Monday 18 July 2016

Regional Flavours Festival

On Sunday we went to the Regional Flavours Festival in South Bank in Brisbane. It was a beautifully warm day (almost hot!). We saw Paul West and Nick Ritar from Milkwood both talk and it was delightful. Sometimes it is nice to hear your point of view is held by others and that you are not alone. 


While we were there we bought some seeds from Green Harvest, ready for summer. We also picked up a very nice laundry basket to replace our plastic one which is on it's last legs. I don't like the plastic ones because they are made so poorly they break all the time. Now I have a lovely basket which will last forever, almost makes me want to do laundry!


I was also busy in the kitchen. I made kumquat marmalade from 2kg of kumquats. It is super delicious, sweet at the start and finishing with a mild bitter taste. It was a lot of chopping small kumquats!






I also made my first batch of sauerkraut from our own cabbage, we'll see how it  goes.



The garden is going well, I'm hoping the warm days doesn't knock it about too much. The broccoli and lettuce we planted about a month ago is doing well.





I started off on Friday with some yarn for my grandma's vest, but ended up returning and picked up a whole heap of coloured yarn to start the blanket for the queen bed that I've been planning for a while (thanks to an excellent sale). The colours are great and I think they'll look nice together. Here is a photo of them. Can't wait to get started. I have become the person with a big stash, at least I have a plan for it all.



Have a nice week!

Monday 11 July 2016

Quick blogging break!

So, unintentional break from blogging. I've been feeling pretty unwell over the last couple weeks. I got one bug, felt better, went to NZ to play a soccer game and picked up another one. Poo! Well I'm on the mend now, but I haven't really felt like blogging too much, so here I am catching up!

On the weekend we went to my parents farm. We ended up working all day Saturday catching up on OH's work, and drove down Saturday night. On Sunday we drove down to Ballina and I bought myself a used snowboard off gumtree. It's so perfect and awesome, I can't wait to use it when we go to Canada. Then we helped Dad to burn some excess sugar cane trash (leaves). That was fun. Here are some photos.







The garden is moving along nicely. Our mass green plantings are coming along well and the garden looks like it is actually growing something! Here is some new foliage on some of our natives.





The potato box has exploded. The ones in the new boxes are coming up too.



My peas have come up too, I hope to harvest a bit from them before it gets too hot.



Our broccoli plants that we had to trim due to bug damage have now got several (too small) heads per plant. Note to self: don't trim broccoli plants! There are at least 3 heads in this photo, all from one plant.



Our rainbow silverbeet is very interesting to look at too.



And I think this cabbage looks like a giant, lovely green rose. Don't you?


And these are our ever expanding patches of greens.







It's very satisfying to be outside after work and observing all the new life springing up all around me. I wish our garden could be bigger so I could be working in it more, sometimes its very frustrating just watching it all the time! Have a nice week!