Saturday 23 April 2016



A wonderfully busy week of garden happenings too since we have been home :-).

My Honey has been hard at it on the bobcat – he didn’t stop for 3 days!














This rock wall was lowered a little as he had previously taken out some of the driveway to correct the drainage.  










Of course, the garden bed had to be lowered a bit too – look how lovely it looks now.  There are two transplanted lavenders in there (we grew them from cuttings stuck straight in the ground closer to the house) – and they have had a nice soak of seaweed liquid to help them settle in – here’s hoping they like their new garden bed.  Oh, and if you look at the end of the garden bed you might see the twin pineapple we decided to transplant too – really hoping it might get a bit more heat here and actually fruit – still a pretty long shot though…













The orchard got the love it needed – lots of mumby magic, covered with old straw and some rocky soil put in between the trees to plant up the chook fodder food forest next month:
















And finally, an unexpected bonus of those many hours of earthworks – this walkway/driveway between the house and the shed no longer looks like a building site – yay!













Next month it will be planted up with baby natives – just waiting for the rain to be on the reliable side.

But today was “below ground” planting day (moon gardening) so these went in today:















Oh, and plus some sprouted ends of the Kipfler potatoes I had in the pantry :-). 


It’s been a fun couple of weeks :-)!

We’ve celebrated a tenth birthday!  Double digits is always a good birthday in our home – and the birthday boy chose to go fishing for his birthday outing.  It was great fun to feed the fish and crabs and bring home fish and chips for dinner!
 












Then we had a lovely holiday in Toodyay – very relaxing, even though we were camping in the rain…
















I’ve said it before, humidity aint so bad when it is so pretty fog… 

And over the Avon River too…











 And making sparkles in the spider webs…











It was indeed lovely :-).

Saturday 9 April 2016


Happenings lately in our sunny strawbales:

Completely home-grown roast dinner:














Ours – potato, sweet potato, beetroot, pumpkin, spinach, chook.  Others (shared with us) – zucchini.

YUM! 

Chook wasn’t tough at all. 

Which is good, because another 2 will be processed to the freezer soon.

Harvest happenings:















That big-un is over 30cm across and weighed a good amount too.

Sweet potato soup was on the menu J!

Last week, we had a delivery of the good stuff:













4 m3 of Mumby Magic – and it will work its magic in our orchard as soon as we spread it out. 

Poor orchard got all put in without us mulching properly so it is well time for us to give the fruit trees some love before winter sets in.  Plus we will be establishing a food forest as the understory in there so we grow more greens and grains so we can free-range the chickens a bit more.  I can’t wait!

Now, lookie what my Honey has been doing!  J














Now if you know your paving, you will see that he has been cementing in the edges – and that can only mean one thing!!  The paving around the house is finished!!!  Yay!!!  Cue the party whistles, balloons and confetti canons J. 

The photo is actually Michael digging up the edges of the lawn so he can extend the retic right to the paving now (and further) because we can safely let it grow to the edges now. 

Pepper, of course, immortalised herself with wee footprints in the wet concrete edge:














And yesterday, I got serious with getting some winter crops started J.

Planted seedlings of broccolini, spinach, bok choy and cauliflower, plus seeds of similar greens:














We fenced up the garden beds to keep the voracious chooks out!  And did similar inside their run as I put down seeds to start their food forest in there:














Seems voracious birds are a feature at the moment.  Lookie at our sunflowers:













The parrots didn’t even wait until they were finished growing, these were all still green!  We will get no seeds from these few plants – lucky we have plenty others saved!