The lay of the land

I love being able to eat the food we grow in our own backyard. It's hard work sometimes, and we do have occasional failures, but generally things go according to plan and the hard work pays off in fresh organic food. Above is the last of the most recent crop of kipflers potatoes. Last night I turned some of them into a potato salad that we had with a spinach pie. The pie was made with half English spinach and half silverbeet, Welsh onions, garlic, and eggs, all from our back yard and picked just before I cooked dinner. The cheese in the pie was a local cow's milk feta and some imported Parmesan. The potato salad was made with our backyard radishes and green onions with homemade mayonnaise. A thoroughly satisfying meal, on all levels.

I have a full day today with gardening, sewing, cleaning and writing. I'll knit while I'm resting. I've just made bread and it's on the first rise now, soon I'll make the bed and clean our bathroom.

A native frangipani growing on the edge of the rainforest along the back boundary of our land. Those grey sticks are part of a trellis on which we grow passionfruit.

I've changed to my summer routine this week as all of a sudden it's quite warm. Yesterday it was 34C (93F) and although the next few days will be slightly cooler, I'll work to my summer routine from now until autumn. After an hour or so on the computer this morning, I put the washing on, and went out to the garden. The smoky darkness was just being broken by light and there was a strong scent of native frangipani in the air. I could hear the whip birds in the rainforest and somewhere in the distance, my favourite sacred kingfisher was screeching. Wild ducks flew overhead with their gentle whistling to each other and in the distance I could see a flock of birds flying towards me. It turned out to be 16 black cockatoos squawking as they flew. They settled in the rainforest at the edge of our land and set to strip one of the trees. I'm pleased there is still some native food for them to eat. I've never seen such a big flock of black cockies. They usually fly around in twos or threes here. I wonder if it's a good sign to see so many.

Our land ends at the creek edge, which is about 20 metres past this point. We put a fence up here to keep the dogs and chooks in but the chooks often squeeze themselves through and forage down at the creek edge.

I watered the garden, then stood staring at the beds working out where to transplant the onions. The pigeon peas are ready to be harvested. When I do that a bit later in the day, I'll cut the bushes back and use the cuttings as mulch on the potatoes. I have some tomatoes to plant and I'll pick something later for tonight's dinner. Hmmmm, maybe we'll have the rest of the potato salad with some fresh coleslaw, beetroot, green salad and boiled eggs. I defrosted 1.25 litres of lemon juice yesterday to make cordial so I might use some of the juice to make a lemon meringue pie. We'll see how we go on that one as I might not have the time. Maybe my love of lemon pie might make me work faster so I have the time to make it. Motivation is a wondrous creature. ; )

Renee asked in the comments how much land we have. Renee, like you, we have one acre. Our house is right in the middle of the property, we have neighbours on both sides, a creek at the back and a one lane road at the front. There are just pine trees across the road hiding an old timber mill.

Our vegetable garden is fairly small but enough for our needs. Our garden beds are about 2 x 6 metres (6.5'x19.5') and the overall garden is 12.5 metres x 8 metres (41' x 26'). The chook yard is next to the garden and is about the same size. I took the following photo so you can see the garden where is stands near the house.

Our vegetable garden is behind this picket fence, although the first bit of fence is just our small back yard. We've fenced it off like this to keep the dogs out or in, depending on what's happening.

Where I'm standing taking the photo above is where we grow bananas, passionfruit, grapefruit, oranges, loquats and grapes. We have that big expanse of grass which I do not like but Hanno doesn't want to plant anything there because it makes it too difficult to mow. We only have a hand mower, not a ride on.

Out the front we have mainly ornamental plants including this wisteria and 15 foot high white rose, but we also have two avocado tree out there that will bear their first fruit this year. Fingers crossed. ; )