Potatoes

We love a really good roasted potato. Or maybe a steamed, freshly dug one, with lashings of butter.  This year we decided to have another bash at growing our own. It's fair to say we've not been all that successful at growing spuds in the past.  We get some but not enough to really justify all the hard work.  After seeing an article on Gardening Australia about growing potatoes using the layering method we thought, why not give that a go.  If nothing else, it will save an awful lot of digging.  And we had our lovely, homemade orange pots just waiting to be filled with something. 

Two varieties of seed potatoes duly purchased, we made up a mix of compost, soil and cow, chicken and sheep poo.  Following the method on Gardening Australia - well, loosely following it is probably more accurate - we put a layer of the mulch mixture in the bottom of each pot and then a layer of spuds followed by another layer of mulch mix.   And then we waited.  And waited.  And waited a little bit more until, at last, some lovely green leaves popped up through the layer of dirt.  So, we added another layer of the mulch mix.  And then we waited. And waited. And waited a little bit more until some green leaves popped up again.  We repeated this process until we reached almost to the top of the pots.   And then the real waiting started. Weeks and weeks and weeks of waiting.  Until last weekend when we decided to bust out the hand trowel and dig down into one of those pots to see what we could find.  And this is what we found:

Four and a half kilos of lovely spuds.  Not bad considering we only planted half a bag (or about 300 gms) of seed spuds (the other half went into Mum's garden).  Can't wait to see how the other pot went. 

Needless to say, we cleaned two up straight away and roasted them in the oven for dinner that night. I don't know if it's just because they were fresh, or because we were full of the glow of having grown them ourselves, but those were the best jacket spuds we've had in a long time.  Lovely crispy skin with really fluffy,light insides.  Yum. Barely needed any butter to make them just perfect. 

I've lost the label though, so I have no idea at all what variety of potatoes we planted.  Is there one called Delicious?????
 

Kurliny Tjenangitj Trail

There's a walk we've been wanting to do ever since we moved down south.   And what better time to do a walk then when one is on holidays.  So we got into our walking gear (just jeans and joggers, we don't have any proper hiking gear), jumped in the car and headed off to Honeymoon Pool where the walk starts.  If you've not been to Honeymoon Pool (which is near the Wellington Dam) it's well worth a visit.  There are plenty of campsites, bbqs and toilets and a lovely natural pool in the river for swimming.  And it's a great place to start several walks, including the Kurliny Tjenangitj (which means 'come and see' in the local Noongar language) Trail.  

The walk starts out with a relatively flat trail along the river.  I took some pictures of the water. Of couse I did. I always take pictures of water.   The lovely D had showed us his beautiful photos of one of his trips in America.  He used filters to get a range of different effects.  Filters? There are filters on mobile phone cameras?  After seeing D's photos, of course I had to give the filters a go.  This is the result: 

I like the black and white filter and think I'll be able to use that quite a bit.  I'm not sure I like the filters that alter the colours.  The last photo is the one without the filter.  

Back to the walk.  The first part of the trail runs through the bush, along the river, past some rapids.  I love the sound of rapids and waterfalls. It really cheers me up, I'm not sure why. 

After about 15 to 20 minutes of walking you can either take a left, which we did, to head up the Kurliny Tjenangitj trail to a look out, or keep on straight, which will take you to the kiosk at Wellington Mill Dam.  There is a helpful map at the junction to help you decide which way to go.  We thought the loop to the lookout looked like the shorter walk.   Which it is, by 3 kilometres.  What we didn't understand from the map, is that it's a pretty steep old climb.  It took as a good hour and a half to reach the lookout.  And it was all up hill.  And some of it was really steeply up hill.  But we were rewarded with stunning views and our first orchid sightings for the year.

I took lots of shots along the way.  I haven't included all of them. That would be just plain boring. Like our footage across the Grand Canyon. Those of you who have been unfortunate enough to see even a few minutes of that will know what I mean.  The rest of you, don't mention it lest R drags it out and makes you watch it.  Instead I've pulled out a selection which I hope highlights some of the beautiful bush we were lucky enough to be walking through.

I really like the way they deal with trees that have fallen across the trail. 

 

Just look at the view from the look out. Isn't it just glorious.

This is R standing on the wrong side of a sign warning of the dangerous cliff.

This is me being cross because R is not only standing on the wrong side of the sign, but wandering about in a cavalier manner and making grand statements about it being perfectly safe.

Although, not cross enough to take my sunglasses out of my mouth. 

It's fair to say we were both feeling a bit knackered by the time we hit the look out.  This is the first really properly long walk we've done in ages. So, we stopped for a wee break and some fruit at the, very thoughtfully provided, picnic table. R did point out that the picnic table was in line with the dangerous cliff sigh. Oh well. 

We were also very pleased to find this map which showed we'd completed most of the walk. In fact, it's fair to say, we were feeling pretty chuffed with ourselves. Who'd have thought we could walk this far without feeling too exhausted. 

We were also very excited when we came across the down hill marker.  After lots of up hill it was nice to be going down. Or more across, then gradually down a bit, then gradually up a bit, then gradually down a bit more.   About an hour into the down hill part of the walk, I realised I had partially slipped a disc in my lower back (probably clambering over one of those logs).  I don't know if any of you have done that before. If you have you'll know that walking across flat ground kinda hurts a bit.  Walking uphill hurts more. Walking down hill? Well, that is the worst.  So with every new gradual down hill slope I was getting sorer. But I consoled myself with the fact that we were nearly at the end of the walk.  That is until we found another map which showed that, actually, we weren't even halfway through the walk.  Seems the first map was for walkers coming the opposite direction than us. Darn!! Shortly after that, we came across the sign warning of the steep descent ahead. Double darn.  I spent the next two to three hours walking with very small steps and in a lot of pain.  Poor R had to dawdle along with me and wasn't able to do anything to help with the pain at all.  He did carry my hat and water bottle which actually did help quite a lot because they felt like enormous weights to me.  And the last part of the trail, back out along the water, the same way we came in, took probably twice as long to do and felt like it took ten times longer to do.  Triple darn!!

We did finally make it back to the car and headed home for hot showers, a coffee and recovery.  We did some googling and found that the first up hill part of the trail was only two and a half of the nine and a half kilometres that make up the trail.  Far out. We thought we were just going for a nice, short bush walk.  At least I didn't get any blisters this time (I ditched the Skechers and wore proper joggers).  Note to self though, google first, walk second.