Grape Harvesting the Modern Way

The grape harvest in this area has been very early this year. They started harvesting white grapes mid February, which is at leas three to four weeks earlier than usual. Most of the harvesting is done during the night now because of the cooler conditions. The machinery thunders down the road, most of them lit up like Christmas trees with flashing lights in reds and white. the little tractors too, make a lot of noise as they trundle their empty bins behind them on metal wheels.

 My neighbour told me his harvest has been good despite the fact it has been such a dry season.

Now here is my new chook Mansion, it has sat in its' flatpack in the shed for the last couple of years and at last I had an enthusiastic friend who cheerfully offered to put it together for me and while I held the sides up, my friend put in bolts and nuts and screws and Bingo!! a new house for some lucky chooks to come and live here. Will I have to make curtains for the window? I'll wait and see how private the birds want to be...

 While cleaning up the old yard and little shed, I cut back a lot of creepers and this revealed the Morning Glory vine with its' stunning blue flowers and the pretty red berries of the Pepper tree. Mind you, the Glory vine would take over the world if you let it, a bit similar to the Banana passion fruit vine which is such a pest in our garden and I don't know how to get rid of that, its roots break easily so you can't trace it to its source.                                                        

The Batwing was knit woven with a two ply pure wool and a mohair fancy yarn with little shiny loops in various colours which unfortunately doesn't show up too well in the photos.
It was quite difficult to weave in as the mohair is inclined to hook onto the needle bars and I had to break the fibres or lift them off the bars nearly every row. Nevertheless it has turned out well and is a light weight garment with knit woven cuffs.
Click on the photos to get a closer look won't you....
My next project is..... I'm not sure....

Migration & The Watering hole of Galahs

 Here at last is another Artist Booklet,  this time it has turned out to be about Migration.
Not Migration of humans but of animals, birds and insects. The cover is knit-woven using a mixture of fine cotton threads in various colours for the back ground. The weaving-in yarn was an Annie Blatt yarn called" Seychelles "and it is composed of small oblongs of yarn on a thread, which does make them look like a string of islands, so it was a natural choice for this project.

 In my effort to be accurate in lining up the pages and covers before punching holes for the cord to go through and bind the lichen covered wooden twig from the Golden Raintree , so making all secure, I forgot to check the sequence of the pages themselves.So the first page is about the Sooty Shear water which raises its chick in a burrow on the foreshore. After the chick is considered mature the parents fly off traveling over 6400km to the north Pacific from New Zealand leaving the chick to find its own way.

 The second page is about the Humpback whale which roams the ocean over 6000 miles, the Grey Whale roams a massive 10-12000 miles.

The poor old wildebeest does a mere 800 km...
It faces enormous dangers though, having to cross crocodile infested rivers to get to better pastures...
Do remember to click on the photos for a closer look...

 The last page was meant to start the whole book off. It is about the amazing migration of the  Lepidoptera, Monarch Butterfly, from California and Mexico to north America . It does this over a span of four generations and it makes you wonder about the inbuilt sense of direction they must have. It must be a genetic blue print with which  they are born, as must the Sooty Shearwater have as well, to be able to travel on their own, to lands they have never seen...

 Although the booklets are fun to do, they do take a long while sometimes to come anywhere near to where I can see what they are wanting to be. I had these pages hanging around for quite a while, and the covers were done well before I could motivate myself to write on the pages and decide what stories to tell on them. Mind you, a hot summer does not encourage creativity in me sadly. I normally do the backing out of denim but I used some coarse cotton material I had been given which was inclined to unravel.....

What has charmed  us of late is the fact we seem to have acquired a mob of Galahs which I'm sure have brought all their aunties, uncles and cousins to use our pond as their watering hole...
They are fun to watch as they drink their fill bending over, tails in the air while their relatives hang about in the Holm Oak or suddenly they all take off in a screaming flurry of pink and grey and land in the gumtrees nearby wondering what the danger might have been....
Silly Galahs....

Rain on the Pond at last....

Some people would find my pleasure at seeing rain on our pond a bit weird...but this is January here on the Fleurieu and the height of summer.
And such a hot and dry summer we have never had as the records show.So when we had rain last Thursday night and early Friday morning, it was a real pleasure to record the rain falling on the pond surface.....we had 12ml of rain altogether and it meant we did not have to water the garden for a couple of days. Tomorrow we will start our watering routine again.

The other pleasure we have is seeing the pure white water lilies rising out of the murky water of the pond. As yet we have not been able to have the pond water clear, though at present I am working at it by using some bacterial stuff used to keep our septic tank healthy.... the goldfish seem to tolerate it as do the frogs, we have at least 4 frogs singing their froggy songs at night.
If I were a composer, their calls, all at different pitches and at intervals would make an interesting piece of music...

We seem to have acquired a small mob of Galahs.
They are an entertaining lot of creatures with a voice less strident than the Corella and an amusing way of going about their daily lives.
They are rather short legged and waddle along on the ground finding interesting plants or roots to eat, or they hang upside down from branches to let the rain wash their armpits, if that is what they are called in the bird world.

They have discovered the pond at last and after tentative explorations as to how to get to the water,( water lily leaves do not support their weight) they now realize they need to get on the lower edges of the slate to get a drink....
The crested pigeons are a bit put out now because they consider it "Their" watering hole and get a bit fussed sitting on their rock amidst a mob of pink and grey galahs .... do remember to click on the photos to get a closer view of these birds....

The bird on the left is a female Blackbird which flew into our window pane and stunned itself early the other morning. The wet patch infront of it is not blood but water which I managed to give it so it could recover.... it did and flew off when next I went to enquire how it was getting on...
one of my friends would not be amused about me saving a blackbird as they are not liked by everyone...I love their song and don't mind they toss the mulch about with gay abandon.

This birdbath is next to the pond and the Rosella and Greeny, which is a honey eater, were happy to share the water on a hot morning...
Tonight though, it was amusing to see the Galahs thinking this was another place to drink and the Magpies which also think this is their private bar, were very annoyed and were busy telling the Galahs to piss off and go elsewhere....
Such is life in a drought stricken garden.....

Early Summer Fruits & Pickled Walnuts

We picked the first of our Brown or Sugar figs on the 3rd of December this year, which is amazingly early. They are big at this stage and not numerous as the major crop won't start until about mid January. By that stage there will be that many that I can start making jars of sticky figs to enjoy during the winter months.
at present though we are enjoying them for breakfast or lunch sliced with cheese. I may also do some in vodka like I have done with the cherries we picked up from a local grower.

On the right is a bowl of walnuts , pricked ready to soak in brine for ten days, refreshing the brine once. I did that ten days ago and now had them out in the sun yesterday to turn black. It got so hot though, yesterday, I had to rescue them otherwise they would have been cooked.
we have had the hottest start to December on record, we were 40C yesterday while Adelaide was 42C and Pt Augusta a massive 45C....

So on the left are the walnuts all turned black and ready to be put into jars and spiced vinegar which is made with various spices and herbs. They then have to sit in the jars for a month before eating them either whole (if you are a pickled walnut fan) or thinly sliced with cheese or meat. I also have a rather nice casserole using pickled walnuts. If anyone is interested I could put it in my next blog. It is a matter of either liking them or hating them. In the 1960ies we had a blacksmith who used to come to Hughes Park and shoe our horses as we still mustered on horseback.

Harry used to organize the shoeing so the
blacksmith could join our Christmas party for the men when he was finished with the shoeing . We would send him home later, feeling full of good cheer with a large jar of pickled walnuts as he loved them. We would see him going down the garden path furtively dipping into the jar and eating one....We had three walnut trees there so there was always plenty to pickle and pick later in the autumn.

I had been watching the young Murray Magpie or Piping Shrike, by our pond two days ago and wondered if something was wrong with it. It hardly got out of my way and sure enough I found it last night , dead by the plum tree with its beautifully marked feathers blowing in the wind.
So sad really, we seem to have had quite a few young birds snuff it this year....
On the left is a series of mulga vases I suppose you could call them. The were offcuts from posts our friend David was using to make yards in the Sandstone Western Australia area where they had a sheep station.He was trapping feral goats. I brought the off cuts home and a young wood turner in Victor Harbor made them int these lovely shapes. Australian hard woods can be so lovely, I adore the Sheoak's wood as well and many more. I have  friend who used to do amazing scroll work in native woods......that may be another story.....

Early Summer and Christmas Break Ups

 Our Book Group meets on the first Friday of each month after lunch. The first Friday in December though, we meet in the morning to wind up the year and have a discussion on the last book we have read. Then we go off to lunch at a previously booked restaurant or pub.
This year however, we had a treat in that Catherine and Sue gave us a mini concert first off. Both women are accomplished musicians so we were privileged to hear some very fine music indeed. It helped to put us in a good mood before we tackled the book discussion.

The book we discussed was Nora Webster
by Colm Toibin, a fine and well known Irish writer. Most of us however were not enthralled with his social realism in this rather boring and lengthy tale of a young Irish widow finding her way after her husbands death. She was left with two young boys still at home and grown up daughters living away from home in the big city.
We were glad to escape to our chosen pub, high on the hill overlooking the beautiful Aldinga Bay. On the right you can see we enjoyed ourselves immensely despite the fact we had to wait over an hour for our food to arrive.......

We've decided to do something different next year...all going well of course.....
Remember to click on the photos to get a better look.
Our summer has started to affect our gardens rather early as we have had so little rain over the past three months. We did have 4ml of rain two days ago and it never ceases to amaze me how the Jacobean Lilies respond to quickly and show their elegant forms above the dry and brittle mulch.

 We were also delighted to see we still have a yellow water lily and since putting some bacterial stuff in the water the pond is starting to look so much better.
The white faced herons are hanging around again and looking to see if any fish are easy targets.
The birds some times land on the roof of the house and you'd think an army of clodhoppers had arrived. We had some rock pigeons land on the roof yesterday and they will get short shrift from me if they persist....

 The summer garden is just that, beige and dry.
I am trying to get a few Holm oaks going along the drive way, they have been in for three years now and are hardly making any headway.
The other plants are hardy geraniums and even they are finding it hard going.
I hope if and when when I get to the Pearly Gates
and asked what I might like to do in eternity, I can say I would like a garden with easy to work soil and unlimited water......

Brian's vegies have been an absolute disaster this year for unknown reasons... the seedling are eaten the moment they pop their heads up, the strawberry plants died in that terrible heat,
(the ones on the right are some I planted in the ground where as Brian's were in raised baskets )
and his tomatoes sit and sulk....
Never mind, the black birds are having a ball scattering the mulch and finding the bugs and the gum leaves rain down in great profusion......

New Veranda and Spring Flowers

We had decided we had better do something about our front veranda....we live on a reactive clay soil which means when the dry weather comes huge cracks appear in the soil. These are also translated to our veranda bricks which were a total mess and very uneven and a danger to our guests especially those who might be dependent on walking sticks. So we asked our trusted building friend if he could correct the problem for us and he did.

Meanwhile of course all the pots and garden furniture had to be removed first....
we put every pot in the corner near the sheds which faces east and is pretty well sheltered from the north winds and even the gully winds from the east and shaded by the big Ash trees. They seemed very happy there and flowered profusely, it seemed a shame to shift them back again now the veranda has been finished.

 The old wheelbarrow sits under a gum tree with a mast like trunk and is full of cacti and succulents. It was a lovely surprise to see the cactus flowering one morning, the flowers only last for a few days but they are truly spectacular.
The two gum trees in this particular area are self sown, usually I pull the seedlings up but they were in a useful position so I let them go. They have shot up straight and tall which is unusual in gum trees other than the Lemon scented trees but these are not lemon scented trees. A mystery.....

The garden sculpture on the right was made by asmallartfactory.com.au and the lass Anna who runs this with her husband gave it to me as a present.Their metal sculptures are out of light steel and are just great. Do visit their website....
The rose in the background is Gold bunny and the green in the foreground is myophylum, a water weed which decided to take over the pond so with great difficulty we have managed to remove most of it. It forms a dense mat underneath though it looks great it was preventing the birds from getting their much needed drink.....

On the left you can see the veranda much improved and we won't trip over the bricks which were so uneven. Now all I have to do is wash the windows especially the one the White face Heron has been attacking , knock, knock who is there? I'd go out and find the bird admiring himself in the reflection of the window despite the fact a lot of it was made grotty by him... a housewife's work is never done.....

Magpie Kills again...Red Kardinal rose

How sad to come back on Saturday after visiting the Artisan Market and getting olive oil from the Quarry Market where Brian also bought six tomato plants, to find the young Magpie stone cold dead in the drive way... In my earlier blog I told of how this male Magpie was bullying the youngster which was quietly sitting by the pond.
It did have a wonky leg but surely it wasn't killed because of that?  We will never know...I buried it next to the Willy Wagtail under the Walnut tree..

Then yesterday, while looking at yet more gum tree branches chewed off by the Black and Yellow tailed Cockatoos , I came upon this large Magpie nest blown down in the ferocious winds the other night. If you click on it you may see the pink plastic binder twine used as lining material.
The nest next to it for comparison is a tiny Greenies nest and the golf ball in it is merely there to stop it blowing away in the wind.....
The greenies did nest under the patio vine last year but this year when they came and had

a look, they must have decided it was too much like suburbia with the Black bird already established (it is sitting on eggs now the nest just above the patio door) and the Wagtails busy constructing their nest a few meters away. The Wagtails have been building this nest for three weeks now and have not occupied it, so we are wondering if it is a rental property or even a spec home and no one is interested in paying high rents in this upmarket position.....

Above is Kym's twig installation....as mentioned before the Yellow tailed Black cockatoos chew through the thickest branches and litter the ground with them. It is all very well to have plenty of kindling for the fire next winter plus all the eucalyptus leaves but it is a constant job to gather them up and store them. At least they don't make as much raucous noise as the dreaded Correllas which can be here in their hundreds making a mess of the gum trees as well.

Above is the Kardinal rose and it is interesting that the colour reproduced here is much more orange than in the garden. It is a lovely rose and among the first to bloom this season.
The variety of flower shapes and sizes and colours never ceases to amaze and delight us
The Gerberas on the left are doing so well this year too. They originally came from Brian's mother's garden and they are quite different to the ones you buy now . I thought they were drought tolerant but they do need watering in summer.....

The other delight is the Callistemon or bottle brush, such an intriguing form when you compare it to all the other flowers in the garden
with delicate golden tips on the ends of the brushes.....
Well, the mower wouldn't start this morning so instead there will be weeding to be done.......
Meditating on the vagaries of modern machinery.....while pulling things out by the roots......