Uralla Lantern Parade 2018 / Summer wrap-up

Two weeks ago, Saturday the 24th of March was the Seasons of New England festival and market day in Uralla, as well as the annual lantern parade. In the past the large lanterns have been rented out through a company in Lismore, but unfortunately Lismore had some pretty big floods last year and all the lanterns stored there were destroyed. A group of Uralla-ites (Urallers? Urallans? Urallaians? Not sure..) has been making some new lanterns for the festival this year.

The annual Lantern Parade

A new Uralla lantern in the shape of a flying ram

My personal favourite was the Rubiks Cube

We are well into autumn if you follow the Australian calendar and say that autumn begins on March 1st, but even though the nights cool down (and because of daylight savings last week it's dusk at 6:00pm and night at 7) and the mornings are crisp and fresh, it still feels a bit like summer with warm sunny days. We took a 10 day trip down to Victoria starting from the 25th of March, and enjoyed a bit of autumnal weather in the alpine regions on the second half of our trip. (Separate posts to follow, it would be optimistic to say this weekend and a bit more realistic to aim for next.) Our garden is still cruising along with tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, zucchini, broccoli, and green beans. Remembering last year, we had tomatoes up until we went to Japan around the second week of May, and would have had them into June if we'd been around to cover the plants during those first frosty weeks of the season. Alas! We will not have the 50 odd pumpkins this winter, and will have to buy pumpkins at the store to supplement our measly count of five (one of which we only grew for seeds.)

It was a bit of a tough summer for gardening (again), with hot and dry periods followed by unusual cold weeks followed by hot again, and on and on. It didn't seem as dry as last year and we were much more vigilant about watering, but hot and windy days dried out our plants faster than we could keep up sometimes and the sun sometimes felt so painfully strong even we couldn't stand to be out there past nine or ten in the morning. We are still learning what plants can tolerate this climate and how to take care of them. We planted two new camellias, one which thrived and the other completely dried up and withered. The remaining leptospermum planted last year which seemed to survive the summer has recently turned brown--hoping this is just a seasonal change. We also planted some new peonies in the front garden which, unfortunately, got pretty fried. (Hopefully they come back stronger next year...) As always, a bit of a learning curve, but overall: better than last year! And that's pretty much all we can hope for.

Lily and Bonito in the sunroom with the winter seedlings,
the next round for the garden