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Mother of mountain (a pickling recipe music video)

Hello pickled turnip and purslane lovers, introducing… a new Artist as Family music video to celebrate Meg on her 49th birthday, featuring Maya Green on fiddle.

Now for the recipe:

First:
Add your cleaned turnips to your jar. We pickle ours whole, but feel free to slice yours first. They will taste the same, but will ferment faster if they are sliced. Pick your purslane and wash if needed. As purslane grows along the ground, it can collect soil. Break off the leaves and smaller stems. Keeping these on will turn your ferment into mush. We only ferment the larger stems. Ideally wait until the stems turn red in colour, but dark green is fine too. Add the stems into a second jar. We pickle the turnips and stems separately as they ferment at different rates. Keep the turnip leaves for cooking, and the purslane leaves and smaller stems for eating fresh.

To each jar add:
Pepper corns, mustard seeds, fresh dill or dill seeds, bay leaves, peeled garlic cloves, slices of fresh lemon or dried lemon. For the brine: 1 tablespoon of salt (non-iodised and without caking agent in it) per 2 cups of water. We use salt from Loch Iel (the Pink Lake) and rainwater.

Fermenting:
Make sure all the solids in your jars remain under the liquid and that they stay that way for the duration of the fermenting process. You can keep the lid on your jar tightly, loosely or not at all. As the veggies begin to ferment they will release carbon dioxide and brine may spill from your jars, so it’s best to place each jar on a plate or bowl to catch the liquid. You may need to top up each jar if a lot spills out. The time your veggies take to ferment depends mainly on the temperature of your home. The hotter the environment, the faster the process. Fermenting is a relationship. Don’t be afraid to taste the brine with a spoon each day to witness the transformation, to embody it, and so the brine can be part of your development too. The brine will start out clear and will turn cloudy. After 10 days or so in a summer home, your veggies might be ready. Taste them. If they are too crunchy, let them ferment for a few days longer. Once you are happy with the flavour and crunchiness, put your jars somewhere cold, such as a fridge, cool cupboard or cellar, to slow the fermentation process right down.

Eating:
We like to put our pickles out in a bowl and just munch them, or chop them up and add them to summer salads.

Summer solstice celebrations (with Dirty Trees and the men’s Firechoir)

The community garden beside the library in our home town has been a site of commons reclamation since a small bunch of us occupied this so-called ‘crown’ land, twelve or so years ago. This little patch of non-monetised, unenclosed, available-to-all organic food commons sits as the only ecologically complex environment in the central business district of Daylesford; a town that sells mostly unnecessary things to tourists in service to the dominant economic orthodoxy – hypertechnocivility.

Last night we gathered to celebrate the solstice, re-commoning and Djaara Mother Country at this bright moment – the longest day.

Artist as Family has been playing music with our friend Maya Green for a while now, and we put together a small set of songs to share with our fellow community gardeners at this gathering. At our first gig as Dirty Trees, we featured poems by an anonymous ancestor, William Blake and Martha Postlethwaite that we’ve set to music, sharing some of the wisdom and lyricism we’ve been holding dear this year.

In this video we play an instrumental version of Mairi’s Wedding (also known as Marie’s Wedding, the Lewis Bridal Song, or Scottish Gaelic: Màiri Bhàn AKA ‘Blond Mary’). It is a Scottish folk song originally written in Gaelic by John Roderick Bannerman (1865–1938).

We hope you enjoy this little garden-brewed moment as you slide into the summer’s downtime or into winter’s hibernation, wherever you are.

Thank you to Blackwood Ulman Jones and Anthony Petrucci for your filming craft, and thanks to you, Dear Subscriber, for staying with us in our various forms this year.

A few days earlier we celebrated solstice at David Holmgren and Su Dennett’s permaculture home, Melliodora. The mens’ Firechoir sang at this event six months after they formed, at the winter solstice. Patrick has so enjoyed facilitating this group with Anthony Petrucci as choirmaster and the men look forward to sitting in circle and singing with the women’s group, facilitated by Meg, in 2023.

Much neopeasant love for a festive and heartfelt season of joy,

Magpie, Blackwood, Blue Wren and Zero

The shadow world of Jab the kids (six months on)

In this week’s video we tell the origin story of our provocative rap-opera, Jab the kids, six months on. When we first published it this video-song received a tremendous reception – everywhere along the spectrum of human emotions, from outrage to praise. So with all that has passed since, with more vaccinated people being infected with Omicron (as is attested by the countries who actually release these figures),

where are we now? These mandated inoculants have eroded civil, democratic and human rights. They have attacked peoples’ sovereignty. The engineered virus, its shapeshifting variants, and the novel inoculants that have attempted to control them are emotionally and biologically fatiguing the world. Why are governments still on an unstoppable one-way, ‘stick to one message’ track to jab the kids? Is it just ideological bloody-mindedness or is it more nefarious? While it’s been decades of manipulation to gear people up, especially children, for ever-increasing numbers of vaccines, should we really accept this next-level colonisation of our human terra, our sovereign bodies? Children (under 18), as you can see in the graph above, have 100% more chance of contracting Covid if they are vaccinated, and yet children’s survival rate is even higher than your average adult, which is ridiculously high. So what is the gain? Welcome to the shadow world of Jab the kids.

You can download the MP3 version of the song here.

We hope you’ve enjoyed our offering this week.

Sending love to you all,
Artist as Family