Day 17 - Spring garden

These are probably not the best photos of our flowers. But with fading light I ran out to capture some of the blooms in the picking garden.





Iris, Ranunculus, Geum, Poppy. Everything is a bit wild, and my original colour beds (white, pink, red, burgundy/blue, orange and yellow) have become a little mixed, but that's ok. I like it.

Friday Flowers

The ranunculus has started, and that makes me happy. 

Some of my freesias evaded the slugs. 

Grape hyacinth and our first rose.

More ranunculus and anemones.

Ah, spring.

Friday Flowers

The grass is taking off at the moment at the hut. Rob spent a happy day in the orchard with his scythe getting the grass down, although I suspect he'll need to be back not before long at the rate it seems to be growing!

I quickly snapped a photo looking from the orchard into my flower garden and onto the hut. It's starting to look really good now, the lilies have started to get growing and my beds are filling up with flowers.


Nigella and Claudia always like to follow us about when we garden, they particularly like to sit on the paths and sniff the breeze. You can see my nicely mulched rose beds (with pea straw) and behind them our happy almond trees.

I think I will see my first rose over the weekend, I've been impatiently watching this bud develop and colour up- appropriately the rose is called "First Prize".

The roses seem very happy in the clay soil, they certainly get plenty of sun and now they are mulched we shouldn't need to water them much. Finally the ranunculi are going crazy, neither Rob or myself can pick a favourite colour, each is so perfect.


Hope you have a lovely weekend whatever you get up to.

Friday Flowers

Today has been a long day.
Claudia woke us at 5am with persistent whining. This is not totally unusual, she jumped up on Rob, yet we still ignored her. She even tried to wake me (this is unheard of, she knows I won't usually get up). Rob looked out the window and saw some wallabies on the lawn in front of the hut and we assumed she wanted to chase them.
The next thing we heard as we tried to fall back asleep was Niagara Falls. Poor Claudia must have been absolutely busting! Luckily she picked the dog bed in our breezeway (with a concrete floor) as a spot to christen when her silly humans wouldn't let her out. We felt so mean.

Then we had to take our car to be serviced, something we always put off as long as we can (maybe we have learnt our lesson here), the brakes haven't been all that great recently. Sure enough they needed replacing, ahem as well as all four tyres. Hmm. An expensive day out for the commodore wagon.

So I wil distract myself and you with pretty photos of the block and garden.

Rob took these last weekend, while I was still snoozing.

I have saved the best tulip to last, the Queen of the Night has just started to flower.

The ranunculus is just starting to get going too.

And these two? They love their early morning rambles in the wet grass, wrestling with each other and munching on fresh wallaby poop.

This weekend I need to get writing, I'm joining in with Sarah's Good Mail Club, so I need to decorate some envelopes and write a few notes. Also on the agenda is spring cleaning the shed and the pantry, both of which have gotten out of control over winter.
What do you have planned this weekend?

Growing and planning

A cool wet week at the hut.
The little seedlings are growing well in the vegetable garden, broad beans and peas, the lettuce has slowed down, but we thought we might harvest some mini rocket for a little salad with dinner tonight. I'm not usually into the micro-herbs thing. We bought a Bruny Island cheese yesterday, a 1792, and it is beyond ripe, it was so smelly we put it in two plastic containers, which may now need to be thrown away! But I'm sure it will taste fine. Friday cheese night is back!


I couldn't resist a little more garden retail therapy this week, and justified it by purchasing vegetables and flowers, it's so not frivolous that way.
So I ordered some (ahem 48) Mary Washington asparagus crowns, some red Ad Rem tulips, Golden Parade tulips, red ranunculus, and Gerbera Garvinea plants in red, pink, yellow and white. Apparently they are cold hardy. I haven't seen any leaves pop up yet from the other bulbs we planted, but I guess I'm being impatient.


All images courtesy of Garden Express and Tesselaar.
It's a big weekend coming up, tomorrow is my niece's 1st birthday party! I can't believe it's a year since I went to visit my sister in hospital and got to hold her tiny baby, less than a day old. She and I are making a Giggle and Hoot birthday cake, tonight we're decorating the top of it. I hope it works out ok.
I might drop by here over the weekend, the weather is shaping up for an inside kind of weekend.

Garden planning {bulbs and roses}

I am so ready for this weekend. This week has been all over the place for me. Work is busy, and I had a few days that were tough to get through. I try not to let work stress me out too much, but this week it did. But by the end of the week I've found some perspective, so it will be ok.

During the week to keep my spirits up, I indulged in some online retail therapy.
My flower garden looks fantastic, but apart from my lilies it's rather empty. So firstly I ordered 250 tulips, 300 anemones and 240 ranunculus bulbs from Tesselaar.

All of these images are from the Tesselaar website.

Next were my roses. Now Rob and I don't see eye to eye on roses. He loathes them with a passion. I however, would love to be able to pick roses for the hut and for friends and family. This partly led to the separation of the two gardens, so that Rob would not have to go near the roses! They are in the u shaped bed that surround the quadrant beds, so even I won't catch myself on a thorn whilst gardening around them. For the last 5 years I have sent away for the Treloar catalogue, which is in colour and mulled over the roses writing lists of my favourites. But eventually I narrowed it down to 40. Ten each of red, pink, yellow and white. They are all hybrid teas, which I know not everybody appreciates, but at the moment that's what I'd like. We certainly have room later to expand!

All of these images are from the Treloar website.

Last Saturday we had another load of soil delivered and Rob finished his vegetable beds. Although not the best time for planting we couldn't resist, so we planted some self-seeded Speckles lettuce and coriander. On Sunday we visited the Tas Farmgate market and picked up some chinese celery, dill and broccoli seedlings from Paulette at Provenance Growers. We also sowed carrot, parsnip, silverbeet, spinach, broad bean, rocket and savoy cabbage seed.

Watering in the speckles lettuce.

Lastly I just thought I'd share a little diagram I drew of our dream harvest year. I've joined in Chantelle's  April Photo-a-day challenge. Today's photo was something I drew. Believe me I don't draw very often. But this was fun. Not so sure about the likelihood of growing tangelos and mandarins in Tasmania, but the rest should be doable.

Happy weekend, I hope to drop by your blogs over the next few days, sorry I've been a bit slack at commenting this week. Well it must be almost beer o'clock! Yippee.