25 sleeps to go!!

Every year, Mr Bon accuses me of peaking too soon as far as Christmas excitement goes. This year I think I'm at risk of not peaking at all, unless I make an effort to drum up some enthusiasm. Christmas is just so much more fun when you've got a break from work to look forward to! Still.. 25 sleeps :):) Hoping to go into the city one night soon to look at the lights and decorations :)

I'm afraid it's another Nothing in Particular post today. Still plenty of things on the To Do list, but we've been a bit overrun with social commitments. Actually by other people's standards we're still quite anti-social, but our standards are quite different :D

Couple of blurry ladybug photos for you - happily, there are still stacks of the little guys hanging around in the garden. I'll have to dig out my half-arsed bamboo ladybug house, and set it up properly. We stuck this indoor plant outside in the hope that we might be able to reverse its slow slide toward death. We noticed when we put it outside that it was covered in aphids, and within a few hours there were two ladybugs chomping away on the aphids :)

So we didn't get much gardening done at the weekend, except a friend came over to dig out the rose bushes I've had reserved for her for a while now. There were 6 roses bushes in the front garden when we moved in.. no wait, there were a few others that died, too :D Anyway, of the 6 that didn't die, these were the last two to be rescued and taken to loving homes. So happy to have them out of garden and in the care of someone who appreciates them! :)

And as a huge added bonus, Bec did a huge amount of weeding as well as some pruning as she went! It's looking heaps better out there now. I did intend (I really did, Bec!! :)) to go out after work this afternoon and do some more weeding, but a few things intervened. Firstly I realised that I hadn't even done the standard weekend chores, so washing and feeding the worm farm had to come first. Secondly, I needed a bit of recovery time from today's Car Drama.

I was a third of the way to work today, when my car's engine just decided to stop. Twice. Thankfully I hadn't made it to the really bad traffic and the tunnel yet, and I managed to get it started and get home. And even better, I have awesome brothers who are very handy in this situation. One lent me a car, and another will be taking a look at my car tonight to see what the problem is. So I got to work two hours late and a little bit stressed, and when I got home from work I just wanted to chill out for a bit.

On the up side, I haven't been too sick lately. Still the odd stabbing pain, but more of the passing "ouch" variety, than the sort that makes you groan out load and collapse on the nearest soft surface. Pleasantly surprised that I managed three social gatherings this weekend with no significant illness. Woot woot!

One more exciting event from the weekend. I went to make a cup of tea, and there was a skink on the stovetop!! My kitchen's far from sealed to critters - we get slugs coming up through the floor gaps, mice, cockroaches, whatever - but this was a first. I eventually managed to catch him after a dramatic chase across the kitchen floor. I considered just chasing him all the way out the back door, but Tess would've been trying her hardest to catch him. So I was carrying him as carefully as I could and rushing outside to minimise his stress, when I feel a pointy feeling in my hand - he was biting me!! What a brave little dude. Didn't drop his tail or anything, just did his best to bite my fingers off :)

I'm sure I had something else to add, but as I've forgotten what it was, it can't be that important.

So many books, so little time

I don't normally keep a reading list, because it would just be too unmanageable - there are so many books out there I'd like to read one day! But I'm making an exception today for one particular reason: this is the list of books I've already bought, but not read yet.

Usually when I buy new books I would stack them somewhere separately from the general book collection, so they're handy as soon as I'm ready to read them. There's no room for that approach now, so I'll make a little short-term reading list.

1. Choosing Eden, by Adrienne Langman.
   This is what I'm reading at the moment. It's taken me a while to get into it, because the start is very Peak-Oil-Doom-and-Gloom, and I prefer to cultivate a cheerful brand of denial rather than the hands-on approach taken in this book. I'm really enjoying it now though, and it's making me so impatient to get cracking on the plans for our new house.


2. The Highly Sensitive Person, by Elaine Aron.
   I've ordered this book, but it hasn't arrived yet. Very keen to read this one. I'm still not convinced on the science of "highly sensitive people", but what I've read so far seems to fit very well with my own life. It will be interesting to see whether this book will have any useful information regarding my health problems.


3. A secret book!
   I can't say anything about this book, as I got another copy for a friend for Christmas :) I can't wait to read it though!!


4. Georgian Style and Design for Contemporary Living, by Henrietta Spencer-Churchill.
   Hehe, what a fantastically English name the author has :) This is another one which I'm hoping will be very inspirational for house-planning. Lots of pretty pictures!


5. Jane Austen's Christmas, compiled by Maria Hubert.
   I do hope I can get to this one BEFORE Christmas!!

The three things I miss most about when I used to catch public transport to work are: the quiet time for preparing for the day/unwinding from the day; the twice-daily gentle but considerable exercise; and the copious reading time!

Without the benefit of public transport, the reading has to fit in between work, work from home because of our Preposterous Deadline, gardening, dog walking, and all the other daily life things that have to be done.

Speaking of things to be done, I had an eventual victory today! Finally got my passport application lodged for the new surname. Not a fun exercise as when I got to the Post Office, they told me the passport photos I got from the pharmacy were no good, so I had to get new ones done, drive off to get them signed by my guarantor, then drive back to the Post Office. Done now though, and I've one step closer to crossing "change name" of my to do list.

Woeful Wednesday - Hydrophobic soil

Time for another round of Woeful Wednesday!

This week's topic - my terrible hydrophobic soil. To be more precise - it has now been way too long since I did a big soil improvement effort for my citrus trees. In the photos you may just be able to see the old, broken down mulch from last time around. No doubt the manure, mulch, and other goodies have improved the soil very much, but it's definitely overdue to be reapplied.

I have heard some Perth gardening personalities say that you should apply wetting agent here FOUR times a year - who has the time?! I'd like to aim for twice a year but in reality I'd be lucky to get around to doing it once a year. Still, the established citrus trees aren't too fragile so that's good.

So what I did for this post is a little experiment. Just before 6pm I went outside with a glass of water, smoothed out a small depression next to mini-unidentified-citrus, and poured half a glass of water in. I then took a bunch of photos. Can you see the curved meniscus around the edge of the water?? To me that is the sign of impressively hydrophobic soil. Some little bits of soily stuff floated on the water, but the water definitely wasn't able to soak in to the soil the way it should.

I waited around for a few minutes hoping to get a progress shot, but the water wasn't going anywhere. I then came inside, glanced at the clock (6pm), and hopped in the shower. At 6:15pm I went back outside with the camera - still no change in the water/soil.

At 6:30pm I went out again, and hurrah! The water was no longer pooled on the surface - I had a little "wet" patch of ground. I say "wet", because.. well, it's not really. I just brushed the top of the wet patch with my finger, and took a photo - bone dry about 1mm underneath.

So.. definitely time to treat the soil with wetting agent and other goodies! The weather has cooled down lately so I may manage to get some trees done before next Wednesday.

To add a bit of positivity to today's post, I took a picture of some of the baby imperial mandarins on the tree next door to mini-unidentified-citrus. Yum! Can't wait for them to grow up...

In which my head keeps trying to explode

Aaaaaaaargh. No weekend posts this time, because I spent most of the weekend fighting off nasty headaches. Not sure why - too much sunshine perhaps.

But it may have been worth it - the path is finished! Here is Tess modelling the new section for you. I can't believe the plumbago in the background is actually trying to look pretty. DIE DIE DIE! I hate the plumbago. Actually getting close to going and knocking on the neighbours' door to ask if they would mind if I killed it. Godawful bloody thing.

Plant plumbago in the middle of your garden if you want to - I mean, it obviously grows like nuts and doesn't need feeding and watering. Just whatever you do, don't plant it right next to your fence!

The path was finished in the midday sun on Saturday, which is probably why the headache got so bad, if not the actual cause. But there you go, Woeful Wednesday is a success! It's going to be hard to work out what to post this Wednesday - still a lot of woes to choose from.

I'm not sure the path is actually worth this many photos, but meh. I'll just have to try to blather on enough to fill in the gaps :D

My headache unfortunately came back again on Sunday, with a vengeance. Possibly another case of too much sunshine/not enough water while we we're out and about in the morning - more on that when I get to the photo.

The headache is also still lingering today :( I'm also experiencing some interesting new symptoms from my IBS, so all in all I haven't been feeling great lately. I've now regressed to a kind of pain I haven't experienced since I was a teenager - at the time I actually assumed everybody got the same pain, and it was just the polite thing not to mention it. Heh. anyway, it went away at some point then, so I suppose maybe it will go away by itself this time...

The vegie patch is still a bit out of control - I'm not sure if there's anything useful we can do about the tomatoes at this stage?! They're enormous, and they're well and truly crowding out the other plants. Can I massively prune them back? It's a bit late to start doing the proper laterals-based pruning, but just shrinking them down a bit would help the other plants. Mr Bon harvested lettuce, basil, and celery leaves for our dinner the other night, and thought

it was worth a photo - at least the whole vegie bed isn't a disaster :D

I had a rare rush of productivity this evening - maybe it was a bit of a high at only having a tiny headache, rather than a massive one, or perhaps I'm starting to feel the effects of not having enough gentle exercise, and my body actually wants to get off the couch. Anyway, the worms are fed, the washing's done, the vegies have been fed & watered, the bird baths topped up, the recycling taken out, the rubbish bin on the verge, and Mr Bon collected the fallen lemons. Oh, and the kitchen's nice and clean:)

I also spent a little bit of time clearing out the disaster zone which is the laundry. Aside from the fact that the laundry naturally reverts to a state of chaos and mess, our flimsy little tool storage rack in the corner (like this: http://www.homeinnovationideas.com/garage/organize-your-tools-with-rubbermaid-30-tool-corner-tool-rack.html) finally managed to pull away from the wall - we'd only been able to screw it in in one place, so it was a bit inevitable I suppose. Luckily the washing machine still opens, but only just. Anyway, I think I've had a much better idea. If we could rig up a couple of U-shaped structures from the ceiling beams, we could store all the long-handled tools up and out of the way. Might have a squiz at the Howard's Storage World website and see if we can buy something designed for that purpose - I don't fancy our chances of rigging something up from Bunnings products.

And finally... a picture from our adventures on Sunday morning. We went on a morning tour in a horse-drawn carriage - a wedding present from my colleagues :) Luckily the weather was awesome, so it was a lovely way to spend a morning.

We're famous!! ... sort of :)

Hurrah!! We've finally got our copies of Jane Austen's Regency World Magazine, Sept/Oct 2009. There is a long, long rant about why it took us so long to get our copies, but I will spare you the gory details.

Doesn't Mr Bon look fabulous!

The article is about the Pride & Prejudice tour we went on in July. The tour is based around the 1995 BBC version of P&P and visits heaps of the filming locations. We had a fantastic time and it was awesome to be able to crack out the wedding clothes again.

And look, it's not just Mr Bon who featured in a magazine - I got a mention too!

Obviously, I was one of the less memorable personalities on the tour... :D

Anyhow, misnomers aside, it was an excellent tour - definitely look it up if you're planning a visit to England!

Woeful Wednesday - The Path

Welcome to the first Woeful Wednesday post!

My plan for Wednesdays is to feature a part of the garden which needs some work - mostly because I'm hoping it'll provide me with the momentum and inspiration to get that work done, but also because it would be a bit misleading to only show the pretty bits of the garden. Oh, and if I didn't show the dodgy patches, I'd run out of things to post about pretty quickly!

So, today's topic is The Path.

When we bought our place the whole back section of the garden, where the fruit trees are, was mulched. That mulch broke down pretty quickly to be followed by a carpet of weeds. Our plan for the area is to get most of it mulched with a more long-term woodchip mulch, with a stepping stone patch winding through it.

A good friend gave us a whole bunch of concrete pavers he didn't need anymore, and my dad brought his trailer over and helped me bring them home. We procrastinated in our usual manner, but eventually Mr Bon laid most of the pavers out. There is just one corner now which is distinctly lacking in path - in between a vegie bed and an orange tree.

We still have a little pile of concrete pavers hiding discreetly under a hibiscus tree, as well as a small pile of circular pavers given to us by another friend. So all that needs to be done is to get out there and lug the heavy things around! Well, for Mr Bon to lug them around, anyway - the square pavers are way too heavy for me.

You may be able to spot a few other woes in these photos, such as:

• un-mulched spots
• plants in dire need of pruning
• weeds
• invasive plants from next door

These will be the subjects of future Woeful Wednesdays!

Also, just to make the post a little bit less woeful, I will throw in a couple of photos showing parts of the path that are finished, and which I'm very happy with :)

We got a package in the mail today with some news I'm ITCHING to post about, but it will have to wait until tomorrow. Two posts in one day is a bit much :D

Bits and pieces

Nothing in particular to report this time. Last week was very quiet, I felt so exhausted all week that I didn't even try to be productive. Today we baby-sat my brother's dog, which was nice. Here she is looking very decorative in front of the vegie bed.

I did come up with a new plan over the weekend though - Woeful Wednesday. I had a nice chat with Cindy from 2paw the other day, and she mentioned how nice my garden was looking. It made me realise that the blog presents a bit of a skewed picture of the garden, because generally I only put up photos of the nice bits! So from now on, Wednesday posts will be woeful posts - somewhere to show the bits that still need heaps of work. I'm hoping this will also be good motivation to actually get something done about the problem areas :)

Here's a little woeful preview, anyway - the blinkin' inchworms are still making a meal out of our vegies!

My plan of waiting for predatory birds to show up and eat them doesn't seem to be working, so I'm considering digging out the Dipel. I've used Dipel once before when we had a hairy-mary plague in the herbs, I presume it will also do the trick with inch worms.

We've learnt a few other things lately - on the weekend we caught up with some friends and admired their lovely vegie beds. I mentioned how our tomato plants have turned into triffids and I knew you were supposed to "prune out the laterals" but I had no idea what that meant. So Mr Bon and I got a lesson in laterals :) We went out to suss out the laterals on our tomato plants, but gave it up as a lost cause - they're just too big and bushy. So we'll chalk that up as a lesson for next time. I'll also be more pro-active with staking next time - we have three different varieties out there, and only one (Tiny Tim) looks like it doesn't require staking.

I've also stuck some toilet rolls around the base of some of the leeks, but next time we plant leeks I'll try a different trick - just plant them deeper. This goes against my ingrained fear of collar rot, but I'm told it's fine to do with leek :)

One other interesting fact from today - one of my unidentified citrus trees dropped a fruit (finally! the fruit had been hanging there for donkey's years), so I brought it in & cut it in half to have a look. It's an orange! Not sure what variety, I actually thought it had quite a limey taste. Lots of baby fruit on this tree so we'll see how the rest turn out. It's badly in need of a prune though, it's got some atrocious water shoots.

And lastly - a photo to commemorate our first ever bean harvest - so bountiful! :D

Biodiversity FTW

I had a few different plans for this post, mostly resulting from the fact that I haven't really done much in the garden lately. One idea was going to be titled "MEH", and was going to be a depressing rant on how I have lost interest in the vegies lately. Another was going to be "What I've learnt so far" and I was just going to outline a few things I've learnt in the patch as we've muddled along - actually I may still throw that in at the end, depending on how long the post ends up being. Nope, too long today, I'll save that one for another day.

All my other ideas were thrown out the window after a brief visit to the vegie bed this evening. I wasn't even going to go out to the garden today, after having such a 'meh' time at work lately I wanted nothing more than to zone out on the couch. However I thought I'd better have a quick look.

Interest restored! Some interesting things are happening out there lately:

• The vegie bed has been completely swamped by inch worms. These have really tucked into the rocket and the tomato leaves, and done minor damage to the basil and celery leaves.

• Ladybugs! I am seeing quite a few ladybugs out there, which can only be a good sign.
• There are now quite a few ants in the bed, and this seems to me like a really good development - especially since I spotted a crowd of ants eating an inch worm! Fingers crossed they might move on to the slaters next?? :)

I had been meaning to ask my gardening buddies how to tell when my beans are ready to be picked. Well, it's now a moot point as the slaters have been tucking right into them and gnawing the ends off! So I've brought in the grand harvest - 5 beans :D The photo is a bit misleading - the angle makes them look like a normal bean size, but actually they're only about 8-10cm long.

It's a bit hard to see in this picture, but this particular ladybug was eating a small insect - I think a tiny green flying thing.

So I haven't quite given up on the patch yet, although I do really want to get cracking on some other parts of the garden. Most of all we need to get the hang of harvesting as soon as the food is ready, before the bugs eat it all. I say "we", but since Mr Bon is the head cook, it's really his job... :D

When half-arsed is good enough

For ages now I've been really looking forward to getting some of our wedding photos framed and up on the wall somewhere. Mr Bon & I don't have a lot of photos of ourselves - actually that's an understatement - pre-wedding I think we had one photo from my year 12 ball, and one Christmas photo. So now we have those two, and about 450 wedding photos :D

We've also been very slack about putting anything up on the walls, although Mr Bon would like to get some nice tall-ship paintings.

Anyway, I recently found some absolutely beautiful recycled timber frames which were perfect for our wedding pictures. They're made by Mulbury, and we bought ours through Biome.

Aren't the frames gorgeous? Unfortunately, we suck too much to do them justice, for two reasons:

1. Can't get the critters to hang straight. They're sitting too far off the wall to be straightened, so I think I'm going to have to go at them with some corks and blu-tac. More likely, they'll stay all funky-like until next time Mr Bon's mum or my dad come to visit - and then they'll get sorted out.

2. Can't get decent photos of them. This corner just doesn't get enough light for my little camera phone. They do look a lot nicer in real life than they do in these photos.

Anyway, unpolished at it is, that's probably the most productive thing to come out of our weekend. I have managed to do quite a lot of Christmas-present-ordering, and I am slowly making progress with the recorded TV collection. Mr Bon is busy with whatever computer game he's playing at the moment.

Tess has also had a fun weekend - the other day, for the first time ever, she tricked us into giving her two dinners. She's really not enjoying being on a diet! She went to the vet today - she's lost 3 kilos and is now just about the right weight, so she'll just have to get used to being hungry all the time :(

I also made up a new batch of worm-fattening food for the worms at work. We don't really need to make them any fatter, but it's a convenient way to add a bit of lime to the farm on a regular basis, and it does seem to to keep the farm looking happier. We sprinkle a pretty generous amount over each farm once a week.

I also did the monthly greywater maintenance this weekend, and as I flushed the driplines out I noticed something sad - the soil around the fruit trees is really impressively water-repellent again. So I shall have to motivate myself to give each of the trees their ad-hoc soil improvement - same as this orange tree got earlier on. It's on the list.. goodness knows when I'll get around to it.

Small Triumphs

Well, so much for my "shorter posts, more often" plan!

Can't quite pin down where the last week went, but I suspect it has something to do with the losing battle I am fighting with my recorded TV collection. SBS recently showed a whole bunch of Bollywood movies, and ever since then I've been about 15 hours behind schedule. I am watching one of them (Veer Zaara) tonight though, so that will help.

No particular news in the garden. No particular news of the dog. However we have had a couple of small victories.

Health insurance! After a long saga, I have finally managed to organise our family health insurance. Itching to cross it off the list, but I'll wait until the policy arrives in the mail.

I also managed to do 20 minutes on the exercise bike on Tuesday (just under 10km), but that may have been pushing it a bit. My legs have only just recovered and it did make my pilates session a bit tricky yesterday. I will hop on the bike again tonight but perhaps won't push it quite so far.

I had been meaning to blog about how much I am enjoying reading the Grand Designs Handbook, and how impressed I've been that it's not full of architecture-w@nk-talk. But unfortunately I've just reached a chapter which is full of architecture-w@ank-talk, so I've gone off the idea a bit. Hopefully the next chapter will be more satisfying :D

Beans!

I hadn't intended to post today, since I had such a good run on the weekend. But something ever so exciting has happened in the vegie patch!!

BEANS!

I can't work out how these snuck up on us!! I saw the flowers when they first appeared.. maybe a week ago? But these beans came from nowhere! Do they grow really fast??

This isn't the only bean, either - there are a few on this little plant, and some gorgeous tiny beans on one of the other plants. I'm so pleasantly surprised - I thought the slaters had attacked the beans so bad that we wouldn't ever get beans. Still, better not count my chickens...

Lemony goodness

Hurrah!

One of the plans we have for our new house is to learn how to preserve/store the produce from the garden, so we're not wasting anything. Although really, we should get our act together before then, because we have a few trees which produce a large crop in a short time frame - lemon tree, fig tree, almond trees.

Watching River Cottage Autumn inspired us this weekend, so Mr Bon had a bit of a lemon cook up. I did my bit by gathering lemons and cleaning up the impressive mess when everything was all bottled :)

Mr Bon did one jar of preserved lemons (with a bay leaf, a clove, and a cinnamon stick), and a huge quantity of lemon cordial. We were limited by storage containers rather than by lemons! We've been drinking quite a lot of the lemon cordial and we also made up some icypoles which'll be nice on a hot day :)

The cordial is delicious.. and I don't think all this fruit will trigger my fructose sensitivity, because all the added caster sugar should balance the fructose out with plenty of glucose - awesome.