Tis the season to.. procrastinate!

OK, first off I have an awesome photo by way of apology for being so slack:

We've had a few baby's first birthdays lately, and this cupcake was a highlight. Most adorable inchworm ever! Gemma is fantastic at baking and decorating :)

No particular excuses - it's just too hot for me to get anything in particular done. That, and I'm still sorting out the car issues, and working through my to-do list. Tomorrow I also have my first funeral :(

I've noticed from my blog reading list that a few of you guys have slowed down too - must be the time of year. Hopefully in the New Year we'll all be re-energised!

Holy Smokes - Christmas is NEXT WEEK!!

ARGH! Sorry folks - I'm doing a terrible job at blogging lately. Aside from the usual enormous to do list (with updates re car transfers and Christmas stuff), it's crazy busy at work at the moment, so I'm trying to concentrate on nice things like walking the dog and meditating when I get home from work. I'll try to get back into blogging soon. In the meantime, here's a picture we took of Tess last year:

Can I just say... nyaaaaaaaaaaaargh!!

Well, that's a bit misleading. It's been a relatively good week, albeit crazy and busy - too busy for blogging.

Lately the weekdays have been lovely temperatures - a bit hot in the middle of the day, but fine for sitting in an office. But the weekends?! OMGPONIES! 37 or 38 degrees! Both days!!! How does the weather know when it's the weekend?! So obviously it has been too hot to garden, though of course I should have been cramming some in after work. Coulda, shoulda, woulda.

We have been catching up with friends a lot lately, which has been lovely, and surprisingly has involved quite a lot of gardening chit chat. Gemma, this is what lettuce going to seed looks like :)

We harvested out first tomatoes from the monster triffid plants - small, but cute :) There are stacks more out there somewhere within the giant tangle.

Also harvested a small quantity of blueberries. I tried one fresh, and it was a bit meh. Needs to be plied with sugar and made into some kind of desert, I think.

Anyway, on to the crazy business. My car (a little Matiz) is currently experiencing technical difficulties. The kind of difficulties which result in the engine stopping itself unexpectedly when idling. Not fun at all. On Monday I mentioned casually to a colleague that I might have to think about getting a second-hand Prius to take over from the Matiz, and fill the gap before electric plugin cars are available and not too outrageously exxy. My colleague then sent me a link to an auction, and the short version is - on Wednesday I bought a car! :D

So our car situation is now quite, quite ridiculous:

• One car at my brother's house, which unexpectedly stops when idling
• Mr Bon's car sitting in the driveway with a flat battery
• My brother's car (no air con!) on the verge for me to use while Matiz is broken
• Shiny new car!!!

Only it actually gets MORE ridiculous. It turns out that Mr Bon wants to take his car to work tmw instead of the train, so we need to jump start it (with my brother's car). No worries. Move cars around. Jump Start. Mr Bon drives off to visit his mum. I move two cars around and finally get a chance to sit down and have dinner. (Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, he has lost his jumper leads, mine are in the Matiz at my brother's house, so we had to go to Bunnings.. they have none.. had to go to Kmart. By now my feet are KILLING)

So, yeh, I finally got to sit down and have dinner. Watch last week's Rex in Rome. And then I get a call from Mr Bon - he stopped his car at his mum's (WHY?!? WHY!?!?!?!?!?), and it turns out the battery may be sort of more screwed than flat. Oh, the fun and games. I'm writing this live, so who knows how the story will end... but either way, my new (second-hand) car is awesome :)

Woeful Wednesday - Wetting agent and weeds

Ahh. Worked from home today, which is always lovely. I'm afraid I rather wasted the time saved by not commuting, by sleeping in. I think it was worth it though! I had a nice productive day, and Tess even helped me out every now and then.

Priority one for after work was cleaning the

bokashi bin, so I can get the next batch started. I hose it down first, then let it sit in the sun for a day or two, and then clean it with the steam cleaner. I'm not sure this does the trick though - I always seem to get blue mould (which you're not supposed to get) in the bucket. Could be... not enough bokashi powder, too much bokashi powder, or ineffective cleaning?? If anyone has some insight, please comment & let me know :)

So that done, we took Tess out to work off her beans in a nice walk - her friend Chardy was so excited to see her, it was adorable :) Then the plan was to apply wetting agent to mini-unidentified-citrus, followed by some weeding.

I started the wetting agent mission at 6:25pm. Generally I turn the hose up to max, and water for a long time, with the hose about 1 inch from the soil - just to make sure the wetting agent is well and truly activated (when it activates it froths).

Every now and then I pause and dig a little hole to see how far down the water has made it. When the little holes consistently show that the water

has made it about 5cm, that's when I usually stop. Today though I stopped for a different reason - a little baby preying mantis appeared from somewhere! At this point it was just starting to get dark, and the water had made it 3-4cm down, so I figured that's good enough for today. It ended up being 7:09pm when I finished, so that's quite a lot of water with the hose going pretty well the whole time.

I'm planning to come back a few days later and do another application, before slapping on the manure, mulch etc - when that's all done, this little tree will be set for summer. I also spotted a ladybird on the little tree, but my photos didn't work out. It didn't look quite like your usual ladybird - the red was a little dull, the spots seemed to be clustered more at his tail end, and he seemed a bit more oval shaped than round. Interesting...

Never got to the weeding I planned to do, although I did pick out a few as I went. I was going to take some photos so that this week's Woeful Wednesday would be more about weeds than wetting agent, but by the time I finished up with the wetting agent it was too dark for photos.

Oh, and I spotted this cricket and managed to get a photo. Cute :)

Bokashi busy-ness

So, today I emptied the full Bokashi bin into the compost tumbler. Sensitive readers can count themselves lucky that smell-o-vision hasn't been invented yet :D

Tess is invariably attracted by the sound of the camera phone taking a shot, so she naturally came to see if she could offer any assistance.

The best part about Bokashi is the juice - once the bucket is in full swing, you can drain juice off two or three times a week, and dilute it for the garden. I usually stick a bit of bokashi juice (a sweet chilli dipping sauce tub's worth!!), some King Kelp, and some worm juice (from work) in the watering can all at once, and distribute it out to vegies/fruit trees/pot plants.

For anyone who hasn't heard of Bokashi before - it's a composting system that came out of Japan. Food scraps (including onion, citrus, meat, dairy) are added into the Bokashi bucket and then squashed down with a potato masher. You then sprinkle the scraps with the Bokashi powder, which contains little microbes. You then seal the bucket up tightly until next time scraps are added. The scraps ferment, and when the bucket's full you can either bury them in the garden, or add them to your compost. I prefer the latter, because I hate digging holes!

Here's how the bokashi contents looked after being added to the tumbler:

Coincidentally, the other day on the gardening forum, we were discussing lacewings and antlions. I happened to mention that I'd seen heaps of antlion cones at work, but never any at home. Well, what do you know!! I found four or five cones under the compost tumbler!! I suppose they prefer to situate themselves in places where Tess is less likely to trample their delicate constructions.

As I was walking back and forth in the garden doing odd jobs, the blueberries were looking so pretty that I decided to try some macro shots. They didn't work out perfectly, but good enough :) Anyone have any suggestions on how to best use a handful of blueberries?? I'm hoping to get another bush for Christmas, to increase yields - but in the meantime it would be shame to waste the ones we do have.

And just in case Bec is reading... :D When I finished cleaning the bokashi bucket, distributing the juice, and bringing the washing in, I decided to stay outside and weed until it got too dark. Well, I didn't make it until dark - I started getting light-headed and dizzy every time I stood up from crouching, so I thought that might be a cue to call it a day. Still.. it's a habit I need to get into!