Changing seasons
May 10th, 2009 - Posted in Kaimata Croft, chickens, sheep, wellbeing - by Sarah|
Well winter is definitely here in the South Island – this week’s weather warnings are for heavy snow rather than torrential rain 
.
Moulting chicken with tail feathers growing back and others feathers fluffed out as much as possible to compensate for missing ones.
It is not really that cold here in our micro climate at the croft and the grass is still definitely growing down in the paddock. Sitting typing this requires 3 tops and thermal leggings under my jeans though. The sheep are happy with the cold as the grown ups haven’t been shorn since spring and the lambs were done in March. The chickens have been busy moulting over the last few weeks. If you read the chicken care books they all talk about moulting happening gradually over a long period but ours tend to go from fully clothed to almost bald overnight and then spend a couple of weeks looking more like a hedgehog as their new feathers grow through.
There are bigger changes than a new coat of feathers on the horizon for me and Brendhan though. We are heading off to Queenstown for the winter. For many months now we have been considering whether the Croft is the right place for us and we’re hoping that a few months away will help us to reach a conclusion. There are many things that we really enjoy about living here such as growing our own food and building. However, we have found ourselves feeling the lack of the kind of cultural and social opportunities that really suit us on the coast.
The fact that we have spent over 2 years living with temporary accommodation has also ground us down and a few months away (with an inside loo!!!) may enable us to get a clearer perspective on the place. By the end of the winter we will decide whether to start the house foundations or put the croft on the market and move elsewhere permanently.
woven scarves
So in the meantime Brendhan has been offered a job with one of Queenstown’s main wireless internet providers, Headquarters, and I am hoping to combine selling my weaving and felt at local markets with running fibre craft workshops for people looking for a break from the ski slopes. Much more on this to follow over the next few weeks.
I will also be coming back here regularly to keep an eye on the sheep but we have decided to find other homes for the chickens. So if any West Coast readers would like some or all just respond to this post.
chickens looking for a new home
Speedy shuffling
March 18th, 2009 - Posted in sustainable living, wellbeing - by Sarah|
When we got back home after our fab Christmas break in Cromwell I decided that it was time to get healthy. This lifestyle has tanned my face and bleached my hair (honestly, it’s not grey) and massively developed my upper body strength but my fitness and weight levelled off early on and were not going to magically improve without my conscious intervention.
I started off with The Food Bible by Judith Wills
This book has loads of good nutritional information about different vitamins and minerals in food and why you need a balanced diet. It has chapters covering weight control, food as medicine and for different stages in life. It also has a small selection of recipes and a really useful section of basic ingredients with their calorie, vitamin, mineral and fat content. I decided that to lose some weight I should be eating about 5,140 kilojoules per day (about 1200 calories) so I started weighing and calculating everything I ate and jotting it down in a diary. We still had the same meals we usually did as my investigations into healthy diet confirmed that we tend to eat all the right things (low meat, lots of veg and fruit, pasta, rice etc.) but our portion sizes went down drastically.
The first week of this I had still got lots of birthday chocolate left and so I incentivised myself to stick to the regime by allowing myself to make up any spare kj in my daily allowance with cubes of chocolate. While I haven’t seen this recommended anywhere I found it a very effective way to ensure that I continued to work out that I’d eaten 33kj of carrot and note it down. The transition when the chocolate had gone was a bit difficult but I switched to rice cakes as my ‘treat’ as I happen to be lucky enough to really like them. I also decided from day one not to include fresh fruit in the calculations as its lack of fat and multitude of good constituents outweighed any calorific value.
After 2 weeks I felt confident that I had formed a good understanding of what 5,000 kj looked like in meal portions so I stopped adding everything up but still stick a plate on the scales occasionally to check I’m not going too mad with things like pasta and muesli.
After another couple of weeks I was ready to start upping the exercise and this led me to another highly recommended book: The Complete Book of Running for Women by Claire Kowalchik
This a great book written in a very accessible style and covers all aspects of running from starting out to training for races. I started at the end of Feb with a fast walk for 30 minutes 4 times per week. This is recommended as a check that you’re ready to start running. Then I began the 10 week programme to go from 0 to 30 minutes running. The weeks so far have been:
Week 1 – 2 minutes running and 4 minutes walking x 5
Week 2 – 3 minutes running and 3 minutes walking x 5
Week 3 – 5 minutes running and 2.5 minutes walking x 4
The book has a good set of stretches to do after each outing including a couple particularly important for women – the shins and the iliotibial band (outer thigh). The one thing that has been a revelation to me is the recommended breathing pattern. This is to breathe in for three steps and out for two. This helps to prevent stitches (I haven’t had any) and also contributes to injury prevention as you hit the ground hardest when you start to breath out and this pattern means that the impact is shared equally between both feet. I found that it gave me something to concentrate on when I first started out instead of being left counting the seconds to go before I could walk again. This last increase to 5 minutes of running (20 minutes per outing) felt like a huge increase psychologically but again, the breathing pattern and the practise from the previous two weeks made it fairly easy. This book has also encouraged me to go as slowly as I need to in order to feel comfortable so while it may look like I am shuffling speedily in my head I am running.
I started having a look at the next book this week, the one that takes over once I can happily run for half an hour: The Non-Runner’s Marathon Trainer
