Autumn Fruits

 Nature is truly amazing....despite the drought the Jacobean lilies on the left, which are so stunningly elegant,have appeared as well as the paintbrush lilies below and the bees love them. Their flowers appear first and then the very broad green leaves, beloved of the snails, appear next. We had only a sprinkle of rain on Wednesday but it was enough to wake a few things up. I have started to harvest the walnuts now as they are splitting their skins and dropping the nuts on the ground when there is some rain to encourage them on.

 Everything needs cutting back now and it isn't easy to know where to start. Probably anywhere is alright. The lavender bushes have been done but the succulents are another matter. I would like to propagate some of them as they are so hardy and survive our dry climate reasonably well. the snow-in -summer has been earmarked for a ground cover in the rose garden. We are trying to make a list of roses we both can live with...I like perfumed ones and Brian wants ones that look good to him, doesn't care about perfume....we will see!!

 Yesterday we went and had lunch at the Currant Shed. It is a lovely setting with the charming cumquat trees all like small umbrellas against  a background of vines and tall trees. The food was very good we found, I had the saltbush lamb and Brian the dry aged beef with a glass of Hoffmans shiraz/cabernet, they no longer have their excellent merlot unfortunately, but the shiraz was great. The bill was not to be sneezed at but we have to remember to keep the local places going and keep people employed.

Today I took photos of all the fruit our place produces. The Kalamata olives on the right are looking plentiful but wont pick them till they are that lovely deep purple and that may not be till June or certainly late May.I do them the easy way, soak them in rainwater and change the water every day for a fortnight. Then put them in flagons with bayleaves and origano and a brine which is closed off with olive oil. Change the brine after a fortnight or so and then they sit there till needed and they will keep for a year if they are not eaten before then .

 The quinces on the left are being eaten by the parrots but there are plenty left for us to make quince chips with. I brush the fur off the quince cut them in eight portions and cook them in the same sugar solution I do sticky figs in. Cook them in a big pot for and hour and let them stand till the next day. Bring to the boil again and cook for another hour and let them stand. Drain the chips in a slotted spoon and put them on trays of a dryer and dry for aprox 18 hours. It all takes a bit of checking to see if they are the right consistency. Roll in caster sugar and keep in jars.
Everyone loves them and it is easier than paste.

Brian's pumpkins have been a bit of a disaster this season as were mine. I cannot seem to grow the Queensland blue pumpkin which I think is the best pumpkin, only one year have I been successful with them. At least Brian's butternut pumpkins have produced a fair number the photo on the right shows only portion of the patch. His JAP pumpkins which were so good last year came to nothing this year...JAP stands for Just Another Pumpkin...... at least I will be able to make pumpkin soup and scones and.......

Sayings of old

Tonight while enjoying our evening drink on the verandah on a perfect evening full of light and shade, we started wondering about all the sayings we learned over the years....tough as goats knees...rare as hens teeth...lamentation of crows....thick as a brick....
we thought we could invent some of our own. So we came up with "a bounding of kangaroos"....
"as fidgety as a willy wagtail"..."as prickly as an oxtail thistle" ..."a crepuscular crescendo of corellas"..." as spiky as a caltrop"  we could have gone on.....please add some of your own here, remember to press the publish button though!
Earlier in the afternoon my neighbour, who was also my cello teacher, took me to a house in the Aldinga Echo Village to hear a wind quintet play Beethoven and Poulenc. The house has a specially built performance space which was so elegant. We all sat down in the sunken living space and were transported by the lovely music being played by an oboe, horn, bassoon and clarinet accompanied by the piano. I love live music as it has those little human touches you never get from a perfect CD. It was a private fundraiser for a group in Willunga who assist refugees in settling in this country.
It was just a special afternoon.
Tuesday 26th March.
Yesterday my present cello teacher accompanied me on the piano while I played De Fesch 's first movement.I seem to be getting better at counting and so staying in the right place and not either racing ahead or lagging behind.It would have been so good to have learned all this when I was a child, but I am fortunate to be learning it now.
Wednesday 27th March
It is raining this morning, nice and gently but steadily and at times quite heavily.I hope it will put water in our tanks and also fill the pond up. Our gardening man who was here yesterday and has put in the watering system for the new rose garden, and I were pondering on our pond and why the plants just haven't thrived. The water lilies hardly grew yet once upon a time they took over the whole pond. It came to me last night that it could be the Holm oak acorns that fall in the water and rot there. Perhaps it is the tannin in them that inhibits the growth of everything bar the algy of course!!
My music friends arrived about 11am and after a coffee we played our usual repertoire and did remarkably well seeing as we hadn't played together for several weeks.
Late afternoon I went and picked up my friend from Pt Willunga and we drove to Adelaide to hear Natsuko Yoshimoto play Vivaldi Four Seasons with a twist.We had allowed plenty of time to get into Adelaide as there seem to be so many road works now. The Adelaide Town Hall is a great venue for music and the organ looks so impressive always and sets the mood, I find. We had excellent seats in the Gallery so we were able to see the orchestra without having to peer around people in front of you.
The music was fabulous and the Four Seasons was interspersed with the dance music of Piazzolla's tango-inspired Four Seasons of Buenos Aires which was very different and at times puzzling.
The musicians got a standing ovation especially Natsuko.
We drove home via the express way at 60kph......roll on the finish of the railway line as that will be so easy then to take the train from Noarlunga, that won't be till September or there abouts worse luck!!

Achievemen for the Week

 The week started off with the man who re-did our driveway, digging the foundation of our new rose garden. He also brought in a load of garden compost and soil to put in its place. When our gardener came yesterday, he put back some of the overburden (minus the weed roots!) and then dug it all over. What amazes me always,is, how nowadays, a man with a little machine can accomplish in half an hour what would have taken us days to do with a spade.The two potted roses in front "Fire and Ice" & "Ian Thorpe"will be planted as soon as the watering system is in.

I will never buy a potted rose again unless I can plant it out straight away as you are stuck with watering and feeding by hand all over the summer.
The pump man came on Tuesday to repair the badly leaking rainwater pump. We rely on rainwater for hot water and showers and miss it badly if it isn't working properly. The tanks are getting very low now, the rain we have had hardly registered. Wednesday my piano friend came and we played De Fesch Sonata and Vivaldi Sonata III. Before lunch Brian and I went to see our GP for him to give Brian his last injection  and being in an injecting mode he also gave us both our flu' shot. Late afternoon my computer friend came to check the health of my laptop which had refused to start properly. He showed me a video of a cuttlefish he had filmed while scuba diving at Rapid Bay. It was fascinating as the creature changes color and texture of the skin to blend in with its surroundings when it felt threatened.How marvellous nature is.

The slightly cooler weather has brought up the Candelabra Lillies , their impressive heads on tall elegant stems. I noticed the Paintbrush lillies have started to appear too. Everything else is hanging out for a decent rain. We had an English visitor here yesterday who was most impressed with our diversity of gum trees and amazed at the huge cracks we now have in the soil.It is lovely to have some one genuinely interested in ones wild garden. Have started gathering the walnuts which are splitting out of their husks.It will be good when they are all harvested as the Corellas and sulphur crested Cockatoos are keen to beat me to them. There were hundreds of them this afternoon and took a photo of them in the Sugargum.
We will all be pleased when they migrate to their winter breeding grounds where ever that is, as their noise is deafening and no one is prepared to cull them.A thousand of them breeding will double their numbers again and they are not really native to this area. They are tearing up all the ovals and playing fields eating the grass roots and doing untold damage to trees as well.

Knit weaving with tactile yarns

 Knit-weaving on my Brother 860 with my knitleader,using fancy or handspun yarn, is a real passion of mine. Now that the cooler weather has arrived I will start getting my yarns out and have them where I can display them, re-organise them and generally play around with the colours till something pleases me . Then of course the work of swatching starts and various patterns tried out and colour combinations, washing the swatches to make sure they don't shrink unevenly as the base yarn may shrink at a different rate to the weaving-in yarn. Or that the colours may bleed or that the end result is not appealing after all and the process will start again.
On the left is a red wool base yarn with an acrylic fancy yarn woven in ,some one gave me because they were unable to find a combination that pleased them. I used a 1by1 card but I wove the yarn every 3rd row as it was quite bulky.

On the right are three of the mannequins I dressed in some of the swatches I did a couple of years ago. I used recycled jewelry to embellish them. The one of the left is knit-woven in a sequence of ten every-second row and then ten tuckstitch. In the middle is a fairisle in black and white boucle acrylic, the pattern is in the 970 book of patterns, which is upside down in the book so it needs to be turned around. On the far right is a woven-in boucle yarn and again, interspersed with rows of tuck stitch.

The jacket on the left is again done with the 1by1 card but woven every 4th and 5th row.It is a lovely soft wool background yarn with a 12ply Alpaca weavin-in yarn. The scarf is loom woven in India of an acrylic yarn. I do knit scarves of cotton/ wool mix on the single bed and have needles out of action and select middle needles to tuck for 4 rows alternating with stocking stitch and 4 rows of alternate needles selected. Done on a large tension they work out to a soft, manipulative piece of fabric.
Today I saw some lovely knitteds done by members of the Passap group. The ability of the Passap machine to tuck over a lot of rows is quite remarkable.
Who knows, perhaps I'll do some weaving again soon......

Leafy Seadragon & Paper wasps

 What wonders we have on the Fleurieu Peninsula!! My friend who lives right in Willunga, sent me these pictures of the Paper Wasp (Polistes humilis) nest she found they were building right in her back yard on the pedestal of a stunning metal sea eagle sculpture she has there. She moved to within an inch of their nest to take macro photos and instead of attacking her ( which they will do if they feel threatened!) they merely all looked up with heads in unison when the "click " of her camera went off. How good was that!!, it reminded me of scenes in "miniscule"that delightful film clip we see sometimes before the evening news....

As you can see quite clearly here their hexagonal

chambers are made by chewing woody fibers mixed with saliva and left open and eggs are laid in this. When the young hatch they are fed on a diet of chewed up caterpillars. Unlike European wasps, they will not annoy humans by sitting on the picnic table and taking liberties with a lamb chop or the jam jar.I for one , am happy for the Paper Wasp to eat all the caterpillars they can find.Not that we seem to have had much bother with them this year, earwigs were worse...

The other creature that lives in our sea around the Peninsula, is the Leafy Seadragon. His formal name is Phyodurus Eques and he belongs to the Sygnathidae family which are the Trumpet fish. I was as excited as my photographer friend when he told me that on his scuba diving expedition at Rapid Bay, he saw and photographed the dear, colourful creature in all its natural glory, they look breathtakingly beautiful on a photo, so what it must have been like to see it real and alive would be beyond description....I feel very privileged he sent me these photos and has allowed me to share them with you...hot off the press!!
I am not sure what the little fish is with him, and if anyone reading this ,knows, I would be pleased if you could post the name on the comment box at the bottom of this blog.And of course they are "hims" because the male of this species carry all the young. Wonder how the female of the species persuaded the male to take over all the responsibility of child rearing? Could we girls learn something from this?

Phonognatha graeffei

 Phonognatha graeffei is a leaf curling spider which lives in our pommegranite Shrub.Wikipedia has a very good article on them. Interesting creatures, they cohabit in the same leaf, though on opposite ends!!!I have tried to get the outline of the web, which in itself is facinating as it is half circular and the leaf opening faces the top of the semicircle. They make a new home it seems every ten days or so. I confess to being an arachniphobe yet this afternoon I brushed a huntsman off our bedroom ceiling into a bucket and carried it outside because I thought he might fade away without anything to eat. He escaped of course into some clothes but I managed to get him and take him out to the rose garden.

 The other interesting thing happening because of the drought, is that our soil is cracking very badly. I have taken photos and used Brian's trick of putting a match box next to a crack to show the proportions. Our neighbour once lost some chickens down these cracks and was only able to retrieve two.The other one no doubt finished up in China!!
The other thing that is intriguing is that I have  tan brown iris a friend years ago sent me from Tasmania. It has been transplanted from Watervale twenty years ago, to our garden here near Willunga. It has the amazing habit of flowering in March and the one in the photo I saved from last year and planted close by the house so I wouldn't loose it again.

I have never seen this colour iris in a nursery anywhere. They are such hardy plants the Iris family, surviving here in our heavy soils with very little attention. Must admit we lost a very dark purple, almost black iris in a drought some years ago when we were also on water restrictions. Our waterbill will be huge this season unfortunately but we look on it as an alternative to travel. It is great to have a place which is lovely to live in and we enjoy our surroundings muchly!!!

Black Dog in Myth and legend

References to the Black Dog seem to be mentioned all over the world: Siberia, North America, Asia, India, Egypt ,Greek myths and legends Celtic and English stories.
Black dogs were known as psycopomps and were considered guides to the other worlds and as guardians of the boundaries.
In Egypt it was represented as the jackal headed Anubis and that cult was older than the cult of Osiris.
In Greek legend he was attached to the goddess Hecate who is also linked to Dog star Sirius. Her pet dog was Cerberus watch dog at the entrance of Hades. ( My brother started his naval career in HMS Cerberus !!Hmmm what does that say about the training of young sailors ?)
In Celtic myths they were known as Hell hounds and connected as part of the wild hunt. The myth is common across Great Britain and mentioned as early as the 10th Century.
In Chambers' Book of Days of 1864, he includes an article on Spectre Dogs which said that to have a black dog on the back, was a common phrase.
In a brief history of Black dogs as a Metaphor for Depression by Paul Foley, he mentions that nannies in the nineteenth and early twentieth century would tell their charges if they were in a sulky mood that they had a black dog on their back. As Harry and his sister were brought up by a nanny it may explain why he used to say he had a black dog on his back when he was feeling black and fretful.

This is only a tiny sample of what is available on the "black dog". There are many stories to choose from about Cerberus the three headed guard dog of the Underworld. Orpheus is reputed to have enchanted Cerberus with his beautiful music and so get into the Underworld to retrieve his dead wife. Another story is where King Eurystheus assigns the task of capturing Cerebus in the Underworld to Heracles. Several gods help Heracles to get through the entrance and he is able to ask permission from Hades to take the dog. He is allowed to capture the dog but is not to use any weapons. Heracles succeeds and slings the dog over his shoulder and carries him to King Eurystheus. The King is so petrified of the dog, he asks Heracles to take it straight back in return for releasing Heracles from his other tasks.

My task last Thursday was to take some brilliant photos in the Mt Lofty Botanic Park. Unfortunately I couldn't get close to the rather interesting steel structure across the lake because they are re doing the paths and building stone steps so that was closed to the public.
On the right is a bank of red shrubs which we couldn't identify but they looked very attractive against the different shades of green. There were some dear little blue wrens hopping in and out of the undergrowth, next time I hope to have my better camera and capture them.                             The renovations of my friends gardener's cottage is slowly progressing. He has repositioned the interesting fireplace in what is going to be his siting room. His front garden is already taking shape and the bulbs will be popping up with the first rains. Oh, how we long for rain!!