Garden Days

The girls have headed off to Melbourne for the first week of the school holidays, and it is eerily quiet in a very peaceful way. This morning I decided to sleep in for an hour, because I can. I heard Benson pacing around the house and hopped up to see what he was up to. Well, what he was up to was weeing on Rosy's beanbag. Honestly, that dog can sleep in with the girls until midday without a morning toilet break, but on the day I decide to sleep in until half past eight he has a bladder malfunction? And why the beanbag? Really Benny? The beanbag? Sighing loudly for effect, I stand in Rosy's room contemplating what to do next. I have to empty the beanbag to wash it, but into what? There aren't any garbage bags in the house because plastic = evil. I finally decide to use a doona cover (what are these called elsewhere? Quilt covers maybe?). This is quite a brilliant idea as it is so large, and the beans transfer with a minimum of spillage and I tie some string around the top to keep them in. Happy holidays to me.

For the rest of the day I have been pottering in the garden. There has been intermittent weather. Rain, no rain, sun, rain, sun, rain. I have spent the day putting on my raincoat and/or sunglasses and taking them off again. But pottering. In the garden. Happy, happy. There were about a million and fifty seven baby weeds in my newly tilled vegie garden, but this meant that I could get the hoe out. I like hoeing. I also like chanting "Ho, ho, ho," under my breath as I hoe, and chuckling to myself, as this is the sort of thing I find hilarious, which is why normal social discourse is often somewhat of a trial for me (and others).

There were also approximately eleventy-six tiny baby tomato seedlings emerging in the herb garden where I dumped all the compost from my old house. I have great faith in tiny self-sown tomatoes. It usually means that it is safe to plant tomato seeds in the open garden. I might wait another week, just to be sure. I will also transplant the eleventy-six self-sown tomatoes, and see what kind of tomatoes they turn into. There is also baby lettuce popping up out of the compost, and something that may be a melon.. it is always an entertaining lucky dip. Vegetable roulette..

Today I dug lime, blood and bone, pelletised chicken manure and sheep manure into the vegie garden. Tomorrow I will find my box of trace elements and sprinkle some of that over as well. As I plan to grow most of my own vegetables in my back yard, I will get my soil tested for its nutritional profile, but until I do that I will add trace elements (a smorgasbord of most of the minerals that plants and people need in tiny amounts) to make sure that neither the plants or us end up with any nutritional deficiencies. This is especially important in areas, like most of Australia, with nutritionally poor, very old soils. Land masses that have had geologically recent contact with glaciers grinding through the countryside, or volcanic activity (much of Europe, New Zealand, Japan, lots of the Pacific) have much younger and more nutritionally rich soils. Lucky you. For the rest of us - we must take precautions.

Yesterday was the last day of school. We did some cooking and then wrote about it. One of the six year old poppets wrote that she had cooked a CKON. Think about that for a minute.  What did we cook? Here is a picture of a pretty flower to contemplate while you work it out..

 Do any of you clever gardeners know the name of this small, lavender bulb? It has popped up in my garden. The photo is turned sideways but I can't seem to fix it..

Yes, you are absolutely right, we made SCONES. Isn't the English language wonderful?