Spring garden

Spring means it's time to work on the garden again! It has been quite warm, with days already in the mid 80s. We have started tomato, eggplant and capsicum seedlings inside and have planted greens and root veg (beets, radishes, turnips and carrots) outside. We planted garlic and shallots over the winter which are doing okay as well as fava beans, which only came up so-so. Last weekend we planted zucchini, melon, cucumber and peanuts.

Sprouts one week ago

Sprouts today

Going around our yard a lot of the plants are starting to come back. Last year's poppies are blooming, the strawberries are starting to flower and our mandarin orange tree is covered in tiny fruit. It's still a long way off and there's a lot of work between here and there, but I can't wait for the summer harvest!

A heron in the front yard

It seems like it must be dry if the preying mantis has gone white..

Raspberries!

Peach and apple trees with spring leaves

Back garden bed

California poppies springing back

A line of radish sprouts

This weekend is a long weekend (October 2 is Labour Day) so we have a big project lined up. We're going to work on some hard landscaping, putting in a pathway to the front door and a little patio sitting area between the front yard trees. It will really help the front garden come together—hopefully in a few weeks it'll look really good! When that time comes I'll post some photos.

Gara spring walk

Last weekend we went to Gara Gorge in the Oxley Wild Rivers NP for a Saturday morning bushwalk. It was a beautiful spring morning, sunny and warm with a variety of spring flowers, birds, wallabies, and roos to be sighted along the way.

Shy wallaby

The littlest bird with the sweetest song.

 

Even though it has been dry there were plenty of spring flowers. The wattles have been blooming for the past month or so (with earlier varieties that started in July being done and some of the later blooming varieties just coming into their peak right now) along with many other types of native wildflowers. Most surprising on this walk was all the native indigo we encountered along the path. We planted seeds last year and the seedlings are just getting big enough that we could recognize the full-sized plants. The small purple pea flowers were just starting to bloom. It was really lovely to see.

Native indigo

Wattles

 

The road to the park, through cattle fields.

Delias aganippe (red spotted Jezebel)

 

I had the good fortune of seeing this beautiful butterfly floating around the plum blossoms over the weekend, when I was free and able to take the camera and try to catch a couple good snaps. We don't often see many butterflies, so it was a treat to watch it flit about (and a challenge to try to capture it.) It was a beautiful day! Clear blue skies and a warm wind. It's full on spring in New England.

Springtime (again)

Hard to believe spring is rolling around again here in Australia. I'm sure it'll be summer again before we know it -- at 71F this last weekend it felt a scorcher! September 1st is the official start of spring down under but a lot of the spring blossoms are already on their way out. This time of year always passes so quickly, so we will try to enjoy it while it lasts.

Adventures in natural painting and other house renos

It will soon be a year and a half in this house exactly, and perhaps a good enough time as any to take a look back on the work we've done. When we first moved in there were two big indoor projects we said we wanted to accomplish: painting the walls and getting the floors re-done. As of August now, both of those projects are done. It was a busy autumn and winter: final coats of paint, expanding a doorway between two rooms by removing an interior window, putting in a solar tube in the roof, and the final step of getting hardwood flooring installed. It looks completely different from the house we first saw in December 2015 on our first viewing!

From the first house visit showing vintage carpets and the interior window.

The other side of that window. (For some reason we decided to buy this house??)

 The day the floors were finished with all the furniture moved out of the house.
Now we have a nice open doorway instead of a window!

Then and now: the same vantage point as the first house photo.
The expanded doorway is great and we have finally started using this room. Before
it felt closed-off and uninviting but now it is open and has a nice feeling about it.

New floors!

The thing I am probably the most happy about is the interior painting. Instead of buying paint from the store we bought raw ingredients and made our own natural paint out of powdered clay, wheat starch paste, borax and a little linseed oil. It was great to know our renovations were eco-friendly and wouldn't have any toxic implications at any point. Plus it was so cheap compared to buying paint from the store! We figured we spent a fraction on paint that what we would have using normal paint, considering we had to paint every surface. (Although we did end up buying some latex paint for some windowsills, and the exterior painting we did was store-bought paint.) But the natural paint is a nice soft white and we're both very happy with the color of the sage-green accent we did below the chair rail.

Making natural paint

Mixing the color

Test patches of color

The finished accent (pre-flooring)