The story of my adventures with fibre, fabric and food
I participated in the Christmas Ornament Swap organised by Louise. These are the ornaments I made- not really traditional or Christmassy- except they remind me of summer, the sun and long hots days (we’re having planty of them!) Also, I’m a little obsessed with this fabric. What can I say?
And this is the cherry tree in our new garden. I’m watching them like a hawk, ready to get to them before the birds. I may have to climb a tree, something I haven’t done in a while!!
Yesterday I noticed the tree outside the lounge window has leaves.
When did that happen??!!
:: Stay tuned for my Easy Drawstring Bag tutorial ::
Spring has arrived.
The first snow drop in my garden. Spring must be on the way!
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The nor’wester that blew through today- transforming the pile on my bathroom floor into a folded pile waiting to be put away.
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Pedro- hasn’t he grown? He’s grounded me for the last few months, but I can’t work out what makes you crazier- talking to a cat, dog or yourself. It’s a good thing I don’t have a cat or I’d have hit the trifecta.
…through the veiwfinder of my smart new E-410, as eluded to a couple of weeks ago. Oh how slack have I been? I’ve been taking a photography night class at one of the lcoal high schools- community education is the new black!
A couple of photos I captured on friday:
We’re getting stuck into the lettuce and strawberries! Yum!
Yesterday we finally got the bbq Mum and Dad gave Michael for his 21st birthday out of it’s box and set it up, the proceeded to cook stuff.
(Courgettes, mushrooms and homemade meat patties- yum!)
It’s very cute, and as well as being used to grill you can cook whole chickens in there and smoke stuff like fish too! I think we will have a fun time this summer working out how to use it properly.
Also I signed up for NaBloPoMo, which may be a little ambhitious, and I’m sure the posts will go from interesting to boring and mundane, but we’ll see how we go eh? There’s a badge, and I’ll get it sometime when I’m not procrastinating study for the exam I have in less than 24 hours. Heh.
Step One:
Step Two:
Step Three: Wait 5 months!
Meanwhile, death is swooping over our home.
One week of warm weather and the ants are back, as strong in numbers as ever! At the end of the last ant season I started using this bait- NO ANTS! But I don’t know if the ants died because they ate the poison, or because it got too cold. Hopefully it was because they ate the poison, and I can nip this summer’s colonies in the bud- making it safe for jam to reign supreme again!
But I spent an hour in the garden today.
Would you believe that after I bought that shiny red fork (you can get away with just a fork right? You don’t need a spade too?) and tried to dig in the raised bed I discovered it was actually a pile of wood with about 10 cm of dirt on top? I could scarcely believe it. Who makes a raised bed like that?
So I got a whole heap of leaf mulch and dug it into the bed to the left. Then I weeded out around all the strawberry plants and put some planks down so they don’t get squashed when I’m digging behind them. Tommorow I’m going to get some plant food and put newspaper down around them.
I piled up some more leaf mulch and will dig it in on the weekend.
I’m not really sure that I’m doing this right. Any advice or pointers in the right direction would be most appreciated!
When we were little we had a tape with lots of kids songs on it. One was about the garden:
In my garden, there is a little kowhai tree in my garden, and it’s just about as tall as me. (It went through all the native trees- rimu, matai, pohutukawa etc…)
(There was also one: there are pigs wearing wigs in the garden, eggs with legs in the garden, you get the picture!)
We don’t really have a garden to speak of at the flat- Pedro would soon see to it, but there is a space out the back where someone has had a garden in the past- a row of strawberries that need weeding and some unruly bok choy plants. Inspired by the feeling of picking bok choy and adding it to a stir fry I decided to put a few things in for the coming spring/summer season, so that means starting to grow some seeds and digging over the garden now.
This afternoon Michael and I headed up the road to the gardening shop and picked out some seeds each. I chose a lettuce mix, cherry tomatoes and a zucchini. Michael chose some herbs- coriander, basil, chives and oregano. We made some little pots by wrapping wet newspaper around a spice jar and dunking in water, filled them up with seed-raising mix and planted our seeds.
They’re sitting on top of the fridge in a warm spot, quietly germinating (or at least we hope so!)
In other, exciting news, on our walk this afternoon I was thrilled to find spring blossum begining to bloom. Will take my camera with me and report back tommorow!
