Repurposing

We are caught up in Grand Final excitement today, come on WC Eagles!

 Neo, on the other hand, is uninterested in muscly, sweaty men chasing a leather ball.

 He does enjoy being warm and gooey atop his bookshelf after the fire has warmed the upper air.

 His buddy Voldemort has awoken from his hibernation and is back basking on the settee.

 Voldemort is rather hungry after his big sleep so he's been stuffing his face on banana.

 The male Splendid wrens are colouring up in readiness for the breeding season.  His girlfriend is not quite as spectacular, but cute nonetheless.

 Brows has taken to perving in the bedroom window waiting for her breakfast.

 And Lucy sits right outside the door.

 Do you remember me telling you about Rabbit (Lucy's last joey) and how she was a new mama?  Well I finally got a photo of her bub, cute.

 Rabbit is on the right, and on the left is one of the boys, his name is Pretty Boy Floyd, or Floyd for short.  He has a beautiful face.

 On the left is Pixie, Growler's joey, and on the right is Chevie, Split's joey.

 There's Split at the back and another boy, Pawlie, at the front.

 I dont know who this one is at the front, he has interesting facial markings.  Still thinking of a name.

 We decided to throw caution to the wind and support the local Albany strawberry grower.  $16 for 4 kilos of magnificent strawberries, with not a needle in sight :-)

 We've eaten them au naturale, with ice cream, with cream, made them into syrup, and I also tried dehydrating them.  I have to say we were a bit underwhelmed with the dehydrated ones but it's good to experiment.

 I have a beautiful teapot that has a broken lid so this week I decided to repurpose it, as I have another teapot anyway.  What do you think?  I potted my African Violet into it, I think it looks fabulous!

 The start of a new crochet project, I've put a couple of other projects aside that I'm not in the mood for.  This is called the I Heart Granny lap blanket, I've chosen a colourway that is totally not me, but the colours just sprang into my head.  It's for me to keep me warm when I watch tv.  It's a little challenging to do but I'm enjoying it very much.

Until next time....xx

Tamarillo Thief

Michelle popped down for a visit a couple of weeks ago and she brought a cool little fisheye lens that she can attach to the back of her phone for taking photos.  She kindly allowed me to purloin some shots for the blog.  Aren't they great!

 I love the different way it highlights flowers, and the Magic Faraway Tree looks spectacular.  You can see how dry and brown the ground is under the trees.

 The nosy chicken had to stick its beak in for a look too.  :-)

 A few years ago I attempted to make Michelle a moss garden terrarium.  It was gorgeous, moss mounds, pebbles and Steve made a cute Hobbit door out of wood.  It didn't last very long unfortunately, the whole thing was gobbled up by a white fungi.  So, this visit, Michelle brought it down with her and we cleaned it out and had a go at redoing it.  We added a piece of Maidenhair fern for a tree too.  M reports that it has started to get a bit of white fluff growing again, she's opened the top up to try and dry it out a bit and see if that helps.  It's pretty though isn't it.

 Here are Michelle and Steve at Cosy Corner.

 And Steve and moi there too, we went for a little walk on a pleasant, sunny day.

Does anyone remember these?  They are Chunder Buns, a relic of the seventies.  Grated cheese, chopped celery and tomato sauce mixed together, dumped on halves of a bread roll then popped in the oven til melted.  Very yum.

 Here is the cat.  As the weather is cooling off he is constantly looking for warm places to nap.  He'll be very pleased when we start lighting the fire, which wont be far off now.

 This is what the cat has been getting up to in the wee small hours.  I picked a dozen tamarillos from my tree and dumped them in the fruit bowl.  Neo cannot resist fruit that had a stem attached, and in the dead of night will sneak up on the benchtop, purloin said fruit, then amuse himself batting it around the floor. 

 This is the last of the harvest from the vegie patch.  We are thrilled with the haul of Butternut pumpkins, first time we've grown them.  I made a batch of soup yesterday, it was lovely.  I have frozen some of the corn, I've been slack this time and just frozen them whole rather than stripping the kernels off the cobs.  It will be interesting to see how they are when defrosted and cooked.

 I finally made a start on dehydrating apple slices.  This was a small experimental batch, leaving the skin on.  I wont do that again, the skin goes a bit tough.  Since then I've done another couple of batches with the skin off, much better. 

 On the reptilian front, here is Voldemort who has temporarily taken up residence in the woodpile in the shed.  There are at least 3 big Voldemorts in the woodpile, and we have baby Voldemorts!  Very exciting!  There are three tiny little ones, like mini replicas of their parents, as long as a finger and not even as thick as a pencil.  So cute, and even cuter is that they can sometimes be seen riding on the big ones' backs....I am trying very hard to get a photo of that, not yet though, the babies are very skittish.

 If you look closely mid photo, you can just see the head of a baby Voldemort peeking out from behind the wood.  It is trying to get to the chopped grapes I've put on top, but it's not quite brave enough to come out while I'm there.  I need the parent and child photo to give you an idea of the size difference....watch this space!

 My back garden is very overdue for a big prune, and yesterday I did a bit to start.  The birds have finished nesting now so I figured it's time to get on with it  Look what I found when I chopped down a big shrub near the back door.  At first glance it looked like a mound of dried grass in the fork of the shrub, about half a metre off the ground....

 but when I gently stretched open the tiny hole in the side, the wonder and technical brilliance of the (empty) nest became apparent.  Inside it is soft and watertight, coated with various fluffy bits that feel almost like they've been felted, it was very thick and strong and cosy in there.  I am pretty sure this the nest of the Splendid Wren.

 Here's one of the females peeking at me.  Clever little girl she is to make something so amazing.  No wonder she raised four fine children.

 I am very excited to see this bird again.  It's a White Robin, there were three checking out the back garden last week, and it's the first time I've seen them for about four years.  They are quite a bit bigger than the Splendid wrens and a lot shyer.  I hope they stay around.

 These are lovely birds too, the Western Spinebill, that chestnut colour around his chest is just lovely.  He is a nectar feeder, he's sitting on my Abutilon shrub where he feeds often,

 but he will be pleased too that the Bottlebrush are coming into flower now as well.

 For our records, this is the tank water level on April 1st.  It's gone down since then, gosh we are having a dry autumn although we've had a few little showers here and there, not enough to soak in but enough to green the grass a touch.  The kangaroos will be pleased. 

Until next time.... xx

Goddamn Varmints!

Do you remember that lovely rockmelon from last time, that complete, untouched rockmelon.  Well.  Look at it now.  Bloody goddamn varmints, it's completely hollow!

So I picked the final one, I hope it's ripe enough to eat.  I also harvested the four luscious quinces before anything ate those! 

I did the first apple harvest, the crisper in the bottom of the fridge is now full to the brim with these beauties.  We still have heaps on the trees, I'm planning on dehydrating lots of sliced apples next week, yum yum yum.

This, in my opinion, is our very best apple tree, the Red Fuji.  Really really nice fruit.

These are the Cox's Orange Pippins, as you can see they are a completely different skin colour to the Fujis.  They have a nice flavour too but they are not as crisp as the Fujis and I love a really crisp, sweet apple.  We haven't touched the Granny Smiths yet, probably next week.  The 6 kilos of apples in the bucket will keep us going for a while :-)

I am waiting somewhat impatiently for these to turn orange, these are Fuyu Persimmons and I think they are my absolutely most favourite fruit. 

Isn't the blossom on this Dwarf Lilly Pilly pretty, the bees love it.

The agapanthus I salvaged from my good buddy Ruth are growing nicely.  They are planted along the right edge of the gravel area where we park our cars.  The ground drops away there and created a small bank, so I'm hoping the strong root system of the aggies will stabilise the bank nicely.

My friends Ruth, Lesley and I were given a single African Violet leaf stuck in a small pot of potting mix by our mutual friend Ellen, who has some beautiful specimens at her house.  I am most proud to present my happily growing and now flowering baby African Violet, all from a single leaf!

This time of year we see and hear a lot of the huge Black Cockatoos, as the Marris and Jarrah are setting seed, they sit high in the trees and crack open the nut.

These are Red Tailed Black Cockatoos, the one above is a male because the red on him is a solid colour.

And these two, who have stripey red are apparently either female or juvenile.  I only learned that the other day.  Gorgeous birds.  We get a lot of the White Tailed Baudin's Cockatoos as well, but they more often fly over our place rather than land in our trees and feed like the Reds do.

Steve has been a busy busy boy giving his shed a big spring clean.  It's been a mammoth task for him and there is still a way to go, but this part looks very spick and span.  We both keep getting surprised when we go into the shed!

He's finished the hoppers of medium sized wood for the fire.  We haven't quite got to cranking up the fire in the house yet, but I suspect it wont be long, there is a definite chill descending in the evenings now.

This is Steve's new toy, he saved up his Christmas and Birthday money and bought it.  Apparently it is called a 'thicknesser'.  It's a doodad that you bung a piece of wonky timber in the back, and it comes out the front as smooth as a baby's bum. He is happy :-)

I got stuck into cleaning out the chook shed, supervised by a couple of the girls.  The apple trees now have a lovely load of chook poo flavoured hay surrounding them, and because those trees are still under nets, it means the chooks can't get at it and strew it everywhere.  We love having the chooks and ducks in the orchard, they keep bugs to a minimum,  but the chooks are buggers for digging up around the bases of the trees and kicking mulch all over the place. 

There we are, a spiffy clean chook shed.  You will note that there are two perfectly good nesting boxes screwed to the wall that the original chooks used to use all the time.  This lot refuse to have a bar of them and like to lay their eggs at ground level.  Finally, by accident, I discovered that they love old washing baskets with one end cut out.  Whatever floats their boat :-)

And here is their new treadle feeder.  They hate it.  It make a big clanking noise when the top shuts after they step off the treadle, and it scares the crap out of them.  I am told they will get used to it, and for now I have it in the locked open position during the day and I close it at night.  The good thing though is that the galahs aren't nicking any food out of it. 

We used to have one jump over the fence, escapee, intrepid explorer chicken, then two, then three, so now we leave the orchard gate open a titch so the fourth one, who obviously hasn't done her wing muscle exercises and can't get up and over, can be with her friends.  My goodness they have become bush chickens!  We have no idea where they are most of the day, and late afternoon they wander out of whatever wide roaming area they have discovered that day.  They are very good at following me back to the orchard when they see me though, I feel like the Pied Piper!

And they still love hanging out with the kangaroos!

 I haven't talked much about vegies recently, most of our vegies are finished or nearly so.  We are still picking the last of the cucumber, corn, pumpkin, beans and potatoes.  I just had to show you a photo of our fabulous pigout homegrown vegie dinner.  That's our roast potatoes and pumpkin, our boiled beans, corn and carrots, our roast garlic, along with a bit of roast beef and gravy.  Deeeeeelicious!!

Here's yesterday's photo of Voldemort eating breakfast.  For a change he had a feast of cheese and grapes which he enjoyed very much. 

We are having a lovely Easter break enjoying the company of Paul and Sam, so good to see you both xx

Until next time xx