Instead of blogging...

I made Christmas wreaths! Pretty no?! We have a large bay tree in the garden and all I had to do was bunch the stems together and wire it up. One is for my ma, and one for this lovely lady.

ps. I just got a very late birthday/early christmas present of this book. It's dreamy.
pps. I won the Haiku Thank you giveaway over on Che and Fidel! I am as giddy as a school girl! Thank you Jodi- and *hi* if you are visiting!

Garden Update Spring

Our house is looking particularly sweet in it's spring glory at the moment.
The sweet peas are going absolutely nuts, they smell amazing and are a riot of pink purple and white.
Cucumbers and pumpkins coming up.
Bee's checking out the flowering onion heads.
Last of the anemones in the side garden.
The standard iceburgs out the front are blooming.
The white flowers of the front garden are just amazing - filling the beds to the brim - just the look I love (we've got seaside daisy, white ranunculus and dusty miller in shot here).
The porch has had a spring clean. Tim re-oiled the deck, we rearranged all the succulents and I finally got around to doing up that white cane chair - I'll show you a close up soon.

These are really September Spring pictures - more has happened - I just need to photograph it!

Homegrown Bouquet

Nothing like taking a bottle of wine and a homegrown bouquet to a friends place for dinner.
Dusty miller, fennel fronds, ranunculus, sweet pea, freesia, queen annes lace and something from my neighbours garden which I don't know the name of!
*EDIT* Robusta is my missing plant name! (Thanks mum!)

In My Garden...

The garden! I've been pottering around with our ever expanding succulent collection. Big ones into garden beds or bigger pots, tiny babies gifted to us, divided up, an old tin teapot becoming a plant holder, dropped leaves stuck in the ground to become plants again (gotta love succulents)!

My first Cosmo flower, planted from seed - these guys did not take long at all to grow, they flower right when lots of other stuff doesn't, and the soft leaves look great too, I think these may become a staple in white in the front garden.
Alyssum, also planted from seed. So obliging and easy to grow, flowering virtually all year. I'm organising these all around the front edge of the front garden to drape sweetly over the bricks. I want them to be interspersed with white Violets (flower in winter and lovely foliage all year), seaside daisy's, lambs ears and mmmm maybe something else small and drapey and white which I haven't decided on yet.
And a random sunflower. He's from the seeds of my ginormous Giant Russians but only about 2 foot tall! To be fair, he had a late start to life (these are Summer flowers really), he's in rubbish soil and he got stood on by a tradie and almost snapped in half.

This cool little dude is called Ptilotus, Joey... we'll just call him Joey for now as I have no idea how to pronounce his proper name. I noticed him on a nursery website recently and thought he would be an excellent perennial for my side garden (mmmm dusty pink), and then I spotted him in Bunnings and snapped him up (not sure why plants are boy's?? Are there any rules on this?). 

Anyway, the rest of the side garden is rather.... brown at the moment. I'm slowly working my way down digging up the grass and weeds and rather compacted soil and browsing through perennials to fill it up. They need to be in my colour pallete - of course ;), but also drought and forst tolerant (we do proper weather here in Wagga Wagga), happy with a fair amount of sun for now but also cool with sharing with fruit trees, plus of course leave space for bulbs to pop up and show off through winter and spring. Then there's all the business with making sure they have nice foliage, but they're not all same-y, and mixing up the colours so one end of the garden isn't all yellow and the other end all pink (actually, currently the whole damn thing is looking rather pink!). Basically a recipe for me melting into a big pile of indecision and not buying anything! 

And finally, some tomatos I managed to get before the fruit fly did! Yay! We are still picking chillies and basil (though it is beginning to look rather sad) but the other herbs are marvellous. The potatoes are almost ready to be lifted and we pick zucchinis and cucumbers everyday, from only 2 plants of each! 

*** Dear readers... do you garden? Do you want to garden? ***

In my backyard...

It's garden update time!!! (insert some catchy theme music here)
Spring is truley here (Hooray!) and we have all sorts of cool stuff hapening in the garden.

 The herb bed is coming along, with borage taking over, thyme, rainbow beet and strawberries.

I have chives and coriander, rosemary and mint. Tiny spearmint and parsley on its way... chillies and sage, asparagus and rhubarb. Oh the things we can grow! It's amazing!

Broad beans and snow peas, protecting our cut and come again lettuce and rocket, that miraculously the slugs and snails haven't noticed yet.

The potatoes are coming up, the lemon tree has been planted in front of the neighbours bathroom window (grow you good thing!) Note in the background the Lola proof fence! No more escaping for you puppy!

 The Euphorbia (yeah I know proper names and stuff) are being gorgeous.

 The mini fruit trees have mini blossoms and mini leaves dawwwww. This is a nectarine.

 The white garden in the front of the house is starting to look pretty again - finally!

And our glorious, glorious veggie beds are bird proof and make us so happy! We've even pulled the sprinkler out - which feels so naughty - but the dam is completely full, and I will certainly be doing my bit to make sure it doesn't overflow into my house again.

Garden review...

 

 

We dug up (read Tim dug up) a patch of the lawn to make more room for vegetables! We have beetroot galore, and fennel and carrots have just started to stick their soft leaves up out of the ground! Hopefully these are more of a success than last years carrots which didnt grow bigger than my pinkie finger (and I have small hands). Also the lemons are turning yellow! It feels like they have been sitting there being green for aggges! I'm going to make pudding with this bad boy tonight! And we have rock & water melons seedlings happening too! Spring is magical right?!

Nag your nan, if you're in Australia I mean...

Bicycles

All the cool kids have them. {Via} (God I want that dress sooooo badly...)

They should certainly come in yellow and blue...

And most definitely have baskets... {via} {from}

And be made into cushions and dresses and skirts and bags... {here}

Obviously safety comes first: {Nutcase} baby blue for me I think...

Details are important, so for a decorative chain ring & to hear from cool cycling chicks, check out candy cranks.

Green cinema experience?

I'm finding all the "green washing" that is springing up everywhere rather interesting. Green washing is people jumping on the band wagon of stating how green a product/service is because being green is the trendy / important thing at the moment.
For instance, a few weeks ago we went to see Alice In Wonderland in 3D - it was great. We took our housemates 3D glasses that she had got from seeing it, mostly because we didnt want to have to buy 2 pairs, but also because it's the green thing to do. In the cinema on the big screen they told us that the movie is green because you can keep you're 3D glasses. This is a) true. Reusing is always the best option but b) Amusing in that a statement about the movie experience being good for the environment is being projected onto a screen with about 12000 watts!
I don't begrudge green washing by any means. In fact the more people are made aware that everything has an environmental impact the better, its just that it can all be so wishy washy. This Ted talk is an excellent look at how hard it is to know how to be green, just in the home:

frangipani

Hello sunshine! Thanks for coming to my garden! This is a small branch that fell off a friends old frangipani. I stuck it in a pot and a year later... Tada!

Adelaide cool

We went to Adelaide this weekend. Adelaide can all be a bit cool sometimes. We went to the botanic gardens and the museum of economic botany! Amazing!