This is on my mind...

This year my recent change of work has put me firmly back in the hub of full on retail which has meant there's been little time to reflect on the joys of Christmas. Tonight at work, we'll pull down Christmas, make it disappear as though it never was and leave the store plastered with clearance signs ready for the mania that is the newer tradition of the Boxing Day sale. Yes, I know there are those of you who feel Christmas has become too commercialised and feel that we've lost the 'true' spirit of it. Don't get me wrong, I'm not looking for sympathy here as I've discovered there is still 'spirit' to be found behind the cash register. I love being part of the excitement of customers mad rush up to Christmas, I love hearing the stories of  their loved ones who will receive the items I'm ringing up, I love the joy people get from being able to give gifts to others and their delight in looking forward to spending time with family and friends they may not have seen for some time. For myself, I'll get to catch up with my family too, some I've not seen for too long. So these things may not encompass everything the season should bring, but if it means families and loved ones come together with a spirit of sharing and giving, it can't be all bad. Merry Christmas to all.

This is on my mind....

Inspired by Rhonda from Down to Earths blog (link at right) here's my contribution to todays "This is on my mind..."
This morning the house seemed too big & too empty. Yesterday was Jenny's (on the left) last day with us. She's been studying here in Australia and living with us this past year. We've been involved with a school homestay program for a few years now and it's given us an opportunity to meet a lot a fabulous young girls who've stayed with us anywhere from just a couple of weeks to more than a year. We'll miss her quiet presence, her ready smile & will cary the best hopes for her future.

Secret Santa gets me inspired!

 I'm so glad my hubby is not with me at the island tonight. Before anyone has a moment to think anything negative about this statement, just hold those thoughts until you see the state of my bed currently!

What can I say, I like to fiddle with bits while I'm in wind down mode just before sleep, and well tonight it got a little out of control!

Quite a few years ago now, I made my first necklace for my mum's birthday. At the time it was because I couldn't find anything that would really suit her premade. She prefers to have necklaces that were a bit longer than what was in vogue at the time. I discovered a passion for beads and often experiment with designs while sitting on the sofa watching the TV with hubby, or late at night when I'm having trouble sleeping.

Normally I'm inspired by new beads I've bought, tonight it was a combination of a needed gift for my Secret Santa from work, and when I bought the beads to do that I also fell in love with some lovely faceted Smokey Obsidian & some large "chips" of black agate which just seem to reflect the light beautifully off all its uneven surfaces. (I have to confess here that I really love to work with semi precious beads. The weight & polished surfaces always inspire me and as a "touchy feely" sort of person, I love the feel of them when I'm stringing combinations up. It does make things a little costly though, but I always figure that if I'm going to put the time in it may as well be for something really beautiful, also as most of the pieces I make are for family, I like them to be special, that and if the receiver needs them adjusted or wants the design changed they know I'm only too happy to recycle my own pieces.) I thought these two strings would look great together but had no idea when I bought them how they would end up. The picture below doesn't really do the colour of them justice, but you get the idea.

                                          

The Secret Santa pressie was easy and really no fuss. I just bought some fairly inexpensive (5 strands for $20, a good buy from my point of view) round faceted glass beads in a smokey sort of colour in two sizes. More than I needed for the job, but great colours for future use. Then for a "highlight" bead I bought a large black round timber bead that had a chinese design carved into it for the necklace and a smaller version for a bracelet to match.  I just thread some black hat elastic through these, tied the knot off and forced it into the middle of the carved beads so it couldn't be seen. I've only recently started using hat elastic with a prior similar design I made for myself that looked dressy to wear to work, but easy for me to get on in a hurry when I'm running late. I don't think it takes away from the look of the piece once it's on, but it really makes a big difference in making time, and it's handy to get on when you don't have someone else around to assist with finicky tiny catches!

Total cost for my Secret Santa (which had a twenty dollar limit) has worked out so far at about $12 so I may just make a quick pair of earrings to match as well if I have time.

                                                    

So that was all very quick and controlled but then I started thinking how the leftover beads could work back nicely with the other semi precious beads I'd bought. I do this a lot as I've found the cheapest way to buy beads is to buy them in strands, but I find I rarely use the entire strand in one design as I like to mix combinations that highlight the colours or shapes. I also frequently mix in some less expensive beads (normally chinese crystal or glass) to keep the costs down. This means I've got a stockpile of beads on hand to experiment with when coming up with a design. So after dragging out so of the afore mentioned stockpile, I ended up with a very messy but creative workspace, in the middle of my bed! Anyway I'm thrilled with the outcome, I was able to mix some gold metal beads that I bought really cheaply and had tucked away back with it.

It's still not finished but I think it will make a perfect Christmas gift , so you can't have a really good picture of it yet!  But here's a sneak preview below with the Secret Santa one.

And finally, just because he was so cute a picture of a large green frog that was sitting out front when I came home tonight, the shot's a bit dark, but I didn't want to frighten him with the flash. It reaffirms my decision to try not to use any nasty chemicals in the garden every time I see one of these!

This is on my mind...

Rhonda from Down to Earth (you can see a link to her blog down on the right hand side) has started a Friday post I'd like to join in on. You can read her posts to get the full background but essentially it's where we all talk about the things we've been wanting to do. For me it's been a long work week & I can't wait to get back to my little island shack! I don't think I've mentioned on this blog yet that my little blue shack isn't yet my full time life, just my little bit of hope for the future at this stage. I'm looking forward to a stroll on the local beach at sunset (the view above) with a cup of tea in hand after a fruitful day of gardening, knowing I'm planning and living at least a little in my dreams of tomorrow. One last day of the real world today & then off to paradise!

We were lucky to inherit some established plants with our shack when we bought it. However we've slowly been building up a collection of fruit trees over the last year in order to have our own good supply of fruit in the future. It's hard being patient, knowing that these little seedlings in some cases won't provide fruit for up to five years. Looking back at pictures of the Jaboticaba & the Lychee, these don't seem to have grown at all! But to my surprise, my nectarine, which has only been in a year has blessed us with our first fruits (a grand total of 3!) And one of our little apple seedlings is trying valiantly for it's first apple after only a year in the ground as well. Some have given us small rewards, the mulberry has managed a few berries, even though it's barely more than an upright stick with a couple of leaves, the raspberry did the same & then died off, only to shoot up again this year. Others like the Cape gooseberry has provided us with lots of berries & is covered in fruit again already. Of the vines, the kiwi fruit started off strong, but went into hibernation for winter & have only just started to show leaves again. According to the info I read on them, we may not see fruit on this for a few years yet. The grape cuttings given to me by a local friend failed miserably, with me only succeeding in keeping just one alive, and just recently planted out in to the garden. The grape we bought got off to a great start & then disappeared into the belly of the most amazing grubs and didn't really recover again last season, but this year it's been reborn & has lovely green leaves promising hope. The purple passionfruit gave us a dozen or so fruits last year while the red panama one barely grew. We've also put in the shrubby type fruits like blueberries and pepinos, which have given me a one off harvest. Recently we've added a collection of citrus trees, which for the time being are in pots while we decide where they'll live best for the long term. When asked recently what we have now I found it hard to remember them all so here's the list of what's permanent in the garden now;

Lemonade tree (existing when we moved in)

2 x Mango trees (existing when we moved in)

Macadamia tree (existing when we moved in)

2 x subtropical suitable Apple trees

2 x subtropical suitable Pear trees

Lychee

Jaboticaba

Black Mulberry

Brown Turkey Fig

Black Fig

Peach

Nectarine

2 x Cherry trees

Kiwi vines

Banana passionfruit

Red passionfruit

Mandarine

Tangerine

Navel Orange

Cape Gooseberry

2 x Banana trees

3 x Pepinos

3 x Blueberries

1 x Meyer Lemon

1 x Lime

1 x Cherry Guava

1 x Loquat

1 x Tamarillo

2 x Grapes

18 x Strawberries

Many great fruit salads ahead I hope!

A busy little day

Today was another quick day, with just a limited time spent in the garden. Most of the time was spent putting in another couple of posts for our new fence. A fence to keep the vegies in & the chickens out, without all the mess of mismatched odd bits of chook fence, an entire collection of assorted shapes & types of stakes holding it up all attached by bits of wire, cable ties & left over bits of string. I really would like to think I can have a vegetable garden & a neat back yard as well, and I'm hoping this fencing will form a great frame work for making that happen.
There was a lot of thought that went into the design of the new fence. It needed to be fairly cheap as money to spend on it was limited. It needed to be able to be adapted to allow the chook pen to still move in & out as we rotate it around the finished garden beds. It needed to look good as the finished product occupies a fair bit of our land space. And it needs to last a while. After a bit of of compromise we came up with the finished concept, and I'm really happy with it.

At first I wasn't keen on using treated wood for the framework and posts, but hardwood was going to be too expensive, quite heavy & not readily available nearby to purchase, and we couldn't really spare the extra to do a metal fence this time around. The design was based on our external fence, which is a Bunning's DIY job. It was great for giving us the feeling that the yard remained open, but kept the visiting children in, safe & sound. The new fence consists of panels in the same way, which can be bolted on or taken off fairly simply to allow easy access to bring the chook pen in. It's been fairly inexpensive with each panel being made up of just 3 180cm fence palings, one cut in half to form the sides & the other two used as the top & bottom railing. We then stapled the existing chook wire to the frame work. These panels are then attached to posts. The panels were aligned with the existing garden beds, and are just wide enough to allow the chook pen to fit through the gap when removed. Between the garden beds where there were existing trees instead of garden beds we've made a couple of fixed panels & also a couple of gates for easy access daily.

In addition to this I started to sort out all my old seedling and plant pots. To date I haven't used them for a while as I started to find it just as productive to plant most of the seeds directly into the gardens, but I may have another little project coming up & if all goes well I might just need these again.

Yet another rainy garden day!!!

Today marked another day off for me, and yet another day in the garden while it poured rain the whole time.

We started the day with a trip to our favourite nursery where we purchased a Tahitian Lime ( a dwarf grafted variety) and a Meyer Lemon (another dwarf). We also picked up another Blueberry taking my total now to three. I also got another six pacific blue eyed fish to go into the pond, as the last lot I bought coincidentally disappeared with the appearance of two Ibis strategically resting beside the pond ($60 worth of rainbow perch, an expensive fish dinner).

The citrus have now been potted up along with the left over as yet unpotted Mandarin from a few weeks ago, complete with some strawberries & alysumm around the stem, and the Blueberry put into the ground in front of one of the 'fixed' panel parts of my new garden fence.

In addition to this I picked up & planted a dozen corn seedlings right near the pond area. My success with corn hasn't been great, the first lot didn't get enough water, the last lot grew well, and really healthy looking, formed what looked to be perfect cobs, only to find that they were hollow inside after little bugs (I guess they would have been something related to weevils) had moved in & gobbled up the insides. On a positive note, a large number of tiny green frogs also were living well & happy amongst it, even though we didn't have a water source nearby. So my hope is that this lot of corn will provide at least some protection for the tadpoles as they emerge as tiny frogs, and give them somewhere to hide from the local fish eating Ibis. The corn if it works this time, will just be a bonus.

I've put in some Cos lettuce (my favorite especially for Cesear salads in summer) and some Bok choi in what was the sweet potato bed that had been overun with cherry tomatoes. The sweet potatoes had all been removed & dug up. Actually that's an overstatement! When I say 'all', it was actually just one! An entire garden bed, thriving shoots above ground, plenty of time to grow and almost nothing to show for it. I did however find at least a dozen or more big (really really big) witchety grubs living there, so I'm wondering if the lack of potatoes may have something to do with these guys? I don't know enough about them to be sure.

Finally, I planted some basil out in the front herb garden, near the Artichokes I planted a while back. My first basil plants grew to gigantic proportions in the 'no dig' layered garden bed, but I've not had the same success since. After some research it would seem that Basil isn't partial to chook manure, which would explain why it hasn't thrived in my 'chook maintained' garden beds. I've put it in near the Artichokes as I've found out a few weeks back from watching ABC's Gardening program, they like a feed with sheep manure & potash, so hopefully it will appeal to the Basil too. Also this garden isn't part of the chook rotation & doesn't get 'turned over' by the chooks when they free range around the yard.

There were still some more punnets of seedlings I didn't get too, but they have to wait until my next day off, along with the promised photos!

A Rainy day's gardening

We spent my day off this week making some new plant purchases, followed by lunch with my parents and then finally when it began to pour rain, we got around to putting the plants in. I was determined, rain or not to get everything we purchased planted as often I buy seedlings and then don't get around to planting them, and come my next day off they are laying dead, eaten or gone to seed!

We had a fairly big buy up this time, as I am behind in my gardens & spring has already well & truly sprung! Knowing that time would be limited I decided not to raise my own seedlings from scratch although I have had ok success with this before (some people have said that they find it really hard to grow from seed), and just bought in a variety of bits I wanted.

Last week on my day off I managed to get my seeded sebago potatoes (these have been waiting to plant out so long that the pontiac's I bought at the same time have actually already been harvested!) I don't know how successful they'll end up being after all this time, but they've grown about a foot in height in the week & are looking good. Last week I also put in 4 zucchini & 4 squash seedlings (I was hesitant as I've failed miserably with these to date!) which are still surviving although not looking like they've grown any. Part of the reason I think I've failed with these before is probably lack of pollination, because the flowers grow, but no vegies result. To assist with this, I've planted some alyssum and a couple of nasturtium seedlings around them in the hope of attracting the bees.

Near this garden is a big ghost gum in front of which I've been piling up a bit of a compost heap. Into this I've dug a couple of small holes that have been filled with a mixture of worm tea soaked coir & rich potting mix and then planted with cucumber. Again I've popped in some nasturtium seedlings to keep these company. I'm not sure whether it will be successful or not, as the tree does seem to leach goodness away from anything near it, but the ground has slowly been getting richer so fingers crossed! On the other side of the tree I've popped in some rosella's. My nanna use to grow them & make jam, but the last of her bushes died off & she had no more seed left, so it's a bit of nostalgia more than anything that's behind this.

Along the fence line I've put in 4 rockmelon seedlings, two either side of the raspberry canes. Eventually I want this space exclusively for raspberries, but in the meantime I figure I may as well use the area.

To the herb garden in the front yard today I've added; lemon thyme, coriander, a curry plant & 4 butter lettuce seedlings ( I have had good success with lettuce amongst the herbs out front before so I figured I'd give them a go there again).

We bought a tangerine, an orange and a tangelo tree & have planted them into big black plastic tubs for the time being until hubby finishes the garden fencing and then they'll probably be planted along what will one day be the driveway to the garage. For the time being the pots should be big enough to give them plenty of room to grow. I've underplanted two of these with a couple of strawberries and some alyssum to attrack the bees once they start to flower.

I've also put in more rhubard ( this is my third lot & it keeps dying off). This time I've put some into the herb garden and some more near the lemonade tree and some into my original eggplant patch. Now we wait & see...

Unfortunately no pictures because of the rain, but hopefully when the weekend comes I can get some shots of everything progressing nicely.

What's in a name?

You may be wondering how I came by the name PrincessScarecrow for my blog. It was coined by a good friend. We worked together in a previous life, during the highlight of my "princess" years. We stayed in contact & shared lots of lifes little ups & downs, and for her a succession of awful men who never appreciated that she deserves to be treated like a princess.

I'm a firm believer that every girl who chooses to have a man in her life needs a man who will treat her like a princess. By this for all the women screaming 'we can do it for ourselves', I mean someone who will treat her as special, above all others, and show her respect at all times. Unfortunately there seems to have been a lack of these in her life.

We were again building on the princess theory during my friends first visit to my little shack, where I'm sure she was amazed at the transformation my thinking (and dressing) had undergone. Always one to accept just who I am, or what I choose to do, she never made much comment. However after posting the below image to my facebook the following week after a stroll on a new stretch of muddy beach during an extremely low tide, I think she couldn't stay silent any longer and the title Princess Scarecrow was bestowed.

Gardening Update

Only a short time to spend in the garden today as we’re off to lunch with friends. A quick round up this morning of any bits ready for picking.
Harvest today:
6 x Lemonade lemons
3 x Passionfruit
1 x Small Capsicum
9 x Gooseberries
A large pile of cherry tomatoes and another two nice large ones



The chickens have lain well again this week & I have a dozen eggs from them. They are laying 3 a day now (hold on, doing the maths on this, I think some may be disappearing to the helper gnomes home??)

Hubby has been keen for more of the lemons as he’s worked out they are great for making lemonade and I have to say, it tastes pretty great too. Up until about 6 weeks ago we were failing miserably with doing anything with the fruit from this tree. It was one of the few remaining trees left on the block and we assumed because of the shape of the green fruit that it was an orange tree (actually the picture on the top of the blog is fruit on the tree). We would wait patiently for the fruit to colour up, and of course it never turned orange. That got us suspicious so we did some research & found out it was a lemonade tree. Again we waited patiently for the fruit to turn golden yellow, but it would fall off rotten to the ground before this ever happened. We thought it must have been lacking minerals or water or even diseased although it looked pretty healthy. It had reached the point where even I had given up and had decided to let hubby dig it out & replace it with another new citrus. That was until just recently I discovered via comments on a gardening chat area that they recommend you pick this citrus when it’s just starting to show the first blush of yellow, that once it is yellow, it’s too late. Talk about ‘saved by the bell’. Not just the tree but us too. Imagine we would have been waiting years for another tree to get to this stage.
I would recommend this lemon to anyone who wants to be able to turn their lemons into a drink that doesn’t have the really tart bite of a real lemon tree. These are quite a bit sweeter and you don’t get the tart finish you relate to the aftertaste of a normal lemon.
Our fruit isn’t particularly attractive, it’s quite knobbly and they aren’t the quintessential shape you equate with a normal lemon, but once you’ve tasted them, you’ll forgive them their little bit of ugliness.

Rainy day work

A light rain has kept me house bound today, but no complaints as it was well overdue. I was thrilled to have accomplished two things from my list. The first was to scrub, and I do mean down on hands & knees 'scrub' my floors to remove the muddy build up that has accumulated on the painted concrete floors. The concrete floors have proved much easier to maintain then the old carpet that was there when we bought the place, however mud tracked in on wellies, and on the many childrens feet that have visited gets stuck in the grooves of the concrete left from the original trowel marks. Although I've swept regularly, and hubby has run the mop over it, it was needing a serious scrub to bring it up nicely.

We opted for the painted concrete because the very old and threadbare carpet just had to go and I really don't know what I want to replace it with yet, not to mention the cost of putting an alternative down. I had bought paving paint originally to paint over the red brick pavers in the spare room & our now properly enclosed back deck area. After living with them though for over a year & a half I've come to appreciate the simplicity of them as they were and presto, this gave me paving paint for my bare concrete. For all those wondering, yes, it's cold, but nothing slippers can't fix and some inexpensive blue & white cotton rugs from Ikea. The rugs are small enough that I can still put them in the washing machine & they come up well each time.

Last day off, I stripped the carpet from the spare room and scraped away the glue residue. Today after a good scrub, I've started painting the floor in here too.

All the while I was in my cleaning frenzy I've had brown vinegar on the stovetop. With sugar added I've slowly reduced two litres to under one, and the result is a beautiful caramelised balsamic vinegar. After one of the girls from work (ex chef) told me how easy it was, I've been dying to give it a go.

Also I'm pleased to see my chickens are also back to laying. It's been sporadic, but one or two eggs a day is a great start. I read somewhere that the chickens normally begin laying again after the winter solstice, so I guess it's true.

From the garden today:

a dozen eggs (collected over the week)

two beautiful large tomatoes

heaps of little cherry tomatoes from self seeded plants

one lone passionfruit

a handfull of small chillies

2 little gooseberries

BBQ, beach & other treats

We brought our next set of students over to our little island shack to show them a different view of Australia. These two have been an unusual pair for us to get in that they were only 10 years old, and so a much different view of what was exciting. It was a day of new things for them. I particularly loved it when Susan spotted fruit on my lemonade tree and cried out."Look, look, this one has oranges on it. This is my very favourite tree, can we eat them." Unfortunately it wasn't to be as they weren't quite ready for picking & eating yet. They had great difficutly in believing that my potatoes were in fact potatoes as they couldn't see any growing on the little bushes and immediately wanted to dig them up & find potatoes when I explained that they grew under the ground. Again timing wasn't yet right to accomodate them. However they did get to see & pick some little cherry tomatoes, and took delight in chasing my poor chickens around the yard.

I think we were all relieved when it came time to take them down to the beach. Here they seemed determined to strip the beach of any possible shells. The locals are very protective of the few shells we get on the beach here and do discourage people from removing them. To allow a little excitement I brought some prepurchased shells (please forgive me, this is before I was really aware of how enviromentally wrong it was to take away possible marine life homes, and was having a major craft session upon first moving into the shack & celebrating my seachange)

and conveniently hid them amongst the holes the girls were excavating along the tide line. I explained that because the shells were important for the health of our marine enviroment they would be limited to taking only four shells each, so 'luckily' they just happened upon four beautiful shells each and any of the 'real' ones were left to stay, except for one. Amazing how beauty is perceived. One of the girls discarded a particularly big curved shell for a broken part of a mussel shell much to my surprise.

The other big highlight of the day for them was their first Australian barbeque. As we hadn't really prepared for this in advance & the island butcher isn't open on a Sunday, we had to buy meat from the local supermarket. To my horror the girls were thrilled when they discovered some sort of 'meat sticks' (mince of some variety covered in herbs & spices that were so colorful you knew they would be full of colour & preservatives). I tried to discourage it, but they were actually labelled as ,"BBQ sticks" and as the girls were so proud of themselves for having found the 'right' thing for a barbeque I gave in & let them have them, to this we added some prepared meat patties & set off to make hamburgers, tomato sauce & all.

You'll notice their matching set of socceroo hats, bought for them, along with a set of thongs each by hubby as an "australian" gift to take home. I didn't have the heart to tell him the first thing the girls noticed was the 'made in china' labels on the inside, oh well, something rather humerous in them making a return trip to where they came from.

The day was completed with a dog walk at the other beach joined by my mum and a play in the park. In all I guess a pretty perfect day for your average 10 year old, and not an altogether bad one for us either.

Movement in the garden

Another great day off, and in the garden. It's been a long week and today was time for action, plus a little time off. During the week Hubby picked up a dozen bales of sugar cane mulch. Not the fine stuff you buy hygenically packed in plastic, but real, off the farm stuff. No plastic waste, and a lot cheaper too. So first task to do today was to empty the bales of sugar can mulch from the back of the ute. These will be used around the garden beds to minimise the weeds, both sides of the fences to minimise the grass and around the little murrayas that will eventually (fingers crossed here) become a hedge. For those not in the know, the mulch is used to help hold moisture & warmth, and again control the weeds. Ran out of time to get to that part today, but they are now stacked up with a tarp covering (wet, mouldy sugar cane bales are heavy & not so much fun to play with).

Todays big job was to move the chook pen. I guess at this point I should explain our system. Hubby built a chook pen based on an idea from a permaculture book, except rather than the usual dome design, ours is an 'A' frame made just slightly larger than our gardens. It's made from PVC piping covered with wire fencing, and then a tarp thrown over for a little shelter from the elements. It's been made light enough that I can move it on my own pretty easily. Todays move however was back to the first garden bed, involving trudging it across the yard & removing/moving fences as well. I'll post some details and picks at a later time on how I use the chickens to do the hard work for me in the garden.

I also needed to remove the couple of capsicum and eggplants that were in this bed to a more permanent site. I found that the eggplants & capsicums I put in last season, were duds then, but produced better this time around. They have gotten stronger & bigger which obviously must help. The ones in this garden (see image above) only went in this season, and again were hopeless, (it looks alright, but that eggplant is only about the size of my little finger) so lets hope the next season theory works for these ones too. Below is a 'second' season eggplant, these were massive when they finished growing. I then ripped the remaining heads of basil off the bushes left. Ideally I'd like to turn this into my own home made pesto, but we'll see what time & my energy allows.

During the process of moving the chook pen I tripped over a sweet potato vine & ripped the poor thing right out of the ground. This meant I needed to dig up any sweet potatoes that might be ready (its a little early, I would have liked to have waited a few more weeks). I got a crop of about 4 decent sized sweet potatoes, and a few small undersized ones. This current crop of sweet potatoes came from last year's undersized ones, so I'll keep these to one side & wait for them to sprout.

Ginger

I've been patiently waiting for what seemed to be the appropriate time to harvest my ginger. I bought a Thai ginger plant some time last year & following the instructions stuck it somewhere where it wouldn't hurt for it to become prolific, sat back & Googled some directions on what to do with it. According to one source (I'm sorry I can't quote it as it was some time ago now, and at the time I never dreamed I would be writing about it) I could "harvest" it anytime from about April through till almost September, but leaving it longer apparently results in the ginger being hotter. The tell tale sign of when to dig up the fragrant roots coincides with the leaves yellowing off & turning brown. I'm not one for overly 'hot' dishes, so I didn't want to wait too long, but my leaves didn't seem to want to change colour either. So I've been waiting & waiting for a sign. Today was the day! Yellow leaves from the tips. And then, it poured rain!!!!Not one to be detered, especially after waiting forever, I took the opportunity presented by a break in the downpour & off I went.

Wow, nothing could have prepared me for the amount of roots I got from my one little plant, all hidden under a canopy of leaf fall, & just waiting to be snapped freshly off. I washed the excess dirt off, and ideally would have liked to dry them out in the sun, but it's not to be today, so instead I brought them inside to rest on a teatowel & dry out.

In addition, today was special as we had our new home stay daughter (high school children who come to study english from overseas) and her sister come to stay at the shack overnight. Today, regardless of the rain, we went for a walk along the beaches, and had a pasta for lunch topped with fabulous tomato & herb mixture(basil, parsley, rocket, garlic chives) picked fresh straight out of the garden. It's moments like these I feel rewarded for the work that has gone in and look forward to making it a larger part of my everyday life.

Change on the horizon

My treat this morning, on my day off, has been to lay in bed reading wonderful blogs that have been an inspiration to me since I first began my "new life". I have indulged myself with their tales of gardening success, home cooked meals, and crafty endeavors. But I have also taken on a small sense of guilt. For all these sites I visited & lived vicariously through, I've not taken the time to leave a message or to sign in & let these fabulous people know how important they are in my life and how they have helped to motivate a change in it for the better. I formally apologise now & will make an effort to give you the feedback & recognition you deserve going forward.

This morning, unable to access my "favourites" (a whole other story there) I did a Google search on one of my regular reads "Down to Earth" and found an interview with Rhonda on Chic Blogs. As one of Australia's top Chic Blogs she shared some good advice on creating a successful blog that I will now try very very hard to take on..... post every day. As simple as that, yet not something I've been very good at. Let me see, I've managed... two blogs in 6 months!!!
Ok, in summary, time for a couple of changes!