A meadow in a vase

I asked what I could bring... she hesitated then said "Flowers.... from your garden, please".

So, while the dew was still holding on and the morning air crisp with a touch of autumn, I took my flower-picking basket and the secateurs out into the garden.

The first thing I saw through my flower eyes was a stand of tall leek stalks, in full bloom. Snip, snip, snip as 3 of the balls fell into my hand. Next, the vivid blue of chicory flowers, on long, waving stems. More snips. Out through the Pickle gate to the long, narrow bed next to my window.... lavenders, 3 or 4 kinds, all looking magnificent for a basket of tall stemmed flowers.

Then I had to make a decision.... was this going to be a rainbow of yellows and reds and blues and pinks or would a more natural, autumnal feel be better? I glanced around and realised that the rainbow flowers all had short stems and I was doing long stems.... it would have to be the natural look of the meadow, highlighted with the lavenders and such..... I think it turned out beautifully.

 

Into my mind sprang a comment made by a visitor yesterday "You have let parts of this garden get away from you." I was shocked, dismayed and a little annoyed "No! I have let parts of this garden come to me." I replied. And come it has. In France it is common to let a patch of your land relax and become a meadow, cutting it only once the seeds have dropped and the old life finished. Look at these photos, see what I saw this morning and tell me if you think it would look better as a flat, green, mown canvas or as this painting of life and haven for insects, birds..... and Pickle's lost ball!

My seat by the pond.

Organic vegetables, with added oil and food miles

Are we home gardeners getting away from the real meaning of organic? Should it mean just that our peas or the apples are grown organically and therefore is it ok to disregard the fact that they were grown in a plastic house, fed by water in plastic pipes, labelled with plastic labels and stored in plastic bags ?

Plastic is made from oil, mostly in places far away from where we live. We cannot legitimately say we are reducing food miles if the produce is raised in plastic houses. I even disagree with calling such food "organic" and free of artificial chemicals when so many chemicals have been used in its manufacture through the production of plastic.

I don't want to upset people who have just invested time and money in setting themselves up with a poly house and I understand that glass can be more expensive and certainly more time-consuming to construct, but there is a limit to how much plastic you can use and still call your food organic, I think.

Living in Tasmania now, I fully understand why a bit of extra help with getting things going and producing before the end of summer comes, is so necessary but, oh lalalala, isn't there another way? And I did not believe that the mad scheme of the South Australia government's to fill everyone's gardens with hundreds of metres of plastic drip irrigation was an intelligent way of dealing with a water shortage primarily caused by very poor government regulation on water licenses along the Murray River!

If we are truly seriously trying to live a greener life by growing our own, organic food we MUST stop investing in oil-based props to do so and, in fact, to do most things in our lives. Of course there are always compromises and I am as guilty as anyone else at not always taking the greenest option on things. Anyway, here are some of my ideas:

Find old windows before you start making your hothouse frame. Think outside the square and not follow some pre-conceived idea you have about what shape a glasshouse should be. I recommend collecting as many louvres as possible so you have ultimate control over the air flow and temperature... or putting hinges on old windows you find, or using sliding windows.

(Photos from Garden Web)

Also on Garden Web is this fabulous one and all the details on how they did it:

I am hatching a plan..... making use of a little studio I have already..... thinking, thinking...  always outside the square. (I have never understood that square and didn't even know there was one until a few years ago!)

 

Here is my little studio which, oddly, has south facing windows but a roof that slopes north.... so.... if I were to remove the overhanging buddleia and build a glass section on the northern side, I'd have THE most perfect glass house and potting shed all in one!

 

 

A Pickle update.....

Pickle is scanning the garden for rabbits. His feet are actually on the outside window ledge! Such simple pleasures.

If you go down to the pond today....

you're in for a nice surprise.

Some time ago I bought some more of the spent mushroom bags.... I waited and waited and no mushrooms grew. So, I carried them down to the other side of the pond and stuck my fork through the bottom of the plastic bag a few times. Then I dug a little hole in the mixture, put in a handful of garden soil and 2 pumpkin seeds. It was still cold back then so I pegged shut the top of the bag which made it like a little hothouse.

I put them down by the pond so that the roots will find the water later, and they might also help to smother a bit of the grass so I don't have to mow it. It meant also that at the time, I could sow the seeds without preparing the soil and without risking them being overgrown by grass before they got going.

After a while there was suddenly a hot couple of days and I forgot to unpeg the bag... and then I did unpeg it and it turned cold.... then it dried out.... oh what rough life for those pumpkin seeds and its no wonder they refused to appear for ages! One of them was then eaten off by a snail that left its slimy trail.

We have had a week or so of on and off humid, warm, damp weather.... nothing like the floods in NSW and Qld or the storms in SA, just quite pleasant really. In that week all 3 of the pumpkin experiments have taken off but not only the pumpkins.....

Mushrooms.... in summer! I could barely see the pumpkin seedling as the whole bag was brim full of mushrooms. They weighed more than a kilogram and were more than I could carry! Last time I looked there was only the slimy snail trail and the remains of a seedling and definitely no mushrooms!

So, guess what I am having for dinner, with my compulsory serve of broad beans!

 

Last night I had such a simple, delicious meal of broad beans and here is what I did....not exactly a recipe, more just an idea for you to adjust how you please and it began like this....Late yesterday afternoon I was sitting shelling broad beans and blanching them whilst listening to the ABC 891 Adelaide radio and hearing about the amazing rain and thunder storms which my mother had told me about earlier in the day. It got later and later and I wanted to finish the job..... soon I was hungry, it was 10 to 7 and there was no dinner in sight.... 

Crushed Broad Beans on Toast

.... so I grabbed a handful of hot, blanched broad beans and put them in a bowl. I crushed them coarsely (I had not cooked them much... just blanched) and added a slug of olive oil, some pepper.... all the while thinking about what to do next. I had a lovely, mini foccacia in the freezer made by Cam who sells them at the market here, so I thawed it out and toasted it under the griller. Into the bowl of broad beans I added some semi-dried tomatoes, some seeded olives and some mint leaves. I crushed it all a bit more. I wanted to watch the news at 7 so I did not add anything else, just piled it all on top of the foccacia and took it in the lounge on my tray.

It was so amazingly delicious.... I even told Pickle about it and he cocked his head on one side, as Jack Russells do, and looked at my plate; he'd eaten quite sufficient amounts of broad beans in the garden and then again while I'd been shelling them and dropping the occasional one on the floor in the kitchen. He had no desire for any more!

Bon appetit.

Pickle goes to Africa....almost.

	Pickle has been enjoying watching TV lately; in particular the BBC's "Last Chance to See" series, about endangered animals.
	Later, he stared out the window, gloomily, thinking how exciting it would be to be a whale or a gorilla or a rhinoceros.... life would be much more exciting in the wild than in his garden...
	.... so he attacked the last remains of his cane basket....making out he was wrestling a lion or fighting off sharks...
	.... until he had another idea.... better than all the others....
	This idea required some serious gardening in a newly watered vegetable bed
But no matter how hard he dug, no matter how much he tried, he could not quite cover himself in enough mud to feel like a real hippopotamus.... but he'd had a lot of fun trying!

Postcard from 43 degrees south, 147 degrees east....

That is approximately where Cygnet, Tasmania is.

I love to read Barbara's Postcard from Paris, where, for some years, she has been writing about her own garden, sweet scenes of the French countryside and rustic musings. Here is a video I just found there .

Herbiers

I have such a diverse range of beautiful plants in my garden this would be a lovely way of preserving them as well as finding people to identify them for me, even after they have finished flowering.

I like his idea of, for example, preserving all the plants on a particular farm or geographic area.

 

 

It has been raining solidly since the middle of the night so I lit the fire this morning to keep Pickle and I warm while we laze through Sunday. For breakfast, on the firebox I heated the apple pie I cooked last night, and made my espresso coffee. Cloud has obscured all of my view.... it makes me feel like I am living in the wilds of some remote island.... well, from most places in the world, I guess I am!

Pickle is bored. What is a dog to do on a rainy day but stand on the verandah and dream of digging up bones and chasing rabbits?

Hi..... I'm Pickle

 

Hi, I'm Pickle and I can do all kinds of cool stuff with my ball. There is a new trick I have just invented. I got Kate to take some photos of it for you..... it starts with me getting up on the couch with my favourite ball.....

 

 

 

 

 

First, I make out I am hiding the ball between the cushions on the couch......	Then I grab hold of it like this....
Then I do this fun manoeuvre...	and end up all dizzy, wondering what happened to the ball.....
Did you see me?	Here's me practicing my tricks with my outside ball.
I also love pots because you can throw them in the air, you can put your feet or your head in them and there are hundreds of them at my place!	Most fun of all is making out I am an otter and sliding down the bank into the pond. But when I come racing inside all wet and muddy I get put out again. Not sure why!

I'm dreaming of a white........

After a calm and sunny winter, I thought I'd got off lightly for my first cold season in Tasmania. But wild weather has been building out at sea, down near the Antarctic, for days. And it has begun lashing Tasmania, blowing out the plastic on my gorgeous little glasshouse door and almost tearing it off its ancient hinges; crashing through the trees like a runaway train, and sending my thermometer flying off its sturdy nail on my verandah, right out into the garden!

The rain has filled my dam which is now flowing out of its spillway. The creek is a torrent and what was just a merry trickle through the cow paddock, is now an angry river. We still mostly all braved the weather and headed off to the food forest for gardening this morning. Luckily Celia, our fearless leader, had brought seeds for us to sow and it was really very pleasant in the poly tunnel, sheltered from the worst of the wind and horizontal rain by the shed.

However we soon unanimously agreed that the pub was a far better venue for such a day. Celia had arranged for us to show a DVD about an inspirational Austrian bloke taking Europe by storm with his wonderful natural farming style.

Pickle and I spent the afternoon inside where the fire was our focus. I mostly read.... and ate... and watched the storm! Pickle was very relaxed during even the fiercest of wind gusts.....

 

 

 

 

The talk in town is that we might wake to a white Cygnet tomorrow.....

Pickle helps with the photos.....

Winter is slowly turning to spring here in south eastern Tasmania. I am seeing apricot, almond and other blossoms, grape hyacinths, daffodils and all sorts of flowers I have never seen before. Everyday new buds are revealing their inner beauty and fresh green leaves are shyly peeking out from dormancy, into the changeable spring weather. There are too many photos for one post to upload so I will divide it into two......

The brilliance of this blue.....	.... belies its minute size!
This japonica was first to bloom and it seems its show is never ending	The daphne's scent is as outrageously sweet as is the intense blue of the grape hyacinths
...and still more blue of something-wort, I think.	Pickle was ever helpful with selecting which plants to photograph!
The hellebores are such a delight under the trees	Leukodendrons are some of my favourites