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

A great big THANK YOU!

I just want to indulge for a moment and thank everyone who's visited in the last week or so since I started this blog. It's great to "meet" you all and see what you're doing.  Having spent over 20 years in the public sector world where there wasn't a lot of collegiality and I remember once overhearing that someone wasn't going to be promoted because they wore yellow (I kid you not), it's so nice to be part of a community that is so supportive and accepting and welcoming. Don't get me wrong I loved working in the public service and contrary to popular belief, everyone I met and meet who is a public servant works really, really hard and tries their very, very best to do a great job.
Rose it was lovely to meet you on D2E and thanks for visiting my little blog. Your post about CSR is disturbing and I'm looking forward to hearing of a more sustainable, Australian sugar source.
Tania and Hearts in Asia I was so jealous when I read you were getting 20 degrees + already, although we got rain last week so I guess we're even! LOL :) It was -5 here this morning when I left to come and look after little Charlie (about 745 am)! Now that's pretty cold eh!?!
New Good Life - fantastic post about food porn! I also had one of those "Of Course" moments when trawling through your blog - the used toilet roll as a seed starter - brilliant!
Dixiebelle, Duck Herder and Tammy - like minded souls in Canberra - fantastic!
And crafty, busy, well loved Mum - fancy both having little angels called Charlie! I love following your adventures in living a simple life.
So, I just want to give you all a big thanks for visiting. I will take loads of photos of the establishment of the front yard, and the development of the back, and keep on blogging! I will be visiting you all regularly - and please, keep sending in the comments - and if you haven't commented yet, please do - I LOVE hearing from you all.
Bye for now - Greenie x

I'm gonna have a Fish Pond - and a Swale - and ...

This is my instalment to Hazel-dene's Winter Wednesdays. Today is all about plans plans plans - and I'm very excited. The Sustainable Gardener and I marked out the front garden today, that will feature a fish pond, and a swale cos of the slope AND EVERYTHING! I'm so excited I can hardly speak.  Anyway, here's the photos:

 The little round circle - admittedly barely visible - will be the fish pond - well frog pond really!

and the parallel lines represent the flow of the swale!

Now, what will I plant???? This must have useful plants in it too - and there's an area that is soooooo perfect for vegies that there'll have to be some - but I'm also thinking one of those magnolias with big, dinner-plate size flowers, and some roses. The whole perimeter will be planted with Australian natives.

Has anyone in Canberra grown rosellas? What about Sapotes? I hear they're called the ice-cream fruit.  What else do you think I should grow out here?
The criteria are - must be beautiful and/or edible and/or highly fragrant.
Very excited about the Intro to Permaculture workshop on Friday morning - even though I've had to schedule a work meeting at 7:30 just so I can be there!!!

Enjoy the rest of your week people - Talk soon Greenie x

On Skeletons and Cold Weather

Given that it's lunch-time and still only 4 degrees outside - I thought I'd make a pictorial record of the development of the garden over the past few years.  We had an extension to the house done a few years ago that caused total devastation to the garden.

We were lucky enough to have a bit left over after the extension, so we got the garden landscaped, and paving put in so that my son, who was in a wheelchair could get around the whole area. Sadly, my lovely boy died a couple of years ago, but I'll always remember him whizzing about the paths in his chair and laughing that we could play cricket on the lawn again now!
Since then, I've been planting and getting the chooks to help me improve the soil. I've got about 20 types of fruit:

• Apples (x4)
• Apricot
• Avocadoes
• Blueberries (x5)
• Boysenberries (too many to count)
• Feijoa (x2)
• Gooseberries (x2)
• Grapefruit
• Kiwi-Fruit
• Lemon
• Mandarin (x6)
• Nectarine (x2)
• Orange
• Olive (x2)
• Peach
• Pear
• Quince
• Raspberries (x4)
• Rhubarb
• Strawberries (x23)

With the help of the Sustainable Gardener (the world's best gardener!), who employs young disabled people to help tend a whole bunch of gardens around Canberra, the garden now looks like this:

As you can see, still plenty of work to do, but the skeleton is in place, and things are starting to come along.  In the veggie patch there is:

• Brussels sprouts
• Cauliflower
• Broccoli
• Onions
• Celeriac
• Celery
• Leeks

And two lots of silverbeet in two other garden beds. Shallots, garlic and asparagus in large numbers dotted along a number of the borders.  Loads of comfrey, as well as parsley, rosemary, thyme, sage and chives. Oh! and an almond tree with two types of almond on it.  The chooks' Day Facility is currently on the (alleged) lawn because it's so full of weeds that I figured this would be good green feed for them while the red peas from all the pea straw mulch take off in the other beds. I was going to construct a bit of a run for them so they could get at the weeds and frost-affected tomatoes (we were away when the frosts came), but its sooo cold out there!  Poor darlings are a bit fed up, but they'll eat more of the grass weeds in the lawn this way, and I'll get their run made for them over the next few days.  Something must be working though, because I got a perfect day yesterday - 3 eggs!
I'd love to hear your comments on how you think our little food forest is developing. What's happening in your garden? Post a comment and link back to your blog or drop your photos right in.
Talk soon - Greenie x

There go the Food Miles!

Well - we live and learn!
I wanted to plant up some cabbage and lettuce seed for the Spring and summer, and I had run out.  I treated myself to a quick dash to Bunnings on the way home from somewhere to get some supplies to help make the chooks' Day Facility a bit sturdier.  While I was whizzing across the aisles I noticed their seed section, and thought I could pick up a few packets. I found these:

They'll do the trick I thought, so I threw them into the trolley and headed for the checkout. But when I went to plant them up I noticed that, despite the seed companies being based in NSW Australia, the label said, Seed Packed in the UK!! UNBELIEVABLE - LOOK!

I cannot believe it is efficient to harvest and pack seed in the UK and then ship it 20,000-odd kilometres to then transport all over Australia. Are you trying to tell me it's better to do this than source cabbage and lettuce seeds in Australia?
Anyway, so that's my Friday On My Mind rave for Down to Earth - fantastic blog Rhonda.
Have a great - locally sourced weekend everyone
Greenie x

The Monster Egg

 

Finally, I managed to work out how to post the picture of Keema's egg onto the blog.  Hint: Blogger isn't very iPad friendly! I'll learn! I also managed to plant up 12 punnets with seeds and put into the mini-greenhouse I have.  I planted:

• silverbeet
• sugarbeet
• beetroot (seeds from a very kind woman on the Earth Garden Path who was sharing)
• turnip
• swede
• onions (x2)
• leek
• lettuce
• broccoli
• cauliflower
• pak choi

I planted some parsnip seeds in front of the apple tree, but they should have been planted by May according to the packet so I don't know if they'll grow.

And, I planted out 20 strawberries and a bunch of onion seedlings I had.

I loosened the bottom edge of my chook tractor so that I can move it sometime this week. It's not the most stable chook tractor in the world but it keeps the girls happy and I can walk inside it, so it meets all the immediate needs. I can't carry heavy weights anymore, so I need something lightweight and mobile - but sturdy would be a bonus.  Maybe photos of that next post!

I'm wondering now whether to go for a small mobile nesting box, or to stick with the large floor size of this tractor so I can lock them in there to deter the pesky (but very cute) little male cat who's moved in next door and who spooks them by chasing them.  My previous girl, Bella, would have pecked at him and put him in his place, but these girls are all scaredy-cats (pardon the pun!).

After a nasty experience with a fox a couple of years ago, we installed Guantanamo Chook - a secure facility complete with wire floor that we lock the girls into at night, so I don't need the chook tractor to house them.  And I have a couple of lengths of chicken wire (and bird netting) fence so that I can limit their foraging habits to the parts of the garden I want them to dig up during the day. So the only dilemma is to keep them safe from cats - and maybe dogs while also having the easy mobility I need now.  Any ideas? I'll receive all suggestions - and feel free to post photos or links.

I've been dreaming of something high off the ground, rather like the Milkwood rawbale house but on a much smaller scale and on wheels, with a handle - like from an old pram - so that I can wheel it into position, erect the fencing, block the wheels with a couple of bricks and we're set for another couple of weeks.  Imagination - plenty - skills and materials - a bit limited!

Hope you enjoy the photo of the egg - I expect Miss Keema will be exhausted today after that mammoth effort yesterday!

Talk again soon
Greenie x