New floor pt 1

After many delays, it is finally time to say bye-bye to the threadbare carpet and get some new flooring in most of the house. Unfortunately that means:

• packing up everything on shelves, in sideboards etc and moving it to one of the 3 bedrooms that are not being re-floored

• dismantling and moving all the shelves / furniture etc

• ripping up all the old carpet and underlay

So it's been a fun weekend of packing and moving!

It has also been a very dusty weekend. I was horrified to see the amount of dust coming from in the carpet, on the underlay, and even under the underlay! The haze in the photo on the left is the flash illuminating the dust in the air, and the brown on the floor in the right photo is dust - the slab is the gray streak you can see in the dust. Thank goodness the vacuum has an excellent dust filter!


I hope it's all worth it!!!!!!!!

More spring garden renovations

Jerry's work is never done. He spent last weekend redoing much of our fruit cage watering system - converting it all to either weeping hose or drippers that can all go under the mulch. He's also putting in a new tap to run the under-much weeping hose watering for our potato crop, and laid out weeping hose watering on a couple of our other beds. He also cut up some old cardboard sheets to put in between the beds to keep the weeds down. Oh, and for an encore he built an additional border of pavers around the main bed inside the fruit cage!

Well done Jerry!

Meanwhile the spring cabbages are coming along nicely, the broccoli still keeps on going, and my greenhouse tomato empire seems to be thriving (55 seedlings so far, all happily growing in recycled coffee cups from Jerry's work. Another 35 or so seeds are on the go on the germinating trays!)

Spring has sprung

We spent the first weekend of sprint tidying up the garden, mowing the grass (first time in about 10 months that we have had enough to mow), strimming all the edges and in the vege garden, making a new raised bed (photo below right) and making up beds for the potatoes.

This year we're growing 6 varieties of potato- sapphire (purple flesh), nicola, spunta, kipfler, king Edward and Royal Blue. The last 2 we also grew last year, but the others are all new for this year. Some we are growing in tyres, and others in a semi raised bed with lots of semi decomposed star from last year. As we did last year we'll be topping up with straw as the plants get bigger.


On the harvest front some of the cabbages are coming along well, and another cauliflower was ready for picking. As for broccoli - picked another kg of sprouting heads, so must have almost 2kg in the freezer - and it keeps on going. I've left a couple of plants to go to seed too.


The podded peas are doing well, protected by their copper rings, and my tomato empire is off too a promising start - thanks to the greenhouse

All this activity is just too exhausting for some..........