From the garden

What a quiet couple of weeks we've had.  Here are a couple of photos of some of our home grown produce.

We've had a great eggplant crop this year 

(including a couple of those crazy two in one eggplants).

 

A sweet and juicy rockmelon.

Making a meal of it

We've had incredible rain over the past week.  There has been flooding in some parts of Australia and evacuations in several towns, including a couple of towns close to Canberra.  In Canberra itself there were road closures one day last week and Lake Burley Griffin has a couple of new 'islands' made up of uprooted trees and other debris. 

Tansy was so frustrated at the lack of walks during the days of constant rain that I finally took her out one morning in the rain.  Tansy doesn't like too much rain and I could tell she was sulking about the rain and being so wet, but she was also delirious with excitement at being out and about!

Finally the rain cleared in Canberra on Sunday afternoon so I went out to the garden to pick vegetables.  I gave about 2kg (4.5lb) of split and rotting tomatoes to the chooks and picked about another 2kg for humans.  Then I saw a couple of potatoes poking out of the ground and starting to go green.  All the rain had compacted all the soil and mulch down so much that potatoes were starting to show.  So I had a quick look for potatoes and found a couple more.  I was surprised because of the 39 potatoes that I planted, while they all grew into potato plants, we've had only one set of flowers this season, so I was thinking that maybe we would have hardly any potatoes.  But after finding the first couple of potatoes I decided to get the garden fork and try digging where a couple of potato plants have already died.  And there was a heap of potatoes! 

Canberra has heavy clay soil so with all the rain the soil was really muddy and soggy.  When I dug to about 20cm below the surface the soil was just sludge and water was pooling (like when you dig at the beach).

Today I dug in another part of the garden (when you plant 39 potatoes they end up all over the garden!!) where I saw a couple more potatoes poking out of the ground.  All of these potatoes are just from the top 5cm of soil, some are so big!

We are now very excited about our potential potato harvest and can hardly wait to start digging in a few weeks when all the plants have died back.

Great summer shirt

I love this shirt so much!  I based this design from a shirt I bought last year in Manila.  I found the fabric during a chance visit to my local fabric shop in January and even though it isn't the colour I would usually buy I just fell in love with it.  All the seams are french seams and the neckline has binding on the inside.

Fabric: 1.2m @ $12.99/m
Pattern: A couple of hours to draft
Assembling: Once I cut the fabric out (my least favourite part of sewing!) it took a couple of hours for the french seams, an hour to do the manual rolled hem on bottom hem and arms then another hour for my first attempt at binding!

Back on the needles

Oh, it has been so long since I knit anything.  But I enjoy knitting so I made a resolution that I just had to start again.  A very dear friend gave me a rather generous gift voucher to the Bendigo Woollen Mills, so I used some of the voucher to buy 3 balls of Moorland (67% wool, 33% alpaca) in Storm Blue.  It is a lovely variegated yarn that knits up quite firm, but soft.

It has been a while since I knit so I need a project that requires (hopefully!) minimal effort for maximum output.  So I decided to knit myself a 'Greenfield Cardigan' from the book 'New England Knits' (a book I received for Christmas a couple of years ago).  It is knit in garter stitch on circular needles (I started on straights until I bought some more circulars a couple of days ago - there is a UFO on the 4mm circulars I already have so I needed more...!).

Have you been reinvigorated by something lately?

From the garden

How are things in your garden?  We've had a real mix of good and not so good this summer.  One of the good things is that our tomato plants have exploded with fruit.  We have about 4kg (8.8lbs) of tomatoes waiting patiently on our kitchen bench for us to do something with them.  I think we are going to freeze them because we already made some tomato sauce a couple of weekends ago (when we had 2.5kg of tomatoes sitting on the bench!) and there are only so many tomatoes you can eat at a time!  We are growing 7 different heritage varieties this year, so there is a great mix of colours.

We picked our first corn this week - home grown corn has to be one of the best vegetables ever!

And for the first time ever I made a garlic plait - only a small one, but still a bona fide home grown garlic plait!

Holiday Part 4 - The Rock Islands, Palau

Here it is (at last!), the final installment of our holiday in Micronesia.  The utterly wonderful, beautiful and dream worthy Rock Islands, considered so fabulous that Palau have nominated them for UNESCO World Heritage Listing.  We will all have to wait a few more months to find out if the nomination has been successful, I wish Palau the best of luck because the world needs to know what amazing places there are in the Pacific.

Most of the photos speak for themselves, but I have added captions to a couple of them.

What is the collective noun for hermit crabs?

The Milky Way - a small bay where the sand at the bottom of the bay is silky soft and white.  You have to cake it all over yourself and after you wash it off you'll look years younger. 

Our guide collecting the sand.

The Milky Way sand.

Anybody recognise this well known fellow who is having a nap?

(It's Homer Simpson!)

Keeping busy

Hi everyone, I hope you are all having a lovely summer/winter!  I've been keeping busy with sewing, summer harvests and the general wonderfulness of the season.

No photos this post, just a written update...

Sewing - I've been 'fitting' my husband for trousers.  Some of you might remember last year I 'fit' him for a shirt as part of my college sewing course and he really likes the shirt I then made for him.  Now I'm all set to try making a pair of trousers for him.

I've also been 'fitting' a friend for a dress - she's not sure what she wants, but when I showed her the lovely Simplicity 1291 from 1944 that the amazing Sew Convert made recently, she started to be inspired (and who wouldn't like a dress like that for themselves one day!).

Finally on the sewing front I have been drafting a dress pattern for myself.  I have some very pretty Japanese rayon that I bought last year that deserves to be worn!

Summer harvests - finally the weather has warmed up so our tomatoes are ripening, the eggplants and capsicums are starting and the first ears of corn are almost ready.  We also went wild blackberry picking today.  We picked about a kilogram and it is just the start of the season!

I hope you are all well and have some joy in your life.