Friday flowers

Two babies sleeping. Must be time for a quick Friday flowers.

Foxgloves

Poppy

A rootstock rose from a failed graft I think.

Chicago Peace

I am being a bit impatient for the roses to get going. Then I remembered that last year they started when I was in hospital trying not to have the babies! Dear Rob would bring in a bunch of my roses each day, to brighten up my dreary room, and our mood, as I tried to put off the inevitable. 

Our girls were 11 months old (7.5 months corrected) on Tuesday. I can not believe they'll be one next month. I have not shared much of those scary days prior to their birth or indeed the night before they were born. I was in labour, all on my own, as I had sent Rob home, and I stubbornly didn't want to believe it was happening. So I didn't trouble the midwives much until I realised that I had gotten to the pushing stage, then the midwife found out I was fully dilated, with Maggie's head ready to go. The phrase "emergency Caesarian" doesn't quite describe that last crazy rush to theatre (with Rob speeding in from home to make it just in time). 

I've been thinking about it a lot this last week. I may even write about it day by day leading up to their birthday, as I think it is too much for one post. 

Friday flowers

I tend to feel I need to write a lot for my blog posts to be legitimate. But that's silly isn't it?

I love going back and just looking at what the garden is doing. What we ate. Where we went. 

The sage is in flower, I see it every morning from my bed through the French doors.

The roses have started. 

First Prize. 

Kardinal.

It's Friday which means it's cheese night. The girls both enjoyed the goats cheese on our spring risotto last night. So I suspect tonight they'll want to share our cheese too.

Happy weekend.

P.S. I am halfway through part 2 of our weekend away. 

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: yet more roses!

Late again. Still a few roses left to grace our tables.

A bunch of random red roses.

Glorious one of our favourite yellow roses.

Finally Flamingo.

I think that might be the end of the roses this year. I'm inside with the girls while Rob is outside staking and pruning, with Nigella and Claudia of course.

Can't help but share my latest purchase from Devra party in Brooklyn, NY. A kaleidoscope of coloured honeycomb paper decorations to add to my collection. They make me so nostalgic, as my father had a couple he would put up every Christmas. This time I ordered some 12.5cm cuties and completed my collection of 30cm. I just thought they might come in handy to celebrate a few little people one day! 

Friday Flowers

I missed Monday Menu this week, do not worry we ate! I'll try and be back next week. My rose garden is still producing blooms. This week I picked Valencia roses. I love how deep the yellow is. It is also fragranced. They graced our table this week, for my tea breaks, and for a morning tea with a friend, and her 3.5 month old son. Who is the size of our two girls put together. He is already in size 0. Our girls have certainly made the most of their 0000 clothes, Elisabeth is about to move up a size. She has hit the 4000g mark, Maggie is catching her though, closing the gap, she is 3590g.

Wednesday's post came out of nowhere, I have been drafting a birth story, but I was only half way through. I had been describing the last 8 days of my pregnancy: the scary diagnosis of TTTS; the amniotic fluid drains; the stress of the daily ultrasounds to check on how the babies were going; trying to halt labour for 4 days; and that final night before their birth when I had sent Rob home and I laboured alone. I ended up getting to fully dilated with Maggie basically ready to go with only a heat pack and a panadeine as pain relief. I didn't bother the midwives cause I didn't quite believe it was happening. That final crazy hour when it all got scary as the babies needed to be born by c-section and the nurses and doctors later told me they thought Maggie might arrive in the lift! Rob was still at home as they prepped me for theatre and he only just made it, apparently humming the James Bond theme as he sped into the city. 

I'm not sure how or when I'll share the rest of our story. It is emotionally exhausting to write, let alone read, so I will see, and keep chapters of the story for when it feels right to share.

Happy weekend to you.

Friday Flowers: roses

The roses are still flowering at the hut. When I got 5 minutes earlier in the week I grabbed my new rose pruning gloves and picked some more red roses. The pink selection I picked last Friday are still looking beautiful in their vase. 

This dark red bloom is called Black Magic, it produces long stemmed roses, perfect as cut flowers. I think it's Rob's favourite.

These dark blooms are from a plant called Black Beauty. It produces tiny perfect blooms profusely on a thorn free bush, the reverse of the petals actually start off yellow.

The garden will be thankful for the constant showery rain we had today. For the first time since I was sick with mastitis I stayed in bed until lunch. The girls went to sleep by 9.30 last night, but woke at 1, 3, 5 and 7! So this morning when Rob got up I said I would be staying in bed! The girls even let me nap for an hour or so.

The girls are getting so chatty now, they love cooing away to us, and in the last few days to each other. They were 22 weeks old on Wednesday, or 8 weeks corrected. Despite being sleep deprived I enjoy my time with them so much. Even when little jobs I intend to do remain unfinished at the end of the day, I don't mind if I know I spent the time feeding, playing, talking or cuddling them.

Maggie

Elisabeth 

 

Friday Flowers

24 degrees Celsius? In mid May?

The roses continue to give bunches of blooms and it's only their first year.

This morning I picked red, pink and white. I'll keep the red ones for Rob's mother, but the white ones I stuck in a vase I bought years ago with this very arrangement in mind.

Happy weekend.

Friday Flowers

A really quick post. I haven't had a chance to take flower photos this week. Funny that.
But yesterday I picked a few roses that are still producing blooms.

Cinderella and First Prize

I have started to write the girls birth story. I wrote notes within days of their birth, but it didn't feel I could write it properly until they were home. I'm hoping it's not too long already. It wasn't a simple birth by any means.

Happy Weekend to you.
P.S. I think regular blogging might help me keep track of what day of the week it is too!

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.

Frost and Friday Flowers {camellia}

Hello Friday.
Your arrival is most welcome.
Thank you for your lovely comments on my post about my extended visit to the Hobart airport yesterday (and my Instagram followers) it certainly wasn't the end of the world, but was just one of those days you wish you could have over.

What happened this week in our garden?
Our first big frost for the year. We woke on Wednesday to a blanket of icy white.
Claudia demanded to go outside so she could search out dog icy poles (frozen wallaby poop). Sometimes my dogs are disgusting, they are after all, dogs, but still, eww.



We have some flowers in the garden, so I can do a Friday Flowers post. A white sasanqua camellia, Setsugekka

And a tiny pink cyclamen.

Speaking of flowers. My box of roses arrived on Wednesday. It was huge. Inside, wrapped in a big black plastic bag and wet newspaper, were my 40 bare root roses. I can't wait for tomorrow when we plant them out in the holes Rob dug last weekend.


Happy weekend. Another quiet weekend coming up for us I think.

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.

Friday Flowers

Hello, I'm feeling revived after our 1st weekend, today I thought I'd share a bunch of roses my lovely friend gave me last Sunday, the first picked from her garden this year.
She is one of our gardening heroes, I doubt we'll ever achieve her level of garden perfection, but we can live in hope! She has a lovely garden in Sandy Bay full to the brim with roses, flowers, fruit trees, berries and vegetables. Every available space is used. It's just such a beautiful place to visit. I always think as I leave, one day when I grow up I'll have a garden just like that!
These roses smell beautiful, and even though they've started to wilt (forgot to snip the tips off before putting them in the vase), I'm reluctant to put them in the compost.

I'm still waiting to buy my roses from here. I have picked out 40 roses, mainly for use as cut flowers, in red, pink, yellow and white. Every year I get the lovely colour brochure and painstakingly review any new varieties to see if they might bump one off my list. But I just haven't been able to buy them until we have a fence around the garden and some water.
So next winter is the year to finally purchase the plants. We should do our fence in the next few months, and I can't wait to stroll around my picking garden selecting the perfect rose.
(Rob hates growing roses, so I had to promise to keep them separate from any other plant and promise that I would deal with all the pruning etc! I don't mind, I quite like pruning them!)

Our 2nd weekend is looming, we managed to cross a few things off my list yesterday:

1. Sleep in (well a little). Does 8.30am count?
2. Lazy breakfast. Poor Rob was treating me to sourdough toast with cherry jam in bed, unfortunately as he was bringing the plate in to me a piece slipped off the plate, hit my pillow then smeared down the bedhead. Opps. It was very tasty, just a little messy and enforced a bedding washing day!
3. A little stitching of the Maisy birth sampler (I may have accepted defeat about it being for Christmas- I think it might be a 1st birthday gift now). Didn't get to this one.
4. Help Rob clean out the leaf litter from the driveway drains. Or this one.
5. Keep the dogs away from Rob whilst he uses the brush-cutter to tidy up the orchard. Big tick, forgot to take a picture but it looks splendid.
6. Make some cake bunting for a friend's birthday cake we're making on the weekend (this is as crafty as I get I guess!) See below, it was quite fun really!


So we're having a birthday party on Sunday afternoon for my little friend, and I'm going to visit my sister and Maisy. Who apparently is rolling over now and pretending to cough whenever she hears anyone else cough!