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In all the excitement with tools and sheds, I forgot that while the boys toiled away on construction efforts, the girls planted some self seeded seedlings of natives that we had found on Saturday morning when we were clearing out the aforementioned garden. A few cabbage trees, and a lone pitto.

Lets hope that they manage to take a bit better than the first lot from a couple of years ago (more on them later in the week), but we’re out there to water them a bit more now, so I’m sure they’ll be fine… As long as the hares don’t like the taste of them, of course! And they were free, so no real loss!

(The white stone’s there so I can see where it is to water it!)

As we’re scheduled to take on the construction of a full on shed later this week, I thought I better confirm that I can still lift a hammer and wield a saw!

On the list of things we might find handy over the next few weeks was a garden sieve to (hopefully) enable us to attack some of the large piles of dirt that have been dug out of the foundations and separate the stones from the dirt. I suspect the pile of stones will end up higher than the dirt, but we’ll take what we can for the garden!

As a construction project it went relatively well. I’d give it about a 7 out of 10. I know what to do better next time. And given the size of the dirt piles, we might need about 10 of them and some willing workers to make a dint by the end of next year! Luckily we’ve got enough wire netting for about that number!

Big thanks to Megan for modelling it as well so you can get a good idea of scale. We’ll put her next to the dirt pile some time soon so you can compare.

The weather report today sounded like conditions would be much better for spraying, so we loaded up the car again, and off we went. Sounds easy, but we were trying to drag ourselves out of bed as early as possible so we could start in the early morning when we figured the wind would be still asleep too. And just to make it that much harder, it was the daylight-savings change last night too, so we lost an extra hour. Yawn!

As it turned out, the advantage of starting early today wasn’t so much avoiding the wind (which managed to stay away just about all the time we were there) but managing to avoid an hour or two of the baking hot sun! Boy was it hot! And spraying about 900sqm isn’t quick with only a backpack sprayer, but we got there without expiring. Well, I say we, but Bec did most of the spraying in the heat while I did other chores like pulling out fences and rolling up wire. I’m not sure who had the better deal really.

So hopefully that’s stage one towards getting a reasonably big bit of dirt ready to plant some natives on sometime soon. The only small wrinkle is that one of the trees we planted 2 or 3 years ago that we thought were now dead sticks has a couple of itsy-bitsy-teeny-weeny leaves on it that means we’re not quite ready to pull it out. It might mean that in our stand of natives we have a single maple tree with purple leaves*. Hmmm. That might take some explaining! I think I give it a 60% chance of survival anyway. Mind you, it has managed to last this long. We gave it wide berth with the spray anyway.

The real bonus of the day turned up about 11am. A digger! So we were luckily on site when the first bit of dirt got shifted for the house. Well, dirt might be a bit of a misnomer. I think it’s probably 60-70% shingle and rocks, and 30% dirt. But at least some of it might be useful in a vege garden. If we can work out a way to separate it easily enough.

We even managed to keep out of their way most of the time as we were too busy with our own chores. I wonder how long that will last! For us it’s all pretty exciting really. I guess it’s starting to be a bit real now!

Still looks small though!

*That might sound a weird way of putting it, but three of us can’t work out if it’s leaved or leafed in “purple _____ maple.”

One of the nice things about a visit to mum’s is all the bird-life in the bush around the place. At least it’s a nice thing at this time of year when the sun doesn’t rise too early, and the dawn chorus still starts at a reasonable hour!

This time for some reason there seemed to be a few more varieties of birds around, or maybe I just had more time to stare out the window or to go out and track them down. I can state definitively that while we were there I managed to spot:

• A huge number of Wax-eye/Silver-eyes
• Many European Greenfinch
• A family or two of Tui, including a couple that were quite happy to come close and display themselves to me
• The usual complement of Blackbirds
• A couple of fantails, including a black fantail that I didn’t even know existed. These were just way to fast in the dim light of the dawn/dusk bush to even get close to a photo of
• House Sparrows, of course
• Noisy Bellbirds
• A few Doves
• Some starlings
• A Chaffinch or two (not as many as last time though)
• A couple of Wood Pigeons (I think it was two different ones, not the same one twice)
• Oh, and 3 chickens!

Apparently I missed out on at least the Brown Creeper, Grey Warbler and the Song Thrush, but that only gives me something to track down next time! And there’s still a large number of other birds to track down elsewhere too. Who needs a job!

Today we went for a walk in what was  a nice sunny day at the time, we are trying to make the most of the end of summer (we’ve really notice how much shorter the days are getting already)!

So we toddled over to the local ecological park, which is about a 30 minute walk from here and on the way home we stopped off at the local basin which is apparently a bird sanctuary.  The park would be even more peaceful if it wasn’t right beside the train line.  But its nice enough.

Today’s theme for pictures was apparently berries…  so we walked and stopped and took a pic of some berry tree/shrub/bush, oh look then another type and then some more… and so on. It kept Mike entertained, got us both out of the house, gave us some exercise and we got to enjoy the sunny weather.

[Hi, it’s Mike here.  Just a note to say that the reason today’s theme was berries is that within a very short time on the walk I noticed that there were soooo many berries around. It reminded me that one of the women at work that lives in the Countryside (she does seem to manage to say it like it’s got a capital C) and goes horse riding was saying that all the blackberries and apples around the place have got ripe so much earlier than usual this year.

There were also a lot more types of berries that I took photos of, but I got pretty bored cutting them out and sticking them together… Sorry!]

As I seem to be earning a few blogging Brownie points by filling in some of the silence as Jo seems to be taking a well earned rest, so here’s another small filler for you. Meet our lettuce trees!

Unfortunately this is the  last ever sight of them, as the tall lettuce trees have pretty much gone to seed and it tasted pretty horrible. So they’ve been cut down and chucked away. Hopefully the little ones that were planted a few weeks later is still ok.

The rocket’s also started to flower, so I think we’ll have to try that tomorrow and see how it tastes…

I think it’s about time we ‘fessed up. For quite some time now we’ve reverted to buying coriander to meet our cullinary needs.

I think the combination of completely the wrong pot, the parsely for a pot-mate, and our occasional forgetfulness with regard to watering them on some of the hotter days meant that we never really managed to stop the plants bolting.

On the upside, it has meant that we’ve managed to get a few coriander seeds for the next curry that needs them!

Separating all the seeds from the chaff today by swirling a plate around took me right back to trips to the old goldmines when we were schoolkids too. It was almost even fun!

It was about time that I cleared off a few of the ripe chillis so that hopefully the plants will keep producing more and more flowers and therefore chillis. And we also decided it’s a nice night to munch on Bec’s first two red peppers (they’re at the bottom of the pic, obviously)

Note: that is a dinner plate, not a bread and butter plate!

The big green ones are the Anaheims, and the little red ones are Chilli Bombs.

Yum! And best part is there are still many, many more out there!

Woo Hoo!

The first red chillies of the season have finally appeared. A few chilli bombs – one fully red over the course of today, and two others close to full red.

There’s been one of Bec’s peppers that has slowly been getting redder, and now it’s fully red. But it doesn’t really count. It’s a pepper! It does look nice though, I’ll give it that.

In terms of eatin’, we’ve now had the pleasure of three (green ones, semi-obviously). Two Jalapeños and a Ring of Fire.

Here it is.   The first home grown chilli eaten this season. One of the Jalapenos gave it’s goodness for the sake of last night’s yellow yoghurt gloop like we made a while ago.

May there be many more lining up soon…