Seed raising mix surprises

This one is specially for Our Gang of 7 who's been having one hell of a run lately. Her seed babies got knocked over in the high winds of last weekend, so she wondered about throwing the seed raising mix from the pots on the garden to see what came up!

Well, a few weeks ago, I went away for work and forgot to ask my best friend, DH to water the seed trays for me while I was away. It all got a bit dry and a big nothing happened. So, I threw all the seed raising mix into a bucket and mixed in some left over topsoil that we'd put on some of the garden beds. I've been using that on the new seeds I've planted ever since.

Today when I went out to water - look what I saw in the bucket

There's about 8 little seedlings popping up! God only knows what they are, but I'm going to prick them out into some newspaper pots I made, using Laura's instructions via Rose's wonderful blog (thank you Rose!). I do not have a fancy tool, I just used a round glass that we have in the cupboard, so keep scrolling down till you get to the instructions using a bottle.

Aaanywaay! I have no idea what these little fellas are, but it will be awfully good fun finding out, and I thought it would give !  Stay tuned!

Enjoy the rest of your week
Greenie x

Mercy Dash and a Close Call

There were loads of sightings of foxes in the Canberra area over the past week, and we were away in Castlemaine in Victoria.

And then, I heard it was going to be 26, hot and windy over the next few days. So then I began to worry about my darling little seedlings, including the new tomatoes I got from the Duck Herder and Murra Mumma at the Canberra Urban Homesteaders Club meeting on the previous weekend.

I was getting more and more nervous, and it was ruining my weekend.  So, I finally rang my daughter to see if she had time to do a mercy dash across town and check on my girls, and water my seedy babies. When she'd stopped laughing at me, she did promise to go.

A few hours later, I got a text with the label "Bok Bok Bok" and this photo

Phew! The girls are OK! Then I had to laugh because I had the opportunity to see how silly the annex looked all sewn up with twine from the straw bales!!

When I got home, all the seed trays were fine, and the girls had laid 8 eggs! but one was broken (it was starting to get a little crowded in there!) So, I collected all the eggs, watered the planted out seedlings and the newly planted ones in the greenhouse, and went to bed.

The next day, I went to let the girls out. All were happy to be going to the day facility again. But on the way back, look what I saw

I had left the nesting box door/lid wide open! I may as well have left a "Please Take Me" sign on the fence for the foxes! Luckily, the foxes were visiting another part of the neighbourhood last night. I don't kid myself that the perimeter is fox-proof; any fox that wanted to could get in. Only Guantanamo Chook is safe - unless you leave the bl#@$%y door open!

Anyway, all's well that ends well - and this time - I seem to have got away with the one little slip up!

I must be more careful. I must be more careful. I must be more ...

Talk soon
Greenie x

Awards and Accolades

I was just nominated for the Versatile Blogger Award by Colleen over at Our Gang of 7. So thank you very much Colleen and the Versatile Blogger mob - whoever they are!

To accept one of these awards, there are three rules:
- thank the blogger who awarded you and link back to them (see above)
- share 7 interesting facts about yourself
- pass the award on to 15 newly discovered blogs


Now, 7 facts about me - that I hope you find interesting:

1. I lived with nuns for 6 months once
2. I am currently having a whole month alcohol and coffee free
3. I once lived in Armidale NSW, which is very beautiful, before moving to Canberra
4. I can't believe how many like-minded people there are in BlogLand - it's wonderful!!!
5. I rode 100km on my bike a few years ago in a Sea to the Vines challenge in South Australia
6. I had to get married three times before I got it right!!
7. I've been married to my husband for nearly 27 years.

Since I have only been blogging for about a month, ALL the blogs I know are newly discovered ;-), but my awards go to:


http://eatatdixiebelles.blogspot.com/
http://smileymum.blogspot.com/
http://theduckherder.blogspot.com/
http://sustainablesuburbia.net/blog/
http://ittybittyhomestead.blogspot.com/
http://justlikemynanmade.blogspot.com/
http://girlswearbluetoogarden.blogspot.com/
http://veggiegobbler.blogspot.com/
http://thebokflock.blogspot.com/
http://down---to---earth.blogspot.com/
http://witcheskitchen.com.au/
http://milkwood.net/
http://scarecrowsgarden.blogspot.com/
http://greeningtherose.blogspot.com/
http://hazel-dene.blogspot.com/

Thanks once again to all for welcoming me to the Blog Family! Love being part of this community!

An Urban Homesteading Weekend

It was my turn to host the newly established Urban Homesteading Club in ONC this weekend.

After an absolutely gorgeous, Spring-like week interspersed with a couple of days of rain, Saturday was cold, threatening rain and altogether wintry. I was very ecited, and had loads to do to get ready, so we made an early start. Picked up the community catering equipment, chairs, urn and big box of coffee mugs up from our daughter’s house. Then went to the butcher’s to get the pets mince for the chooks – they don’t like the protein pellets, so I give them meat – we get great eggs!

Home for lunch, then whipped up a quick chocolate cake, which was just about done when the first knock came on the door!

About 12 people in all turned up, and all were very generous with ideas, swapping seeds and seedlings. It was great to be talking with a bunch of like-minded people, rather than feeling like people think I’m some kind of un-reconstructed hippie! (Actually, I am an un-recontstructed hippie!!)

Yummy food, a wander round my garden, great company, relaxed friendly atmosphere – can’t wait for the next one!

Saturday night we had Moules Mariniere with chips (Moules et fritte) for dinner, which was utterly yummy, and leftover chocolate cake for dessert was an extra treat. I forgot to take photos, sorry.

Sunday, after my healthy fruit punch

I planted up about 12 punnets of all the new seeds from yesterday’s swap. Then after hubby’s swim we had bacon, egg and tomato for brunch. Keema’s big 80g eggs were called for, and again, too hungry to take photos.

To make my fruit smoothie, I pour about a cup of apple juice into a blender, and then add:

·         A chopped kiwi-fruit

·         A slice of watermelon, chopped

·         A slice of fresh pineapple, chopped

·         A pear or an apple, chopped

And then whizz it all up till its smooth and creamy. Yum, and awfully good for you! AND, I know I’ve had four pieces of fruit, complete with fibre, which is all any healthy body needs.

Then we bought a new tallboy and bedside cabinets to help with the storage shortage in our bedroom, came home for more gardening, where I planted out the rest of the leek, pak choy, swede & turnip seedlings, and notcied that my old out-of-date parsnip seeds have finally sprouted  under the apple tree – hooray!

Dinner was one of our family favourites – pork spare ribs in chinese barbeque sauce, potatoes and corn. The recipe comes from Ken Hom’s Quick and Easy Chines Cooking, one of my favourite cook-books, with a few Greenie adaptations. You twice cook the ribs, the second time in a yummy homemade barbecue sauce, with ginger, garlic, tomato paste, soy and hoisin sauce, with a bit of sugar and sesame oil thrown in for good measure. The recipe calls for chilli bean sauce, but I throw in a chopped chilli and add extra servings of the liquids to make it nice and thick.

[insert photo]

Slumped in front of the TV and computer for awhile and now off to bed for a good rest before the week starts in earnest!

Have a great week everyone

Greenie x

My beautiful camelias

After spending a couple of years and a small fortune on re-establishing my garden after the renovations and extensions - I had one of those "Oh Thank You!" garden moments ...
Look

In fact, I'm having quite a few of those recently, with the spring blossom, heralding lots of fruit

The broccoli promising to give us so much I might have to try Linda Woodrow's Cream of Broccoli soup

It's a return to horrible cold and wet again today in ONC, but I have too much work to do to be in the garden anyway. Desperate to plant up all the seedling punnets I prepared on the weekend, but am just not getting to it. Oh Well - there's always tomorrow.
Greenie x

Home Sweet Home

My mother always used to say, “It’s always nice to go travelling, but it’s Oh so nice to come Home!” And it certainly is.

We had a wonderful fortnight with our dear dear friends, and I miss them terribly, but I am so glad to be home and to have my chooks, and the cat and my seedlings all in their allotted spaces again!

The seedlings have grown amazingly well under the fabulous care of my friend Alison! Look!

Before

After

And that’s despite a little late night spray with flea mixture intead of water! J

The chooks are back from their holiday with the chook sitter. They had a fabulous time with all their friends and are sulking a bit at being locked in the day facility rather than free ranging with about 25 other friends all day. Here’s a photo of them off on their big adventure.

I used the laundry basket on wheels because I’m not supposed to lift weights any more and these girls are very heavy! It works a treat but one of them always has to travel alone. She sat up the front with me and seemed very interested in all the goings on during the journey. When they arrived, they just leapt out of the basket and cage and joined in with all their new friends straight away. Hmph! Me and my empty laundry basket went home to pack …

It took nearly a week after they got home for them to forgive us before they laid any eggs. In fact, we got one lousy egg today and it's about time I think! :)  They won’t eat the laying pellets in ordinary chook mix, so now I give them mixed seed and pets mince from my favourite butcher. You should see ‘em go when they get their meat! They also get kitchen scraps, weeds, and al the snails they can eat – although I’ve noticed there aren’t too many snails around at the moment. Maybe the girls have eaten them all …

I planted carrots yesterday. I havent had any luck wth carrots for years, and the ones in my current patch are bought seedlings so who knows what shape they’ll be when I pull ‘em up. But then I was going through my very old garden diary, and saw that I’d followed this idea posted by a reader in an old Earth Garden magazine. Cover the seeds with a hessian bag and keep wet. Lift the bag after 4 – 8 days and the seedlings will have emerged! So despite Jackie French saying the soil’s too cold yet – I couldn’t wait – and planted a whole packet yesterday of red chantenay. They’re the short fat ones that it says you can plant from autumn to spring. I covered them with an old quilt cover I had been using as a kneeling cushion in the garden till I thought of putting a pillow inside a large plastic shopping bag – so comfy! I’ll let you know if I have success with the carrots.

Well, it's great to be home, and hopefully I can get back into the swing of gardening, blogging and pretending to seek a balance between that, looking after Charlie and working to pay for it all!!

See ya soon everyone

Greenie x

What a week!

Phew! What a week! We've been frantically trying to get our work finished and get our house in order (no mean feat for us!). We're getting ready for our oldest friends from England to come for a visit. So we're trying to make everywhere look nice, and not like a cross between Steptoe & the Good Life, which I sometimes think our place looks like.

So, we've been busy, busy busy ...

On the weekend I went to the Yarralumla Nursery, probably the best nursery in Canberra, and the one place in Canberra that is seriously dangerous to let me loose in. I bought:

2x gooseberries to replace the ones I've killed

1x Tahitian Lime

1x Kaffir Lime

1x Williams Pear

1x white seedless grape

2x roses, one called Elle after my daughter and the other a Honey Dijon

15x pansies cos I love them and I wanted to cheer up the view from the uncovered deck for our English friends who arrive on Wednesday

2x punnets of lettuces cos they were there ( :-))

2x punnets of coriander

2x punnets of colored foxgloves

2x punnets white foxgloves

1x punnet russel lupins

Then I came home and planted everything except one gooseberry and the coriander because it was going dark, and I could barely move!

On Sunday I had a wonderful lunch with a friend, visited my beautiful daughter (BD) and grand-daughter (beautiful son in law (BSIL) was there too!) and collected more lemons from her tree. Went home and juiced most of the lemons after shaving their skins for homemade citrus cleaner - allegedly this stuff is better than spray and wipe. Find the recipe here. I've kept the best lemons to make preserved lemons. I just need to find a container that is exactly the right size for them. DD gave me a couple of old jars that had had bought tomato (pasta) sauce in them, so I filled those up and I have another enormous old Maxwell House coffee jar that oonce held dried pasta. There weren't enough lemons to fill the big jar, but the long tall jars from DD look really elegant with the lemons in them so I'm really glad I bottled them up.

Monday and Tuesday were spent working, cleaning, working. Cleaned the bedrooms, got the beds ready, cleaned out the car, finished our work projects, cooked ready for Wednesday's dinner. Wednesday was Charlie day as well as arrival day for our friends, so we made a lovely mushroom lasagne, and a lemon meringue pie. I made myself feel a bit like a Masterchef contestant once DH had gone to pick up our friends. I raced around feeding Charlie, putting the lasagna together - remembered I'd not put towels on their bed - brushed my hair, collected the eggs, picked up all the food Charlie had spilt on the floor, took the pie out of the oven, put the lasagna in .... Phew!

Then DD arrived and said that the nanny couldn't look after Charlie tomorrow ... Could we? Well, of course I said yes, knowing that our friends would think it was pretty good fun. But then, one of my work clients rang, could I join a teleconference at 830am? So, Thursday it was up at 645 (unheard of these days for me), raced over to pick up Charlie, home again, breakfast oats and fruit for Charlie. Then the teleconference, breakfast for the rest of us - DH poached eggs and they were yummy!

We went to the shopping centre for lunch and then went on a walk round the lake. I expected Charlie would sleep, but she sang and burgled and put her hand out to feel the breeze for 40 minutes. By the time we got home again, she was completely wrecked and was fast asleep when I went to get her up for her tea before Mummy came to collect her. I felt terrible disturbing her, but she was pretty cheerful about it all, just like the little angel she is :)

We're off on the road-trip tomorrow. Canberra to McLaren Vale via the Hay Plain and Mildura. I love a good long drive so it will be so much fun showing parts of Australia to our friends.

Will be back again in a couple of weeks!

Take care everyone - talk soon

Greenie x