Hello, it's been quite some time since I was last here, nine months in fact! Time certainly flies these days, it's hard to believe we are already in the middle of May and almost the end of Autumn. I have missed taking photos and putting together a bit of a story to go with them. Time to do a bit of a catch up I think!
In October Mum and I had a week's holiday to beautiful Cairns, somewhere I have long wanted to visit.
This was the view from our hotel room. My photos don't do the scenery justice it was
so breathtaking, I love mountains and could have sat on the balcony and looked
at this view all day long.
This view was taken from our gondola going up the mountain to Kuranda.
View of the Barron River from our gondola.
The beautiful Cairns Birdwing butterfly
Another beautiful butterfly we saw
This was very special! Seeing this Jabiru with her chicks in a nest very high up off the
ground. You can't tell from this photo but the nest was huge. This photo was taken at
the Port Douglas Wildlife Sanctuary and it was awesome being able to witness a
part of nature you wouldn't normally see.
Also in October this handsome boy joined our family!
His name is Arrow and he is an Arab, he will be 18
in a few months time but you wouldn't know it!
It is so lovely having a horse to care for and look
after once again after not having horses for a number
of years now. He is my daughter's horse, but as she has
moved out of home I'm the one that feeds and cares for him
on a daily basis, and I really do enjoy it :)
Then on the 10th February we had a lot of rain and flooded.
By evening the water had subsided quite a bit and by early afternoon
on the 11th we were flooded again after more heavy rain. The levels didn't get quite as high
but almost. We lost two lots of fencing, all the horse feed, the chooks had to camp on our
verandah for seven days until their yard wasn't such a boggy mess. I lost lots of plants from the garden and just a general big mess to clean up. We fared so much much better than further out to the east. Given our shire is in the wrong and we shouldn't have flooded to anywhere near the extent we did.....well that's a story for another day.
Summer was pretty uneventful for tomatoes! This was the first time growing
Tigerella. The only tomatoes I picked were the ones above plus the one in the
basket in the photo below. I also grew some cherry tomatoes which were a dismal
failure. I haven't had much luck with tomatoes for a few years now.
Watermelons on the other hand were a huge success!! We picked very close to
100kgs of beautiful full of flavour watermelons! We didn't get to eat and share all of
them as the last half dozen or so had been sitting in the flood waters and even though
they have a hard skin there was no way I wanted anyone eating them. The chooks thought
that was just it as they devoured them. Capsicums have been another success and at the end
of Autumn we are still picking capsicums almost daily.
In April Cody celebrated his 11th birthday, he has been part of our family
for not quite two years now and celebrated with his favourite sorry second
favourite thing after a walk, a car ride. And special dog treats!
So that's a bit of a catch up of the last nine months. Have been busy in the garden so will be back soon with some pictures of what is growing in the garden in the lead up to winter.
