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!

pumpkin seeds - what not to do ...

Read somewhere about all the things we unnecessarily throw out, like pumpkin seeds cleaned from pumpkins. Good point!

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.