I know it’s early, but here it is – the wild-flower for December.
Driving up the driveway one day in daylight (for a change) we spotted a big blue spiky set of flowers. Further research around the place had found a heap more. No idea what they are other than definitely not lupins or foxgloves, but they’re pretty impressive. I like them.
Over the last couple of weeks we’ve had some cucumbers slowly expanding amongst the greenery in the tunnel house, and today we decided was the first harvest day. Three cucumbers off 2 plants. Not a bad start!
I foolishly suggested to Bec a couple of weeks ago that she shouldn’t get too excited, as I suspected we might not get anything like you buy in the supermarket off them. I was wrong! They seem like they’re a pretty good size at over a foot long. I’m now really, really glad we’ve only got the pair of plants!
But at around about $2.00 each for a cucumber at the supermarket lately we’ve saved ourselves about $6.00. Some way to go yet to reach pay-back!
After the visit to the alpacas we continued on down the road to join in one of the local schools fund-raising events. A garden tour around 8 gardens. These weren’t your city gardens, but sprawling country versions. And pretty impressive gardens they were too, on the whole.
There was generally a lot of English inspiration in them, with copious amounts of box hedges etc, but most had a native plantation out on one edge.
We got around 6 of the gardens, but as it was so stinky hot we found ourselves gardened out and called it a day and went home to get out of the sun and stare at our expanse of dead weed covered dirt and dream…
A couple of weekends ago we took a bit of a break from our busy work schedule (hence lack of any posts lately – sorry!) and went to visit some newly born alpacas on a nearby work friend’s plot. Just to make things more interesting they were also shearing all the alpacas now that all the shows were over so they didn’t boil in the heat. It’s a bit different to sheep shearing. I’ve never seen a sheep needing to be tied down to get a haircut!
Here’s the big boy before his trim…
And after. Quite a change!
And yes, the baby ones were indeed quite cute.