Patience is a virtue when it comes to living the good life, discovers Wendyl Nissen in this extract from her new book, A Home Companion.
One of the skills I have had to learn since moving home, far away from the corporate world, is that of patience.
As a magazine editor I was not renowned for my ability to wait and see. It was now or nothing, my way or the highway, just do it and talk about it later, a good meeting is a short meeting and give it to me yesterday. If I was negotiating an exclusive story deal with a celebrity or a newsmaker and they asked for some time to think about it I'd say: "Sure, take all the time you need, I'll ring you back in 10 minutes." If I had asked one of my writers to chase up a story that morning and by the end of the day they hadn't got it, I would wish them a good night at home ... on the phone. "You'll have that story by the morning, won't you?" I would smile, ever the velvet steamroller.
These days my bread is not going to rise any quicker just because I want it to and it won't respond to threats - although it does like a hot-water bottle placed under the bowl in winter. Making a batch of laundry liquid does take - and will always take - half an hour no matter how quickly I grate and stir and pour. But it always puts me in a good mood while I'm making it thanks to the lavender oil I use in it, which has the bonus of making my kitchen smell wonderful.
And my hens, Marigold, Hillary and Yoko, were not going to start laying eggs just because they were over 20 weeks old and all the books said they should. Or because I spent more time than I should creeping up on them in the bushes hoping to catch them in the act. Or because I had deposited two "pretend" plastic eggs in their nesting boxes hoping to fool them into laying an identical real one.
"I saw one of them rolling around looking like she might be in the hen equivalent of labour," I informed my husband.
"I think that's what's called having a dust bath," he pointed out.
"Do you think I should play them a rooster call to stir them into action?" I suggested after returning from the empty nest box. The hens were now officially 22 weeks old.
"Where would you get that from?" he asked reasonably.
"I think my cellphone has one as a ringtone," I said, impatiently pushing buttons and finding only a salsa tune.
In the end I had to simply accept that my hens were more interested in expending energy on escaping my carefully erected chicken-wire fences, than settling into the nesting box producing eggs.
I simply had to find other things to do while I waited, like getting my picking garden in order. The wonderful thing about warmer weather is that salad greens start growing so quickly that if you have a good bed-full you can take a leaf or two from each plant for a fresh, nutritious salad at lunchtime and dinnertime and the next day they seem to have miraculously been replaced. The plants can go on like this for months before they bolt to seed in the hot weeks of January.
In Auckland we can grow salad, especially cos lettuce and rocket, right through winter, but it is slow going.
While I kept an eye on my hens for imminent egg arrival, I planted out a garden bed with a dozen plants of cos and oak-leaf lettuce I had bought from the garden centre. Then I liberally sprinkled around rocket and endive seeds, which always pop up within a few days in warm weather as long as you keep them moist. These can all be picked one or two leaves at a time from the outside of the plant by using your thumbnail and just nipping the leaf at the base. This way you don't harm the plant and it will generously grow more leaves for you.
I bring the leaves in and simply put them in the sink and fill it with water. I leave them to soak while I do something else for dinner and when I come back any dirt or bugs have simply sunk to the bottom of the sink. I whip the leaves out, throw them in the salad spinner, add my simple sesame-lemon dressing and there is our salad, positively heaving with goodness.
There are so many advantages to picking vegetables just before you are about to eat them. There is the flavour which is so fresh and crisp - nothing like the limp offerings you buy pre-washed and prepared in bags at the supermarket. There is also the fact that you know what has been sprayed on them, used to fertilise them and what they have been rinsed in, which in our case is absolutely nothing. The salad you buy in those bags will often have been fertilised with chemicals, or sprayed with chemical pesticides and some are even soaked in chemicals before they are bagged in gas to make them last longer.
Then there is the fact that the minute a vegetable is harvested it starts losing some of its nutrients and vitality. Fruit and vegetables that are transported to supermarkets around the country are usually picked before they are ripe, which gives them less time to develop vitamins and minerals. They may look ripe but they will never have the same nutritional value as they would have had they been allowed to ripen naturally. They are also exposed to heat and light, which degrades some nutrients.
I recently saw boxes of "fresh" veges sitting outside my local supermarket in the sun, waiting to be taken inside. You can only wonder what condition they were in by the time they reached the cooling sprays in the vegetable aisle. Picking a fully mature vegetable or fruit as close as you can to eating it has to be the best use of your garden. Sometimes I grow iceberg because it is my favourite lettuce and Pearl loves it too. There is nothing better than a fresh crisp iceberg leaf thrown in the mouth and crunched to your heart's content.
Occasionally Pearl and I sit with an iceberg chopped up and dip the leaves in our favourite feta and spinach dip. But when you grow them you do have to leave them be until they are fully formed and I lack the ... there's that word again ... patience.
The closer I get to nature and self-sufficiency the more I realise that being patient is not a waste of time where you hang around and nothing gets achieved, which is how I used to view it in my former high-stress life. Now when something doesn't happen when I think it should, I see it as an opportunity to do something else while I wait.
This is when my attention often turns to sheets. White sheets - or sheets that should be whiter. One of the things I loved about Paul when I first met him was that he was a crisp, white-sheet man. Paul had a 100 per cent cotton, gorgeous weave, beautifully-made bed complete with hospital corners, unlike most of the men I knew who still slept between the polycotton print sheets their mums had given them when they went flatting and whose idea of clean sheets meant you washed them once a month. My love affair with white sheets - and Paul - has meant a desire to keep the sheets crisp and white, which gets difficult after a while. Constant washing with commercial laundry detergents leaves white sheets clean but with a grey/yellow tinge to them that no amount of soaking or bleaching can get rid of. There's a reason for this.
Commercial laundry powders and liquids have been developed to leave a residue in your clothes and linen, which they call optical brighteners or whiteners. These attach to fabric and when hit by ultraviolet light they change the light's wavelengths coming off the clothes. The optical whiteners stay in your clothes, are absorbed through your skin and can affect your immune system. They are thought to cause allergic skin reactions in babies and children. What they also tend to do is leave our white sheets grubby. And just in case you didn't know, most commercial laundry detergents consist largely of washing soda with variations in the types of artificial fragrance, colour and additives mixed in.
I remember my Nana used a product called Blue, made by Reckitt's. The label on it was a beautifully designed piece of Kiwiana with the catchphrases "Clothes always snowy" and "Clothes always fresh". The Blue came in a little netting bag and you threw it in your washing during your final rinse. It could also be used to treat bee stings and insect bites. You could even clean windows with it.
The blue pigment corrects the yellow/grey pigment and returns the material to "brighter than white!"
You can't buy Blue here any longer, although you can still get it in Australia, so I set about creating my own Blue equivalent. The blueing powder is created out of Prussian blue pigment, which is the most extraordinary thing to behold. The deep blue colour is astonishing and has been used for centuries by painters. It was even once used in some armies during the Second World War to reduce sexual urges. Apparently they would slip it into the soldiers' coffee and all desire would be diminished, which I'm sure made things a lot more peaceful in the barracks.
You can buy Prussian blue powder at art shops. We source ours directly from the US, though Paul is determined to get some from Germany so he can say we get our Prussian blue from Prussia.
I mix the blueing powder with baking soda and then add it to the final rinse. While I was trying to get the recipe right I ruined about three sets of our beautiful, expensive white sheets which to this day have blue blotches on them. When I finally got the mix right, I then hung the sheets out in blinding sunshine to dry and Paul, who hadn't been aware I was even making the blueing powder, came in from the line holding up a sheet and saying: "Did you bleach these, I've never seen them so white!"
I sometimes hear from people who have made or bought my blueing powder and have not waited until the washing machine bowl is completely full for the rinse cycle before adding the powder. They also end up with blotches on their sheets. I now know that you simply throw them back in, washing them as normal with warm water and my laundry liquid and the blotches will wash out. Don't let them dry as I did! By the way, if you have a front loader, just put the blueing powder in the fabric softener container as I'm told this works well.
I always wait for a bright sunny day before I wash my sheets, which is why I love November when the heat of the sun returns. It's a great time to take the opportunity to go through the linen cupboard and freshen everything up.
Sunlight is a fantastic bleaching agent, it's free and it's effective. I've often hung a stained piece of clothing out disappointed that I couldn't quite get the spot out and then collected it at the end of the day only to find the mark completely gone.
I've had hundreds of enthusiastic emails from people who tell me stories of old sheets and articles of clothing they had given up on and then managed to revitalise with a bit of blueing. And one story I wish I hadn't heard was from a woman who emailed me to say she used it on her elderly husband's undies. "He has the occasional accident so it's nice to be able to get them white again," she shared.
I will stress that the blueing powder is not a soaker like NapiSan or bleach. It won't get stains out, it just corrects the overall pigment. I try not to use bleach, even though Nana used heaps of it. If I need to give something a good soak I tend to use the Ecostore laundry soaker as it avoids many of the harmful chemicals associated with other soakers and works really well.
* Extracted from A Home Companion: My year of living like my grandmother by Wendyl Nissen (Allen & Unwin, $29.99). Out October 6.
