... on plants.

There has been so much going on in the garden recently. It seems that just about every day there's been something new to sniff. One of my favourite flowers as far as scent goes are those little old-fashioned white freesias. This year I got a stack of bulbs from The Digger's Club and put them in a big shallow pot on the deck.

The native bees are still around, and it seems they like freesias too. Look at their little pollen balls!

My big pots of pansies, heartease and anemones have been flowering spectacularly for weeks. I don't think I've ever had such success with flowers in pots before!

The vegie garden (with the new hardwood edges) is packed full of greens, and they're now at the stage where we can hardly keep up with the output and need the chooks to help out! There's some carrots up the back there too, they should be ready in a couple of weeks.

 

This morning there was a first flower on my extra-special purple beans. I do so love purple food.

Speaking of chooks, (who are somewhat garden-related as that's where they live) Marilla had been sitting in an expectant trance for three weeks. Over three weeks, actually, as it took me about ten days to source some fertile eggs for her!

Of the twelve eggs, five hatched, which isn't a bad result considering the eggs came through the post. There was a possibility none would hatch, as who knows what happens to a fragile package en route? But there's now five one-week-old Pekins cheeping in their coop, which is just a wonderful thing. 

Look at those feet! Time for me to go and pick a colander of greens for our dinner, and squeeze a few chicks. Not a bad way to finish the afternoon!

... on 'What's going on?' A garden/chicken/house update.

I was delighted, week before last, to go out to visit the chickens to find not one but two eggs in the nestbox. These are the first ever eggs from these hens and I was rather proud that they laid them in the box rather than willy-nilly in the pen, which can often happen with new layers. Extra happy that two hens laid their first egg on the same day! Since then we've been getting two eggs every two-ish days, and we're having omelettes for dinner.

This afternoon, the ladies are all piled together in a dustbath they've been progressively improving over the weeks. After a rocky start with the magpies, they've settled in fine here - all previous parasites are gone and now that they've started producing eggs I'm feeling like they're making a valuable contribution. Livestock, not pets! (Yeah, right.)

The Stephanie Alexander no-dig garden experiment has definitely been a success, and in fact I have Stage 2 (same again, so doubling the garden area) awaiting planting right now.

It's absolutely bursting with food. The kale and spinaches have ensured we haven't needed to buy greens for ages, and there is a bumper crop of shelling peas coming on at the back there. I have grand hopes for the potatoes, and the red ones (which I found to be called Cranberry Red) appear to be doing much better than the Sebagos. The only disappointment has been the zucchini, who are valiantly producing stacks of little zucchinis which all rot on the stems. I have just cut many of the leaves off to try and dry them out a bit. Hello compost bin!

To date, we have had two figs off this tiny little twig of a tree, which is groaning with fruit. It's a green-skinned variety called 'Adam', and he's in a pot for now.

There's been a lot of flower action - I've had some giant pansies and these sweet little pots of heartsease. (I used to think that was spelt 'heartsy', but I like 'heartsease' much better.)

House news. C built our front gate a while back. Here's what it looked like as soon as he installed it.

Now check it out... this is that 'designed-to-rust' high-copper-content steel. We wanted something that would make a bit of an impact from the street as well as provide privacy to the deck beyond. I am loving this effect, and the surface is going to get even rustier!

Well, you know me. I'm keen on rusty old junk at the best of times, so being able to apply it in an architectural sense? Fab!

... on changes.

It's been an up-and-down week for me. I've moved house - mostly. It's funny - the new house seems completely full and yet I know there's still an awful lot of things left in my little shed out the back of my Ma's house. Packing up a place that I've lived in for ages (and loved) has been a bit of a bummer. I haven't enjoyed the process at all (although I have found a few things I thought I'd lost!) but the sadness has been tempered by the notion of the beautiful new house I've moved into. C and I are discovering the lovely times of day here - somehow the main room captures the best parts of the whole day - it's filled with beautiful light in the mornings and in the evenings. I know that as soon as we've lived in it for a little while longer, it'll start to feel like 'home'.

But there's been more sadness. Sometimes having chooks can really wrench at my heart, for they become pets as well as livestock. I don't know who it was that said "If you have livestock, you're going to have deadstock." but that's what's been happening. Four chooks have died from various ailments in the past few weeks, with the most recent departure our beloved and handsome Pekin rooster, Boyd, who had some kind of fit and just... expired. He was a lovely little feathery man. It's such a shame. My Ma has resolved never to get attached to chickens ever again, a resolution I know she will uphold until the next time the produce shop has silver-laced Wyandottes for sale.

Humpfh!

... on more christmassing!

There has been quite a lot of christmas action happening around here.

 There has been the making of cards and the sprinkling of glitter.

 There has been much construction of lunch-paper pompoms to adorn presents and bonbon hats.

There has been the acquisition of a casuarina for our family christmas tree, undertaken with a certain degree of stealth, at dusk. (Thinned from the side of the road down near the creek... since the bushfire two years ago they've grown up so thickly they can't all survive!)

There has been the cutting of my Ma's christmas cake.

There has been a daily inspection by the chooks about how things are going inside the house. "Get out, Boyd!"

... and there has been some degree of craftiness going on. It's time to clean up! Wrap those last presents! Crack open a bottle of Rekorderlig Strawberry and Lime cider and... "ahhhh!"

... on finding joy in small things.

There've been too many disasters in the world of late - I've been feeling the weight of the world. Flooding here in my home-town of Brisbane, the earthquake in New Zealand, the tsunami and nuclear emergency in Japan, all of them devastating. Sometimes I just can't look at the footage on the television any more.

It amazes me that life goes on. Yesterday I read the most perfect quote which covers that quite nicely. "We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen." which is from DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover. So, I've been trying to focus on the small, local things that bring me joy.

Like this: all the rain over this past summer has meant that there has just been a bumper crop of guavas. Guava trees often spring up in urban spots - I gathered kilos of them from a tree on my local railway cutting and made my first batch of guava jelly.

And like this: I bought my very first pair of proper hiking boots in anticipation of climbing a mountain. As soon as they arrived I put them on with my new proper hiking socks and just fell in love. When I walk in them I feel tall and strong, like I'm standing up straighter. I've done all my previous hiking in Blundstone boots, but no more. No more!

(As an aside, I've also been enjoying Hipstamatic on a borrowed iPhone. My own phone is six years old and doesn't have a camera - I can certainly see the attraction.)

And most definitely like this: by hatching eggs. I have Pekin bantam chickens, and last year I ordered some fertile eggs from a breeder and put them under two broody hens. Of the 12 eggs, 8 hatched, and of them 5 were roosters! So, SO handsome - I wished I could have kept them all, but so far I've found lovely homes for 4 of them, and the last boy remains with me - at least - until the neighbours complain. He's only just starting to crow. Anyway, his biggest brother was much more advanced and was happily performing his roosterly duty with my older hen, Birkenstock. After he went to his new home my Ma took a couple of her eggs and put them under yet another broody. "Those eggs won't be fertile," I said. "He's too young." My Ma replied "Let's put them under Sylvia and find out!" Last weekend - look what happened!

So, how do you beat the weight of the world?

... on agricultural shows.

You know, some weekends, you just can't go past a good poultry display. Chooks patiently wait out time in their show cages by scratching optimistically in their straw and poking their heads out between the bars to see what's going on down the aisle. I saw lots of handsome roosters I'd like to borrow for my pekin bantams at home, who I am sure would be wonderful mothers...

...and I saw an excellent duck. Happy Brisbane RNA Show!

... on things that are good for the soul.

A box of chickens came to live with me on the weekend. These four bustling swishing ladies with their feathers that come right down to the ground and make them look like they are wearing long full skirts are absolutely entrancing, even more so when they trot about and occasionally trip over their own feathered feet.
I could sit and watch them all afternoon!