You CAN teach an old dog...

Three things I learned this week.

1) I learned how to drive a forklift. My employer sent me away for a three day course and I stayed in a 4 ½ star motel for two nights at company expense. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to fully enjoy the facilities because my free time was spent studying the theory section of the course. The study paid off because I scored 100% in the written test.

I didn’t do quite as good in the practical but I did enough to pass, therefore I am now an authorised forklift driver even though in my job only requires me to drive a desk and a computer.

One of the few motel luxuries I was able to enjoy was my room’s spa bath. This leads me to the second thing I learned.

2) Eureka! Archimedes was right – and this provided my third learning experience.

3) When using a spa bath make sure the water level is well above the water jet nozzles BEFORE you get into the bath and definitely BEFORE you start the spa pump.

I sat in the bath as it was filling and started the pump when the water was above the nozzles.
I then realised I had no soap so stood up to get it from beside the bathroom sink.
Removing myself from the water caused the water level to lower below the nozzles – which immediately fired water across the length of the bathroom soaking everything.

My Dream House is For Sale

I first saw my dream house almost 4 years ago. I now drive past it maybe three or four times a year (double that if you count the return trip). The dream has never been realistic. It fails according to several different practical criteria.
But it’s hasn’t hurt to admire the place.

The house is on the gentle slope of a hill with rows and rows of vines between it and the road. The combination of house and vines is postcard material.

["Body Double" vineyard used to protect the integrity and identity of MY dream property]

Yesterday I drove by again and saw that the place is for sale. I wasn’t prepared for such an emotional reaction. The house was available! But at the same time I knew it was unattainable.
I could never afford such a place, it is too far out of town and it would be far too much work for someone with no experience in the year-long tending of acres of vines. What a tragedy it would be to let me loose in that place, putting the vines at my mercy!

Hopefully the right people will buy the place, maintaining its appeal, continuing the pleasure it gives on those few times of year when I’m able to fuel my unrealistic dreams.

According to the real estate information on the sign outside the house, it dates back to the 1870s. There are 7 acres (not sure how many devoted to grapes). It has 4 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms and a collection of outbuildings, one of which would be suitable for a wine-tasting room. Being on a main road it could easily attract passing trade to a cellar door. The interior of the house seems to be very tastefully renovated and decorated.
Where can you find more details?
I’m not saying – just in case those Lotto balls fall in the right order.*




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* And assuming someone also buys me a ticket considering I don’t buy them myself.

The Imperfections of a Perfect House

Country Change part 3

After a few weeks and a lot of money spent on legal fees, we backed out of the purchase of the perfect house. Several unrelated concerns all came together to make the process of buying the place too stressful.
I’m not sure where it started, but living so far away without the chance of checking the place again didn’t help. Imagination helped to inflate a few minor concerns into potentially major problems. The legalities were taking longer than expected. Building inspections revealed a few minor problems – which as per above became imagined major problems; and the few cosmetic inadequacies started to be perceived as daunting renovation projects.

We planned to rent the place out for a couple of years until we were ready to move. It already had tenants and their lease still had a few months to run. But we hadn’t done our homework on things like landlord’s insurance and when the real estate agent started sending us brochures and forms, trying to sell us their recommended product, my ignorance of the matter started to scare me. At the same time I had been reading some real estate statistics and found that the median house price in the town was 2/3 of the amount we had agreed to pay – had we agreed to an inflated purchase price?

Then the house’s few deficiencies started to become an issue. It had no garage and the car port roof was bent. The doors on the built in wardrobes and linen cupboards weren’t fitted correctly. There was a water leak in the laundry. The access to the front door from the path didn’t have a proper step. The evaporative air-conditioning unit on the roof seemed to be too close to the chimney of the log fire. All of these were concerns that could have been easily cleared up if we had been able to see the place again.

In the end the worries took over, we dropped our plans to buy and my peace of mind was restored.

Did we do the right thing? It’s hard to say. At times it seems like we made a big mistake. The house itself was exactly what we wanted, but the block of land was probably too small. It also had the wrong aspect, facing to the west with the back garden on the east side of the house. It was a sloping block on the low side of the road, and because of the slope, the back garden would be in the shade of the house for most of the afternoon and would get full sun only in the morning. The backyard was also the smaller part of the garden with the house being built closer to the back of the block than the front. This didn’t really suit the hopes I had for the garden I was planning
We now drive past the house quite frequently and it it is easy to wonder what could have been – but in doing so we are aware that the house is further from the town than the house we eventually bought, and since Gloria doesn’t drive that could have been a problem.

For quite a while I felt a little guilty for letting the vendor down, but several months later I found out that after the failed sale, the price of the house was increased by $30,000 and sold immediately. And that was an indication of the next problem we faced – the start of a booming market.

House Hunting

Country Change part 2

How do you shop for a house in a town 400km from where you live?

At first our attempts were limited to the couple of times per year that we passed through the town on our way to visit Gloria’s family. We would take a break from our journey (which we used to complete in one day) by taking a short detour to our chosen town where we would stay overnight. This gave a few hours to check the real estate situation.
Clearly this wasn’t ideal. It would take a lot of luck to be in town at just the right time when that perfect house came onto the market. It would also give us only one chance to see a house before we had to make a decision on whether it was the right place for us.

To help our search we made a list of the things we wanted in a house. There were the essentials, and there were the desirables. After living in a small two bedroom flat for over ten years we each wanted a little space for ourselves to pursue our different interests. Gloria wanted a room for her crafts, where she could leave things out until her project was finished instead of packing everything away each day. I wanted a study/library where my books could be brought out of storage and where I’d have a suitable environment to write. We also wanted enough land to suit my ambitious gardening plans.
Other requirements were more cosmetic and not considered essential, things that would give the place a bit of character such as polished floorboards.
Overall we had a lengthy list. We were planning a major upheaval and we wanted to do it right and leave no room for regrets.

When we were looking around for a suitable town, one of the key factors was the cost of housing. We spent a lot of time looking in the windows of real estate agents, to see what kinds of properties were available and for what price. The town we eventually chose had several four bedroom houses advertised, on a few acres of land for less than a quarter of the price of a run down house in Ryde where we were then living. Our dream seemed very attainable.

When we moved on from window-shopping to actually inspecting houses, we were given a sudden reality check. Most of the houses didn’t come up to expectations. There may have been four bedrooms mentioned in the advertising, but some were so small I’m not sure how a bed would fit into them, not that we were going to use them as bedrooms, but we still needed them to be a reasonable size.
No matter how many houses we saw, there was always something lacking, nowhere had that feeling of “home” and we were becoming a little discouraged.

Then we were taken to a house that had everything. The floor plan was perfect. The house had more than we had hoped for. Some of the cosmetic requirements were missing but the layout of the house itself was exactly what we wanted. It had four very good sized bedrooms, a workable kitchen and dining room with plenty of storage and workbenches. There was a formal lounge room AND a separate, less formal family room. At the back of the house with access from the family room and the dining room was a covered veranda with views of the countryside. There were also additional rooms under the house providing a potential fifth bedroom or private guest retreat with en-suite.
We made arrangements for another viewing the next day and decided to buy it. The first significant part of our dream was becoming a reality.
Or so it seemed...

"C" - Change

Country change part 1


I can’t remember exactly when we made the decision to move from Sydney to the country, but it took many years for that decision became a reality.

We were living in a small flat and at that time we were surrounded by disruptive neighbours. What a joy it would be to live in a house with a space between us and next door instead of an inadequate common wall separating us from loud music, noisy parties and late night toilet flushing. (Not to mention the amorous nights of the couple upstairs!)

And while our security block of units had some advantages in keeping out most unsolicited visitors (sales reps, JWs etc.), it was not such an advantage when next door’s late night visitors forgot which unit they were visiting and buzzed our intercom instead, long after we had gone to bed.

There would be many advantages to living in a house. Not only would there be more privacy, we could have a garden and grow some of our own food. We could sit outside and not overlook a neighbour’s balcony only metres away. We would have more room inside and my sizable library could be brought out of boxes and put onto book shelves.

Unfortunately the cost of houses in our local area made them ridiculously out of reach. The cheaper places were being snatched up, knocked down and replaced by concrete monstrosities that barely left enough room outside for a clothesline. Even if we could have afforded somewhere, it was not the environment we wanted. The only option was to look away from the city, so we headed out west.
Due to family considerations we restricted our search for a suitable country home to a distance of four hours from the coast and we visited towns from Parkes in the north to Junee in the south. Each town had its unique attractive features but each had some disadvantages, but it didn’t take long to find the place that ticked the most boxes. Fortunately it fell almost exactly halfway between my parents on the coast and Gloria’s parents further west making occasional weekend visits possible.

Finding the right town was the easy part and our choice seemed to be perfect. It had all the necessary services and unlike other country towns, the main street was not lined with deserted shops. So with the location chosen, all we needed to find was the right house.
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Note: While moves to country areas away from the coast are usually referred to as a “Tree Change”, I came across the term “C” Change a while ago, in which the “C” stands for “country” and I decided I prefered it to the more commonly used label.

Lopping, Shopping, Birthdays and Bargains.

Our local council announced it would be conducting a pickup of green waste over the next week. It is the perfect opportunity to deal with some of those bigger pruning jobs and dispose of the waste unsuitable for the compost bin.
The announcement seems to have mobilised most of the town into gardening mode. I’ve never seen so many people in their gardens with secateurs, loppers and pruning saws, and roadsides are piled with prunings. In our street it looks like someone has been planting mature kerbside shrubs and gives an idea of what it could be like if the grass nature strips were replaced with verge-side plantings like those created by Josh Byrne on Gardening Australia.

To take advantage of the council pick up we decided to deal with a few things we’ve been putting off for a while. Between our place and next door we’ve had some kind of native tree with a collection of long skinny trunks topped with fine foliage and occasional creamy coloured brush-like flowers. There were two significant problems with the tree. Firstly it was planted on top of the water and gas pipes supplying the house. Secondly, parts of it were leaning over the neighbour’s place. The latter problem has been the reason it was left alone for so long. I didn’t want to hack away at it and have it fall through their roof.

After work on Friday I made a token attempt to cut some of it back, tackling some of the lower, untidy branches leaning over my neighbour’s property. On Saturday we went out for the day and on our return found that our neighbour had continued what I had started and had removed those parts hanging precariously over his house, leaving the remaining tree looking very untidy. Sunday therefore turned into a day of tree lopping and armed with a handsaw I spent a couple of hours cutting the tree back until I was left with five, two and a half metre high stumps. It took me 45 minutes to cut the first one down as low as I could and every muscle and joint was aching. I wasn’t looking forward to the other four stumps.
At that point the neighbour across the road started up a chain saw to attack his own garden and offered to come over and finish my job. Two minutes later and it was all done and all that remained was a stump barely 30 centimetres high.

All of this was much more work than we had intended to do, but at least a major job has been completed with a lot less effort than I’d expected.

Our day out on Saturday that allowed next door to make an assault on our tree was a trip to Canberra. We did a circuit of antiques shops and galleries hoping to find a bargain or two, and since it was Gloria’s birthday we had lunch in a café at Beaver Galleries opposite the Australian Mint. We’ve been to the gallery before to look at the art glass on display but we’d never been to the café.
We both ordered Vegetable Lasagne and were amazed at how good it was. At first the serving seemed a bit stingy, with a solitary rectangle of lasagne in the middle of the plate, but the value was in the tasting and the serving size was more than adequate to satisfy our appetite (which unfortunately led us to miss following up with a serving of one of the tempting cakes on offer).
Each layer of the lasagne contained a different type of veggie; with eggplant, yellow and red capsicum and zucchini being accompanied by a subtle but tasty tomato sauce. Additional flavour was provided by a spoon of green pesto on top. It was the kind of meal that makes you want to take your time and enjoy the different flavours in every mouthful.

Our shopping trip wasn’t quite as successful as the lunch, but for the second time we unexpectedly stumbled across a piece of Helmut Hiebl glass. Until recently Hiebl was a renowned and respected glassmaker with some of his work being held in Royal Collections. I have heard that poor health has caused him to stop practising his craft. The two pieces of his work we have found recently would probably be classed as paperweights. The first shaped like an apple was purchased without realising it was his work. It was signed but we didn’t recognise the signature until we got home and compared it to a piece we already owned. On Saturday we found another signed paperweight in the form of a mushroom, however this time I recognised the signature as soon as I saw it.
In the last couple of months we’ve had quite a bit of luck with finds of art glass. Gloria found a signed piece by Peter Crisp for a few dollars in a local antique shop; we found the two signed Helmut Heibl paperweights and also, the find that most excited me was an early signed piece by Setsuko Ogishi, made in 1984 while working at the Jam Factory Craft Centre in Adelaide prior to the 1987 opening of her own Hunter valley studio and gallery.
Awareness of an artist’s work and recognition of their signatures has allowed us to find pieces priced well below their real value, although (while appreciating the lower price) the real joy is in finding and recognising the piece in the first place.

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photos:
1) roadside prunings
2) the remains of our heavily pruned tree.
3) the Palette Cafe
4) Maureen Williams glass from her exhibition at Beaver Galleries.

Roses are Red – according to the promo material.

My imagined perfect Rose garden didn’t translate as desired from my mind to the garden, but I can’t deny that occasionally we get a stunning display of roses. Usually this is for a couple of weeks in spring – until the first unseasonable heatwave scorches the flowers, or they are battered by wind and rain. Considering the damage that steady rain can do to roses, I wonder how they can do well in places like England where they have been adopted as the national flower.

We also get some decent flowers in autumn, and in preparation for this year I gave mine a hard pruning in February. Maybe they haven’t flowered any better than previous autumns, but the pruning has done them no harm.

In the back garden I have a selection of David Austins. These are old-fashioned looking roses, many of which have a very pleasing fragrance. They have a reputation for having a long abundant flowering period in contrast to those genuinely older style roses that they resemble.

In my small collection I have a variety of shades of pink and two different types of white. Some of the darker pinks were supposed to be a deep red, but they didn’t live up to the advertised descriptions. Those pictured are the pale pink “Heritage” and the white is “Winchester Cathedral”.

I also have a “New William Shakespeare”. This is supposed to be a deep red but isn’t. It is also supposed to be quite resistant to problems but a little earlier today I noticed it has a terrible case of blackspot.
Others in the collection are “Hero” which has refused to flower for the last two years; “Othello” – a lovely dark pink with a very sweet fragrance like lemonade; “Mary Rose", with a VERY pink flower and “Glamis Castle”, a prolifically blooming white.

While these roses can flower profusely, I have found that the flowers are extremely delicate and drop petals very easily. Successful deadheading needs a very light touch, otherwise the scale of the task is increased; as one spent head is removed the displacement of petals leaves more heads to be dealt with.

Books of Interest

On my book blog I have reviews of two books that may be of interest.

Chocolate and Zucchini









Foxeys Hangout

Neglected Blog Updated

This blog has been suffering more neglect than my garden. At least the remains of my veggie patch has been getting some occasional water from the tank.

The vegetable crop has been a little disappointing. We had a reasonable supply of Lazy Housewife and Purple King beans, but not as many as last year. Corn was very disappointing with less than 10 cobs out of three separate sowings. The last lot attracted a lot of bugs – Gloria refers to them a stink bugs, green things about the size of my little finger nail. I can appreciate the reason for Gloria giving them that name. A few months ago one flew into my mouth and the taste it left was revolting.
We also found the silk ends of the corn cobs were being eaten by something. What we managed to salvage were very juicy and had good flavour, but there were far too few to keep us satisfied.

We had far less zucchinis this year, but that lack was more than compensated for with our yellow button squash. We are still getting a few of those each day even though everything else has given up the ghost.

I’ve now sown one whole bed with seed I saved from my broad beans. We didn’t really like the beans but they’ll make good green manure. They are growing quite healthily. I also put in some green feast peas and snow peas. Those are two regular failures that I’m hoping will give us better results than usual. The only other things on the way are a few rows of carrots, beetroot, turnips and radishes. We always do okay with beetroot and had the best harvest of carrots we’ve ever had over summer.

One thing I want to try again is cauliflower. I’ve tried them every year and had only two successful heads. This time I want to read all of the books and make sure I do everything right. If I fail again we’ll have to resign ourselves to buying them instead of growing our own (which will be no change from the current situation).

Yesterday afternoon I was pleasantly surprised to find a few goji berries on our bushes. I’d been wondering whether it was worth keeping the plants because they were a bit straggly and have demonstrated a tendency to send out vigorous runners. We’ve had a few new shoots emerging a metre and a half away from the parent plants.

There wasn’t much fruit but we had enough to have a taste, and if they become more prolific it will definitely make it worth keeping them. The fruit was very pleasant: sweet and juicy but I’m not sure what the flavour could be compared to. The bright red-orange fruit would make a very interesting addition to a fruit salad. The fresh fruit is nothing like the dried examples we found packaged in the supermarket. As a dried fruit I found them tasteless and splintery. Gloria tried to re-hydrate some and describes the result as smelling like an old wet blanket, and tasting exactly like they smelled.

Last weekend I reduced our lawn by several more square metres. I laid down heaps of newspaper and had some topsoil trucked in. I think I’ve almost decided on the layout for that part of the garden. Part of the remaining lawn will be turned into a paved or gravelled area suitable for an outside table and chairs. I’d prefer gravel but I’m concerned about its potential to get weedy, and if I change my mind it’s much harder to remove gravel than it would be to pull up paving.

I now have quite a large area of bare garden beds. I’ve held back from planting anything until I decide what kind of plants would be most suitable. At the moment the whole area is covered with sugarcane mulch waiting for me to be hit by some inspired planting ideas.

For the last few days we’ve had swarms of locusts all over town. You can’t walk anywhere without stirring them up. We’ve often had patches of them outside of town but this is the first time I’ve seen so many in around the town itself. I tried to photograph them in the garden but they don’t come out clear enough in the photographs.

Sunday turned out to be a day marked by weird coincidence. In the morning I started reading a book called Blackout written by Connie Willis* In the evening Gloria and I were watching a new TV series called “Survivors” about the aftermath of a catastrophic plague that kills off most of the population of the world. Of course, as a result of the plague all public utilities including electricity collapse. Just before the end of the episode our own power was cut off, blacking out our part of town.
It was annoying to miss the end of the show, but there was some compensation for the disappointment: on a moonless, powerless night, the stars have never looked more brilliant.


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* review to come on my other blog as soon as I finish it.

My Extravagant Imagination

It would be wonderful to have a lifestyle in which I no longer need to work full time in a job I don’t enjoy. Part of the (romanticised) appeal of self-sufficiency and frugality is to have more freedom to explore the things that interest me, providing an avenue to do something creative. But straight away I hit a problem – my imagination and its creative urges are not exactly frugal in nature.

What do I mean? Well let me point out some of the creative (and other) pursuits in which I’d love to indulge.

Music. For years I’ve wanted to play the fiddle. I have a large collection of recorded fiddle/violin music, mainly folk and traditional but including a little classical. I love the sound of the instrument and the variety of sounds and styles that it can create. A cheap “students” fiddle seems to cost a couple of hundred dollars but on top of that I would need lessons; but would it be worth it when I wouldn’t have anywhere to use those newly learned skills on a regular basis? I’m also not so sure I’d be satisfied with a student’s instrument. I’d want something a little classier that could double as a decorative item at home when not at use.

Astronomy. I’d love to have a decent telescope and a very dark place to use it. Unfortunately my house is exposed to a lot of artificial lighting from a nearby hospital car park so finding a good clear unpolluted spot isn’t easy. Also those decent telescopes can be very expensive. I still kick myself for not taking advantage of a very good discount being offered by Australian Geographic several years ago when I could have got a very good telescope for around half price. It even had an inbuilt computer to make the finding of stars and planets much easier. It was still expensive, but far more affordable than at full price.

Glass. Gloria has been collecting pieces of art glass for a while now and I’ve been trying to find out more about Australian Glass artists. We’ve visited the studios of some local glass artists and the creative process is fascinating and varied. From slumped glass, utilising a kiln and moulds to hot glass in which molten glass is blown or rolled into required shapes the results can be stunning.
It’s the kind of artwork I’d love to try for myself, but I’m sure the costs of setting up would be enormous. Not the kind of thing you could start on a whim.
Some glass artists offer short classes and the Glass Works in Canberra gives the beginner the opportunity to make their own paperweight or glass beads.
But returning to my extravagant imagination, I would not be satisfied with the short term solution of using someone else’s equipment. My dream would be to have my own studio and creating masterpieces that can be sold for a fortune. Definitely not practical – but that’s why I’ve been writing about an extravagant imagination instead of an extravagant reality.

Eventful Weekend.

Often weekends merely provide us with a welcome interruption to our weekly work schedule – replacing our days at the office with household chores; but some are more memorable than others.

Last Saturday and Sunday threw us a lot of surprises.

We drove to Wollongong to visit my parents. For most of Saturday nothing was out of the ordinary until a power cut interrupted our TV viewing. This would normally be a minor inconvenience, but my semi-invalid dad found himself stuck in his reclining chair. Stuck because it is operated electrically and he couldn’t lower the chair to allow himself to get out. It does have a battery back-up for such occasions but he had never bothered to install the battery.
Three of us had to wrestle with him (and the chair) to help him out.

Even though the power returned less than an hour later, we all decided to go to bed anyway. Gloria and I found it hard to settle because of a strange noise that repeated at regular intervals. We were staying in a room usually used by my young niece who has several talking toys in the room so we though one of them may have been playing up. Every 13 minutes we heard something/someone saying “Aha!!!”

After about an hour of puzzling over this our attention was drawn elsewhere by a series of loud explosions. Gloria opened the blinds and for the next 15-20 minutes we were entertained by a spectacular firework display courtesy of the nearby Buddhist temple as part of their Chinese New Year celebrations.

The next morning the mysterious “Aha!!!” was back and after another hour of investigation we discovered the culprit. There was an automatic insecticide spray on top of a book case and every 13 minutes it would attempt to expel a dose of its poison. However it seems to have been empty and could only emit a dry gasp.

We drove home later that day and ran into the kind of downpour that causes nightmares on the road. And it was a nightmare for some. We saw two separate accidents where cars had aquaplaned from the road and into the ditch between the northbound and southbound lanes of the Hume Highway. One the cars had rolled onto its roof and was being attended by an ambulance crew. We saw the Police Rescue racing to the scene a few minutes later.
Despite the obvious dangers due to wet roads and very poor visibility we still had trucks racing past us at high speeds.

The rain eased and the sun came out about half an hour later when we pulled off the Highway to visit the town of Gunning. We’d noticed a sign advertising an antique shop so we decided to have a look. Next door to that shop was an old movie theatre now being used as a book shop and art gallery. I can never resist looking for treasures in old book shops so we went in and looked around. Just inside the door was the old ticket office that the shop owner was using as his office/counter. He didn’t look up when we walked in.
To the back of the room was a set of stairs going up to the old projection room and we followed the signs that told us there was more to see upstairs. I brought Gloria’s attention to a painting by someone famous, Max Cullen, a man perhaps better known over many years for his acting rather than painting. The name wasn’t familiar to her but I said she’s definitely know him if she saw him because he’d been in a lot of Australian films and TV series.

We went back downstairs, Margaret left the shop and I spent a few more minutes looking. On the way out I looked across again at the owner. This time he looked up at me with a big bearded, smile – and it was Max Cullen himself.

The final surprise came when we arrived home.
It wasn't unexpected considering the downpour we'd experienced on the road. There was 67.5mm in our rain gauge.

Mixed Vegetable Results

My other two blogs have been getting more attention than this one recently. So what have I been doing this year so far (apart from writing elsewhere)?

I haven’t been doing much in the garden apart from collecting a few veggies as they appear. Our yellow button squash are by far the most productive thing and I’m keeping work colleagues well supplied as well as having plenty for personal consumption. However it’s the worst zucchini year I’ve had – but there have been plenty for our own use at home so I can’t complain.

Corn has been a failure with maybe only six half decent cobs being produced, however I’m hoping that the late sowing of the last of my seed may produce a bit more.
This season I tried purple beans for the first time and had a reasonable supply for a couple of months, but there haven’t been any to pick for a few days now and the plants are starting to shrivel up. I had a much better crop from my regular bean – the Lazy housewife, but again there has been little to pick recently. But those bushes are still very healthy looking so I might get some more out of them.

The plants I’ve been most concerned about are my tomatoes. They’ve had an abundance of fruit but it’s been very slow ripening. I’ve mentioned before that they were grown from seed given away with Burkes Back Yard magazine. Maybe the biggest disappointment has been one called Yellow Stuffing. They are refusing to ripen on the bush and so far I’ve seen only one fully ripe example – one I picked early and kept in the house for a couple of weeks.
I wasn’t impressed with the resulting fruit. It had hardly any flavour and was quite dry in comparison to the other varieties. If we had more ripe fruit to try we would put its name to the test. It is clearly a fruit created for stuffing, consisting mainly of a firm fleshy shell, hollow except for a small ball of seeds in the centre. It is very capsicum like in appearance.

Another type I’ve been able to pick is a large orange/red variety whose name has eluded me at the moment. It has a large pumpkin shape fruit. The ones that have ripened on the vine have been quite soft. I’m not sure whether that should be the case. I tend to get worried about soft tomatoes after a fruit fly infestation a couple of years ago. So far we seem to have avoided that problem – although I think I did see a fruit fly inspecting the fruit a few weeks ago. I also salvaged a couple of fallen fruit that were swarming with tiny little maggots. They were quickly dropped in a plastic bag and left in the sun for a couple of days.

Gloria has been making good use harvested tomatoes, using them in salads, on sandwiches and for a salsa-like creation for use on pasta. I’m only hoping she is being vigilant enough to notice the presence of grubs should they be in the fruit. But as the old saying goes, what we don’t know can’t hurt us and maybe the addition of a little protein to the vegetable pasta would add to the nutritional value.

I also planted a Black Russian tomato purchased from BigW – but the fruit from the plant has not been the right colour. It has remained a common red instead of the darker colour expected of a genuine Black Russian. Most of the fruit we’ve picked so far have been from this pseudo black Russian plant and most of it needed to be picked earlier than I’d like because the blackbirds quickly attack the red fruit.

Garden Habitat Again

My previous post mentioned the various creatures that make their home in or near my garden. I now have some recent photos of some of them.

The blue wrens seem to nest in some dense bushes in my neighbour’s yard but they spend a lot of time in my garden. The male bird tends to be a lot more timid than the female. I guess this is because his bright colouring makes him more noticeable and vulnerable to predators. The female (and her young) think nothing of coming within a couple of metres of me when I’m working outside.

I have seen a book listing 100 birds you must see before you die. The list includes all kinds of exotic birds from around the world. This particular wren is listed among that 100 and it is very satisfying to know we have a family of them that call our backyard home.


Not quite as pleasing to the eye is this creature. I’m not sure whether it is a frog or a toad. It would be a little bigger than my closed fist. It likes the area around my veggie garden because of the regular watering.

I took these photos yesterday. I was picking beans and when I heard something hit the ground I thought I had dropped some, but it was the frog/toad moving around near my feet. Hopefully he is earning his keep by eating some of the less welcome residents of my veggie patch.

Garden as Wildlife Habitat

How many of us recognise that our gardens provide habitat for a variety of critters?

I know mine often gives a home to all manner of bugs, slugs and caterpillars that are hopefully grateful for the feast provided for them in my veggie patch. They must feel more at home than they should – at least until I bring out the white oil, derris dust and other safe means of deterring their presence.

How easy it would be to resort to more lethally effective means of ridding the garden of these pests. But then, an indiscriminate nuking of the garden would also rid the place of those living things I want to encourage, such as bird life, lady beetles and of course the essential bees.

To an extent those pests provide an attraction to some of the life I want in my garden. Where would the ladybirds be without an occasional outbreak of aphids?

Years ago I worked for a man who had created an amazing little ecosystem in his garden – all by providing a seed tray to feed small birds. This is how it worked:

The birds came for the seed and scattered some across the ground below the tray. The fallen seed started to attract mice at night, which in turn managed to attract the attention of a local owl that started perching near by waiting for a nightly snack.

Personally I prefer not to provide things like seed trays. Instead I’m trying to provide native plants to provide a more natural source of food for visiting birds. If I tried my former employer’s approach I suspect it would result in the attraction of snakes rather than owls to take advantage of the mice.

While I have not seen any owls being attracted to my garden, I have a list of almost 30 birds that I’ve seen visiting or flying in close proximity to my home. While I can’t claim that my garden had anything to do with the presence of a pelican flying past, there must have been something to attract most of the other species on my list: from the ducks and hawks that have made rare visits to the more common honey eaters, parrots and the ever present blackbirds.

Visitors other than the bugs and birds have been less noticeable. Apart from an occasional neighbours pet we have mainly seen small lizards of various kinds, several frogs huddling in unlikely damp spots and twice I’ve come across a larger frog-like creature that may have a been a toad.

Last Post for 2009

Almost Christmas again and I’ll be away from my computer until after the New Year holiday. I haven’t contributed much here in recent weeks because I’ve been concentrating on my newest blog which is devoted to books. One of my recent entries on that blog is a review of Linda Cockburn’s new novel Who Killed Dave which many will find to be an entertaining read but overall was not to my taste. Some will know Linda through her blog, her articles in Organic Gardening, or her previous book Living the Good Life.



According to recent weather reports we can expect some heavy rainfalls over the Christmas break as the remains of tropical Cyclone Laurence head into NSW. A decent downpour would be very welcome to top up my water tank. It is now down to half full, the lowest it’s been since it was full to overflowing a few months ago.

The most productive things in the garden at the moment are the yellow button squash. We have three plants that are bearing more than enough fruit every day. We are also getting a good supply of zucchini, but they have not yet reached the fruitfulness of previous years.

This year I have tried a new type of bean. It has purple pods that are supposed to turn green when cooked. We have now begun to pick the first of these, but so far haven’t had the opportunity to try them. We also have our usual “lazy housewife” that is beginning to provide a promising number of beans. Its still early days, and I sowed fewer seeds this year, but we will hopefully get enough from the plants to meet our needs.

Last week I harvested all of my garlic. It is now hanging in the garage to dry. Likewise my Barletta onions were ready and are also drying out a little more under cover. The rest of my onion crop has also done very well but needs more time in the ground.

We had expected to get our first reasonable sized blueberries this year, but we were too slow in netting them and every bit of fruit disappeared thanks to the birds. Fortunately there weren’t many on the bush so there weren’t many to lose – but it would have been nice to at least get a taste.

At the back of the garden I have two Goji Berry bushes. Be warned – if you are thinking of growing them they send out vigorous suckers. That’s not the kind of thing they list on the label when you buy them. Ours are now entering their second year. I’m not sure when they are supposed to fruit but we’ve had no sign of anything yet.

Our Raspberry is also looking very vigorous, but again no hint of it fruiting. It also has new growth springing up everywhere in its immediate vicinity; but at least I was aware that it would send out suckers and the many new shoots were no surprise.

I now realise that I’ve overplanted my tomato patch. It is very congested and hard to see the fruit. Most of them were from seeds that were free with Burkes Backyard magazine but I did buy one Black Russian plant from Big W. That plant is doing very well and being on the edge of the garden I can a lot of good sized fruit waiting to ripen. Hopefully we can avoid fruit fly this year. It’s been three years since I last tried tomatoes, hoping the break might help us to avoid the problem when we tried again. The first tomato crop we grew wasn’t helped by the fact that a peach tree had been neglected in the garden prior to our move into the house. The peaches became infested with fruit fly so we decided to cut it down and to rely on the many nearby stone fruit orchards for our summer fruits.

Costa In Town!

Costa, from the SBS gardening show Costa’s Odyssey was a surprise participant in last weekend’s Cherry Festival parade in Young NSW.


Instantly recognisable due to his very serious beard, Costa “drove” a tractor down the town’s main street during the celebration of Young’s 60th Cherry Festival. His “drive” was being recorded by a camera crew so expect to see his visit as apart of a segment on the next series of his show.



I’m still wondering whether success in the garden is proportional to the quantity of one’s facial hair.

Heat Effects and Death to the Lawn!

Apart from a short post about kamikaze insects I’ve neglected this blog for a while. With a couple of weeks of extreme heat, gardening hasn’t been very appealing and a as result the garden itself has taken on a neglected look.

It’s been hard to keep things in order when the temperature made it too uncomfortable to spend time outside. And there was just no way I could keep dehydration of the plants at bay with the hose. Now, most of the roses have crashed and my potatoes are very bedraggled after a very promising and healthy looking start.

With the lack of recent gardening inspiration I have been spending time starting up my new “literary” blog: Out of Shadows and I’ve tried to catch up on some of the books I’d been neglecting. But my garden was not completely abandoned.

On some of the cooler evenings I did venture out to reclaim some of the lawn area by creating two new garden beds. The first of these was next to the new water tank (which is now half empty again). We had three cubic metres of garden soil delivered and only half was needed for the tank area, so I used the rest to extend an existing garden.

To create the first bed I put layers of newspaper over the grass, piled a good thickness of the soil on top and added a covering of sugar cane mulch. Towards the back of this garden I planted a fuchsia that is supposed to grow up to two metres tall. If that height estimation is correct it will make quite an unusual looking plant because its flowers are tiny. Unfortunately I’m not very confident of its future, it seems to be struggling. Planting during an extended period of extreme heat perhaps didn’t give it the best start – although it is in one of the more shaded areas of the garden.

The second garden bed will be left for a while. I approached this one differently. Firstly I marked its borders by digging up the grass around the edges. I then placed the clumps onto the garden area grass side down and covered them with thick biscuits from a bale of “lucerne” straw. [I put the lucerne in quotes because there seemed to be more oats than lucerne in the bale – with an occasional hint of “Riverina bluebell”!]. I covered all of this with a good thickness of newspaper and topped it all off with the rest of the delivery of soil. I won’t plant anything here until the various layers have settled down significantly giving the area a bit more stability. I also used the last bit of my sugar cane mulch to cover half of the bare soil.

Looking at the back yard now I can see it taking the shape I’ve been looking for. After more than three years of planning and replanning, I feel like I’m finally getting somewhere. There were two clear turning points that started to move things out of my head and onto the ground. Firstly was the relocation of the old Hill’s hoist clothesline which had been right in the middle of the garden, limiting access and mobility. We replaced that with a removable clothesline to the side of the house which opened up many more possibilities. It also improved the view from the windows in our family/dining room.
The second turning point was the installation of the water tank. Now that the tank is in place we can attend to the area that was needed for access for the tank delivery.

Eventually I will reclaim all of the lawn at the back. Most will be converted to garden beds, with a small open paved/gravelled area in the middle. We’ll need to shade that area in some way, but the means of doing that will be considered later.

I’ve written quite a lot here without including any photos to illustrate the things I’ve been writing about. I haven’t taken any photos recently because the decline of the garden (after such a promising start in early spring) has been a bit discouraging. But now the weather seems to have cooled off a little, and after a decent rainfall yesterday, I might take the camera out again in the next couple of days to take a few more photos to post at a later date.

Insect Conspiracy

What’s going on in the insect world? Is there a conspiracy against me?

Yesterday I was digging in the garden making the most of the cooling evening temperatures when a bug flew half way down my throat. I was able to cough it up and saw it was a green stink bug (also known as a shield bug – but the “stink” version was definitely more appropriate for this one). It was bad enough knowing I’d almost swallowed the thing – but the aftertaste of it being in my mouth!!!!! (And no, considering the experience, the use of so many!!!!! is not excessive).
I couldn’t get into the house quick enough to get to the mouthwash.

But you may say that one unpleasant insect experience does not make a conspiracy – but how about a second?

This morning at work I went to the water cooler to fill a mug to take to my desk. An ant was wandering around the top of the water cooler. As I started to fill the mug the ant actually RAN to the edge of the cooler and launched itself into the air towards my drink

Tax, Zucchinis and the Effects of Rain.

This afternoon I have an appointment to do my tax return. My last return was wonderful. Having been unemployed for most of the year I got all of my tax back. It was the best tax refund I’ve ever received.

Things will be different this time. For part of the year I was working two jobs, and one employer wasn’t deducting the correct amount of tax out of each pay, so I’m not looking forward to the outcome. I’ll certainly have to pay the Tax office instead of having them pay me.

If only our bills could be paid in produce rather than $$$. With the Zucchini season starting I can imagine that I could more than pay any pending tax bill with a suitable quantity of zucchini. They’ll be growing quicker than I can pick them in a week or two.
We’ve already picked the first small ones. They were barely 5cm in length but I thought I’d grab them before they shrivelled up. Last year we lost a lot of the first ones to appear. I’m not sure whether it was because they weren’t fertilised. At the moment we don’t have many male flowers on the plants to do their job

The last week has seen some significant growth in many of the veggies, which is probably due to the massive downpour we had one day last week. We had 46mm of rain in around an hour and parts of the town temporarily flooded. The rain has also given life to the lawn. Over the past few months I’ve used the lawnmower more times than in the previous three years and I’ll have to mow again this weekend if I get the chance. Two weekends in a row is a bit excessive in my opinion, so it’s time I moved onto the next stage of lawn replacement by extending the garden beds again

BELLA HARDY

Having spent my childhood in Derbyshire, England I look out for anything with links to that county. Over the years holidaying family members have given me books, glassware and porcelain with Derbyshire connections. One of the things eluding me was music.

I first came to know of Derbyshire singer and fiddle player Bella Hardy through an article in “The Living Tradition” (a traditional music magazine) and was able to buy her albums via her website.

The albums have not only added to my collection of Derbyshire “memorabilia”, they are a quality addition to my music collection. There is something about the traditional music of Britain and Ireland that I find much more appealing than more “popular” genres. It has a timeless depth of story telling missing from the commercial stuff we hear all the time via the mass media.

Samples of Bella’s songs can be heard on her website. Her strong rich vocals and traditional English fiddle style are given prominence in the recordings and are not overwhelmed by unnecessarily lavish production. Her songs and her talent are allowed to shine on their own merits.


Night Visiting
In the Shadows of Mountains