Pumpkins Are Ready When Pumpkins Are Ready

After 2 or 3 weeks of hobbling around I can happily announce that my back is hunky dory, yay.  This is one of the methods of self-healing I used.... hot water, bubbles and wine, luvly.  Mum gave me a nifty bath pillow for Xmas which is really comfortable, it has suction cups to keep it in place.  Tres good.

 

We had the pleasure of the company of mum and dad for 3 nights.  Here they are in front of dad's new car which got its first country run.  It was lovely to have to you to stay!  xx

 

Have I ever talked about kikuyu?  It is lovely, lush, green grass but my god it is hard to keep it out of where you don't want it to be, talk about rampant!  This is a wood pile we stacked up about a year ago that has all but been covered over by the kikuyu, and we needed to move the wood.  Mindful of the possibility of slithery things that may have taken up house within the pile, we dragged the wood out using a very long pole with a hook on the end.  No snakes to be found but my goodness it was hard work fighting to get the wood out amongst the tangled kikuyu!

Here is wood now, in a nice, neat, civilised pile.  I need to spray around the perimeter of the pile with Zero a bit more often to keep the grass at bay.

Steve has made a start on the shifting of much sand from in front of the house.  When the sand pad was done by the earth moving guys, they put a lot more in front than was necessary, just to keep everything stable whilst the house was being built.  Consequently we have heaps and heaps of sand to shift.  I need to poison that lovely looking green grass there too, cos it's kikuyu!  We are going to plant a small lawn there, but we are going to use Emerald kikuyu which is a new strain, it is much less rampant than the wild stuff, but is very very green and tough and resistant to drought.

This is time of year for wonderful sunsets.  Here is another glorious golden moment.  I love taking sunset shots with that dead branch of the the jarrah tree in the foreground.

We harvested a big bed of leeks last week, they just quietly sat there and grew like very well behaved plants, with little love and care from us.  Excellent.

 

I spent a morning chopping them all up then I cooked them gently til soft with some of our garlic.  I froze half the batch for future meals and with the rest made a big batch of potato and leek soup.  It was superb even if I say so myself!  Yummy.  Even better that we grew the garlic and the leeks and the potatoes ourselves.  I am very proud.  :-)

I've told you about the pumpkins that are growing all over the place, and that apparently you wait until the plants are dying back before you cut the pumpkins,  Wellllll, I couldn't wait and I cut one.  The stem was starting to brown off a bit so I thought it might be ready.  I popped it into the pantry for a few day to harden off, and this morning Steve chopped it up for me.  Looks okay although a bit pale.  I diced it up, boiled it and then mashed it all up, with the intent of freezing cupfuls ready for making pumpkin scones and pumpkin soup.  I have to say however, that I tasted some and it is very very bland with not much pumpkin taste at all.  Serves me right for picking it too early.  I'll use to to make scones but I think I'd better add cheese to the mix as well to give them some taste.  One lives and learns!

 

We have been looking for a rug for our living room floor.  Although we love the vinyl timber-look floor and love the feel of it under our bare feet, we are mindful of the need for something cosy underfoot as the weather cools down.  Bearing in mind that we have already ordered two red recliner chairs, we were hunting for a rug with a hint of red.  Ta-dah, this is what we bought.  What do you think?  We love that it is quite different and the colour goes really well with all the wood in the room.  Better still, we bought it from Harvey Norman and although their sale had finished a few days before, they had forgotten to take the '40% off' labelling off the rug, so they honoured the discount and we got it for 40% off (well done Harvey Norman for your integrity).

My friend Kerry has requested a blog post walking through the house showing every room, so that is the plan for the next post okay Kerry.  :-)