This Little Chook Needs A Name!

Here at the Farm, we have recently acquired 16 beautiful young chooks. They come in a few different colours and patterns but we reckon this one (below) is the prettiest. And, she has recently laid her first 'pointy' egg (see photo at bottom of page). The problem is, what to call her?


We - Norid and Janet - would like to enlist the help of friends around the world to find exactly the right name for our elegant spotted bird on the left - a Spangled Hamburg if you please!

So we're having a Name the Chook competition. Interested?

We see this as being something of a 'Wing-Wing' situation! 'X' the Spangled Hamburg gets a proper name, we get even more fun, and you get: fun, the chance to be involved with the Farm (albeit virtually) and perhaps Amaroo can get a little bit of support in the form of the many $1.20 entry fees which will be flooding into this blog before August 15!

How Do You Do This?

1. Dream up a name (or names) for our Spangled Hamburg

2.Send your brilliant entries to this blog address thethousanddollarzucchini.blogspot.com
or submit as a comment below.
Include:

• your choice of chook name
• your full name
• your paypal email address

3. Deposit your entry fee * into the paypal account*

* Enter as many times as you wish. Each entry is $1.20
* click on the Paypal "donate" button at the top of the page

The best entries - as judged by an independent feathered panel of 'eggsperts' - will be posted on this site. And the winner - ta da! The winner will receive a one-off downloadable poster portrait of our little spangled friend to impress your nearest and dearest.

Watch this space for...
Regular updates on the Farm activities, recipes and more competitions.

The World's First Pumpkin Artists?

Last week's pumpkin primping & painting was a unique activity for me and my friend - or indeed for anyone! For my part, as I got more into it, I started to create artworks rather than characters...Can we claim the distinction of being the first pumpkin artists in the Universe?!!

Posting the rest of the piccies now. Enjoy!








Above we have Belly Dancing Pumpkin, Alien Pumpkin, Clown Pumpkin, Monster of the Deep Pumpkin, French Impressionist Pumpkin & After Turner Pumpkin.

My favourite of these is the last one - After Turner Pumpkin - because it reminds me of a Turner painting. It was bought by someone who was house-sitting a place full of original artworks, with the same colour scheme. They had left her a whole pumpkin to consume - so she replaced it with one that doubled as an original artwork as well!

PS: We made about $70 from 12 dressed pumpkins and a few 'naked' ones. Maybe not such efficient fundraising, but an irreplaceable experience and process...possibly making us the first pumpkin artists in history - at least on this planet!!

This is what happens when you have a surfeit of PUMPKINS!

This post is mostly photos of the pumpkins my friend and I made last week to raise money for our organic vege patch and our favourite charity.

The venue was the Incinerator Theatre in Ipswich, Queensland - an iconic building by renowned architect Walter Burley-Griffin. The event was an amateur performance of Neil Simon's The Odd Couple. It was fun - the script especially was great, but for me, I most enjoyed showcasing and selling the fruits of our creative labours of the previous week. You've heard of Bananas in Pajamas - well this was Pumpkins in Just About Anything!


See for yourself. Unfortunately, didn't get any snaps of the new appreciative owners of Dressed Up Pumpkins - but I managed to get their 'mug shots' before they went to the party.

There's a Cinderella Pumpkin, A Secret Garden Pumpkin, PumpCon Man and the Pumpkin Bride!

That's it for today with Pete the Pumpkin Pirate!
More on mad pumpkins later!

Pumpkins Galore!

The last couple of months, pumpkins have featured large in my life. I help out at an organic vege patch on a Saturday as a volunteer and, a few weeks ago, the pumpkins had to be picked because the frost had begun to wither the vines.

A team of cheerful people with a ute gathered up the pumpkins - took them from their beds and lined them up on another old bed base...there must have been hundreds of them! But now, what to do with them? Especially in an area where everyone has pumpkins and honesty boxes on the side of the road.

Well, we have managed to move a lot of them - every week you take a pumpkin home as a matter of course. Baked pumpkin, pumpkin soup, pumpkin chips - even pumpkin muffins...you name it we've eaten it with pumpkin! The honesty box idea has worked well too on the property we are situated in - people coming to meetings, workshops, working bees and so on have been buying them and no doubt adding to the vast store of pumpkin recipes which must be accumulating in the universe!


To tell you the truth - I haven't got all 'pumpkinned out' yet. (Though my attempt at 'pumpkin custard' doesn't bear repeating) But last weekend, we decided to make an extra effort to move some of the remaining 50 or so.

A group of women we knew were fund-raising with a night at the local amateur theatre's production of Neil Simon's The Odd Couple. There were going to be raffles and art auctions...so we snuck in too - with, you guessed it - pumpkins. But these were no ordinary pumpkins. Two of us spent the spare hours of our week painting, primping and dressing...transforming pumpkins into characters - pairs of Odd Couples!

I must admit I got very attached to the ones I created. But they did go to good homes - people really appreciated our efforts with these 'dressed pumpkins' and we got to sell a whole lot of 'naked' ones as well.

So once more, we kept the fun in fund-raising. I think the pictures in the next blog will speak for themselves!

PS: Miss Piggy Pumpkin's still got tickets on herself!