Creativity and Hot Summer Days

 Today and tomorrow are forecast with 40*C temperatures so we are busy trying to keep the water up to some of our plants.February is a sad month for the gardens as most of the plants find the heat too much and disappear under ground.
The seasons are changing quite markedly now and it is drier and drier each summer.
The heat seems to kill any creativity in anything including us humans.
So my little textile/fibre artist booklets are in the doldrums.....

To find something to do, other than housework
or preserving fruit ( I have done 12 kg of sticky figs...and tubs of ratatouille marked as Rat and deep frozen....we won't starve this coming winter....) I thought the pieces of cover I knitted for the booklets and which did not work out, would make little cushions. Purely decorative and useless really, though they could be used to keep jewelry on perhaps, I did enjoy making tassels for them.....

 I forgot to mention the apricots. Last year I wanted Brian to cut the apricot tree down as it had not produced much fruit in its short little life.But he and Anton convinced me to give it another go. So we made a concerted effort to cut and poison all the suckers it was throwing up, watered it and Voila! a bucket full of lovely apricots which I made into some jam (my favorite) and stewed and deep froze the rest.
The tree is a Hunter apricot.

 All this preserving reminded me of a Gypsy saying I found somewhere and which always stayed with me " The winter will tell us what we did last summer".... this could be interpreted in different ways but for me it is to do with food.

This summer the bark and leaf litter of the gumtrees is astounding. I keep on raking it up near the house and putting it elsewhere but it could be done each day, a very contemplative act

We have also had some stunning sunsets this summer but there are only so many you want to record, I wonder what will happen to all the digital photographs we take these days....
The new rose garden has managed to survive so far, we only had one which didn't come out at all
The pond looks awful but the frogs seem happy and the white faced Heron has a lot of trouble seeing the gold fish, we intend to pump it empty when we get the first rains....oh, the first rains.....