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As we’re just a bit sick of trying to dig down for gardens, we thought we’d give going upward again a try instead. This time we’ve forgone timber for rubber, and taken three tires destined for the dump off the hands of a very nice tyre shop man and plonked them down in a spot we deemed about right, filled them with soil and compost from the mound, and chucked in a few courgette plants. Easy as!

Hopefully they’ll like the heat they should get from the rubber and give us lots of courgettes, but not so many marrows please.

The tyre shop dude said he gets quite a few people in wanting tyres for their gardens. He reckons most wanted them for strawberries, which got us thinking that maybe we should give that a try next…

Yes. Yes indeedy. It does seem that you can, in fact, make a curry containing just about anything! Tonight’s effort was based around watermelon, and I have to say it was actually quite unexpectedly yummy!

Light, but tasty. Not too sweet, as the chilli powder seems to take away some of that. Just right really! And really quick. Think I’ll keep this one handy for a really quick, summer light dinner or lunch.

We arrived home tonight to find that Tony had obviously been around and re-cultivated the soon-to-be-I-hope lawn area. I’m not sure if that was in response to the weather or the slightly probing phone call we made to him earlier in the week. So just a bit more stone burying to be done and then the seeding. We hope!

Might be almost time to get the hoses and the lawnmowers sorted…

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.

A bit of a hiatus has been happening (or is it occurring?) on the lawn project, as you might have noticed. It’s been so windy and rainy lately (interspersed with fantastic days) that Tony the lawn man has got a bit behind. So our lovely patch of dirt has recently turned in to a luscious green field. Of weeds.

But Monday morning Tony arrived to give it all a bit of a spray. No pictures this time, sorry, as we had to just leave him to it and rush off to so some work. Hopefully we’ll be able to take lots of pics of the next stage to make up for it!

I was starting to think that I might have to re-use dandelions for November’s wildflower. Not exactly the same dandelion, but one with a much, much higher flower stalk. (It has to be to stick out over the very high grass that taken off with all the rain and heat lately.) But today we took a stroll down the back to the river to see how things are down there and whammo! Great swathes of buttercups met the eye!

They’re pretty cute flowers really. I like them.

And they saved you from yet more dandelions, so you should like them too!

It’s been a while since we had any big mounds around the place, much to the disappointment of the kities, but this week a new one appeared. A big pile of topsoil and compost for the vege garden.

Yes, that’s right. We’ve run out of other mounds to sieve (and any desire or motivation to sieve anyway) so we took the easy route this time and had a truckload delivered. They even found the little yellow flag I’d left out to tell them where to dump it. I was expecting the flag to be found at a much later time at the bottom of it all, but they obviously enjoyed putting it back right on the top. I chuckled.

I say we took the “easy way”, but we still have to shift it around the place. It’s going to take a few wheelbarrow loads! But that’s still a heap better than sieving! Luckily apart from a bit required reasonably quickly around the spuds the rest can sit for a bit while we track down some timber for a few more raised beds.