Hoping for the showers to come our way. We planted on the weekend onions, celery and sweet corn.

We are harvesting red grapefruit, pumpkins and lots of chokos. Also tamarillos, guavas, chillis, elderberries and the everyday odds and sods.

I just get stressed trying to find the time to water seedlings or seeds when I'm at work all day and it is a long day. So when the showers come, I can sit back and enjoy watching things grow.

This weekend, I have lots of weeding to finish after the wet wet season and will plant barley and I'm moving some of the sweet white yam. I'm waiting for the sorghum to ripen so winter peas can go into that bed and sooner or later I'm going to have to really wreak havoc on the 1/4 acre pumpkin patch now that its autumn. Might stick in a few broad beans and maybe some fennel seeds.

Waiting to put in parsnips and turnips and hoping to do a new potato garden. I left weeding the stone fruit trees because I figure they are about to go dormant anyway so I've got a bit of time up my sleeve there.

So please, some light regular showers would be appreciated. Thanking you.

I have lost in cyberspace my first blog entitled US which was a rundown about how hubby and I had come to this point.

It was amusing, concise, interesting and informative.

No honestly, you can take my work for it - it really was but its gone now down the neck of the netmonster that eats unloved posts.

Just thought I should explain that the US was me and hubby and not the United States about which I know next to nothing.

So put in a picture instead. Seeya

Elvira suggested that I should write about coloured cotton plants.

When we lived in the west, I grew lots of ordinary cotton just as a garden plant. We would pop a bush in anywhere in the spring and then they grew with quite an attractive flower a bit like a single hibiscus. When the bolls were full and cracked, the cotton fibre within would look fairly dry. We would hand pick the bolls and just pull the fibre out. You soon realize where the saying "cotton picking" came from because each boll would have ten or more seeds which we just picked out by hand. Any suggestions for doing this more easily would be welcome.

I then received some coloured cotton seeds which are naturally mutated into shades of green and brown. I had always known that these mutations existed but obviously they are relentlessly weeded out of commercial cotton crops because the slightest dark fibre in bales of cotton can cause endless trouble.

The greens went from pale green through to a teal green colour and the browns went from creamy champagne to an onion skin brown. When the fibre is sorted into greens and browns, blending with a card comber can make the colour more uniform when spun.

After picking the seeds out, all these seeds can be used the next year. In the west, I would plant them in spring for a long growing season. But since trying to grow cotton at the coast I have found that the wet season plays havoc with the quality of the fibre that a boll will produce. I have been thinking that I might plant them in mid summer so that they can do their growing during the wet season and by the time they have flowered and set bolls, it will have dried off a bit in autumn to make the fibre production more successul.

I would probably anticipate putting them in in late November or early December. I wonder how that will go?

And if you hand pick the bolls, your plants will keep producing for years unlike the commercial cotton plants where they kill/ defoliate before harvesting. I think a bit of frost might knock the plant back a bit but they seem fairly hardy and are certainly not soft little plants to look at - there can be a lot of hard wood in them so they may come through a hard winter for you.

Cotton is hard to spin unlike wool. Wool fibre has the natural little scales which cause the fibre to catch onto itself and spin into a nice yarn. Also, spinning wool in the grease before washing also makes it easier to spin. Cotton is not greasy and its fibrous scales are smaller so to spin cotton on a spinning wheel requires a very high tension and spinning speed to give lots of twists per inch.

I would like someone to try spinning cotton on a drop spindle and tell me how that works. I haven't tried it but it might be easier. Also, I wonder if adding an oil to it would facilitate the spinning.

I find the best use for home grown cotton is to blend with wool for spinning, thereby making a lighter yarn that is a bit softer and cooler.

Some australian cotton growers are growing coloured cotton organically and selling a woven fabric which is quite beautiful. Just google organic fabric australia and they will come up. They are using the coloured cotton with cream/ white to weave a gingham check and doing imaginative things with other organic fibres.

Have a look for that and enjoy.

So we've skipped over the adventures in the bush. When we had had simply too much drought and floods and geographical isolation and intellectual isolation we headed back to the coast to our little hobby farm which had been rented out and we started again.

We were right. We had many more skills than before and were ready to make a real go of the self sufficiency thing. However, still lacked money. As a result I am now working 50 hours a week with nearly two hours of commuting each day and hubby is working full time.

We now classify as time poor.

But I really loved the idea of relocalization and jumped on the scheme when I heard about it. This is because I know that one day I will not be working and my local people will be my main group with whom I will interact. I need to start relationships now for when I am at home.

Also, I remembered the Joh electricity strikes. Does anybody else remember these? Joh went head to head with the electricity unions who then went on strike and power supplies were dramatically cut. We were supposed to get one hour one and 1/2 hour off electricity. In reality it turned out more like 3 hours off and 45 minutes on.

Now I was living in a largish country town and I can remember just laughing at the poor people in the south east corner. In our town we had an abbatoir, a dairy which did milk, butter and ice and a large small crop industry.

The council stepped in and made sure that priority electricity supplies went to the hospital, dairy, abbatoir and some cold stores. Health needs were centralised, we had plenty of milk and ice to keep food fresh, fresh meat and fruit and veg. We seemed to have plenty of local baked bread as well so they may have been working with gas ovens. We saw vision on the TV of how consumers in the south east were panic buying and running out of things.

So we were fine during what was a difficult energy supply time. But that town has since grown. And it no longer has a dairy. It has closed and all dairy production is centralised in Brisbane and freighted back to other areas. There are still a few local bakers but most bread is baked in Brisbane and sold through supermarkets. I don't know if the abbatoir is still there - I don't like to ask. The fruit and veg industry is still there but it is mainly grown under contract to the supermarkets. And a lot of the farms have been cut up for housing.

So if energy supply became an issue today, would we still be laughing? These things I have been through makes me understand the absolute necessity to decentralize production and services throughout the country. However, this is not government policy and it is not economically rational so these difficult times which may occur at any time due to production problems, supply problems or just simple accidents would have a much greater effect on our daily lives than it would have 20 years ago. We have made ourselves vulnerable to incidents which would impact on community security and stability of the necessities of daily life. This must be amended and if we have to start personally and one at a time to get the message happening, we will just have to do it.

One day, when I finish work......