January 1st 2021

Hi lovely readers.

Did you have an excellent New Year's Eve?

We spent it with friends that we seem to share NYE with most years.  To be honest, I'd be fine being at home in bed but that doesn't seem to happen, and now with a 16 year old daughter who is fully embracing the party life, if I'm not out celebrating myself I can see I'll have to sit up till midnight anyway to collect her from whatever party she is at.

Which is what mums do, isn't it?  Either drive the husbands home or the children.

I took a stroll around our garden last night before we went out and photographed it.  This time of year is the most productive in our small vegie/fruit patch.  The photo above has the thyme and oregano that have both gone to seed, but the flowers are so pretty on both, I don't mind letting them grow a little nuts.  But they are both overflowing onto the path, so it's time to give them a haircut.

The strawberry patch remains enormous and every year it gets cut back to within an inch of its life, no delicate pruning here.  The whippersnipper gets run over it and I think 'that will never grow back' but it always does.  Consequently we have a freezer full of strawberries that I don't know what to do with.

There is also a resident sleepy lizard in there somewhere, he always manages to scare the living daylights out of me.  Despite KNOWING he's in there, I always get a shock when I put my hand on something moving and scaly.  

Loads of tomatoes have been planted this year.  I didn't plant anything that I find hard to grow here, so this year was many tomato plants, cucumbers, capsicum and chili.  I make a mean chutney, and also a great sweet chili sauce too, so I plant those.

I used chook manure this year hauled from the chook shed.  Normally my husband does that job but he had a back operation and that put him out of action most of the year so it fell to me.  I didn't remove some of the chook food from the dirt I stole out of the chook shed, and had the added bonus of many lovely self sown things, mostly sweetcorn and sunflowers.  

You can always find basil in my garden.

The plum tree is heaving with fruit, and due to a fruit fly outbreak here we aren't allowed to remove the fruit from a 15 kilometre radius, so it's all sitting there taunting me.  Normally I give buckets away, but this year I am guessing I'll have to cook it up myself.  I normally make a plum sauce from this, we don't like plum jam here so I'm just going to have to try and get to use it all up myself.

The apples are far from being ready, but they are growing very well.  They grow too big, which is a problem because I would normally put them in lunch boxes but they don't fit.

Many, many nectarines also - I don't think they will get used either as we can only eat so much fruit ourselves!

And our one, solo avocado growing on the avocado tree.  We have so little luck with them.  My husband is treating this one like a newborn, trying to get it to maturity.

And finally, a gloriously blooming self sewn Sunflower.  

Hope you get a minute to sew today!