Saturday, December 25, 2010

Nothing was stirring not even a mouse.

Of course now the youngest is up and his alarm clock is beeping for the second time. Eldest isn't awake at all yet.

Santa has been.
Above:
The most popular present of the morning.
  Eldest has wanted one of these for a few years.  We've all had  a bit of play with it now though.  
Very hard to resist.


Youngest took this last shot with his phone.


Have a wonderful Christmas everyone. 

Stay safe.

Sunday, December 5, 2010

Change

Woke up quite early this morning. Well ok, far too early. It wasn't even light and it gets light by 5am here.






Decided once it was light to make a cup of tea and go and sit out the back to enjoy it. There was a distant little bit of morning mist but a gleam of sunlight just over  in the distance looked promising. Tea made I got myself settled outside. It's been a while since I took some photo's from this perspective so here they are.

A shot down the street to show the new houses, the decimation the developer has created when he cleared the blocks across from us and the little bit of mist over the bush, etc.

The Developer has cleared the blocks of all trees that are in the way of  building. He's obviously decided by doing this himself  it might help them sell.





...............................................................................

CHANGE


I took some pics and went inside to find a camera cable.. It took me almost 10 mins to find a camera cable and when I returned it was to a creeping mist world.



















After a short time I couldn't see beyond the fruit tree netting in the fruit farm behind the house.















Then as I typed this the sun started to shine through and it went bright.

First there was a rainbow.














Then the mist cleared and there was bright blue sky.







By the time I finished typing it had been less than an
 hour from start to finsih.

The sun was gone again, hidden behind darkening clouds and a general feeling of gloom. So cold I had to run inside and grab a jumper.



 

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Roses

Well the roses seem very happy.  Last year some garden conditioner was added to the builders sand pad
 (wasn't great quality I must admit) and then closer to where each was to be planted some organic soil conditioner was added, dug around etc. ( nice stuff) Then sugar cane mulch was added around each rose. This year they've had a little more sugar cane, but not much, lots of seasol, and molasses added.   Then  watered and watered and.... finally in September pruned. Then about 2/3 weeks ago they were given one small dose of blood n bone .  :)  I'll be giving them some seamungus soon. I can't re-mulch them as I've planted ground cover in between all the roses and it is just starting to recover from it's rather rough  and savage removal from another garden and quick thrust into my soil.  Native wood violets.  I'm looking forward to watching them grow. Hopefully it won't be too hot for them.



Lawn is looking rather lush as well.  Wet day for the 2nd day in a row. Lots of seed heads appearing in the lawn now.

DH has pretty much decided to go for a push mower again but to buy a brand new one as we had a very old 2nd, 3rd, 5th? hand one before.   He mumbled something about self sharpening blades. I'll leave it for him to work it out.


Sunday, October 24, 2010

Lawn

well I'm back from Perth and it's time to  update this thread with pictures of our beautiful lawn.

From this:



Close up of the glorious stuff.  phew.. ( holds nose)





Add one of these and loads of raking and leveling 
   and some of this  20 kg of Zeolite and 20 kg of spongolite


To get  this
 
 

Now add seasol, molasses. seamungus and water and hopefully we'll have a thriving lawn.  woohoo

Sunday, September 26, 2010

Some visitors and gardening in rocky soils

Late yesterday morning  the bird sounds we'd been hearing became louder and we discovered we had some visitors.  A "splendid Blue Wren" in full mating plummage came for a visit to the alfresco area looking for insects and bringing 2 others with it. We think they were females. It seemed quite unafraid of us watching from our slide of the glass. It investigated the spotlight on a  chair, pecking at it. We now assume it was fascinated by it's own reflection but at the time we thought perhaps there were insects and webs on it. Eventually it found a small caterpillar. It shook it about a bit and then swallowed it in one quick movement.







Yesterday we got stuck into weeding most of the main garden bed. It had been over run with a variety of horrid weeds.  We got most removed from the bed and some extra soil was shifted to another garden area and planted two leucadendron's down near the boundary fence between the last silver birch and the manchurian pear tree.  One is,"Safari Sunset" a lovely red flowered plant   and the other an unlabeled yellow

















Today was to be a planting day. I got up early and collected 20+ plants, mostly tube stock in preparation for planting from in front of the house.

Now supposedly you are meant to rake your garden areas when preparing them to remove all rocks.  If we did that we've have nothing left. So I raked and dragged the rockier sections out of the way and left it at that. I left some rocks to be used as markers for later seed planting.
By mid morning the plants were all in.  A mix of native shrubs and ground covers.
Then it was off to the next town to market day to see what I could find there and to the nursery in the same town. I returned with 3 packets of seeds for baby spinach, baby carrots and chilli's as well as punnets of cherry tomato seedlings (8), garlic chives,sweet basil, baby spinach and 5 other small native plants.
After a cup of tea it was off into the garden to plant.  I also gathered 17 society garlic plants from my plant collection near the garage.  My plan was to plant the garlic around the outside of the vegetable area hopefully  reducing the "food" aroma  that will waft towards the bush where the rabbits live.
  The society garlics closest to the retaining wall need to be shifted. 3 of them are too far out of line.
Everything planted, I watered and headed in for a cold drink and a late lunch.  It's done.   The ground is dusty in parts, rich with added soil conditioner in other parts. These sections will be for non natives and veggies. I have to investigate some thing to help out our "ned kelly" grevillea as it's being overwhelmed by the enriched soil it's been planted in.