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.

lovely lovely gums

Our block includes a few introduced gums, presumably planted as ornamentals. These have flowered through much of winter, and are a joy to have. In permaculture terms, they serve a number of functions, including providing bird habitat (the wattlebirds, particularly, love them) and pollen (if not nectar) for bees at a time when food is quite scarce.

a stitch in time?

Slowly building up beds, planting holes and planting mounds to take fruit trees. First lot are due as bare-rooted trees shortly. Others to be ordered for spring planting. Lessons from past failures have been learnt.

transplanting wattles

Getting sick of buying wattles for windbreaks etc (even though the IGA always has some good local ones to pick from), especially as half of them die before I get organised to plant out. And propogating from seed sounds rather forbidding - and too long-term for impatient people like me. So had the bright idea to try transplanting self-sown ones from round the place.

first winter musings

Winter’s well and truly here, and with it the best and worst of life in Fryerstown. I love winter but the house here is so, so cold and so hard to warm up, and this first burst always brings dread at the three or four months of denying discomfort that’s to come – if I won Tattslotto it would be a designed-from-scratch passive solar house for me. So much for the charms of our relocated suburban 40s weatherboard!