Holly Hocks and More

Happy New Year everyone and welcome to 2024.  Halfway through the first month at that.  Time flies as they say.  And that's my poor excuse for the very long time between blogs.  Which, be warned, means I've lots of photos to share with you.  So, if you've half a mind to wade through my ramblings, grab a cuppa, sit back and read on. 

Last year I planted some holly hocks in a pot.  I nurtured them carefully, giving them plenty of water and a feed every now and then.  Between a range of bugs and rampaging rabbits (okay, I'm exaggerating, they weren't exactly rampaging) they barely managed to keep their leaves on.  This year I moved them under the shade of a tree and lo and behold, flowers.  And what beautiful flowers they are. 

I'm keen to put some out in the garden and to share the love.  To this end, I gathered the seeds from the seed pods. Which are almost as beautiful as the flowers and very interesting to boot. 

I like the way they seeds grow in a neat spiral around the centre.  Kind of like slides in a carousel (if anyone remembers those!!). Granted the phots aren't great. They're my first attempt at using the macro option on my mobile phone. But hopefully they're good enough for you to see what I mean.  Come Autumn I'm going to plant the seeds in pots. I'm hoping to have as much success as S did with his Hoyas.  Then there will be holly hocks for all.  Wouldn't that be grand. 

The holly hocks weren't the first of our plants to flower for the first time.  This is a native that we planted out two winters ago.  I'm not sure what it is exactly but it is nice to have a white flower.   Most of our natives are yellows and reds. 

The next photo is of a lilium.  What a lovely, cheerful welcome to Spring it made. It's a bit of a showoff huh.

The previous owners of our lovely patch of paradise planted lots of bulbs, including jonquils which flower prolifically and reliably.  The flowers are beautiful all by themselves. But this year, we got the added bonus of watching a butterfly supping on their nectar.  Needless to say we wasted a goodly amount of time watching it. Our plans to get work done in the garden are frequently undone by the wildlife around here I have to say. 

Luckily we did manage to drag ourselves away from the wildlife to do some work in the garden. It seemd like an awful lot of hard work at the time, but somehow that memory just faded away when we started picking and enjoying the fruits (literally) of our labour. 

The nectarines were amazing (by all accounts), packed full of flavour and lovely and juicy. We've an early and a late nectarine so we got to enjoy those for a long time.  We didn't harvest as many apricots as last year but enjoyed the dozen or so that we did.  R was most excited to pick the first of our Satsuma plums. They're his absolute favourite. We also harvested a small amount of cherries, one prune, some mulberries and kilos of blackberries. The strawberries have also been plentiful and the raspberries are just starting to come in.  Yay.  Vegetable wise we've had more lebanese and bush cucumbers than we know what to do with, an abundance of zuchini and lettuce and we're now picking tomatoes and egg plants.  We were getting quite a lot of beans until something munched through the stems of all the plants.  We've been busy with things away from home so we haven't had time to plant replacements yet.  Oh....and we had some heritage beetroot. Little golden ones, pink stripey ones and an almost black one.  We've mostly enjoyed those just sliced thinly in salads. Delicious. 

It does look like we spend most of our time in the garden and not doing much else.  But we have fired up the woodfired oven a few times. We've mostly baked pizzas and bread in it but we did experiment with a slow roasted pork.  Everything has been delicious but it's fair to say we're still getting the hang of making the most of it when we do fire it up. 

The oven has to get up to between 500 and 600 degrees celcius to make the best pizzas. It takes a surprisingly small amount of wood to get there and, if the wood is good and dry, only a couple of hours. And as you know, I love a good wood fire (a safe one of course) and cooking in the oven has been a joy. 

The dough was made using R's sourdough starter, which is now seven or eight years old.  All of the toppings, except the cheese and salami, are from our garden.  Which somehow made it taste better. 

I will sign off now with a picture of our newly planted, apricot day lillies. The colour hasn't come out all that well in the photo. In real life it's a lovely, deep apricot.  The pot is just outside the door, so we see the flowers whenever we go outside and, on our way back in.  Lovely. 

I will try and post another blog soon once I download some more pics. 

A Strange Thing

R did a wee tour of the pens (as we call them) to see if our newly planted natives were still surviving the rabbit and kangaroo attacks (they are, yay) and he noticed a few of these on some of the plants.

We emailed the pic to our good friends at My Pest Guide.  If you've not heard of My Pest Guide it's a great app that helps you to identify good and bad bugs in your garden. There's real, live scientific type people who answer queries via the app.  They even give advice on what to do with the insects you've found.  They identified this as a Spittle Bug, or Bathyllus albicinctus (Hemiptera: Cercopidae) to use it's official name.  Apparently, to protect themselves from predators, the nymphs produce a little glob of spittle around themselves while they're sucking the sap on the plant. Hence it's common name.

Cool huh. 

Blooming Art

One of the things we like to do, if we happen to find ourselves in Bunbury with a bit of spare time up our sleeves, is to pop into the Bubury Regional Art Gallery.  It's in a fabulous building, a pink former convent that was built in the late 1890s that is worth visiting even without any exhibitions to entice you in.  And if that wasn't enough to tempt you, BRAG change their exhibitions regularly, they're always really great art and they're free.  What more could one ask for.  

The last time we popped in to the BRAG they had an exhibition of flower arrangements in the Chapel Gallery.  These were definitely not your average flower arrangements and I think it's fair that they found themselves being exhibited in an art gallery.  The photos really don't do the arrangements justice, but I hope they at least give you an idea of what can be achieved by someone talented who has a bunch of flowers to work with. 

 I really do need to improve my photography skills.  I guess you'll just have to trust me when I say the arrangements were superb.  I had no idea flower arranging could be such a stylised art form.  They have this exhibition every year.  If you happen to be in Bunbury when it's on, it's worth checking out. 

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.