat pump as an air conditioner in the middle of a 28 degree day, then swing to spinning forwards when we boiled the jug. We got a rough idea of how much each appliance drew from the grid, and played around with things so there was as much backward winding as possible.

Now our import/expert metre is set up, we will be paid 7 cents per kW hour of electricity we feed back into the grid in summer, and 10 cents per kW hour in winter. We pay about 35 cents for each kW hour we buy in from the grid. So it makes sense to use as much of our required electricity as possible during the sunny middle of the day. We started generating about 7 am during the height of summer - although at that hour the amount was trifling - and it kept up for at least 12 hours on a sunny day. Now autumn is coming, the production hours are shorter.

So the dishwasher and washing machine should be switched on when the sun has climbed high, and if we get organised enough some cooking is also done then. It also pays not to use too many appliances at once - it's best to let the washing machine finish before doing the vacuuming, and finish the vacuuming before switching on the dishwasher. That way we know all our electricity is free; we won't use more than we are generating and have to commit that evil act of buying in pricey electricity from the grid.

Of course, that degree of management isn't always possible. We just do what we can comfortably fit into our routine.

Our clever move

Well, maybe it's not supremely clever, but instead of having all of our panels facing due north to maximise electricity production, we had three installed on a west-facing section of our roof. We generate less overall electricity this way, but we generate more in the late afternoon/early evening than we would with all north-facing panels. This, of course, is when we are more likely to be cooking the evening meal, so the generated electricity will be used, rather than sold earlier in the day for 7 cents and bought back in the evening for 35 cents.

Storing electricity

Ah, everyone wants to store what they generate at lunchtime so they can use it later. We can't do that yet - the batteries cost way too much - but we hope to be able to add that into our system one day.

The electricity bill

A snapshot from our first post-solar electricity bill.
Sorry the pic is so tiny: click on it for a bigger view.

Heh heh heh. We got a thrill when we received our first post-solar electricity bill. Here's a snapshot of it. Can you see the orange bar for this February, representing how much grid electricity we used? That's the almost invisible bar to the far right of the graph. It is minuscule. We generated more than we used, and got a credit to our account.

This did include a couple of weeks of the windback honeymoon mentioned above, when we were essentially getting a dollar's discount for every dollar's worth we generated. Plus it was an outstandingly sunny summer. I don't know if this lovely negative amount will happen again.

It definitely helps at this point to forget we paid $12,000 to be able to get this credit! But this is the first month of many more...

Our solar supplier

In case you're wondering, we bought our system from www.whatpowercrisis.co.nz. They were great.

Update for the following month's bill

In the following (also sunny) month, we used $60 worth of electricity. Before we got the panels, it used to be about $150 worth, so we're obviously doing a good job of using the electricity we generate while the sun's shining. Happily, we also exported about $30 worth, so our bill this month was $30 odd. Nice.

Solar powered bread rolls

I'm building up to a post about our new photo-voltaic panels, lovely things that they are.

In the meantime, here are the details of some Very Good bread rolls I make quite regularly. Recently the rising and baking of these rolls in this house has been powered exclusively by the sun. I reckon that's so green that I might as well be hand-stitching a quilt of rabbit pelts harvested from my backyard rabbit farm. If I had one.

When I bake these I feel like Ma on Little House on the Prairie in her hand-built cabin, or maybe Milly Molly Mandy's Mother, sheltered by her thatched roof. How those women would have loved my breadmaker*! Not only would they have hand-kneaded their bread, but they would have had to light a fire to bake it, even in mid-summer. My weak arm muscles quiver at the thought.

This dough is actually a pizza base recipe from my friend of nearly 30 years, Sandra. (Sandra, how old we are growing!) The original uses all white flour and is definitely my favourite pizza base, too.

Solar Bread Rolls

(Of course you don't need solar power or a bread maker to make these; I am not that demanding.)
This takes about 15 minutes total effort with a breadmaker* (three bouts of five minutes). If you start at 10 am they'll be freshly baked for lunch.

1 3/4 tsp active dried yeast (not the breadmaker sort)
1 tsp salt
1-2 tsp sugar
3 3/4 cups of flour (making it as wholemealy as my family will tolerate, I use about 2 1/2 cups of wholemeal flour and the rest plain white)
1/4 c olive oil
1 1/3 cups water

You know, don't you, that the ratio of flour to water is crucial to making good bread? Therefore, you need to measure those ingredients carefully. Everything else you can be somewhat gung-ho with.

Place everything in a breadmaker* and mix on the fastest dough cycle. I have a Panasonic breadmaker with a pizza dough cycle that takes 45 minutes. Alternatively, mix it all together by hand, knead for 10 minutes and leave to rise in a warm place for 45 minutes or so.

Shape into balls with floured hands. Dip each ball into white flour to lightly coat it before sitting it on an aluminium baking tray. The flour coating stops the rolls sticking to the baking tray, making for an easy clean up. It's also very pleasing to the mouth.

Cover the dough balls and tray with a clean tea towel and place somewhere warm in direct sunlight: a sunny concrete patio or deck, a barbeque or even a trampoline all work well. Give strict instructions to the children if it's the latter. If it's not a verywarm day, place in an oven at 40oC.

After an hour or so the rolls will have risen beautifully. Remove the tea towel and place the tray in a 190oC oven. You can either preheat the oven, or put the tray directly in there as you turn it on. They should be baked within 10 minutes of it reaching full temperature.

These are good the same day and okay the next. After that they're chicken food, or you could freeze them ready to split and fill with garlicky/herby butter for when you want garlic bread.

*For a rave review about the gourmet and bank-account-flourishing benefits of owning a breadmaker, have a look at this post on my new favourite blog, Mr Money Mustache.

Please don't reward people with "stuff"!

I expect you've noticed that green is the new black. Recently I read an Australian home and garden type magazine, and every house boasted its eco-credentials. I'm a sucker for a gorgeous house, but most were about three times as big as they needed to be, and massively overglazed, but hey, there was the odd recycled brick wall and some lofty insulation, so the eco box was perfunctorily ticked.

Anna's school is on trend and all-for-eco, and have a new environmental scheme the children can participate in. These schemes are great! But sometimes I think that the importance of not rewarding children or adults with "stuff" gets lost. There's little appeal to "not having", of course.

When the school children have done enough nude-fooding, walking to school and gardening - among other admirable things promoted by the scheme - they can purchase a badge and a T shirt to show off their achievements. I wonder where the badge and T shirt come from, and where will they be in five years' time?

A random sample of the stuff littering Anna's room.
Yes, she loves it all, and no, we do not need any more!
Note the restored art deco dressing table: t's not in my "stuff" category.

They will probably have come from China, in a factory that pours pollution into a river, and produced by near-slave labour. (The same goes for almost everything in Farmers, Briscoes, the Warehouse, Kathmandu.... etc.) In a year or two most of them will be in the dump.

There is no paying market, of course, for the true eco-mantras: Make do with what you have, and Stop buying Stuff! Most humans since the dawn of time have forcibly lived with those values; they have had no other choice. Now, quite suddenly really, we can update our wardrobes and houses with cheap crap every year or two. Just don't think too hard about how and where the crap was made, or it will be tinged with ugliness.

When my mother was born in the late 1930s, there were just over 2 billion people in the world. When Jack was born 11 years ago, there were 6 billion. Now there are 7 billion. I can't even conceive of one billion people, but I know they all like lovely stuff. What will it cost the planet to supply it, and where will it go when it's disposed of?

I think we need to be extremely choosy about what we buy.

Here's a call for creativity. How could the children be rewarded for their environmental achievements without giving them something that undermines those achievements? Anna scoffed at my suggestion of swan plants grown in home-made compost. A lunch-time sushi-making class, perhaps? An afternoon of making puppets, or a parkour lesson? A packet of seeds?

Beginners' parkour. No stuff required. 

(If you haven't spent twenty well-entertained minutes watching the 'Story of Stuff' video before, I totally recommend clicking here to watch it!)

Growing up - and a new growth chart to prove it

The children started back at school last week after a long, hot, happy summer holiday. Jack, aged 11, was off to intermediate school for the first time, which meant getting a uniform together.

This is Anna on the first day of school, not Jack!
 He has asked me not to put his photo on this blog anymore.

It's at moments like this that I catch myself behaving like the mother of a cuckoo chick. The cuckoo egg has been illegally laid in a nest, and the resulting chick begs to its forcibly adoptive parents. The poor parents, utter slaves to their instincts, work themselves to the bone to feed the needy chick, even when it's as big as them and looks nothing like them.

I spent most of the day before school started sewing a new zip into a second hand uniform jacket - and it had to look GREAT before I was happy with it. Putting in a new zip nicely is harder than you'd think. The week before that I'd bought him an expensive pair of black leather shoes that fit the uniform code yet are all the rage (I can't even mention the brand lest it feed the beast of fashion and put more parents under pressure). He wore them to school on the first day, got a blister so painful that he walked home barefoot, and has worn a second hand pair of roman sandals ever since.

My cuckoo mother streak is rivaled by my streak of frugality and environmental awareness. This time last year someone told me how much the uniform cost to buy new, and a fortnight after that I'd bought almost an entire uniform set second hand for a fraction of the price. Jack doesn't care about second hand, as long as his gear is stylish. Thank goodness.

The boy is growing enormously fast now. We've been keeping track of the children's heights the old fashioned way: pencil marks scratched into a door frame.

Our continuing hallway renovation (read dragged out and way overtime - we are thoroughly sick of it) means that the door frames are being sanded and repainted. We can't bear to lose the height marks, so I splashed out on one of these:

It's a gorgeous pin-up wall canvas - photographed here on the floor, although eventually it will hang on the hall wall - and it can be moved or rolled up and stored away whenever needed. It's made in Christchurch. You can read more about it here.

I made a final measurement as I was transferring the numbers and dates from door frame to canvas. Jack has grown 2 cm in the last two months.

With a child-to-adult growth spurt looming - or even starting now - he's going to be more like that open-mouthed cuckoo chick than ever.

Flowers and flops in the garden

It's the height of summer, and we're feeling pretty smart about some of our garden produce. Certain other attempts, however, have been distinctly shady.

Last year I got excited about growing flowers with the vegetables to encourage beneficial insects. Yet I forgot about the importance of sun, and the ability of flowers to grow tall and shade the very plants that were meant to be growing our food! In some patches the flowers grew so tall and healthy that the vegetable and berry plants were shaded, with a corresponding drop in production.

Sweet peas shading the blueberries.

Pest problems? We have none, probably because of those carefully selected flower species, alyssum, phacelia and buckwheat (the sweet peas are just there because they're pretty and fragrant). But actual capsicums or strawberries? None of them either. Well, there were just a few strawberries.

Phacelia shading the strawberries.

My reading and scheming has paid off in other areas. For the first time we grew great big, strongly flavoured garlic bulbs, and lots of them. We did it by the book, supplying plenty of compost, spacing the cloves a hand's width apart just before the shortest day, mulching them and keeping them weed-free. It's been a fantastic success.

I've also been delighted with the Tomaccio tomatoes from Egmont seeds. Five bucks for two seeds? Worth it! They are the sweetest and most productive cherry tomatoes we've grown.

We're also picking beans (loving the sweet cobra runners from King's Seeds), cucumbers, spring onions galore (always too many spring onions), zucchini (we like slabs of it cooked on the barbeque) and soft buttery lettuce grown in the shade of the cucumber plants. Egmont's gourmet lettuce salad blend is delicious, and very affordable at $2 a packet. In the consistent heat we're having (it's 28 degrees C as I write), lettuce lasts about three weeks in the shade before bolting, so you need to sow new seed about that often.

And the poppies... Anna and I have fallen in love with them this year and have grown plenty. None have been shade culprits. My favourite is Kings Seeds' Icelandic poppy, and their peony poppy (which I'm told is an opium poppy) is stunning too. Happy days.

Icelandic poppy

Peony poppy

What the photos above don't show are my ever-present gardening companions. They join me each evening in the garden, which is the only time it's cool enough to be out there (I have another project filling the cool mornings).

These ladies are always keen for snails and greens.

My friendly and patient pal who decorates wherever
he is so beautifully.

Oh, and the sandflies and mosquitoes. They're there too, wanting a taste of my sweet tomaccio-red blood, and deterred only by clothing or insect repellent.

The most beautiful island

Over the summer break we were lucky enough to go to a stunning island. It is one of my favourite places in the world, because it is so wildly beautiful and there are no roads or cars. If you want to go somewhere, it's walk, paddle, or stay put.

Although it was peak holiday season, there were very few other people there, and they were great company. It made it such an easy place to be.

The only entertainment devices we took with us were books and a kayak. No screens, and yet the children were happy and content, as in love with the place as us, clambering over rocks, swinging on the rope swings and skimming stones. They could hardly believe that this wonderful place was their backyard for a few days, and they could roam free. (They were on the ipad within minutes of returning home.)

One of the best parts was cooking great food over a fire, all the while listening to the song of native birds (this is a predator-free island). My favourite was the parroty screech of kaka. I also loved my encounters with an old friend of mine, the North Island robin. Another one appeared every twenty or thirty metres when we went walking.

We also roved to New Plymouth - a lovely town of beaches, bush and rivers - and Auckland, where we went up the Sky Tower and to the Auckland Art Gallery. At the art gallery was a collection of intricate, inspiring lego buildings, which anyone and everyone could add to and modify. And add to and modify they did - it was a happy, absorbing hive of activity. (Alert to creative and frugal families: I think it's free to get into this part, but it might pay to phone ahead and check.)

The art gallery was full of things that people had created to be beautiful and interesting. It struck me that no matter how hard we try, we cannot compete with what nature provides, slowly and blindly.

The African tinge to my mince pie baking

Usually while I'm doing Christmassy things like baking fruit mince pies, I dial up some Christmas carols and delight at the voices of boy sopranos. Instead, today I was feeling my African roots, so I listened to Shoshaloza on You Tube. My African roots are no stronger than any other freckly white person's. I mention them because our mitochondrial DNA shows we all come from Africa originally, and I really love African music and dance.

I listened and danced to about ten versions amidst the pastry, tins and fruit mince, with an ipad propped up at the edge of it all (plus my usual kitchen bench accompaniments of school books, art equipment and little girl novels... oh Anna, Anna, you do spread yourself around the house).

I loved them all. A favourite, though, was the Drakensberg Boys Choir's version - make sure you listen to the especially magic second part, you will be smiling and dancing! This version has my requisite boy soprano in it. For pure sound, the winners were an absolutely stunning Swedish choir (N3A of Kungsholmen Gymnasium, the title says).

The Swedish version is kinder to white people - there are no black singers among them to show up their stilted white movements! (This is a song you have to move to while you sing.) I don't know why dark-skinned people move so rhythmically, but I envy and admire them for it. I've seen it repeatedly in Africa, Melanesia and Polynesia (plus of course in Maori people here in New Zealand.)

We spend a lot of time, money and energy on Anna's dancing. She loves it and 'feels' the music, which not everyone with white skin does. It feels important to us. I'm usually sitting on the parents' benches at the side of the class doing the seated groove. Maybe my resolution for next year should be to get up and dance when the music takes me, no matter what the other mothers think! Some might join me! I hate the thought that singing, dancing and playing music is being replaced by listening to and watching other people do it, usually on a screen or sometimes a stage. Why not in our streets, our gardens, our houses?

Where are our roots, people?! Shoshaloza will remind you why they matter.

The mince pies I make are ugly little beggars compared to the others I see. They look like my grandmother's did, because I use her recipe and method, and even her tins! But oh, the taste... unbeatable. They're a really important part of this family's roots.