Things and stuff

So the weather has been a bit strange this year. This is the cumquat going in to flower in a big way while there are still fruit developing:

The smell of blossom was very nice and rather strong. The small lemon tree out the front is about to go in to flower again, but of course out of sync with this one.

I've also had another go at making Hunan-style salted chillis. This time I've grabbed a more appropriate chillis and acutally measured the salt.

Packed in to a jar:
And now to wait for it to be ready. Oh and to work out what to cook to taste these with. The method/recipe came from : Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook: Recipes from Hunan Province by Fuchsia Dunlop. I just need to choose which thing to cook.

In unrelated news, after the last carrot harvest, there were some other undeveloped carrots still left in the ground which were now ready:

Surprisingly they seem to maintain their colour even after microwaving:

Fresh and delicious!

Last but not least, the correa and lavender also seem to be enjoying this strange weather:


You'll need to click on the image to see the correa flowers more clearly. The chickens have also decided that the lavendar tastes great again. We'll see how long that lasts.

Finally a charity for me to join in

So the usual big do something silly charities don't really work for me. I have a mo, so Movember isn't much point. Similarly shaving for a cure doen't seem like much of a challenge since I shave my head twice a week anyway.

Time for something new and different. Something less folically oriented. Time to don the cape for Capril (their facebook page has some photos). While it doesn't seem to have taken off just yet, I'm hoping it does. The money for this one goes to Beyond Blue.

An afternoon in picures

Blackbird cafe

Grasshopper Laneway Bar

Marble Bar

Zeta Bar

Current harvest!

So some of this years harvest was fairly feeble. Planed an awful lot of corn, but only 3 stalks came up. This left us with only 2 cobs:

We also experimented with trying to grow carrots. Not the most amazing results, but encouraging and clearly worth doing again:

Margate revisited!

So this time when we went to the Margate Train, it was open!!! (As opposed to last time). Well, it was mostly open. Oddly enough there were still some shops closed.

While we did go through a few of the shops, we ended up here:


I had a good chat to the guy running it who wasn't there in 2009, but had since taken over the shop and started on a quest to convince other shop owners that it might be good to be open during tourist season.

We bought a refreshing drink:

which was rather tasty. Well, a sweet soda taste (reminded me a little of creaming soda). Rather pleasant and I'd get it again. According to Wikipedia, the Dandelion and Burdock soft drink recipe has been going since around 1265.

The main booty which we brought back was:

Mulled-wine flavoured lollies (top left), dolly mix (top right), soor plooms (the green ones at the bottom; apparently first invented in 1337), a Kendal Mint Cake, and the Nipits (licorice pellets) as well as Tunes (they just looked tasty). There was a lot in that shop. Yes, I was a kid in a candy store.

Animals along the way

These are some of the characters we ran in to on the walk around Coningham. No idea who this little chappy was, but there were a lot of them and they move quickly Glad to get even a vague photo.



We were lucky to see the pair of these twice and get some happy snaps. It's suggested that it's a Swift Parrot. That makes me feel quite privileged (although happy to be corrected).


And finally, here's a shiny beetle:


Hopefully more photos soon!

Vistas from Tasmania!

All of these photos were taken with a (BlackBerry 9800) smartphone, and then pasted with the current version of Hugin. Hugin did well to paste together the rather badly taken photos. I have to say that for whatever reason, apparently my concept of horizontal is somewhat lost when taking the photos with the smartphone instead of a camera.

Either way, here's some of what we saw.

Here's the view from Mt Wellington on Boxing day, straight after a sudden "snowstorm". It was pretty cold although the ground was too warm for any snow to settle.


Here's what we saw on the way to Hartzview.


The next two were taken along the walk at Coningham:



In the next exciting installment.... more photos!

What I did on my holidays

An essay by Mr Snerg, esq., aged that and three quarters.

I made stuff! Did things! Went places!

Just wanted to post a few piccies of things to remind myself of what I got up to, now that I'm back at work.

I made some soap! Here's the 3 different soaps I made. The first two batches, on the right, are my usual recipe (vegetable oil, no palm oil), are also as usual rather soft. So the third one I made using about 1/3 lard. I haven't used the lard one yet (still curing), but I am looking forward to finding out the difference. Apparently hard wearing soap is achieved by using either animal fat or palm oil in the recipe.

I'm rather happy with how the colours turned out, and the fragrance seems right too (that one is green tea and jasmine; the other two are frangipani, and lavender).

In the next exciting episode...

Beans, pickles and stuff!

Not a shabby weekend. Finished most of the post-turkey-day-cleaning, although we still have a mystery hat with an unidentified owner. I also pickled the left-over jalapenos (around 400g of them). Never pickled anything before so I'm curious how these will go! I got the brine recipe from http://www.davidlebovitz.com/2009/04/pickled-peppers/ but sliced them instead. In the second jar I topped it up with carrots and onions. Looking forward to it.

We're also keeping track of our beans. So far, so good:According to Digger's club, we should get 1.2kg per vine. That's a lot of beans!

We also have this little guy who seems to be completely unafraid of the chickens:
Unafraid to the point where we recently had an egg inside the coop that was broken in to and then eaten out.

The fridge is ready for Turkey Day!

One turkey is defrosting, the other is brining using the recipe from the Pioneer Woman.

Cooks river eco festival

So in between other gardening endeavours, we took time out to go to the Cooks River Eco festival, held at Ewen Park in Hurlstone Park.

Sadly there weren't many people there to enjoy it. It was quite cool. Had a few stalls with lots of helpful enviro stuff, a few stalls about cleaning the cooks river and surrounds including information about sightings of long-nosed bandicoots in the GreenWay corridor (Iron Cove to Cooks River) that I just had no idea about. There was plenty of kids entertainment including theatre and stilt walkers, workshops for the grown-ups, and also a UNSW demo of a solar powered Wii.

We did get to eat some tasty food. I had a kafta roll and an iced lime juice. We also got some goodies like a shower timer and an LED touch light.

The river around Ewen park looks like this:There was plenty of stalls. These ones were selling jewelery, soy candles, yoga tea as well as eco information:
In the distance is the stage and solar Wii:

On the walk back to the train station, we saw some lawn that looked like this:
Any idea what these are?

Saturday out and about and around the house

So on Saturday we went out for breakfast and coffee (first coffee was from Bean Tampered in Summer Hill and was awesome, second coffee was from The Last Drop in Dulwich Hill and was much less good; glad we bought some beans from Bean Tampered!). After that, we went to some gardening places again! This was the result:

It's jasmine planted at the bottom of the lattice. The funky objet d'art looks like this front-on:
Also that day, the parrots decided to visit the tree next door. Very cool:

Well that was a lovely weekend

So apart from the great weather, it's been quite fun and also productive.

Friday night started with a delicious Mexican flavoured birthday dinner with some Finlaggan for dessert.

Saturday involved ferreting around in the back yard, trying to finally fix the chicken free zone. This involved needing to move a post to a spot that had a suspicious ceramic pipe in it. Originally I thought it was some kind of water run-off, but after digging around it turned out that they were short sections that didn't interlock. And one side was a dead-end. So I was happy to remove the middle chunk to let me put the post where it needed to be for the gate to shut.

After digging, went to another delicious party in the afternoon. This party was cake themed, and not only very tasty but also had many calories. After far too much cake, I got back to things around the house. Did some late night cementing to do a little more finishing on the wall.

Sunday was another beautiful day and involved much gardening. I finished moving the fence post and fitted the latch. I also finally put up the wires for the runners to grow on. I planted some tomato seedlings, and seeds: beans, corn, and carrots. Also some lettuces, and broccolini. Also giving some coriander and tri-coloured sage a go. That was oddly difficult because the planter I went to use had soaking wet soil that wouldn't dry out, as well as far too many root eating grubs. The chickens enjoyed the grubs. I also planted some tomato seeds in some punnets. Might have to order some more seeds from Diggers in the near future, but that Plants Plus was useful for buying some seedlings and a bird bath.

After all that I had a beer and some pizza.

I think I'll sleep well tonight.

Found a new garden centre!

Well, actually, this weekend we went to a nearby garden centre down a street we hadn't been before. For all you Ashfield/Strathfield area people, it's not that far. It's in Kingsgrove. You can get an idea of the place from their website.

So what was it like? It doesn't do bulk landscaping dirt or rock supplies, but it does do a lot of plants and other usual garden stuff. Was very pleasant to walk around. They were about to launch a new catalogue of stuff, so they were a little low on some things but overall well worth wondering around if you are looking for plants or garden things. It also had a decent looking cafe. I didn't try the actual food, but the pistachio friand was great, and the coffee was as tasty as it looked:

Macchiato art

Because I don't drink caffellattes. I've been drinking double macs for a while now, and recently one place has started arting up these tiny delicious caffeinated morsels. Here's what I've been drinking:

We have a real backyard now

I dug up this:

All real backyards have toy army jeeps lost in them.

Fuzzy tree!

So our tiny tree, while it hasn't grown, has decided that spring is good!


It's a lot of fuzzy blossom for such a tiny tree!

The sunroom makes a good greenhouse!

So a few weeks ago, I planted some "Purple tiger" (a.k.a. Trifetti) chilli seeds I got from a friend - some in the sunroom, some in the courtyard. Turns out the sunroom worked well as a greenhouse. 5/7 came up there, as opposed to the courtyard where 0/8 came up.

They look like this now:

You can see the purple tinge in the leaves. They won't be very hot as chillis but they should make a decorative plant as well as a milder chilli option.

Gardening and chickens

So working on the back yard again at the moment. The removing of some grass gave the chickens the best day of their lives. Am a bit worried about the brown chicken (Godzilla). She's got a lot of patches where the feathers seem to be snapped off. Not sure what is going on there. She seems happy enough, and there doesn't seem to be anything visibly wrong apart from the broken feathers.

On the flora side of things, we've been planting things in the back yard too. Mostly natives, like this correa reflexa (Australian native fuchsia):

The wire cage at the back is protecting the fig tree from the chickens. Turns out that they find the leaves irresistibly delicious. It needs two layers of protection to keep the chickens out, otherwise they reach through and pull the leaves out.

No more treekey

So I thought I'd update what the front yard looks like now that the dead tree, bougainvilleas, palms and other stuff has been removed:


While we could and did do a lot ourselves, we resorted to paying some nice people to remove the palms. They certainly earned their money that day and I'm glad we paid people to do it. The replacement plants are mainly banksias, with a hakea planted in the front corner (behind the succulent in this photo). At least when these grow up they should provide a good habitat for native animals that wander around.