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