Bountiful harvest

We've been eating from the tree of knowledge - the apple tree in our own garden of eden. What I do know now is that it is a miracle that a tree in our backyard can produce such superlative fruit - as red as the apple in the story of Snow White but not a drop of poison.

In fact our apples are organically grown - so no chemicals or pesticides. We weren't sure when to pick them so kept trying them - at first they were a bit too sharp so I made them into apple crumble. The last harvest was just right - deep red on the outside, firm and white on the inside, with that sweet freshness that is the essence of apple.

I'm putting some works into the local Agricultural Show - which has an art section. Some of the works I am submitting I finished last year and some are more recent ones - the works below are the recent ones. Wish me luck!

A handful of 'mums - acrylic on canvas

Still life with chrysanthemums - pastel on paper

Ocean echoes - pastel on paper

Flashbacks

Well we are a couple of months into 2011 already - how did that happen? Here are some highlights for you...

A painting I did of cherry blossom - commissioned by a friend

My niece's dragon birthday cake - a joint effort

P's sister and her family from Queenslnd stayed with us after Christmas so we had a festive lunch with his side of the family

L enjoying the water slide at Christmas in our newly turfed back yard!

After the festive madness we went away camping for a few days with friends near Freemans Beach - very relaxing...

Windy weather - perfect for kite flying

To the beach...

An excursion with L to the Aquarium - I took photos of nearly every exhibit - here are some of the better ones (taken with my iPhone)

Then a trip to Tasmania with my sister, her kids, my mum and her friend - 11 of us

Wineglass Bay- Freycinet on the east coast of Tasmania

L always had to be the leader on our walks

Dove Lake - underneath Cradle Mountain in central Tasmania

Taking a well earned break - nearly at the end of the Dove Lake circuit

Lake Lilla - Cradle Mountain in the background

Horseshoe Falls - above Russell Falls on the way to Hobart

The Neck on Bruny Island off southern Tasmania - penguins and short-tailed shearwaters nest here

Blue berry bombs

P and L put their detective hats on and got out the magnifying glass the other day when they found splats of blue on our pavers (unsealed - why oh why did we think that was a good idea?) at the back of the house... after further investigation they traced them back to the source - an exceedingly pretty bunch of blue berries at the front of the house, scattered among the lime kangaroo paws. I believe they are the fruit of the Blue Flax Lily and are edible - though I have yet to try them myself.

One morning soon after their discovery, as I stepped out for my early morning walk, I heard a little chirruping sound. When I looked up I spied a crimson rosella inching along the fence towards the berries. I crouched down so as not to frighten it away and watched as the scarlet and ultramarine blue parrot hopped onto the bright green kangaroo paw stems and bent down to pluck a purply blue berry. As soon as it had the berry in its beak it snapped down on it and a burst of juicy spray went out in all directions. The feast the birds are enjoying seems to causing them to do blue droppings - which is what we found on our pavers.

Now instead of blue splats on our pavers we have small piles of white powder. No - we haven't been dropping our cocaine stash along the path - it is bicarb of soda which is good for absorbing spills and stains. Lets hope it works.

Christmas unwrapping

Weeding for the best part of 5 hours - that's what I was doing one weekend in December. Thanks goodness mum and dad came to help otherwise I wouldn't have got very far... our backyard has been a wilderness for some time now and every time I surveyed it I got that sinking feeling otherwise known as despair - when you know you've left a chore too long and it just keeps getting harder every day (or should I say month) you put it off. We have now made some inroads - is it too much to hope we'll have a half-decent space by Christmas..?

In an effort to stem the tide of unbidden greenery, P decided to cover most of the yard with blue tarpaulins (a sort of blue Christo artwork if you will) which had the effect of creating a hothouse for the weeds under which they flourished, as we discovered when we started the unwrapping of the back yard. I have a hunch they actually thrived beyond normal parameters - the photosynthetic process in green plants uses the blue spectrum of light to function.

P and his Dad get out the power tools - for building the retaining walls

L had a ball in the sand pile with his herd of toy dinosaurs

P's Dad working on the wall - see the wrapped yard in the background

L and P hard at work

P levelling the ground in preparation for the turf laying

Our backyard ready for turfing

They were so green and lush I wished they were edible - they looked pristine and almost virtuous in their green-ness - thoughts which I had to swallow down as I proceeded to tear them from the ground and onto a make-shift compost heap. I guess if you take the long view, we will be eating them eventually, once they are composted down and spread around our vegetable garden to be, the nutrients from that green-ness will come through in our salads and stir frys of the future.

Another side-effect of the blue tarps was to create a huge waterfall in our back yard where the tarps collected all the rainwater and directed it to the corner of our garden where our sunken garden (read drainage pit required by council) overflowed and threatened to engulf our back neighbours' house. P was up in the middle of the night working to stem the flow. Luckily that only happened once in a particularly heavy downpour.

I am hoping to get some help from a permaculture garden service - they might be able to help with some of the hard labour and also advise on design for our garden. We have quite a clear vision of what we want, but we could always do with more information on how to go about it and which plants will do best in different areas. We'd like an organic vegie garden, complete with chook dome as well as a sizeable portion of lawn for L to run around on. We're putting in a shed behind the water tank and eventually we'd like an above ground pool in the back corner (opposite the sunken garden). I'd like to have some native shrubs and trees around the fence line as well. We also want to plant some large deciduous trees near the house to ensure good shading in summer and bare branches in winter to let the light through.

All in good time!