Garden early August

Thought I would take a few photos of the garden this morning after a lovely 15mm of rain fell overnight. It has been such a long time since I last used my camera, I'm way out of practice.

I love this purple Hardenbergia

Purple is one of my favourite colours in the garden

The white Hardenbergia is very pretty too

Purple or white, the bees love both!

A lovely lemon coloured grevillia which I'm unsure of the name

Chorizema Cordatum or Heart Leaf Flame Pea.

A beautiful Australian native plant which is

currently sitting in a pot in my shade house 

waiting to be planted out.

Cheerful Daffodils and Bellis

I love how delicate the Jonquils look against the Crepe Myrtle bark

More purple! This time a wallflower

More Bellis, I first saw these at Floriade in Canberra

a few years ago, and have been growing them ever since.

The vegetable garden is doing really well at the moment.

The Kale is dark green and very healthy looking.

The broccoli has gone to seed already, but still picking 

a few side shoots most days.

The healthiest looking cabbage I've managed to

grow for a number of years.

Self sown carrots and beetroot

Hoping this beauty survives, my parents have an enormous Elk horn

in their shade house and last week it came crashing to the ground.

Luckily it wasn't damaged, so it was a perfect time to split it up into

smaller plants and my sister and I were very lucky to receive a couple

each for our gardens. Ive put this one attached to a gum tree in the

chook yard and the other one on a board hanging in the shade house.

Touch wood I don't jinx myself by saying how healthy the vegetable garden looks! Most years I have a terrible problem with grey aphids at this time, but so far none at all. Fingers crossed it stays that way. After about ten days of beautiful almost spring like weather we are back to freezing cold and rainy days, but I don't mind, I seem to be one of the strange few that enjoy winter.

Where do I start.......

Hello, once again I have neglected this blog for quite sometime. It's funny I have been missing from here for such a long time now, that I don't even know where to start. Lots of different things have been happening but nothing in particular to keep me away from here, just the longer I left it, the harder it became to log in and start typing again. Although I've been gone for a long time, I have missed blogging, so am going to give it another go :)

I will start with a few photos from a garden tour that Mum and I went on last October to the Hunter Valley, Blue Mountains and Canberra. It was a fantastic trip and the gardens were amazing and the scenery pretty spectacular.

The above three photos are from the Hunter Valley Gardens which we spent a good part of the day wandering around and taking many many photos.

The next three photos are from the Blue Mountains. Wow. I knew I would enjoy visiting there, it's somewhere I have always wanted to visit. But what I wasn't expecting was for the Blue Mountains to steal my heart! I instantly fell in love with the place and didn't want to leave! I can't wait to visit again. It is so breathtakingly beautiful.

Next up was Canberra, where we visited Floriade, The Australian War Memorial, The National Museum, Tulip Top Gardens and Cockington Green. It was a fantastic trip and these few photos are just a few of the thousands I took. I'm thinking once I have them sorted and organised I will do another blog post but do one post on each area that we visited.

Now for a few photos from around the garden.

Our first watermelon.

We had a great harvest of onions, the best yet. This is just some of the bunches

hanging under the shed lean-to. About to use some of them later today

when I make a caramelised onion and tomato tart.

We are picking lots of cherry tomatoes and eagerly awaiting the bigger toms

to start ripening.

The gorgeous smelling Philadelphius.

The passionfruit vine is growing at rate of knots now it has finally settled in and we have quite a few flowers, looking forward to some yummy passionfruit.

It's another very hot day here and I need to go and finish off some of the watering so will leave it here for now, until next time, have a great weekend.

Hello

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.

A cold weekend and new trees

Hello, what a cold and blustery weekend it is here. It's currently sitting on 9 degrees Celsius at lunch time. Too cold to be out in the garden so the following photos are ones I took a few days ago. This post isn't really much of anything but more just because I want to keep up the habit of posting regularly. Yesterday we received 15mm of rain which the garden enjoyed and a bit more for the rainwater tanks.

Last week we had a couple of very cold nights down to -2 and the frost has burnt all the green shoots on the mulberry tree.

The mandarins are nice, but the poor tree is under attack from sooty mould. I have been trying to get rid of it for quite some time now but don't seem to be having much success.

The Casuarina or she-oak trees indigenous to this area from a distance all look like they are dying.

It's only when you get up close, you realise what looks brown and dead from a distance is actually

the trees covered in pollen.

Close-up of the Casuarina pollen ............  ah-choo!

Obviously taken a few days ago when we had blue skies

nothing but grey skies this weekend.

Back at the very start of winter I planted three Silver Birch trees.

Looking forward to seeing them covered in their summer green leaves, then changing

into a soft buttery yellow in Autumn before becoming skeletons again in the winter with

their silvery white trunks.

I've never really been a big fan of succulents but a few of them are growing on me.

This one in particular 'Jellybean' is a cute little plant.

I don't know the name of this native plant, it was a cutting from Mum's garden

and it has tiny little white flowers in spring and summer.

It seems to like this spot quite well and does a good job of softening up the tin wall behind it.

Shorty my parents dog has gone home about an hour ago. Mum and Dad have arrived back home to the freezing cold after their holiday overseas in the heat and humidity. I was planning on cooking a roast dinner tonight for them thinking they would enjoy a home cooked meal after being away for a couple of weeks, but they have both come home with food poisoning. We will still have our roast tonight as it will be the first one in ages that eldest teen will be home to sit down at the table and eat with us, as she is generally working a double shift on a Sunday. Hopefully Mum and Dad will be over it soon enough and I will cook dinner for them and we can go through the photos of their latest trip. :)