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

Fruit, Fruit, Glorious Fruit!

Well, Steve and I are on a diet.  It's a good time of year to do this as there are plenty of bits and pieces in the salad line that are growing in the garden.  Apart from the chicken and cheese, everything on this lunch plate is from the garden, which makes us very happy.

 Our stone fruit continues to be magnificent, after the nice lot of yellow nectarines we picked at New Year, we were blessed with 5kg of luscious apricots.

 And today we have just started picking the flat white peaches....oh my god they are sensational, so juicy and sweet!  We have waited very patiently for these peaches, this is the fourth fruiting season since we planted the tree, and apart from about 8 tiny fruit the very first year, the tree had all sorts of problems with leaf curl the following two seasons, so badly that the tree was weakened and dropped all its fruit.  This year the spring weather has been better and the leaf curl was not quite so prevalent, and finally we are being rewarded with lots of lovely lovely fruit.  Great for dieting, a delicious treat instead of fattening things.

 I've been to the Albany Summer School the past week, doing an art course run by a children's book illustrator Gabriel Evans....if you want to check out his work, click here.  We learned mainly water colour techniques (which was a huge learning curve for me as I knew nothing), things like skin tones, shadowing,

 interesting skies, scribble techniques for shading, wet wash, dry wash, loads of stuff.  Although parts of it overwhelmed me, I enjoyed the course very much and felt I learned heaps and heaps.  Now to keep practising!

 Speaking of chickens, our escapee chicken thinks she is a kangaroo.  Not only does she continue to escape every day, she spends most of her time hanging out with the kangaroo mob, going right up to them totally unconcerned.  Here, one of the joeys is a bit taken aback at the sight of someone with feathers, but after a sniff they ignored each other.

 Here's one of this year's joeys, looking all chubby with her fluffy baby fur.  Her mum is Split, grazing behind.

 Do you remember me telling you about our alpha male Ben, that he got into a fight with another huge male just after Christmas?  He was a right mess, a bad throat wound and a damaged mouth as well as being very very sore.  The photo below shows Ben back in October when he was a magnificent specimen of a huge male kangaroo.  He had lost quite a bit of weight after this photo when the breeding season started, presumably too busy chasing the girls to eat, but he still looked pretty good early in December.

 Poor old Ben, he disappeared for a few days after the fight but then he dragged himself back to our place, poor bugger could barely walk, and started following us around, (which unnerved us as big male roos can be dangerous, but he was only able to move as slow as a snail so that was okay) desperate for food.  We realised that he couldn't eat, or rather couldn't graze, he was holding his mouth half open so we wondered if he had a broken jaw.  He's a pitiful sight, I'm sure you agree.

 So, we had a decision to make, do we ignore him and let nature take its course, do we find someone with a gun and put him out of his misery, or do we look after him?  Well, we don't cope well with seeing an animal slowly dying before our eyes, so we decided to start looking after him.  We had to plan carefully how we would feed him as male roos are not to be trifled with, not even sick ones.

 So, every morning, after checking carefully where he is, we put out half a bucket of roo muesli for him, alongside the 50lt water bucket that we always have in the paddock for the roos to drink.  His mouth is slowly recovering and in the last week he is able to chew much better than before.  He still doesn't seem to be able to graze, as in bringing his front teeth together to bite grass, but he can eat the loose stuff we give him.

 So he spends most of his time in the same spot, where we put the food.  This is good actually, as he has stopped following us.  He has a little mate with him too, the smaller roo, his name is Nash, is a two year old joey whose mother disappeared a few months ago.  He is independent but normally at this age he would still be hanging around at least near his mother, so he is appreciating a bit of food too, as he is on his own. 

 So Ben is looking better, he has put a tiny bit of weight back on, he is eating better, but is still moving very slowly like an ancient old man.  He spends most of his day lying down against that fence, or tucked under the lime tree, then gets up and has a feed and a drink then repeats this all day.  He goes away at night, presumably into the bush.  He has definitely lost his alpha male status.  The big boys don't keep that status very long, I think he's been the alpha male for 18 months.  Anyway, we are happy that he's not starving to death. The chicken checks up on Ben a few times very day too, she goes right up to him.  He could easily squish her but he tolerates her cheekiness.

I've done a bit of crochet lately, I made another market bag for shopping.

 And I want a couple of large, round, fat cushions for our settees, so this is the front of the first one.  I still have to sew it into a cushion but the crochet is finished.

 And I had a lovely time doing the jigsaw Michelle gave me for Christmas.  I love busy jigsaws and this one was wonderful!

Until next time.... xx

Blown To Kingdom Come!

My goodness we've had some stormy weather, the wind has been relentless with day after day of severe weather warnings.  Apart from losing power for 10 hours which was a bit of a pain, we got off very lightly.  There is tons of mess, loads of little branches to pick up, but thankfully no whole trees down.  We lost a big branch from the big old jarrah in the back garden, but it very neatly fell onto the grass between the two garden beds, so it didn't squash any plants.

My lovely Melaleuca incana blew over though, that's the one that the butterflies and blue wrens spend a lot of time in, right outside the back door.  Thankfully it blew onto a lavender bush that stopped it from being completely blown over.

 I managed to haul it back up and tie it securely to a star picket.  I also gave it a big haircut to reduce the weight, so now I will cross my fingers and hope the roots weren't ripped apart and that it will start growing again.

 I am rather fond of this plant, called Loropetalum chinensis.  The photo doesn't show it very well but those frilly little flowers are in fact a bright hot pink colour.  It's a very flamboyant plant with its maroon leaves and hot pink flowers, it makes me smile.

 This plant is called candytuft, virtually an annual, but it drops its seeds readily and therefore comes back every year without any effort on my part.  They are slowly spreading in the garden bed outside the kitchen window, they are very pretty enmasse.

 I spent some time tidying in my sewing room.  Steve very kindly cut back an old cupboard we weren't using any more, to give me some shelves for my yarn stash.  I could never see what I had when it was tucked away in the bowels of a low down cupboard.  Now I can admire it and easily see where the gaps are that require a bit of shopping.  One can never have too much yarn, or patchwork fabric, or embroidery threads.... :-)

 This is what I'm working on at embroidery. It's canvaswork and I'm trying to invent a small street of quirky houses.  It will end up square shaped and the plan is to stitch it the front of a patchwork, rice-filled cube, to use as a door stop.

 This weekend was the finale of the annual Southern Art and Craft Trail.  We waited til the last day as we knew the crowds would be thinning out as its the end of the school holidays.

 We toddled off into Denmark this morning and wandered through four of the venues, admiring the talents of many local artists.  Since we moved into our house down here, we have bought one piece of original, local art per year, and this is what we bought today.  My photo isn't very good, the watercolour has a lot more depth that I can show.  We love it, it's called Flying Free by artist Sarah Bondini, who we met today and had a lovely chat with.  It's so nice meeting the artist of a piece of art that you absolutely love.  It has pride of place in the living room now. :-)