The Surprise In The Garden

Life potters along in lovely, cool Albany.  Currently it is 19 degrees which is surprisingly cool for this time of year even in Albany, it's lovely. 

Steve is our resident bread maker and he is today making small bread rolls instead of loaves as it helps make our portion sizing a little easier while we diet.  We're not eating much bread so we've been freezing most of the rolls and grabbing a couple out when we need them.  These ones are in the process of rising, they'll be going in the oven soon and the house will smell divine...... :-)

 The Angel peach tree continues to bless us with her wonderful fruit, I picked these 2 kilos this morning, that 9 kilos in total from this tree, with probably another kilo still on the tree.  Yum.

 I'm experimenting with freezing some of them, skin off, stone removed, sliced and frozen on trays before bagging up.  I hope they keep okay, it will be a big treat to have peach flesh in the freezer after the season has ended. 

 Bees are very busy in the garden, collecting pollen from the profusion of flowers that continues.  This is a very pretty, pale pink pelargonium.

 And these are Candytuft, they self seed every year and provide and mass of low colour, they are almost white with the teeniest blush of pink.  The butterflies like them.

 Just look at what I found in the garden this morning, I'm still in shock!  I have a little grove of banana trees in the back garden, simply because I love the look of them.  Never did I expect to find a huge flower with the the beginnings of teeny tiny bananas forming.  It will be interesting to see what happens, I would be gobsmacked if they developed fully, surely its too cold down here?  Anyway, I was very excited and isn't it pretty!

 It sounds like a bird aviary out the back, there are so so many little birds, which is just wonderful.  I managed to snap this pair this morning, a feat in itself as they dart around constantly, a Redwing fairy wren male and female.

 Here's our old girls, Lucy at the back, and Patience in front.

 And here's Ben, doesn't he look bony the poor old bugger.  He seems happy enough though and has become a permanent resident.  As long as we put some food out for him he is content to eat, drink, then lie around and snooze.

 This is one of his favourite spots, tucked under the lime tree.

 Since doing the illustration/water colour short course last week, I am trying to make myself do lots of little sketches.  At the moment I am mostly copying others until I have enough of a stockpile to be confident to start trying to develop a style of my own.

 It's amazing how you can't think how to do hair or what angry eyes look like, so it's good to have previous sketches to look back on.

 I am determined to master line drawn cats, I find them hard.  I discovered after drawing my mouse, that to turn it into a rabbit all I needed to do was lengthen the ears and change the tail, it's a case of working out the important bits of an animal to recognise it in a quick sketch.  Practise practise practise hey

 And speaking of cats, here's Neo with his best 'slightly pissed off' face. :-)

Until next time, xx