Between Now and Then.

Christmas has been and gone and New Year is happening tonight.  The garden though continues to be timeless (almost an inverted oxymoron, that statement) and the chickens and ducks, kangaroos, magpies, crows, the bush rat that lives in the roof of the shed - all are completely unaffected by the phenomenon of counting days or years.  A very wonderful lesson!

The water falling from the sky (you can't really call it rain, more like a deluge) has flooded many parts of Queensland and we were afraid the garden would be affected too since it is in a low lying part of the grounds, but it's still there - waterlogged and soggy with every bucket and bathtub and dish we left lying about filled with water.

Oddly though not much has grown.  We expected to be overrun with beans and tomatoes and weeds but no, things have not moved on much.  Probably too busy gasping for air amongst all that rain.

The good news is that there are at least 15 new ducklings - yellow and black mostly and moving about in a group so that they almost look like one being.  It's hard to count them as the mothers won't let us get too close - very protective and fierce.

There'll be six new chickens too when our routine gets back to normal.  You can see the chicks in the box below.  They've been hand raised.  Lisa took them home over Christmas and although she's loved having them, I believe her son is rather amazed at how much mess they can make in the kitchen (where they run free).  So I'm guessing she won't miss cleaning up after them.

We're pretty sure the really big one is a rooster

The previous entry is about the rose flower and how, as a climber, we hope it will screen the chook palace.  In between the roses are rosellas (plants not birds) - a relative of the hibiscus so they have lovely flowers.  They also grow quite tall and will screen the palace and provide lovely shade. The flowers eventually turn into fruit and will be dried and sold as tea.  Very refreshing and tasty.  The nut grass, which is probably our most pesky and persistent weed, was rivalling the rosellas so we mulched heavily with newspaper and then with straw.  Below is the picture of our progress.

Mulching the rosellas

Next time I write it will be next year, but then of course, it'll be this year.  A toast then to the timelessness of life; it's always the present - and that's the best place to live.

Cheers for now
Norid

Titian

The Garden at the Centre of the Universe has it's first rose!

Titian - climbing rose

 You may remember me writing about this previously.  We wanted something to hide the Chook Palace, which is such a paradise for hens and such an eyesore for humans.  What better than the favourite flower of a Favourite Person.  Thank you to Jane for donating the funds to make this possible.

Imagine this beauty in maturity, hiding The Palace

It rained and rained again this Saturday but we harvested and weeded in the rain.  Better than last week because this week it was hot and humid so the rain kept us cool.

Here is our golden garlic.  Beautifully presented in little gift bags made by Anita.  It's selling like hot cakes too.  Hopefully the proceeds will keep us in mulch for a while!

Our path to wealth!

On another note entirely, the ducks have ducklings.  You can just see a little yellow dab in the right hand corner.  I had to take this picture through the mesh at the front of the cage because the ducks are very protective and hiss and peck if you get near their babies.

Brian has been building his masterpiece for quite a while now and it's nearly finished.  It's a raised garden bed for those of us too decrepit to bend a lot.  First crop will be lettuce and sweet basil.

Brian, working on his masterpiece

 The tomatoes are absolutely wild.  We have planted ones and volunteers and they are growing faster than we can harvest and sell them.  Thank heavens Margaret, who is a great cook, has taken lots of green ones to make into green tomato chutney.

Lisa picking tomatoes

 We were determined to get into the crop rotation we have been planning for months, but which somehow has never come about.  Yesterday John marshalled us all into a work party (5 of us) and we dug over, weeded and prepared a whole garden bed which will be planted with beetroot and lettuce.
To fertilise it John mulched up the cow manure he had gotten from a local cow farmer.  It really stunk too.

John mulching cow poo

 This is amaranth.  On the packet it says "leaf amaranth" and in the catalogue it differentiates between leaf and grain.  Trouble is, we don't really know what to do with leaf amaranth.  It hasn't sold well, and to my uneducated palate it tastes terrible.  So we're leaving the flowers to see if they'll turn into grain.

Leaf Amaranth

And finally, another chick was born on Saturday morning.  We called this one "Smoko" since he was born around smoko time.  We all reckon it's a "he" because, unlike Saturday Morning, he was big and bouncy and loud and active from the minute he came out of the shell.

If you've not seen our calendar, please have a look at it.  You can find it by going to the top of the page and clicking on "Chicks with attitude calendar".  It's a fundraiser - but you can read all about it when you get there.


Cheers for now
Norid

Organic Vampire Repellant

Before I start on the vampire repellant have a look at this tiny chick.  It was born just a few minutes before its first portrait was taken!

It was the rainiest day we'd seen for a long time.  It was one of several rainy days in a row, but this was definitely the heaviest - it barely let up.  Anyway, we were drinking tea and chatting under shelter,  waiting for the rain to stop, when we heard this little "cheep, cheep" sound.  We finally realised it came from the incubator and sure enough, there was this little wet looking chick, shivering.  John picked it up and held it in his hands to warm it up.  It is wrapped in the sleeve of an old shirt and finished the first part of its day wrapped in sleeves, in an ice cream container sitting on top of the incubator.

The next part of its life included a ride in a ute, being carried up a steep hill in the rain and finally being delivered into the hands of its new Mum, who doesn't have feathers and doesn't cluck, but has a way with newborn chicks.

Meet "Saturday Morning" - so called because that's when it was born.

Well, if a film star can name her child Sunday Rose, we can call a chicken Saturday Morning.

OK, on to the vampire thing.  Garlic!  You knew that!  Both Anita and I (whose homes are redolent of garlic) can vouch for its efficacy.

So.  The garlic crop has been ready for harvest for a week or so.  Garlic doesn't like wet soil and it can turn mouldy quickly.  Garlic is our gold mine.  Put all those things together and the garlic had to be harvested and dried on the wettest Saturday this year!

So off went the troops to harvest in the rain!  But, once harvested, then what?  Dry it in the rain - oxymoron to say the least.  Solution?  Go to Anita's house and work on the verandah.  You can see the pictures below.  It doesn't look like a wet day does it?  But it was, it just didn't stop pouring.

trimming the roots and pulling the muddy leaves off so it can be dried better.

We did several trays of garlic and we were wet and muddy by the end of the day.

I said above "go to Anita's house".  Easy when you say it fast but in fact it was quite a business.  We had to load two cars, in the wet, with boxes of muddy garlic - trying not to get it on the upholstery.  Then we had to transport it from the driveway at Anita's house to the back yard, without letting her chickens out onto the road!  But it WAS fun and we finally settled down to a routine of washing trimming and stripping.

That's me, stripping, above, and that's Anita, washing, below.  Crazy to think of having to use the hose in all that rain!

Washing garlic in the rain!

But wait, there's more.  The redolent part.  The garlic wasn't going to dry out in the air, and mould is a very real threat.  And as I already said, garlic is our pot of gold - $30 a kilo in the shops!  So now Anita has a wire bed frame in her lounge room, covered with garlic, drying with the aid of an electric fan.  The things we do!

Thanks to Janet for the photos.

cheers for now
Norid