Hello!

It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Well, there hasn’t been much to talk about. Winter was here. It was long, and cold, and so very, very, very WET. It’s a little surprising how wet it was. I looked up the Bureau of Meteorology, and there was some information there that said it was the wettest June/July period for Melbourne on record. Basically it was so cold and wet – sideways rain, temps not above 6C most days – that we stayed inside, tending the fire and knitting things. (well, the others may have played cards, but I knitted.)

However, looking at some photos of the last little while on my phone, I saw that we had actually made some progress on some tasks… so with out further ado, via dot points and photos, here’s what we’ve been doing:

All that rain made the path to the cars very muddy. After the I-man fell one day and caught himself on one hand to save his suit from being mud-streaked, he snapped. And spent the Queen’s birthday long weekend digging a path bed, laying gravel, and using a whacker plate to compact it down. We’ve now got a path that we love, and MUCH less mud and dirt in the house! Win! (That there’s the Boychild helping. He’s so happy in his raincoat in the mud!)

The path got finished, complete with some winding through the garden, and I planted some lavender that I got at a bargain price from a local nursery to make an informal hedge eventually (that’s the lavender in pots, about to go in, and yes, it was a very rare sunny winter’s day – one of the few we had):

Amusing-shaped vegetables were harvested from the winter vegie patch. This one’s a parsnip. Only a couple were forked and twisted like this, the rest were gorgeously round, fat and just as a parsnip should be. Roasted alongside an organic chook… YUM!

Other things of note:

• Boychild’s purple sprouting broccoli began to grow actual broccoli! Here are 2 shots: one just starting, and one just at harvest:

• We’ve been eating masses of broccoli for the last 4 weeks. The plants have gone totally mad, and the side shoots that grow after the central head has been harvested are succulent and delicious, either raw or cooked! Yum!

• Coco the goat has gone back to our friend’s house, just for a while, until the blackberries grow out of hand again. We’ve booked her back for late September!
• We are taking the opportunity that a low livestock-to-person ratio offers, and renovating the chook shed. It is a lovely big one, but is not rat and fox proof, and the run is enormous, taking up the heart of our property. We’ve made a plan, and are excited about moving fences, opening up the heart of the place, and finally getting feathered friends again. We love chooks! Hooray! Photos of this are to come, I think it deserves a post all of it’s own.

And now that it’s Spring again, and the sun has been wrestling itself out from behind the rain clouds, I’m sure there’ll be more to tell, and more to show.