We've had some stormy, windy weather over the past week. In fact I am writing this whilst snuggled under a quilt with a hot wheat pack on my feet as it's only 6 degrees outside and 8 degrees in the shed! It's been raining and hailing all night and morning which is great for our water tanks. They are both 80% full which means we have over 100000 litres stored so far. The hail is spoiling the look of our pretty sugar snap peas, they still taste good though.
On Saturday there was an almighty wind storm and although we are very pleased our buildings had no damage, we were sad to see our favourite jarrah come crashing down. It's in front of the house on the other side of the driveway, and was the tree to provide a wee bit of late afternoon shade for the front of the house. Oh well. This is what it looked like in back in March, I've always loved the twisted, gnarly trunk.
And this is what happened to it.
The next day we got to work on the clean up. Chain saw and mulching machine at the ready!
All finished. A nice pile of firewood, a big pile of mulched up leaves for pathways and a pile of manky bits and pieces for the next bonfire.
This is the tree now. The main trunk is pretty much dead but behind that are two smaller trees, we're not sure if they are separate trees entirely or are joined to that big trunk underground. Regardless, they look healthy so hopefully they will grow strong and beautiful.
Prior to the stormy weather, we had about 10 days of lovely warm days. It was amazing how fast seeds sprouted and seedlings grew. The vegies are producing well too. How's this for a colourful lunch. I am right into making beetroot dip, it is yummy! Cooked beetroot, natural greek yoghurt, lemon juice and salt all blitzed up together. This batch was a bit runny actually, I was a bit heavy handed with the yogurt.
The cliveas exploded into bloom. Aren't they gorgeous, such a cheerful flower.
I experimented with popping a few pumpkin seeds into the pig poo compost pile, and am very happy to see that two have sprouted. I've never grown pumpkins before so crossing fingers for success!
With the advent of warm weather the other observation was lots of tiger snakes! Apparently they have just awoken from their winter hibernation and are hungry, hence we are seeing a lot of them. In the last two years we have only seen two snakes so it was a bit of a shock to have six sightings in two days! We have taken the opportunity to slash areas of long grass and bracken nearest the shed to give us more of a buffer zone between us and them as they tend to hang around just inside the bush outskirts. They are fairly timid and disappear if you make a lot of noise, so I have taken to stomping if I walk near the outskirts of bush areas. Since the weather has cooled down again we haven't seen any. They are rather beautiful though, don't you think. This one I photographed was sunning itself near a pile of old wood at the bottom of the hill, well away from our buildings.
Well, as I round up this blog post it is still raining and hailing outside and it is still freezing! We warmed our insides this morning with yummy porridge.
We dashed out in our wet weather gear for a quick look at the creek which is flowing nicely again, it had slowed to a trickle a week ago,
On our walk we saw poor bedraggled kangaroos hiding in the bush, and this wet, fluffed up kookaburra.
I think I might stay in bed for the whole day! :-) Yep, good idea, the thunder is starting up now too. Seeya!
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