A Garden Harvest

It’s golden marigold season and the garden is magical! Julia cooks from the harvest and makes a tea. Anastasia goes for a swim with the ducks and gives her tiny kei truck a diy makeover!
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We are sisters, Julia and Anastasia Vanderbyl. A few years ago, we began a journey to live a life in perfect harmony with nature. A life of caring for animals, growing fruit, planting trees, gardening, cooking, creating, building and learning to live with the land.
In this time, nature has taught us more than we could have ever imagined.

Our environmental films document the landscape, the lessons we’ve learnt and our work as regenerative farmers here on Bundjalung Country.

We live on the land of the Arakwal and Minjungbal People of the Bundjalung Nation. We acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the Country we live on and recognise their continuing connection to the land and waters. We thank them for protecting this rainforest and its ecosystems since time immemorial.
Chapters:
0:00 A huge garden harvest of edible flowers
3:58 Swimming with ducks in the stream
7:19 Drying flowers for tea
7:47 Lighting a fire in the afternoon
11:35 A tiny kei truck makeover!

[Music] at this time of year a golden hue stretches across the garden the marag golds are in full bloom and their bright color ignites joy in all you can smell their fragrance throughout the land it smells as deep as the color is bright and this smell actually Wards peso so that they don’t eat the Abundant Gardens [Music] produce they also attract pollinators to the Garden butterflies and bees rejoicing in color and nectar [Music] the flowers are always a reminder of the beauty in the smallest things each tiny petal joining in unison to create this larger Vision it reminds me to look around to see all of the small things that create this [Music] life the flowers are starting to fall so Julia is harvesting them for the kitchen [Music] the end of one plant just brings the beginning of another we always spread a few seeds between our fingers encouraging the next season’s growth the changing season means that it’s the perfect time to plant spinach so in the gaps where the maragold no longer grow Julia is planting seedlings [Music] today jir is making a tea for marold petals to harvest is such a practice of understanding the in of time sometimes it is necessary to spend all afternoon picking to collect fruit before a storm or flowers before they [Music] fall sometimes when you have such different plans for your day you realize that the garden is Cooling and the produce needs picking in these moments It Feels So fastpaced within the season like you only have a quick window before the pimms will be taken by birds or the rain will spoil the mangoes but then there is the slowness the weeks waiting for tea to dry the months spent watching a tree slowly grow buds then flowers then [Music] fruit or the seasons passing between a seed sprouting from soil over the next week as the tea dried we watched these seedlings grow so slowly in rain in Sun and in the passing of [Music] time the Ducks are growing so fast and in this beautiful sunny weather I take them to the creek often they are bigger now so they enjoy the faster moving stream the one that flows from the mountain high above [Music] [Music] happy this Moola white duck still gets a little bit worried so she likes to sit on my lap for a break sometimes but snug gets so excited that she swims up and down the stream [Music] [Music] [Music] I [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] sh the [Music] [Laughter] [Music] it takes a week or so for the petals to dry out and then they can be stored and used whenever to always remember the bright Taste of the afternoon garden light a fire is always such a beautiful way to slow down seeing all the intes of nature light gardening is a balance of time understanding yourself within the fast moving seasons and the slow growing seeds sitting around a fire feels like this too it seems to stop time like nothing but the Flames exist this simple task of growing a fire from a single spark feels like the only thing in the world the Sun is setting earlier now and we love to be outside at this time of day and understand this change [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] yeah oh look at that col [Music] amaz you like it yeah [Music] [Music] we are sisters Julia and Anastasia and a few years ago now we chose this life in the Australian rainforest with the help of our animal friends we work to restore Nature’s Balance garden grow our own food and live with the land and if there’s one thing that this life has taught us it is to find joy and creativity in every moment from cooking to caring for the land creating with our hands sewing painting and gardening we’ve learned to do it all with love we wrote a book that tells our story of returning to a life lived in harmony of Nature and in it we share all the secrets of how to live a creative life you can buy it by following the link in our description or from bookstores around the world also for the first time ever we are offering fin art prints of Julia’s art the link to purchase them is in our description too so I used to think that cars were silly things that were just metal chunks that got you places but then I got my tiny Japanese truck which is honestly the most amazing thing it’s so practical I use it every day for different things around the farm that’s why there’s buckets in the back right now because I’ve been fixing the roads with it but because of that it has been getting a bit dirty and grimy so I’m going to give it a little bit of a makeover So currently she’s a bit of a mess inside I’ve got ratchet straps everywhere there’s a thousand different places to put your water bottle if you ever need five water bottles at once this is where I hang my swimmers so they can dry after I go for a swim and then there’s a tiny bucket which is it hangs from the mirror and it has my bucket list in it because you know so my plan is just I want to make it a little bit nicer I want to put something on the seats to make them covered and pretty and you know safer so they don’t get so dirty I want more little silly details like my bucket bucket list and yeah I just want to make it cuter okay so I’ve been collecting crochet blankets in op shops for a really long time for this project and I have too many options that I actually don’t know what to do I have option number one is this rainbow which is really big so I think it’ll cover both seats which I really like the idea of option number two is this blue which is only small but it’s so cute and it matches the exterior of the truck option number three is this cute white one which I think is big enough to cover both seats and then option number four is this pink one which probably would only cover one seat so it would be maybe with this one so I’ve been sitting here for the longest time trying to decide on what color I think the covers should be but I think I’ve decided I think that this one is the best because it’s the roughest blanket and I always feel really sad cutting up someone’s beautiful crochet so I think this one since it’s already falling apart is a good option and also there’s so much of it and also I think the colors really compliment it and it’s got this baby blue in it so how could I not okay so it’s time to take it to the studio I only had one pin in the whole car so for the width I used it to remember where to cut it and then for the height I’m literally just memorizing the color so I normally wouldn’t be so so crochet irresponsible is what I would call it and cut where crochet hasn’t already ended like have these Loose Ends because this means that the whole thing can now fall apart but because the crochet is already so rough and it’s already falling apart in so many places I thought that it would be easier this way instead of like normally I would find a section where it already joins and I’d cut along there so then I could like Rec crochet it together but this isn’t the case I couldn’t have done it here so instead I’m I’m going to use the overlocker and overlock these raw edges and that’s going to hopefully stop it from fraying but before I do that I’m going to trace this so I can get the other chair so my plan now was to make a kind of little like tunnel through this where the elastic will go and then it will just cling to the seat like a SE color but my problem is that I never buy anything new in my life and I only collect things secondhand which is great and I love it but it also means that every single bit of elastic that I have is probably from the 1970s probably one of my grand mothers and it’s completely degraded there is no stretch left in any of that so I’m not sure if it’s going to work as a seat cover option one is I use it anyway and see if that tiny little bit of stretch is enough option two is I use something like had elastic which has better stretch but it’s so small I don’t know if it would have the strength to hold the seat cover to the seat so the sewing machine doesn’t want to sew through this you see like it keeps getting C and then a little bit will drag onto the foot and then it’s really annoying you have to undo it but a trick that I learn in uni is that you can put a piece of paper underneath the machine as it sews and sewing machines actually kind of love to sew through paper you don’t actually have to sew through it you can just kind of put it next to it as it sews and then it doesn’t catch on annoying little bits of yarn okay so I have have them ready now I just need to put all of the elastic through and hope that they’re the right size okay so the elastic is all through I don’t know how tight to make it so I’ll just do that afterwards but now is the stage to see if it works that’s pretty cute so perfect now I just have to do the second one I thought that I was finished but then I decided that I should make little head coverings too because this can go here and it’s going to look so cute I finished and I’m just so happy with how these turned out I was looking for something to cover my car seat for a really long time and I looked at a few different crochet options but they were all really cheap and a fun or not so fun fact about crochet is that it can’t be done by machine so every crochet piece you see has to be handmade so if you see something cheap or from somewhere from Fast fashion then you know that someone is being ripped off to make that crochet and instead I used an old blanket from the op shop and made a new use out of it something both beautiful and practical I’m so excited I love it thank you for watching and don’t forget you can purchase art prints or our book through the links in our description thank you so much to our community of patrons always making us so inspired to Garden cook create and care for the land