Permaculture class at my place

Lay awake listening to a night of heavy rain and mulling over a big day ahead, and woke to a drizzly morning and an early start to the day. There was the vegan cake recipe found online to try (with my own lemons and rosemary), the weekend’s pumpkin seeds and dried olives to prepare for snacks, and a ‘leftovers soup’ to make while clearing the fridge and tidying the kitchen.

winter’s depths

Ice on the car windows, ice in the dog bowl, even a layer of ice on the shallow puddle that passes for a dam. If the days have been intermittently bright, and mild, the nights have dropped decisively below zero (-4 in Bendigo last night).

preserving our olives

Have finally picked this season's small harvest of olives, all from the tree near the causeway, and by now very ripe, some even starting to shrivel. And they've been in a bucket for a couple of days now and are looking a bit sorry and bruised.

late autumn observations

After periods of steady rain in the past few weeks, the ground is soft, mushrooms and other fungi are pushing up from under the leaf mould, and the frogs are croaking. Everything looks green - even if much of that is moss or germinating weeds.