Quiet weekend at home - not!

Another busy weekend for us. I had some of my old school friends over on Friday night for dinner, I made homemade gnocchi and a creamy mushroom and leek sauce. We had an unexpected visitor - a 10 month old dog who was scared by the fireworks and ran almost 2km to our house. Luckily we were able to find her owner quickly. I also played a soccer game on Friday night. First time goalkeeping in a loooong time. I had a great time, and I still have some of my skills!

OH visited his Mum last week and came back with heaps of awesome produce. One haul was a heap of guavas, so we made a lot of guava jelly.

It smells a bit funny to eat but it's very tasty. He also brought back about 12 cups of rosellas, so we made a bit of jam too.

We've still got 2/3rds of it left so we have grand plans for a bit of cordial. I also made a very basic soap from soap flakes, water and vanilla essence. It's hardening now and we'll see how it goes. It almost seems too easy!

We also ran around on the weekend to build a cool new seed raising area. It's 3x1m so it's pretty big! We used almost all recycled parts, except for the roof and screws. I am worried that it is too exposed but we'll see how it goes. Sometimes its good having an OH who did carpentry for a bit.

I've also spent my free time digging a big hole in the yard. I convinced OH to plant out the Rosellas, and as we don't get much frost here hopefully they fruit before the lease is up. The patch is going to be a permanent flower garden to bring some bees to the garden. I will post photos of it when it isn't just a patch of dirt! This long weekend we are heading off to my parents farm, hopefully the weather is good. Time to relax a bit I think. Have a good week and long weekend!

Market time!

What a busy weekend!

Today we went to the Green Day Out in Brisbane to try and sell some of our old shop stock. We sold everything half price (what we paid for it) to try and get rid of some stock. We sold more than 60 items so we made a pretty big dent in the stock. Here is our stall.

And here is our lovely spare bedroom with heaps more space. The clothes and market stuff now fits on the 3 racks and in a box.

It is a really great event and an awesome simple living resource. I bought an electric yogurt maker which I'm really keen to give a spin. It seems really easy to use and I can make dairy and non-dairy yogurt. I also got a preserving starter kit which has things like jar tongs and lid lifter. Now I just need some food to preserve and a good book and I'm ready to go. I also got some bicarb so I can make more cleaning products.

Yesterday I noticed that there was a heap of rio in the skip bin from the construction next door so we grabbed it to make a trellis. We put it up next to our peas. We haven't had much luck with trellis' staying up and being tall enough for our plants. This one looks good and sturdy.

Our seedlings are also plodding along, but we haven't been able to plant at the beginning of the month like planned. They just haven't really got past the small adult leaf stage and are really struggling. We also learnt this week you need light coloured shade cloth rather than green for letting enough light in. Oh well!

Hopefully we can plant something soon other than peas!

A Weekend of Microgreens and Dishcloths

Last weekend was lovely. Saturday was weeding and knitting at OH's Dads, and lots of homemade pizza and red wine for dinner. It was nice to have a few drinks (and many more laughs!).

Woke up with a bit of a sore head on Sunday, but after a slow morning of reading we headed off to OH's mum's house. OH and his mum are planning on growing microgreens on a fairly large scale, so Sunday was spent preparing. We built a large worm farm from something that was intended to be a dog kennel (???) but it is totally perfect.

There is a bucket going down the hill for worm juice. We are planning to put a table/bench thing on the plain steel bit on the side. We also did a trial run of some different potting mediums, like coconut fibre, seed raising mix and worm castings. It will be interesting to see which one works the best. We also tried 3 different types of seed to see what happens.

In between all this work I managed to finish 2 dishcloths. 

It's been a while since I knitted last but I seemed to pick it back up quickly and I was quite surprised that I finished 2. Now I need to find a needle to finish it off. I think the weave (?) might be a bit loose, I guess I will see when I try to clean something. Might use smaller needles next time. Here is a nice photo of a sunset I caught last week while on a walk.

This weekend we are going to see a concert on Saturday night, and trying to sell the rest of our shop stock at the Green Day Out in Brisbane. We had a good day there last time so hopefully we will be able to get rid of a bit of it. Have a lovely week!

Easter Weekend

Wow! What a weekend. Spent 4 whole days at my parents farm, which was glorious. Spent many hours on the boat in the beautiful autumn weather. Caught a couple fish, but it was nice just being out on the water. Here is a nice picture of a butterfly that graced us with its presence last week.



We had a heap of eggs last week so I decided to make a pavlova and custard for Easter. Previously I haven't had much luck with getting the pavlova to be marshmallowy on the inside, but this time it worked! I used Rhonda's recipe from The Simple Home, and it was very delicious.



However, in the oven it rose quite large, but it was just the outside shell. Then it all crumbled in! I'm not sure how to prevent this from happening.



Over the weekend our garden survived, and our lettuce exploded in size. Can't wait to have homegrown lettuce in sandwiches and salads again. I hate buying lettuce when it's so easy to grow.



Our seedlings are also going very well. There are some more adult leaves but they aren't ready to plant out yet. They seem to be quite slow growers in the commercial seed raising mix so we're going to try a full worm casting mix soon to see if that helps. What we have planted so far into the worm castings is going very well! But there are also a lot of tomato seedlings coming up :( we need to be more careful what we put in the worm farm in the future. I don't think we've put any tomatoes in in ages and putting it in the compost instead.



My aims for this week are to clean the house before the weekend and hopefully start some knitting. I've got the gear to start to learn again, just need to start!
Have a lovely day!

Wood chips!

We've been helping my Dad to trim some trees over the past few weeks and he wanted to get is something nice in return. So along with a curry dinner last night, he bought us a ute load of wood chips! We've been thinking about getting it for a while to attempt to control the rampant nut grass problem. Here is the garden now:

It looks soo pretty. Now it needs more plants so it's more green! On Friday we went to Bunnings to get some potting mix and have a look at prices of seedlings as a reference if we want to sell ours. I spied a whole bunch of finger lime trees and had to get one! We've been meaning to get one for a while because they are such slow growers but they've always been quite expensive. We got this one for around $18. It's coming out the bottom of the pot so it's time to repot it.

At work we've been having a bit of a bake off and the challenge so far has been scones. I've never made them before so I've made some now and they look awesome and are so delicious! I'm so happy with them. I'm going to whip some cream and have jam with them tomorrow.

 

Hope everyone has had a relaxing Sunday!

My Happy Place

At the moment, my happy place is the garden. At this time of year, there is a beautiful breeze coming off the ocean in the late afternoon. The sunsets are lovely and it is a great time to just sit and watch the chooks. These are my 4 girls. They don't have names. The white one is broody (for the 2nd time this year!!!!) and I'm not sure how to get her out of it. She's a bantam sussex. The brown one is an Isa Brown, and the other two are Australorps x Isa Browns.

We just signed for another 12 months at our place, which is great because it is so close to my work and we have a great yard. Here is the chicken pen with our array of native and fruit trees. OH built the henhouse which he is very proud of.

The trees are all in pots and will be planted when we finally get our own place. Last weekend we went a bit crazy with the seeds and planted heaps! They are going so well considering they've been in the ground for less than a week. We have been preparing for winter, so we planted spinach, cauliflower, lettuce, coriander, parsley, kale, leek, carrot, beetroot and cabbage.

The garden is a bit bare at the moment because we weren't sure if we were extending our lease (hence the masses of seedlings) and we also had a clean up yesterday. Going to get some mulch on the weekend for the pathways. We have a serious problem with nut grass!
 
It's getting there though! We will fill it up, and OH wants more beds but I'm not sure if we're allowed/need them. It was a lovely afternoon today, I hope everyone else had a great day too.

First Post!

Yay! First post!

My name is Kat and I live in Brisbane. I am the ripe old age of 22 and I am a graduate mechanical engineer. Over the course of my life I have figured out that my interests aren't quite the same as those of my peers. My current passion - gardening!

I made this blog to document my garden a bit more, as I find that we repeat our mistakes a bit and I hope that writing it down will help me remember better. I also love cooking, so maybe I'll post some of my favourite recipes too.

This weekend I am picking up my mums old knitting gear and I'm excited to get back into it again. I used to do scarves a few years ago and now I want to try some dishcloths. My simple living journey is just starting and I'm very excited about it. My most recent success is making laundry detergent for pennies.

I have been enjoying these seperate things for a while, but what brought it all together and inspired me was Rhonda Hetzels blog Down to Earth and her books. The forum she has linked in her blog is home to a lot of very fascinating characters, also interested in the idea of simple living like me. Thanks to their ideas I decided to finally start a blog!

Happy reading!