Make Your Own Instruments

Here at Heritage Hill, we love a bit of DIY. From making our own jams and chutneys, to harvesting food from the gardens for our own lemonades and icecream. We like making our own rugs from rags and art from trash. We love getting down and creating from scratch. And today, I thought we’d look at how to make your own instruments, with which you can make your own noise.

I found this beautiful website, http://students.ed.uiuc.edu/langellr/activity1.html where a range of students from elementary schools in America designed and created their own instruments, which they photographed and wrote instructions for on the site. From simple Marrocas made from disposable cups through drums and bongos made from cans and guitars made from boxes through to fantastic, made up instruments which, you’ll be unsurprised to learn, are my favourites.

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce to you the Pluckaloo

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A Christmas Old Fashioned and Merry

What are you doing for your food this festive season? The Clarks picnicking outside Laurel Lodge in the early 1900s.

My idea for this post was to go back to one of the old recipe books in the collection to examine what earlier generations created for Christmas meals. Usually, in Australia, traditional Christmas food are inherited from the United Kingdom, thus you find recipes extolling the virtues of roasting duck or chicken and vegetables in temperatures that are similar to the temperatures outside. Back then there was no affordance given for the fact that Christmas in Australia falls smack bang in the middle of Summer, when it’s hot enough in the kitchen without putting the oven on for hours at a time.

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Artichoke internet sleuthin’

Something has been bothering me for a while. In our veggie patch, the artichokes have been quietly flowering away for some time, and every time I pass them, I’m struck just how closely they resemble a thistle. So today I decided to do a little internet sleuthin’.

It turns out that the artichoke looks like a thistle because it is indeed a member of the thistle family. It originated in the Mediterranean area of Europe, which made me wonder if that’s where artichokes come from, where do thistles come from? The thistle is the Scottish national emblem, and you can see it everywhere in Scotland, but Scotland is hardly the Mediterranean!

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What is your garden trying to say to you?

The iris is "Good News"

Languages can be found everywhere. We all know about books, magazines, the internet, street signs and shop names for the written word, and anytime you pass anyone in the street, chances are they’ll be using verbal language. There’s visual language, the way we read and interpret pictures, photos and art, but did you know that you can even read a garden?

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Researching History

The internet is an amazing place for historical information, as long as you know how to find it! For instance, did you know that National Library of Australia is in the process of digitising Australian history? It has in it’s archieves papers, books, photos, recordings, maps and more and it’s slowly going through and linking them all together in a project called Trove. It was through this archive that I found the article below, in which Mrs Harts father, Dr Langley, gives medical advice and instructions on how to amputate a leg over the phone to a man who’s empolyee has had his leg manged in a threshing machine. The very idea makes you even more thankful for modern ambulances and the health service, doesn’t it?

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uncovering garden secrets

I don’t know a lot about decorative plants. Vegie patches is an area I’ve dabbled in, edible plants I understand and do ok at growing, but decorative plants didn’t really used to interest me, until now.

Heritage Hill is surrounded by almost 2 acres (Or just over 2 acres, depending on who is telling you) of beautiful gardens that have been kept in the 1930′s style that Mrs. Hart planted. This means that they’re divided up into little square sections, which call to mind the Art Deco style of straight patterning. We have 1 full time gardener and a number of part time gardeners who work hard to keep the gardens beautiful, all year around.

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