Stop the shop

OCTOBER is Buy Nothing New Month, and ALISON APRHYS is reaping the rewards of growing her own food, riding to work and not replacing her broken TV.

OCTOBER is Buy Nothing New Month, and there’s a lot to be said for incorporating the old tried and tested into a modern lifestyle.

As a colleague said, you are living the new Amish life.

While I am yet to acquire a bonnet or a buggy, I do adore using much-loved retro objects, rather than dashing out and committing ‘‘affluenza’’.

Listening to the wireless is tops. Particularly when the footy is on.

I know some fans have to watch their team on the television.

But there’s something magical and poetic about being in the garden turning over the compost, or at the beach waxing up a surfboard, or pulling over while driving down the coast along the Great Ocean Road as the radio tells you breathlessly the score, who’s been caught (or squawks my favourite, ‘‘loose men everywhere’’), or relates how your favourite player pulls his socks up, tosses a few blades of grass in the air, and then plants the Sherrin through the big white posts.

I did have a TV, but it died after 20 years. And if I am really desperate to watch Dr Who, I can always do so on my laptop.

Listening to the radio is even better while making cakes with my lovely 1960s Sunbeam Mixmaster, which is older than I am.

It still does a beautiful job, no matter if it’s my mother’s ginger fluff sponge, a chocolate butter cake courtesy of Cookery the Australian Way, or a fruit cake offered up by the Presbyterian Women’s Missionary Union Cookbook (which was compiled some time before Rommel terrorised North Africa).

In fact, I think the Sunbeam could easily make the cakes without me.

There’s really something special about using recipes that generations of cooks have baked and fed to the people they love.

Even better is cooking up a meal from food you have grown yourself out the back.

I’m enjoying gorgeous heritage Purple Dragon carrots, which apparently contain 28 times more anthocyanins (antioxidants that create the purple-red pigment in berries) than plain old orange ones.

And the garlic and onions will be ready to harvest soon. It’s so satisfying to pull them from the soil and think about all the delicious things I can cook with them.

The other day I made pumpkin soup, using a variety of homegrown pumpkins, tomatoes I froze last summer, onions, and garlic, served with olive and rosemary bread from a reliable recipe I’ve been making for years.

I felt like a cross between Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Ma from Little House on the Prairie and that inspiring New Zealand lass and free range cook Annabel Langbein.

Growing food from seeds you have collected from your best vegetables and herbs, or have been given by friends, is also a cracker.

Last weekend I planted beans, spinach and pumpkins from such seeds, and I just know they will give me luscious results – in between chasing chooks out of the compost heap. In fact, the rocket and peas are already up and powering along.

Pushing my old fourth- hand hand-operated fly-mower through the clumps of clover and winter grass in between my vegie beds is also heaps of fun.

It’s great f or upper- body conditioning and cheap as chips to run.

Plus, I can hear the radio, and the chooks loll behind it, eagerly eating the insects thrown up by the blades.

My decision to have a radio but not a TV, to use a hand mower rather than a petrol one, to cycle my 50km-a-day commute when I can rather than drive, and to try to buy 90 per cent of my clothes and homewares from op shops and garage sales rather than stores, is not born of Luddite stubbornness.

It’s simply heaps more fun, and much more frugal.

At the end of the day in this mad, stressed-out old world, we need all the harmless fun we can enjoy.