Month: December 2016

Apologies for the grotty gardeners hands, but I was a bit excited to pick the first raspberry! There nearly wasn’t a photo – I wanted to scoff it down straight away! 🙂
Happily when I did get around to scoffing, it tasted fantastic!

I had a nice time this afternoon picking a few things from the garden

It takes me ages to pick the snow peas. They are like Ninja’s – they hide in plain sight!!
Half of them went into the salad tonight. I hadn’t realised how much I had missed fresh crunchy salads!

Today was another market day, and my friend Maureen kindly said I could bring along some more lettuce to sell. So I took down 8 – they were bigger than pictured above as this was taken in November – It was quite the box of leafy greens!! I got a lot of ‘oooh’s and aaaah’s’ from people as I walked through the market!! 🙂
By the time I went home, had brekkie, and returned, they all had sold!
I also accidentally sold several calendars as well (I was delivering Maureen her calendar  – she liked it so much she bought more as well as another lady who saw and bought 4!!)
Its not often I go to the market, not have a stall and come home with nearly $150!!!! (How much closer to Texas does that get me I wonder??)

I just finished cooking up some fresh strawberry jam (as one does at nearly midnight) so I will leave you with a couple of garden photos and then trot off to bed!

Enjoy what is left of your weekend!

Cheers

Oh it was bliss tonight! The first new potatoes were on the dinner plates for tea tonight!! I bandicooted around the base of one of the advanced plants and came up with these little beauties! They tasted so good too!! We have been missing our potatoes. It might be a little while before the next lot will be ready, but we enjoyed this treat very much.

My snow pea harvest doubled today! haha
And I got almost half a kilo more of strawberries.
I am taking a leaf out of Mavis’s book (over at 100 Dollars a Month) and started to weigh what I pick. Just out of curiosity. Lets see how long that bit of dedication lasts!! 🙂

This afternoon it stopped raining – still cool and the wind was annoying, but it seemed like a good time to go and get another couple of hours in at Ruby’s garden.

She is really happy with her ‘Christmas peas’. I am sure they will be ready for the dinner table on Christmas day.

Like everywhere else… the slightly warmer weather and all the rain has meant weeds going mad.  Jeff and I did some major weeding/clearing a few days ago (Jeff brought along his whipper snipper and sheared off all the tall grasses/weeds that were going to seed. It really helped.

Today I thought I would concentrate on this plot. The oxalis is rampant. The two remaining silverbeet raced to seed, so I wanted to replace them as well as make some space to thin out and replant a lot of the beetroot.

I only dug up one row of the over crowded beetroot, but it filled the space I weeded easily. I will have to weed another plot if I am going to space all the rest out!

Felt good to make a bit of overdue progress in here (And have a cuppa afterwards of course!)

On a different note, my Texas Fund is now $653.50
I think I am well on track there 🙂

Have a fabulous day

Cheers

What a miserable day out there today!! Tonight we put the fire on and parked ourselves in front of the TV.
I worked out where our summer went. I read how the past few weeks the North Pole has been on average 22 degrees Celsius higher than usual!!!!  Not 2 point 2. No typo. Twenty two. Thats nearly 76 Deg Fahrenheit for those that can’t be bothered googling.
Not real good.

I am wondering what kind of produce we will end up with this year if the warmer weather doesn’t come and stay put for a while??
I am actually a lot disappointed in my garlic. The bulbs don’t seem to be forming up like they should have by now. They really look like they need harvesting, but I will give them a couple more weeks. It was about this time last year that I harvested them…. but this is a weird season.
I love my garlic and it will be really sad not to have a big decent crop! Oh well… gardening has its wins and losses.

Happily the snow peas are just starting to produce! Lots of flowers… and today I made the huge harvest of five… 🙂

And some lettuce on the table for dinner too

One of the tomatoes in the hot house is doing especially well

Yesterday I spent a bit of time in the herb garden cutting back the oregano and lemon balm. I really don’t want them going to seed just yet!

Unfortunately tomorrow the weather calls for more of the same misery. I think I will pick more strawberries and indulge in a few more milkshakes!! Thats bound to cheer me up!

Hope your day was great!

Cheers

Today Jeff completed the little house to cover the bore and bore pump.
Apart from a few nails and screws, its all from reclaimed materials. Some pallets, some freebies from the hardware shop and some were Ruby’s old fence! Tin at top came from Tip Shop ages ago.

It was pretty heavy – so I was all ready to go Egyptian on the moving side of things

Disappointingly it moved well with a couple of ropes under it and both of us carrying it down into the yard.

It was only a little awkward to get it over the structure and get the pipe threaded up and out the gap in the roof

So fabulous to be hiding the unaesthetic pipes and switchbox (Which up until now was covered by a bucket weighed down with a brick!!)

I spent the rest of the day puttering about the garden doing a lot of ‘this & that’

Firstly I got onto that pile of silage

I did a bit of weeding and hoeing just to try to keep on top of it a bit

I feel better that at least something is mulched!

On advice of a reader, Elizabeth, I decided to also try grass clippings as a mulch. Since Jeff also mowed the lawns today, I thought I would rake up some and use it.

There wasn’t a lot to collect – mostly scattered too thinly now the rain has eased a bit, things aren’t as lush. Still… every bit helps!

Then it was time to dig up some of those self seeded tomatoes in the hothouse that were thriving!

I put several seedlings in a bucket then went all about the yard and randomly planted them!

All in all… a most productive day! (Not to mention another half a kilo of strawberries!! 🙂 )

Cheers!

Well – I was a little bit excited to sell my first bit of garden produce today. I was late strolling down to the markets, but my lovely friend Maureen said she would take some of my lettuce to try to sell.

Basically by the time I walked up past the stalls, chatted to a few people and wandered back, 5 out of 6 were gone! She sold the last one as she was packing up!!

So there! $12 more dollars towards my Texas Fund (Which is now well over $400 so I am pretty happy about that!)

It was a lovely day out at the markets.

Back home I scored a bit of free mulch. Some leftover silage from the paddock behind us.

The chap who manages these paddocks is getting them cut for hay in the next few days, but needed this last bit of silage gone. We obliged. It will make a start while we wait for seaweed. The weeds in this should be minimal as they have been wrapped up and the heat generally cooks the seeds. Anyway… can’t be worse than my current weedy patches! 🙂

So – I had a little project this afternoon to do. It needed some specialised equipment, pictured below.

I’ll leave you with that bit of weirdness and let you know tomorrow night what it was all about 🙂

Look what I discovered in the hothouse! Baby cucumbers!

It was a good Sunday, and what better way to end the afternoon, than by making a strawberry milkshake with fresh picked strawberries!!

Cheers!