Nectarine Blossom

Whilst we still have another month of Winter and I have certainly felt the cold this year, our little nectarine tree is already welcoming Spring.



I love to see the first blossoms of the season in our own backyard. :)

-Polly

Mushrooms



It's been a week between posts because my photos are on one computer and my software is on another and I'm having trouble getting the two to talk to each other. So, sorry if the photos in this post don't show up. They're pretty big and very much unedited.

 

Anyway, onto the actual post:

Mushrooms!

Something I love about this time of year (Autumn and Winter) is spotting all the different mushrooms that pop up everywhere. Here's some that I found in our backyard recently:

I mentioned in another post that we saw some interesting ones at the zoo not long ago. I didn't get any pictures of those. I have realised that I don't know a lot about fungi. Any information on the topic seems a little sparse, too. For Australia-specific information, anyway. We did get this book in the mail recently:

I've only read the introduction and a handful of entries yet, but I like it.

Have you spotted anything interesting in your garden lately?

-Polly

Duck Park

There is a park not far from our house that E refers to as the "duck park" because there are always lots of ducks on the lake there. E likes to pretend to be a duck, waddling around and saying "QUACK!"

We have been spending a lot of time at that park lately. It's a nice place for a picnic. There are benches, tables and gazebos, as well as plenty of lawn, for a choice of where to sit.

E loves the play equipment. Here she is posing on the slide:

There's even a flying fox that is "not scary, it's fun". I think perhaps it's just a little scary.

The duck park is also a great place to go for a walk around the lake or to kick a ball around. It's quite a popular spot, so it's good for some socialising, too.

I love this time of year. I sit at the park, with the baby all rugged up, watching E play and looking up at the pretty deciduous trees.

-Polly

PS. Happy Solstice :)

Autumn Garden

In our garden there are leaves turning yellow and red and falling to the ground.

Our smallest tree is giving us lots of lemons which we have been making into lemonade and baked lemon slice.

Nasturtium plants are flowering beneath the citrus trees and parsley has taken over the herb bed.

Honey-snap peas are sprouting in little pots alongside spinach, basil and rocket.

And we're still getting ripe eggplants and chillies.
I wonder if we'll get enough warm days for the green tomatoes to ripen.

-Polly

Green Garden

Happy St Patrick's day. I don't have anything holiday-related to share, but I do have a 'green' post for you. :P

I love how the garden is refreshed after only one day of rain.

I had recently pulled out what was left of last year's silverbeet and left a couple of roots behind. Now we have nice, fresh silverbeet without having to replant.

We have a rockmelon that seems about ready to be picked. Not bad for a store-bought melon that we buried as 'compost'.

The second lot of chillies are fruiting at the moment (we've had jalapenoes for a while now). It's always nice to have fresh chilli to add some kick to a meal. We had a big, red one chopped up in our tacos last night.

I love Autumn. :)

-Polly

Mud Puddles and Raindrops

Yesterday, we finally got a rainy day! Above is a picture of E wearing my old slippers to check out the mud puddles. Last Winter's gumboots are 2 sizes too small.

To take advantage of our first rainy day in what seems like forever, we did some 'rain drawings'.
We got out the washable markers and drew pictures onto ordinary copy paper.

We placed the pages one at a time onto a large tray and took them out into the rain.

Then we brought them back inside to dry,

And that's how we made our rain drawings.

There seems to be no more rain today, but the weather is slightly cooler and the sky is still overcast. We spent the morning in the backyard, E playing on her swings and slide, both of us simply enjoying some much-needed outside time.

-Polly

Back in the Garden

We finally got a cloudy day this week and decided to spend it out in the garden. Our garden had been a little neglected with all the hot weather, but mostly kept alive thanks to the reticulation. There were plenty of weeds to pull and veggie beds to prepare. It is officially Autumn after all. We still have a few veggies that we can use and we picked a zucchini and a bunch of beetroot. We still have chillies and parsley that we pick as we need them.

The flowers that we planted make the garden look nice and bright and they attract a lot of bugs.

E was singing one of her favourite songs this morning (The Itsy Bitsy Spider) and so we went outside again to look at some real spiders and their webs. There have been a couple of decent-sized spiders living in one of the veggie beds for some time now. I would have pulled all the celery already if it weren't for them. I'm pretty sure there are a lot of baby spiders now, too, but they are way too small to photograph with our current equipment.

Sorry for the weirdly focussed pictures. I'm still getting used to my new phone-camera, but it does take higher quality photos than my last one.

-Polly

Corn

Here is some sweet-corn that we grew in our garden this year:

Yesterday we had a "corn" themed day. Some of our corn was left until it was dry and I set these out on a tray for E to explore, with the cobs, husks and silk all separated.

She discovered that she could pull the dried kernels off of the cob.

I introduced her to dry polenta (ground corn) and we made some cornbread using a recipe from "The Joy of Vegan Baking".

E made some corn collages using little squares of crepe paper.

We glued on some real corn husks to finish them.

Some of the husks were also used to make this paper flower:

I thought this might be a good theme for the beginning of Autumn (according to the calendar). According to the weather outside, it's still very much Summer.

-Polly

Spring Planting

So we finally got around to doing our Spring garden. We left it too late to start with seeds, so yesterday we went out and bought some seedlings, a bag of manure and a couple of big bags of mulch. This morning, E and I went outside in the (much needed) rain and planted all our new seedlings in the veggie beds. E also had great fun jumping in puddles. It's been a while since it rained.

Golden Oregano

Heirloom Oxheart Tomato

We've filled all of our veggie beds again now. The new plants are sweetcorn, zucchini, two different types of tomato, jalapenoes, mild chillies, basil, mint and oregano. Still surviving from last season's planting are parsley, beetroot, kohlrabi, red onion, celery, silverbeet, parsnips and one lonely Japanese burdock. We also have some eggplants, oregano, brown onions and older tomato plants that aren't in the beds, but surviving elsewhere in the garden. I'm looking forward to the bounty.

E enjoying the garden in the afternoon sunshine

We pulled  up some of the silverbeet, beetroot and parsnip and the last of the turnips and swedes. They became the base for a minestrone that I made for dinner. Gotta love those home-grown veggies. When hubby got home from work, he installed new sprinkler heads, so it will be easy to keep it all watered.

Happy gardening :)

-Polly

L is for Leaves

We have had so many nice, clear days over the past week, I can't remember the last time I saw a cloud. E still likes to go outside and collect flowers so, the other day, I thought we'd mix it up a little. Instead of going out and collecting flowers, our morning walk became a leaf-finding expedition. E took along her little basket (another op-shop find) and we headed towards a local park where there are lots of big gum-trees. We found only a couple of fallen leaves along the way, but once we got to the park, her basket was soon filled.

We carried it back home and sorted through all the leaves that we had found. Some were long and some were short. Some were green, while others were brown, or orange, or even purple. Some were big and some were very small. It was a really good activity for introducing opposites and adjectives (although E, of course, just sees it all as talking and playing).

E had a great time making collages with some of the leaves, using pieces of clear contact that I had cut for her. The contact works really well for this because there's no need to use any messy glue and once they're finished, the leaves aren't going to fall off. We stuck the finished collages up on a window to let the sun shine through. The morning sun gives them a nice glow, showing all the different colours in the leaves, while the late afternoon sun gives a silhouette effect.


There were a lot of leaves left over after making the collages. I think we collected a few too many, but I may use it as an excuse to do another craft project with them later this week (if they last that long). Most of the left-over leaves were arranged in one of E's vases where she'd usually only have fresh flowers.

I also did a new drawing for our alphabet series (two leaves in the shape of an 'L') and E, as usual, helped with the colouring. It seems that activities with leaves are usually reserved for the Autumn months, when many leaves are changing colour and starting to fall. Doing these activities in Spring, meant that we found a lot of new leaves sprouting (like on our little plum tree which has just 'woken up' after the Winter) and we could compare different types of leaves on each new plant that we found. There just isn't as much variety in the leaves that are on the ground at this time of year.

-Polly

Simply Spring

Each day brings more Spring weather: clear skies, warm sun and cool breezes. Each day we head outside, either for a walk around the neighbourhood or simply to the backyard to pick flowers and run around a bit. Back inside, E heads to her little, wooden table. It's placed up against a North-facing window, giving her a perfect, sunny place to do some flower arranging.

-Polly

More Flowers

Today is the first day of Spring. We have certainly been noticing the Spring weather this week, as have many of our neighbours. The local playground has been much busier than it was over Winter. While we do occasionally stop there, most of our neighbourhood walks are just that: walks. We wander along at a toddler's pace, examining random flowers and rocks along the way. There have certainly been a lot more flowers recently.

One day in particular, we walked along our street and found a lot of flowering weeds on the verge. "Flowers!" cried E. "More flowers!" She'd take a couple of steps... "More flowers!" Because they were weeds, I let her pick some. Another day, we were doing much the same thing in our backyard, and again E ended up with a handful of flowers (weeds). We went out into the front yard and found more flowers and E was quite excited. A neighbour, who was also out  in her front garden, let E pick as many of her 'flowers' (more weeds) as she liked.

We do also have somewhat intentional flowers in our gardens, such as the nectarine blossoms, eggplant, rocket and kai laan flowers and a couple of little pea flowers, all in the backyard. I can't remember the names of the plants that we have in our front garden, but many of them are now in flower, too. There's little purple flowers on some grassy plants and little red flowers on some sort of succulent. There's also a big, fuzzy bush that looks like it's going to flower, for the first time, perhaps this week.

Birds have been quite active around the place with all this Spring weather. We often see green parrots land on our back fence and there have been a lot of pink galahs around, too. There are also a couple of families of magpies that stalk a local park and the roundabout at the end of our street. I haven't seen any of the black cockatoos lately. I know they're quite rare, but there was a flock of them that lived in the local scrub. Unfortunately, a lot of the scrub has been bulldozed to make way for more houses. We people take up a lot of space.

Our garden is also full of insect life. While pulling weeds the other day, we came across some fuzzy caterpillars, some black beetles, some little ants and a whole bunch of different bugs that I can't name. We also have green caterpillars and slugs and tiny little pointy-shelled snails. They all like to eat our veggies. There are crickets and grasshoppers and butterflies and flies. We have found many different spiders. I'd rather not have the red-backs, but the rest are okay. We were quite happy to find a couple of ladybugs the other day. E likes to watch the bees collect pollen, possibly because they're always on the prettiest flowers.

E and I were out in our front garden again this morning and picked even more flowers. I really should do something about those weeds. :)

_______________________________

Okay, I meant to post this a couple of days ago, obviously, as it's no longer the first day of Spring. I am sitting by our back door, right now, watching a storm. It's a storm that's supposed to be worse tomorrow and is affecting pretty much the whole West coast of Australia. E and I did get outside for a bit this morning, before the storm hit, and E collected one more bunch of 'wild-flowers'. Sounds much nicer than 'weeds' doesn't it?

Happy Spring!

-Polly

First Blossoms

Over the last few weeks, we have been watching our little nectarine tree grow it's first buds for the season, green shoots and, as of yesterday, blossoms. Each day it has grown a little more. It's woken up from it's Winter sleep, when it was nothing more than a stick in the ground.

I don't think I've ever enjoyed welcoming Spring as much as I am this year. Perhaps it's because I'm not getting swooped by magpies every morning as I walk to work (now my 'work' is right here at home) or maybe because I have a daughter to share little wonders with.

-Polly

Discovering Spring

I love the light at dawn. It's as if the world is glowing. This morning I got up and opened all the blinds to let as much of that light in as possible. As I opened the blinds covering our back window, I was greeted with this:

Ah, I love rainbows.

It has been raining here for the last few days. We got a couple of hours of clear sky yesterday afternoon, so E and I took the opportunity to go for a walk around our neighbourhood. We discovered many signs of Spring, even though it's officially Winter for another 4 weeks. E loved finding flowers in our neighbours' front gardens, especially if they were purple flowers. We stopped at one flowering shrub for quite some time, simply to admire the flowers. E was quite happy to sit and admire these plants. She did pick some soursobs and a dandelion flower. I didn't mind, as they are both weeds here.


We stopped at a park and E, who always seems to have her head in the air,* called out, "Trees!" It wasn't a bad thing for her to be looking upwards in this instance. There were no walls or chairs or anything really for her to walk into.
"What's so special about these trees?" I thought. I looked up and noticed that these trees were looking particularly beautiful and were full of parrots and galahs. Fair enough, E. I'm happy that you get excited about trees. Perhaps we have a future conservationist on our hands.

E had fun playing on some of the playground equipment and finding treasures like rocks, leaves and seed pods. There were even some tiny flowers in the grass.

-Polly

*Like Hans Guck in die Luft, a story that I only recently heard, but was often read to my husband when he was a child. He heard a version where Hans drowned in the stream.