Last fruit

I'm eating the last fruit from the garden now. 

Perfumed quinces 

and equally perfumed feijoas.

also the last handful of tomatoes from the wilting vines.

First summer harvest

Lemons (well they are fruiting most of the year), artichokes and rose geranium to scent the baked custard.

The hay is from the stock-food store. I've been taking the dog off his comfy hay to take photos lately and he huffs very gently to himself as he is hustled off.

Sorry Mr Pip, you can have your brekky now.

Garden blitz

Three days of pruning and weeding and digging out the blackberry wilderness. Then a day in the ruby recliner with a bucket full of rose clippings and a book.

Couldn't even  bring myself to throw a ball for the dog.

Quince and early apple blossom

It's getting hot, too warm for a jumper the last two days. The first of the blowies buzzed inside yesterday.

 

We're well into Spring, the equinox is coming up in the next day or two. The  quince trees and the early apple are in bloom.

Quince and apples and roses are are closely related. 

I love all three, but I'll have to wait a bit longer for the roses.

One more tree to flower - the grafted apple.

Peach and plum

I found a chopped-up stump by the back fence when we first moved to this house. Thin wands were sprouting up from below a graft line on the murdered tree, so I left it alone to see what would grow back.  These are its fiercely pink, serrated blossoms.

Until it fruited I didn't know what it was. It is, in fact, a peach tree producing quite small, but very sweet and  juicy yellow peaches. It's a tough tree, growing steadily all through the drought.

Not the usual peach blossom, is it?

And this is my adored greengage plum tree, well established when I arrived. 

 In blossom or in leaf it is beautiful and its fruit is a marvellous, gleaming yellowy-green

I can hardly ever bring myself to prune it as I love sitting under the low-sweeping arches of its branches.

Worlds in glass

I'm home sick today, voiceless and trying to finish off a bit of work before the end of the financial year. But the sun is streaming in through my window and my terrariums are a joy. I set them up after finding this book in the Lifeline Op shop last week

and spotting this blog and this segment on DesignSponge.

 

 

Look ! Each little world-under-glass has its own tiny watercycle. 

The tall one, the round one both have tiny rust red fungi and moss from the park in them, there is a quartz stone from an old mine mullock heap and a wonderfully black and patterned bit of red-pine bark.
The jar has a fragment of earth and  moss scooped off the street.
I've left lots of space for things to spread and (hopefully) flourish.

(Click on the picture for a detailed view)

 It's been three days since I set them up. This is the first time since setting them up that I opened them. They smelt wonderfully of wet earth and moss. I must be careful to leave them alone now. I want them to be self supporting.


The terrariums cost a total of $3.50 - 2 glass saucers and 2 jars and 1 bowl - from the oddments table at Dana Street Op shop.

Now I want to make a drier world with pebbles and cacti - and then I want a little landscape with tiny buildings and stuff.  

I must rein this in. 

I must let the folk on 'Collectors ' be a warning to me. I do not want to be the woman with a  hundred jars of moss.

(Yes this is a tiny promo for a weirdly wonderful half hour of ABC Friday night TV. Do watch 'Collectors'  it will amaze you and make you happy).

But I love moss inside and out. 

bees and butterflies and dogs

There haven't been many bees in the garden this year. I 've seen clouds of butterflies and masses of dragonflies but very few bees and not many blow flies.

I live near a very large park and most springs I see a swarm or two of bees - in the park and even settling briefly (and a bit scarily) in my front garden. Not this year. The lavender, which should be abuzz with bees, is full of butterflies instead. Perhaps the weather has been too cold and too wet for bees?

I wonder if the reason I haven't had any plums, peaches, apples or almonds this year is because there have been so few bees?

Berries have been good though - I grew lots of blackberries (the approved non-weed kind),  loganberries and wrested a few raspberries from the birds - or the dogs.

Paddy loves fruit and will scavenge fallen fruit and steal it from lower branches. He got most of the feijoas last year. The nectarine tree did well this year and so did Paddy.

Perhaps you can see the fragment of a nectarine at his feet. The Kitty dog is much more conventional in her eating and usually leaves the fruit alone, but this year she followed Paddy's lead and began to eat ripe nectarines too. Here she is watching Paddy eat his nectarine.

Now she's off to find one too.

Sneaking behind the lemon tree, and sniffing around for fallen fruit.

Then she looks up  - yum!

She looks a bit ragged and un-sheepdoglike as I have just given her her second summer haircut.

Confused chrysanthemum

Summer is not a time for flowers in my garden as I limit water to herbs and trees, but I do have a few pots and this chrysanthemum has been flowering for a couple of weeks now - completely out of season.

Perhaps, as in an old Chinese story, the chrysanthemum spirit is grateful for her rescue - I found the plant withering in a supermarket last year - or perhaps it is my miraculous worm tea. I dosed all the pots with it before Christmas.

Maybe she is encouraged by her neighbours, the pine and the bamboo?

In season or not, she is very welcome.

Hot and purple

I've been overcome by the heat. It's been like late summer here rather than late spring with 30 degree plus days even in cool Ballarat, no rain in a month when we expect rain, and the plants in the garden are racing to keep up.

The garden has been briefly full of beauties like these, old-fashioned  iris that I've acquired from old gardens and roadsides.

They rushed into bloom and plants that usually flower all through November had finished in two weeks. I've saved a few pictures of them.

The hot weather has made the lavender bushes happy. I gathered five baskets of lavender from the garden, the English lavender that preserves against moth and decay.

It dried in a couple of hot days and I made simple lavender bags to sweeten the shelf of winter flannel sheets

and to protect the newly -washed, sun-dried winter woollies folded away in the cupboard waiting the cold on a day that feels as if cold will never come again.

Dog's breakfast

It's 9am, forget the plants, what about breakfast?

Come on, the kitchen's this way!

How long do I have to wait?

Just dogs

I've walked, eaten brekky and now I'd like to sleep until the afternoon, thank you. Call me at three.

I've walked, had brekky and done a bit of guard duty.

What else is going on around here? Gardening? Fine!

Secateurs - yes I can manage those too.

You're sure you don't want me to run off with them so you can chase me like we did with that garden trowel?

I'll just check out what you've moved over here then. Nice pot plant.

Cooking the quinces

Here are the quinces growing in my garden. I had only a few this year because the tree is very young. These are the last of my autumn fruit.




I bought some more quinces from the Farmers Market in neighbouring Buninyong so I'd have enough for quinces baked in honey and for some jars of quince jelly. These are a much larger and deeper yellow variety than the quinces in my garden.




I love quinces. My mum and my grandma both made excellent clear red quince jelly from the old quince trees that were a so common in gardens in my childhood. Ripe quinces smell exquisite, and quinces seem to be able to produce generous amounts of fruit in even the harshest years.

This is the casserole my mum always used to bake her quinces in a honey and sugar syrup. Quinces take five slow hours to bake in a very gentle heat. I tend to add a couple of rose-scented pelargonium leaves in the last hour.


I have two varieties of Rose pelargonium growing, this one has a slight hint of lemon in its rose. I use the leaves to scent pot pourri, fill vases in the house, and add them to custards, sponges, cooked fruit and jellies.

Hay, worms, happiness

We drove the trailer right out of Ballarat and halfway to Daylesford to get twelve bales of hay for my garden. We didn't really have to drive so far but it was lovely to travel out of town.

The next day at the Farmers Market I bought a worm farm. I know that worm farms can be put together out of anything lying around, and I'll make a big, sit-on -the-ground, out-doors one in spring, but this is an odour-less, recycled, Aussie -made marvel.

And I can keep it in the bath. (We only shower now because filling a bath for each person is too wasteful). It's too cold here in winter for worms in a thin container, and we won't want to carry food scraps outside in freezing, sleety weather.

It will look uncouth, unchic and not pretty, but my bathroom is as much storage and work room as bathing place.

Paints, pastels, glue, etc are all to be found by the bath anyway, so what's a worm farm or two ? Yes, I plan to have more!

Here is the first delivery of worm food, which my team of one thousand will be turning into soil and worm tea over the winter.