Head in the Clouds – Feet in the Dirt – Page 149 – Traipsing through life in NW Tasmania

All Creatures Great and Small

I am a sucker for animals – there are not many I don’t like. I’d even rather relocate a spider than kill it.

The ones we officially own, like the cat and chickens are spoiled silly. Pretty sure Pip runs the house –

Although he has to put up with small indignities –

The chickens get premium scraps, as well as cakes baked for them –

A mix of grains, egg (with shell) garlic, rolled oats, a dash of flour etc

Seed blocks made for them –

Proper funerals if they fall off the perch-

Admittedly they also have to put up with occasional indignities –

We unofficially share our place with possums –

Brush tailed possum. They do share our fruit, but so far not too destructive.

And a cheeky rabbit –

We had an exciting drama once with a 4 foot tiger snake that decided our bathroom was the best place to hang out!! I couldn’t believe my eyes when I came home and saw it gliding into the bathroom!! Pip was on the bench just watching it and I was desperately hoping he wasn’t going to pounce, as I was going to have to go after him and that wasn’t going to end well for any of us!

I saw it go under the bath, so I went in and scooped up the cat, closed the door and ran to wake up Jeff (who was on nightshift) so I could share the news. Bleary eyed he dutifully came to the bathroom, we opened the door and there’s me grovelling about on the floor with a torch looking for the damn snake – and then I look up! Draped over the towel rack like an ornament!!

Well, you can’t have a bloody great poisonous snake cavorting about the bathroom, so I did some phoning about to get a snake person in to catch and relocate it.

They eventually arrived (two and a half hours later – and with only one loo in the house, I had to make other arrangements as even though I like snakes, I wasn’t ready to sit on the toilet with it lurking nearby!) From memory it only cost about $40 for the mother & son team to come in and do their thing! Money well spent and we immediately blocked up the offending hole in the bathroom!

Of course we get lots of interesting insects – ranging from your usual grasshopper-

through to the weird and wonderful –

But todays unusual animal drama came from a lizard. There are a lot of them scampering about out the back at the moment.

I was finally getting around to cleaning up the back veranda, and I found this poor fellow stuck to a bit of packing tape that was hanging off a box!!

It probably took about an hour of delicate work with a cotton bud and a jar of warm water – I dunked him in a few times…

I think I would have cried if I killed him, so we took it pretty slow – and the trick was keeping the newly unstuck limbs from resticking themselves on again! He could feel the freedom coming along and got quite wiggly (understandably) once a few feet were loose.

I thought he may like his new found freedom in the herb garden among the oregano-

Well that was my good deed for the day – I even got the veranda done (with a bit of help from the wonderful husband)

Hope your day was great!

Cheers

Growing Tomatoes from Laterals

Apart from stuffing ourselves silly at Ruby’s on roast turkey and vegetables – and double helpings of trifle for dessert – it was a reasonably quiet day.

I did get out in the garden and fluffed about picking what tomatoes remained, a few other vegetables (small pumpkins!!) and half heartedly collected a variety of seeds that seemed ready (Beans, sunflower & marigold)

Pumpkins store well for a long time – in a dry well aired area on their sides.

I am thinking roast pumpkin as well as pumpkin soup

I picked a variety of laterals off my waning tomato plants with the hope I may be able to nurture a few through the winter to get a head start next season. For those of you just heading into the warmer spring weather that have not tried growing tomatoes from laterals – here is a bit of a guide.

I am not good at growing tomatoes from seed. I haven’t given up and am saving several seeds from fruit this season. However, I have no trouble snapping a lateral off an established plant and growing a new one.

This season I spent approximately $5 on three new tomato plants and the rest of the 20-something plants came from laterals or self seeded.

First, if you are not sure which branch is a lateral, check the photos below

email t1 — A lateral starts in the crook of the main stem and the leaf branch

email t4 — A good sized lateral to break off to start a new plant

While it is not essential, I put my laterals into a jar or glass of water to watch the process of the roots forming, simply because I enjoy it!

You can plonk them straight in the ground and have the same success as long as you keep them watered.

Depending on how warm it is, roots can start showing as early as a week, but not unusual for them to take a couple of weeks.

To me its like magic watching the process! I have found the plants grown from laterals quite vigorous and produce well… don’t forget free, which is about as economical as you can get!

This jar full got packaged up and posted out to another state where they survived and grew for a friend who needed more plants. That’s tough!!

Well – we have a cool night here so the fire is on and beckoning me to go and stare at it! Pip is already snugged up in his sleeping bag

Cheers

Easter Weekend

Someone needs to move these out of my reach for a while.

It doesn’t matter that I am starting to feel a little funny, I can’t stop eating them!!!

We dived into “Egg Money” to treat ourselves to a packet (each) (That saves the husband – wife squabbles because someone may have eaten more than his fair share)

So – what are people doing over this long weekend? Celebrating Easter? Taking a well earned breather? Work as normal?

I think one of our chooks is taking a well earned breather, as she laid a marble this morning!! I mean really! It wasn’t worth her effort!!

Probably the reason I had those Cadbury chocolate eggs on my mind! Clever chook!

One of the fun things about living around here is randomness. I was sitting inside avoiding some housework today when I heard someone walking around the house. I saw a lady looking lost, so I went out to say hi and see what she wanted.

Turns out she and her husband dropped in because they had seen my sign and wanted vegetables – even though the tables weren’t out!

Fabulous! Here – grab a box and follow me! What do you want?

So I dragged them all over the yard and let them pick and dig what they fancied, including cherry tomatoes –

Beans, parsley, carrots, apples and beetroot

I threw in a few seedlings and seeds as they are just preparing a garden, then we got down to the business end of the deal.

“How much?”

“Um… more than $5, less than $10?” (you can tell I am totally prepared and businesslike for all of this)

They laughed, handed me $10 and promised to return!

River Afternoon

Since Jeff has a nice stretch off from work and the day was warm, we decided to take advantage of the autumn sunshine and take the kayaks out for a paddle.

We only recently invested in kayaks. I had been putting little bits of money aside for about a year – the five year plan was to head to Ireland – but Jeff got a bit keen when he heard how much I had squirrelled away and suggested we get the kayaks.

We had often seen people kayaking on a lot of the local tidal rivers and it looked a wonderful way to spend a few hours.

Mine is the Kitty-Cat-Kayak

I found the coolest sticker ever at a market – perfect for my kayak

We usually like to put the kayaks in the water about an hour before high tide. The theory is that it will be easier going upriver and a doddle coming back!

Its lovely on the river. You see the occasional other paddler, birdlife and if you are lucky, a pademelon. (Imagine a kangaroo that is not as tall as up to your knee and is as fat as a basketball and you have a pademelon)

We got rained on going upriver and sunburnt coming back.

But that’s kinda normal for Tassie weather.

It was lovely floating along coming back and watching the gum trees as we glided by

Lunch tomorrow at Ruby’s! She is roasting up a turkey!

I will skip breakfast in anticipation!

Anyone doing anything special this weekend?

Cheers

Friday’s Footprints – Black River Beach

I am sure I can’t keep saying “This is one of my favourite places” on all of these posts… But we really love driving about 40 minutes west of us to take a stroll on this rugged beach, which rarely has another soul on it.

Mid summer is probably different but we reserve our jaunts for the off season.

Its a great place to visit to relax, collect some shells, play about with the camera, paddle in the ocean if its not too cold and see what odd things the sea has washed up that day.

Odd things –

Cropped weird thing — Clueless. Anyone shed some light?

I like the spikey grasses

and where the beach meets the river that is racing down to the sea

I totally love driftwood. But there are limits to what I can fit in the car to decorate my garden with

It can be beautifully moody

Or show off its colours

The sand has artistic tendencies

As does the water colour of the river

We have a ridiculous number of these shells at home! I do plan to use them to edge my herb garden one of these days

Always time for a selfie

A great place to visit in north-west Tasmania

Cheers

A Ton of Weeds

It was a beautiful day today, and I didn’t care what needed to be done inside – I was going to be out in it.

My poor garden is in an appalling state! I really haven’t been keeping up – just accepting the food it gives us without maintaining it lately!

It was pretty refreshing to get in there and make a good start on prettying it up again!

One of the raised garden beds was full of self seeded broccolini and mini cabbage, a few cos lettuce that went to seed, some rogue potatoes that I never even planted there and a single capsicum that hasn’t fruited but looks quite at home.

Time to get a bit ruthless and remove it all!

ok – I didn’t have the heart to pull up the capsicum. Its trying so hard!

Found plenty of fat juicy worms! The chickens suck them back like spaghetti – but only if they are lucky enough to find them by themselves. I prefer worms in the garden working for me!

I hate twitch. Long ropey grass. I can never get it all – sometimes tempts me to move over to the dark side of chemical poisons. Resisting so far!

I tried to choose the best of the moth eaten brassicas to replant under the ‘vegie net’ It took a while to carefully inspect every leaf for grubs and eggs and me flapping my arms about and yelling at any cabbage moth that came near. They look a little forlorn after their relocation, but hoping they will bounce back in a few days.

My best friend gave me these wonderful nets. She grew some beautiful non-grubby cauliflower over summer using these! I really should have put mine up again sooner.

And yes I know I have replanted in the same spot, but I like living on the edge – we shall see what happens!

Moving right along to this mess –

It took a bit of time to pull up and remove a good portion of the unwanted plants and weeds in here – I didn’t quite get around to digging it over but there was a vast improvement by the end of the day.

A small bit of excitement at one point as I disturbed a beautiful Redback Spider. These are famed for making life uncomfortable in the old days when you would find them under the toilet seat in the outside dunny!

So I risked life and limb to put her in a margarine container and moved her to a more ‘photographable’ area so I could show you all 🙂 (Most of you are probably saying, please don’t bother next time!)

It was hard to get a decent shot of her as after her margarine experience she was a bit skitty, and wouldn’t stop the race for freedom.

There is an antivenom, but a bite will make you reasonably unwell. (and no – I don’t garden with gloves!)

OK – I did don the leather gloves for this baby –

They are the nastiest thistle around. And even with the gloves on I got stabbed right through a couple of times!!! Much more troublesome than spiders in my opinion. (Serves me right for letting the garden go so long!)

One of the nice things about working in the garden is being able to forage for lunch. I ate tomatoes and raw beans. I could have really gone wild and had a carrot, but maybe tomorrow 🙂

I gathered a few fresh eggs then came inside to wash off the dirt and get dinner on the go.

I had thawed out some mince but hadn’t made any grand decisions about what to do with it. I have saved some to make hamburgers tomorrow, but tonight I made one of my favourite Japanese side dishes, Koroke.

Mash some potatoes and fry up some mince (I like to add some curry powder to the mince.) (And don’t add milk or cream to the mash – maybe a bit of butter – if its too soft they will fall apart)

Put some some bread in the Gee-Whizzer and make some breadcrumbs, and crack a couple of eggs –

The proper colour of eggs from free ranging spoiled chickens

Mix your mashed potato and mince and form into patties. Dip in the beaten egg and roll in the breadcrumbs

Shallow fry in a pan of oil and you are done.

I usually have teriyaki chicken to go alongside this, but I wasn’t going to bother driving into town for it. (We top with the Japanese Kewpie Mayonnaise and Tonkatsu sauce)

Such was my day! I hope yours was great too!

Cheers

PS Cari asked what a Granny Bonnet was, so I hunted up some photos –

Scale – you can tell they are quite a small flower and the heads hang down.

Seedy Stuff

Source Images: DSC_3839.JPG (Av: F8.0; Tv: 1/250 sec.; ISO: 500; FL: 60.0 mm) Processing: Fusion F.3 (HDR; Mode 1) — Plenty of bee’s means a healthy garden

I have only been doing this gardening thing properly for a bit over four years. I enjoy learning new ways to grow vegies – trying fruit or vegetables I haven’t had before. So the idea of collecting my own seed just made so much sense. I have been getting into it more and more.

What I call my lazy approach of not bothering to pull up vegetables that are going to seed can actually be relabelled as ‘permaculture’ 🙂

I had a beautiful big patch of parsley last season. It eventually went to seed and I never really got around to pulling it out. Come spring, I had little parsley plants popping up everywhere!

Its been growing madly all around the zucchini plants with no real assistance from me. A few were easily transplanted to the ‘proper’ herb garden too. Not only do you get free plants, but you can sell the excess, so what’s not to love about this?

The scarlet runner beans were the first thing I started to collect. They are just so obvious and easy. The pod that you missed picking at the right time becomes nice and fat, then browns off. You crack it open and ‘voila’ there are your new seeds. The fact that I have a huge mason jar full of more of these seeds than one person sensibly needs in a lifetime is neither here nor there.

Of course, seeds from zucchini’s, cucumber, pumpkins, melon etc (basically any that you can scrap out of the fruit) are so easy to collect. Just dry them out on some kitchen paper or newspaper, then store them in paper bags until spring. (Do yourself a favour and label the bags!! Captain Obvious I know, but for people like me who just think they will remember which were the capsicum (green pepper) and which were the chilli seeds… Well, you can imagine)

Can I digress for a minute? Capsicum. For all those in North America that call it Green Pepper. When you come down to Australia for your awesome holiday of a lifetime, don’t order green peppers on your pizza as you will get really hot chillies. My poor father in law, who is extremely sensitive to spicy food ordered EXTRA green peppers on his pizza. I thought we were going to have to jump start the poor bloke!!

Anyway – back to seeds 🙂

I have saved tomato seeds and tried to grow tomatoes every year, but they really don’t perform for me (yet – I haven’t given up) I prefer using self seeded plants (they come up everywhere now) or laterals (which I will save for another post.)

The theory here is that the seeds get the moisture and nutrients from the fruit for a better start.

Planting the slices of tomato worked well… most germinated, but I soon killed them 🙁

Other plants that you let go to seed and flower can produce a phenomenal amount of seed.

A single lettuce plant can produce enough for you to use for a few years. Although collecting it is more fiddly. The seeds are tiny – you pull the dried buds apart to get the seeds. I find seed collecting a very relaxing task actually…

Dried off lettuce flowers – seeds ready to pick

Another advantage to letting your plants run to seed is that the flowers bring in the bees. I let a broccoli go crazy in the hothouse and it was very helpful in luring in the bees to do their work on the tomatoes, chilli and cucumbers.

This plant grew gorgeous huge broccoli, flowered like mad – and produced very few seed pods!!

My seedy broccolini in the outside garden totally exploded into seed pods! Many nights were spend in front of movies podding these teeny tiny seeds! The crazy amount of plants that have self seeded as well is now on my urgent “To Be Attended To” list.

Broccolini seeds alongside the snow pea seeds for scale

Fennel is a lovely plant. It thrives on neglect. I didn’t even plant it in the first place, but like a lot of things around here, it sprouted up and did its own thing.

I read that fennel attracts the kind of wasps that love to munch on codling moth, so we were thinking of creating a garden ring of fennel around our apple trees. Has anyone heard of this or tried it?

The fabulously gnarly little silverbeet seeds (swiss chard) are starting to dry off –

One thing I did learn – don’t put similar plants close together if you want to get seed. I had silverbeet and beetroot (beets) close together that went to seed. Cross pollination happened. What I grew from those seeds was really peculiar!! Lesson learned.

The basil flowers are going to seed too at the moment and I am watching them brown off. I picked one stem to see what the seeds were like and how to get to them. They will be fiddly as well – tiny seeds. But I don’t think you can have too much basil in the garden, so it will be worth the effort.

I collect some of the flower seeds as well – sweet pea (easy), Granny Bonnet (fairly easy) and sunflower seeds (dead easy)

Source Images: DSC_7989.JPG (Av: F10.0; Tv: 1/60 sec.; ISO: 1600; FL: 60.0 mm) Processing: Fusion F.3 (HDR; Mode 1) — Sunflower seeds – and leftover petals

Garlic is another easy one.

Just save a bunch of cloves to plant the following season. I was actually quite shocked how much seed garlic was to buy. One of my lovely cousins who was growing it in a big way started me off with some and I have saved and replanted my own ever since.

Another advantage to seed collecting is that you can make a few dollars off it if you have an outlet like a local market. I like to use my extensive origami paper collection (the collection that makes Jeff twitch a little bit) and fold envelopes for the seed. It all helps with the garden paying its way. Its just costs you a little time. They also make great additions to presents if you are into home made/grown gifts.

If you have a garden and don’t save seed – give it a go. Its pretty easy, it saves you money and its quite satisfying to grow food from seed you have nurtured yourself!

If you do collect seed and have any tips or things you recommend with the process I would love to hear from you.

I will finish up with a couple of leek seed heads photos because it took me a very frustrating hour to find these images (I have an extensive collection of photos lol) so I wasn’t going to not include them.

Cheers

Ruby Tuesday – Fairy Floss once per Century!

Meet my Great Aunt Ruby!

I know a number of you may be familiar with Ruby via some posts Mavis put up on “One Hundred Dollars a Month”

My aunt is an amazing woman – she is 99 years old, lives by herself, keeps herself fed via a fabulous garden and is an all round wonderful person to know.

I thought I might reserve Tuesdays to write an anecdote or two about Ruby, her life and stories from way back. (Yes – Tuesday – are you singing the song yet ?? 🙂 )

While Ruby’s daughter, Margaret and myself help out in the garden, Ruby does an awful lot of it herself. It gives her the independence to be able to trot up the back and ‘get herself a feed’

During a recent afternoon cuppa together and chat, Jeff and I discovered that Ruby had never tried Fairy Floss before!! (Cotton Candy) How is it possible in nearly 100 years that someone hasn’t given fairy floss a go??

Ruby is a nurse from way back – and hospital matron! She informed us that she couldn’t believe people were eating what looked like cotton wool! She knows what cotton wool gets used for and eating it just wasn’t something she could bring herself to do!

Recently at Steam Fest, I found a van selling fairy floss, so I cheekily bought a packet then took it around to Ruby. She giggled so much, but she is such a good sport about the mad things I ask her to do, she dutifully tried it to please me!

After inspecting it carefully and working up some courage, Ruby tried some fairy floss for the first time in her 99 years!

She said it was nothing like she expected and it wasn’t bad at all. But she didn’t need to have it again! 🙂

I suspect Great Aunt Ruby is happier with the fresh goodness of her garden than sugary carnival food! Probably why she is still with us!

Cheers

1 Ruby hothouse — Queen of the Hothouse!

Blackboard List

I am not generally a list person. But today I thought I would give it a go as I am pretty much an aesthetically relaxed procrastinator so I thought it would help.

Plus crossing things off is quite satisfying.

I had been meaning to make up some cherry ice-cream for a while. I had bought some cooking cherries locally and froze what I hadn’t used. My parents bought us an ice-cream maker for Christmas! (I think they were playing favourites here as I do like ice-cream, but Jeff has an addiction)

I made a traditional vanilla ice-cream base recipe and then just poured the pureed cherries in.

The final colour turned out pretty fabulous!!

It taste tested up really well 🙂 But it has to freeze overnight to be ‘proper ice-cream’ (waiting – waiting – I wonder if its ok to have ice-cream for breakfast?)

Passed the taste test – I might have licked the bowl and stirrer too!

It was a beautiful day outside and I couldn’t let that sunshine go to waste without putting a couple of loads of laundry through –

Note to self – remove spider webs tomorrow

It was a good excuse to get out of the kitchen a few times and soak up the sun.

I got into those windfall apples and rescued what I could. Even the dodgy apples still have plenty of good bits to use. We have codling moth unfortunately that we haven’t got under control yet. At least they mostly burrow to the core so they are easy to cut out. This one was a bit more manky looking –

But I still got plenty out of it –

It was hard eyeing off the blue skies out the kitchen window, I wanted to be in the garden, but I knew the tomatoes were going feral, so I had to sort them out too.

I used a good amount in a slow cooked meal. I thawed out some stewing steak last night and added a couple of onions and a mix of beef stock, mustard powder and a liberal helping of my plum-Worcestershire sauce. (one of those make-it-up-as-you-go-along dishes!) I know these recipes call for browning the meat & onions first, but I am a huge fan of not adding to the workload or dishes – so, into the pot altogether at once!

It worked out really tasty, which is lucky because it is going to be dinner tomorrow night too.

The rest of the tomatoes got sorted – either chopped and frozen or given to the chickens. I did not even glance at the tomato plants when I was in the garden!! I don’t want to know what’s ready to pick until tomorrow or the next day!!

Eventually I made my way down to the beach, but there was less kelp than yesterday.

Wynyard Beach – beautiful afternoon to be out

I was strong and stayed away from the shells

Funny thing was, as I was walking up the beach picking up lumps of kelp I could hear a conversation coming up behind me. I thought… that’s nice. Friends out for a stroll on the beach. Ha – one woman on a phone. She walked all the way along the beach above and back and she was still on the phone! I felt a little sorry for her. I guess I love it that I completely unplug when I leave the house. I see a walk on the beach as a way to unwind and just be with a friend or your own thoughts for a change, rather than organising those busy lives of ours!!

Anyway – I found it easy to fill two bags with kelp. There is a lot of grassy seaweed on the Wynyard beaches which makes fantastic mulch. (But there are a couple of girls coming to stay in April and that is a perfect job to get them to help me with -saving that task up for later)

I was a bit naughty and put the bags in the car 🙂

See how I responsibly added a tarp under the bags?

If you live by the sea and are allowed to collect kelp – this is how I make my ‘kelp juice’

16 kelp juice recipe — Kelp Juice Recipe

Then your vegetables can grow big and strong –

Another of my supersized vegies! Mad beetroot! (or beet )

Recipes below if you are interested!

Have a great day!

Old Fashioned Vanilla Ice Cream

300ml milk

pinch salt

1/2 cup castor sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla essence (or 5cm piece vanilla bean)

1 egg, beaten

250ml cream

Combine milk, salt, sugar, vanilla into saucepan – cook over medium heat until nearly boiling.

Gradually stir half the milk into the egg – stirring

Add all back into the pot and cook over low heat until mixture thickens slightly.

Refrigerate – chill well.

Mix cream in with wisk and pour into ice-cream maker to do its thing.

(This is where I added in the cherry mixture. Raspberry is next on my list!)

Mostly Made Up Slow Cooked Beef recipe.

1 kilo stewing steak – cut into chunks and coated in flour

600gms chopped tomato

two thickly sliced onions

Broth: Mix:

1 cup beef stock

1 teaspoon mustard powder

1 tablespoon Worcestershire Sauce

Mix all together, splash more Worcestershire Sauce in and add some garlic salt.

All into oven at 100 deg. C (or slow cooker if you have one)

I did this one for about 4-5 hours and thickened at the end with a bit of cornflour, served with rice.

PS 😀 😀

Market Day

Source Images: DSC_1610.JPG (Av: F11.0; Tv: 1/500 sec.; ISO: 800; FL: 20.0 mm) DSC_1611.JPG () DSC_1612.JPG (Av: F10.0; Tv: 1/400 sec.) DSC_1613.JPG (Av: F9.0; Tv: 1/320 sec.) DSC_1609.JPG (Av: F10.0; Tv: 1/400 sec.) Processing: Fusion F.3 (HDR; Mode 1) — Sunrise over Wynyard Beach

Despite my pessimism about the weather and a chilly start – it was a gorgeous sun drenched day, with minimum wind! Sometimes Mother Nature gets it exactly right!

I found my spot and parked the car and of course grabbed the camera and dashed down to the beach! All that kelp!!! (yes yes – the sunrise was quite lovely, but I was making plans for a return to stock up on kelp for the garden!)

Wynyard Beach looking back towards Fossil Bluff

By then I was sufficiently awake enough to start unpacking the car and setting up. I would like to take a moment to let you know that Jeff piked out on me and stayed home!! The advantage to this is he is not wandering the market unsupervised spending the money I am trying to make. The downside was at the end having to cross my legs a bit! 🙂 (The public loos (toilets) are waaaay down the other end of the market)

One of the regular stall holders that I have gotten to know came and helped get my gazebo up – I can do it myself, but its quicker with more hands of course! One of the nice things about this area – friendly helpful people – although I must admit the man in question did tease me about actually turning up today!! He thinks I am a fair weather person!! I would totally agree!!! If you had experienced having a market stall on the foreshore when the wind was howling, the rain was coming in sideways and unexpected hail in summer – then you would think it was perfectly reasonable to pull the covers over my head and stay firmly at home!

Today was one of the more perfect days!

There were lots of people out and about today, but not so many reaching into their pockets to spend.

I was really pleased though, to offload almost all the boxes of vegetables that I brought with me. The jams & sauces keep, so no drama and less cooking over the next couple of weeks!

I also put a nice big jar filled with parsley on the table and offered it free to people who stopped to chat or buy. I have so much parsley I am happy for it to be used, and a small free thing cheers people up I reckon!

I love meeting new people & chatting to the regular stall holders that I have gotten to know. I have made new friends with a couple and their young daughter who moved to Tasmania in their old bus less than three weeks ago and I have already run into them about 5 or 6 times. I am wondering if I should try to convince them I am not actually stalking them! 😀

People watching is fun, and customers are varied but mostly friendly and chatty. One lady made me chuckle a little today as she wanted some of my cherry tomatoes… I was offering that people could fill a bag for $2 (and telling them not to be shy about stuffing it as full as it would go) Anyway, she only wanted a few unripe ones, so she filled the bag about a quarter full or so and asked how much… 50 cents I say confidently. Her face fell and she spent the longest time trying to decide what to do!! I thought it was a pretty good price (hey we are talking organic here too!) Maybe I should have just said to take them gratis!! Sometimes I think of the best thing to do too late!

By 2pm, everything had died down, so I packed up as fast as I could (remember – crossing my legs now) and drove literally across to road to see my Great Aunt Ruby, as its tradition for me to drop in after the market and have a cuppa!

I caught her cat napping in the sun (perfectly reasonable for someone who is nearly 100 years old!) So I dashed past with a breathless “Hi Ruby – Its Lisa – I need your little girls room right now!!”

Once that was sorted I could give her a big hug and catch up. The darling had cooked me lunch!!!

Everything from her garden fresh!! Oh did that go down well!!! Of course we finished up with coffee and sponge cake before I took my leave to get home and unpack the car. (A job almost as bad as folding washing, but not one I can avoid – pretty sure Jeff would say something about having to drive to work with boxes of sauces and market tables in the car with him…)

It was nice to sit down with Jeff and count up all my loot – $130 today which turned out a lot better than I had supposed so was totally worth getting out of bed early and spending a day not in the kitchen!

A quick wander about the garden is necessary – just to see what is happening. Jeff had done a lot of work weeding and trimming trees etc. Then I saw someone – who shouldn’t have been – in my vegetable garden!!! Bad Chook!

After throwing the chicken back over the garden fence I ate a bean –

and picked the last small corn cob to discover it had about 20 fat kernels – so I ate those too! So sweet – they just explode in your mouth!

I hope your weekend has been a lot of fun

Cheers

Source Images: DSC_1634.JPG (Av: F11.0; Tv: 1/125 sec.; ISO: 1600; FL: 60.0 mm) Processing: Fusion F.3 (HDR; Mode 1) — Zucchini Flower and Parsley

A bit of a tidy up…

With all the rain, followed by plenty of sun, the grass (and weeds) were shooting up at a rate you could almost watch!

And we were beginning to lose the cat –

So we did a much needed tidy up of the things that the wind had scattered about the yard and Jeff got out on his mower and sorted it out (I laughed when I caught him driving up to the apple tree to pick a snack for a break!!)

I picked up all the windfall apples so he didn’t do a yard-size apple puree. Quite a lot of the windfall apples are ok for use –

But a lot have been nibbled on – probably by our local possums or the single rabbit that has also taken up recent residence –

The chickens had a perfectly lovely afternoon as they are not normally allowed up the ‘house side’ of the property (something about their insistence on digging up my strawberries and herb gardens) So they were thoroughly over-excited at this little extra freedom today.

Its funny watching them zigzag all over the yard chasing bugs. But then finally they worked their way up into the strawberries and herbs so it was time to herd their little feathery butts back to the other side!

Not a bad herding job! The usually scatter in 9 different directions!

I’m actually trying to “Speed-Blog” tonight as we have to be up at silly O’clock tomorrow morning to get down to the local market and set up. I’d just like to take this opportunity to explain I am not a morning person. In fact “not a morning person” doesn’t even begin to explain how much of a morning person I am not! So tonight I would prefer to be in bed while the clock still says pm for a change

So I picked a few tomatoes –

I managed to separate a large crate of saleable cherry tomatoes out of these

All my jams/sauces are sorted out and other bits and bobs that I need are all in the car. We just have to (ok I am saying “We” here because Jeff still hasn’t fully decided if he is coming along with me tomorrow…) pick some parsley and silver-beet in the morning and shove the last boxes in the car before going. Early.

Goodnight all – fingers crossed that tomorrow the weather doesn’t do a nose dive back into the biblical-level rain of yesterday!

Cheers