Prickly Brains

We visited the Albany Show a couple of weeks ago, always interesting to see a variety of things.  There was log chopping...

 And cutie pie alpacas...

 And more cutie pie alpacas...

 And impressive huge metal sculpture...

 And bizarre cacti that look like brains...

 And magnificent poultry...

 On the home front there are loads of little birds buzzing around, gathering nesting material and showing off to each other.  This magnificent fellow is regularly outside the kitchen window, a fabulous Splendid Wren.

 The weather is very strange, it still feels like we are in winter with it being wet and hovering around 17 degrees, but suddenly we will be blessed with a sunny, warm morning.  Neo is content to burrow under the blankets until the temperatures rise.

 Steve harvested his fantastic crop of garlic.  They have grown really well this year, the globes are huge and very healthy looking.  They are drying over near the shed now, then we'll strip the browned off foliage from them and store it in a basket in the pantry.

 For our reference, this is the water tank level on November 1st.

 We've been looking through a few more boxes of Barbara and Eric's things.  We came across this interesting sword.  We believe it is a replica of an old Chinese ceremonial sword.  I'd love to decipher the text on it!

Until next time... xx

Special Occasion for Special People

We popped up to Perth overnight to see some special people and help them celebrate a huge milestone - 60th wedding anniversary!  Congratulations Mum and Dad!

 We had a lovely dinner at Chez Pierre in Nedlands, yummy yummy food and great service.  Sorry for the crap photos, I couldn't remember how to make the flash work on my camera!

 When Steve was doing his half of the drive to Perth, I was working on my crocheted cardigan, it's coming along slowly.

 I finished the second oven cloth, I think they look quite nice sitting there together. 

 I used old denim as the cloth, it matches my tiles reasonably well.

 I made another joey night bag for my friend Claire.  I'm doing them one at a time to begin with until I get the size right.

 Speaking of kangaroos, here is the lovely Lucy.  She is definitely a lady of many years, she is getting some grey in her fur now.  She is adorable.

 We've had lots of rain the last few weeks, so the creek is belching out masses of water at the lower end.

 We noticed one of the very old trees alongside the creek, which had a huge overhanging branch, suddenly looking lower than we remembered it.  For a few days we made a point of not walking underneath it.  Just as well!

 This is what greeted us a few mornings later, the whole thing fell down.  It was pretty much dead and had snapped off at the base.  Steve got busy and it's now all chopped up and on the woodpile!

 Have a look at this fascinating fungi.  There is a small area in the back garden where these pop up.  They stink!  Like something has gone off.  Hence their name. Aseroe rubra, or Anemone Stinkhorn. 

 This is a sight that pleases me, this is Callistemon Little John, a mini bottlebrush that grows to about 3/4 of a metre tall.  I love the dark red flowers, and the little nectar birds are very happy to see the flowers too.

Until next time... xx

One Lonely Apple

I'm sitting here at the window, snug and dry in my ugg boots, watching the rain run off the top of the water tank.  Winter has certainly arrived, it's freezing cold, the wind is howling and it is wet!

 A photo of the water tank level shows that it has increased dramatically in the last few weeks, excellent, we love a full water tank.

 This is something I hadn't expected with our new blinds, they do a grand job of stopping the driving rain coming straight at the house, but they also get this pretty sort of iridescent sheen to them when saturated with rain.  It only takes a hearty gust of wind and it all falls off, but it's pretty while it lasts.

 We donned our wet weather gear and had a property wander a little earlier, here is Steve all rugged up.

 And what did we find?  We found a flowing creek at long last, hooray!  It's been very late to start this year, testament to the dry autumn we had.

 Here's Growler and her joey Pixie, watching as we did our creek walk in the rain

 

I love this plant, this is the new growth on my Karri Oak, or Chorilaena quercifolia, a large shrub that is endemic to Karri forests.  I planted this one in my garden about 6 years ago, it took a good 3 years to settle in but it grows really well now and the birds love it as it has small but nectar filled white flowers in spring.

 This is Grevillea olivacea, Orange Glow, growing in the same little front garden as the Karri Oak.  Same again, it took quite a few years to become a happy plant and this is the second winter that has produced a huge mass of winter flowers, beautiful.  This is a very large, dense shrub and the wrens love it, they spend a lot of time deep within, it keeps them safe.

 And of course, the winter flowering favourites, the acacias.  Mine are Acacia fimbriatas, I also have Acacia Cyclops but they are not quite flowering yet.  Such a lovely cheery show, and they smell so fresh and fragrant.  The bees are in happy, buzzy heaven.

 As the weather has been a bit yuk, we've been doing inside things.  Steve came home with a 10 kilo bag of pickling onions for only $8, so we had to put those to good use!

 After much chop chop chopping and cry cry crying, we were ready for action.

 We have five big jars of pickled onions,

 and eight jars of caramelised onion chutney.  Now we have to patiently wait a month for both to mature before we can sample them.  :-)

 Egg production has been very slow the last six weeks, averaging one a day, but it's interesting how a couple of days with some sunshine changes that very suddenly.  Today we found three eggs, good stuff.  I want to make a batch of lime butter as we are drowning in limes, and now I have enough eggs to do it, yay.  I found out the other day that I can freeze the lime or lemon butter, that is really good to hear as it urks me that it only has a limited life in the fridge, so that solves the problem!

 This photo of a forlorn tiny Sundowner apple is a statement proclaiming the very last piece of fruit from this season in the orchard. We have had a constant supply of fresh fruit from the orchard since just after Christmas until today, a fact that I am thrilled about as we carefully planned our orchard and the various varieties of stone and pome fruits so that we had continuous fruiting for six months, and this year anyway, it worked extremely well.  And we now have citrus in abundance so it's all good!

 And now I feel justified in pulling out my stock of apples that I dehydrated a few months ago, when we had a glut of fruit.  What a lovely way to continue with eating our own fruit, I love dried fruit and find it hard to only have a little!

 Continuing on with the inside activities, I am still crocheting at a furious pace.  A secret crochet mission has just been completed, more about that later, but for now I have made a start with the scary scary task of trying to crochet myself a cardigan.  It's a big learning curve making a thing that has to be a specific size!

 And here's the start of another new project, lots of colour in this one

 I thought I'd have a go at making a crocheted rug using fabric scraps.  It's slow going as it's hard work on the hands so I shall pick it up every now and then, but I rather like the concept, and using something that is technically rubbish for a useful purpose always pleases me no end.

 I've done a bit more on my embroidered oven cloth

 Steve was dabbling in the shed and he found a half finished woodwork project.  He'd put it away because something about it was frustrating him, but he is looking at it with new eyes now.  It's meant to be an open book, the other way up, but he got stuck on how to create the look of the open pages.  But he had a thought to display it this way up instead, and as I have always loved how he did the cover, I think this is splendid idea.  He's got some more playing to do with it but I am happy to see it resurface again.

 I went back to Bunnings with the non-working hedge trimmer....it ended up being a faulty battery so they gave me another one, and all is well.  We also added a reciprocating saw to the power tool collection.  We've had a little play with this during some brief sunshine, it does a great job of pruning and also cutting smaller pieces of firewood that are a bit small for the chainsaw.  So with this and the hedge trimmer which will whisk through the softer growth of the overgrown plants, when I finally get my arse into gear and get out there, the garden should look spick and span in no time :-)

 And as is the way, you can always find a positive in life if you look for it, so through the cold, windy and wet weather, we are blessed with the most magnificent of sunsets.  Makes the heart sing :-)

Until next time.... xx

Big Lesson Learned

If you saw these Navel oranges in the shops, would you buy them? Probably not.  I was thinking about how we are brainwashed by marketing and sales to only want perfect looking fruit, regardless of how they actually taste.  These are the start of our Washington Navel oranges, they look as manky as hell on the outside, having been battered by wind and scratched by a wire fence, but let me tell you, they are absolutely delicious, as sweet as can be and a delight to eat.  The tree is loaded with them and we are very pleased!

It was olive harvest day on Monday.  We managed to save our olives this year, we have one Frantoio olive tree that is now producing loads of fruit, but the last two years the green parrots have stripped it bare.  This year we netted it, and until two weeks ago the net did a fine job of keeping the birds out.  Eventually the parrots managed to chew a hole through the top of the net and we kept finding a couple of intrepid greenies inside, munching away.  So, harvest date was set before we lost them all again.

 After coaxing the net off the tree, taking nets off fruit trees is not much fun, branches grow through them and get caught up, it requires great calm and patience to remove the net intact, we set to work picking the fruit.  We were very pleased to discover that our clever olive tree had given us 4 3/4 kilos of fruit.  They are quite small but going on the one jar I pickled five years ago, they have a lovely, nutty taste.

 I spent hours putting a slit into each and every olive and they are currently soaking in water.  In a few days time I will sit them in a brine solution, where they will stay for 3-4 weeks, changing the brine every few days, then they will be bottled in a half brine half vinegar solution and the jars topped with a centimetre of olive oil to keep the air out.  After a month of that then we can eat them.  It's quite a process but worth it in the end.  We also have two Kalamata olive trees that are still quite small, but they are stubbornly refusing to flower and fruit, here's hoping they get their act together next season!

 The birds were all thrilled to see the net off the olive tree and they finished off the last of the olives right at the top of the tree that were too hard to reach.  It beats me what birds see in olives off the tree, they are as bitter as all hell!

I've started pruning the back garden and I'm being ruthless as a lot of the shrubs are very overgrown and leggy.  Above is the lavender which I've cut to almost ground level, it will be fine, they like a good hard prune.  It has created a new vantage point for this lovely female RedWing Fairy Wren to watch for insects to gobble up. 

I'm still trying to get a good photo of this beautiful RedEared Firetail male, fossicking amongst the limestone pebbles on the back steps.  He is another lovely little bird and we are thrilled to see them in the back garden this year, previously they kept to the bush undergrowth.

Speaking of birds, I have a sad story to relate, and from it we have learned a big lesson, never, ever underestimate a predator.  You know how the chickens have been escaping from the orchard and have been roaming around?  There was one chicken who couldn't jump the fence and was being left behind, so we started leaving the orchard gate open a wee bit, so she could squeeze through and join her friends.  What a stupid thing we did.  A fox, in broad daylight, snuck through the gap into the orchard and into the chook yard where it grabbed one of the ducks, then a little while later it also grabbed one of the chickens who were in the bush near the shed.  Steve was walking to the shed when the other chickens burst out of the bush towards him, and he realised that the fox has grabbed the other chicken.  He locked those three up and followed the trail of feathers and then found both the chicken and the duck's bodies, it wasn't until then that we realised the duck has been taken too.  Oh my goodness, we've been really sad about it, and felt like we let the duck down by not protecting her in her yard properly.  Because we've had no problems with foxes all these years,  we became complacent about predators, almost thinking that our little farm was immune to nasty things like that. Needless to say we have learned a huge lesson, the gates have been fortified to stop the chickens jumping over, the gates remain shut, and we are keeping a watchful eye out.  Nature can be very cruel.


Neo spends a lot of his time at night sitting in the window watching the creatures of the night that we can't see.  I expect he has seen the fox roaming around in the dark more than once.  It makes me wonder how often they are around. 

I had a trip to Perth last week to visit mum and dad.  I took the opportunity to give mum her Mothers Day present early.  My secret crochet task can now be revealed, a lap blanket for mum.  It's a light weight one, made of cotton, not for really cold days, but for just when you need a little something over your legs.  I'm really glad you liked it mum, I enjoyed making it for you.  xx

Water tank level for our records.  It's going well, the level is on the rise.

Until next time... xx