Gardening after a long dry summer -inspiration!

Well, the big news is that it RAINED! So yes, it is officially 'autumn" or actually it is bunuru, the Noongar name for the season where the storms begin and the weather gets a bit cooler - low 30C rather than high 30s-40C-  and the Marri trees are in bloom. We had a fabulous thunderstorm this week and it has made everything greener and more refreshed. 

I harvested the pomegranates, to save what I can of the crop because various birds or rats have been eating them. I took a few to a local food pantry, along with some fresh limes from our tree, and they were well received. Now I need to get the kernels out of these in the bowl, so we can freee them for salads later in the year.

A bit of rain makes Perth gardeners think of planting things! I went to a garden cntre and bought a new hibiscus, some herbs and a salvia for the front garden, which I have been renovating. I have scattered calendula and marigold seeds in there as well. Our rear garden is pretty much given over to the fruit trees and productive raised beds.  The front garden, however, whilst it is wonderful with both fruit and flowers for much of the year, looks pretty drab at the end of summer, as very few plants flower in the heat, and everything is a bit stressed. 

I want to plant things closer together and have more foliage, at the very least.

This is a rose called glamis castle, I think. It is never very abundant in summer, but the spring and autumn suit it better. 

The plants that can take the heat in this climate -frangipani and hibiscus - are going to be featured more. My two white roses are survivors, but they have shown that they just need more water than our drip irrigation, 2 mornings per week as allowed, can deliver if they are going to flower consistently. I have changed the watering delivery method to help support them, along with a bit of handwatering too. 

I have planted an apple blossom hibiscus and a purple one called Hawaiian Skies.

Everyone says that salvia are tough and long-flowering, but I have tried two before, which died. I have a new one, and will take special care of it and hope it becomes established. 

I have put another frangipani in the ground -it was a cutting which I grew on in a pot since last year- and also a lemon verbena which I also had in a pot. 

There will be some lower storey plants -yarrow, iris, pelargoniums, daisies, along with some herbs like thai basil and parsley. I have scattered marigold and calendula seeds.

 

Getting Inspired

There are a couple of places I have found real inspiration recently. One is the wonderful Regenerative Skills podcast, which connects me with a community of permaculturists around the world, who are working in hard conditions, and who often have very few resources.  It is a source of hope.  

Hugh Edward's You Tube channel is also a fantastic resource. I loved the 9 tips one which helped me get on to the job of processing my seed for storage. This picture below is fennel which I had been drying in the laundry. It smells amazing! I have come to really think that fennel is an under appreciated herb. It grows as a perennial, has tall ferny fronds and is so useful in salads and for creating a bed for your roast to sit on in the roasting pan. You can eat the seeds and they germinate well in the garden and will grow without much water. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIyoaLX5LQs&ab_channel=HuwRichards

I have been letting these self-sown pumpkins run under the citrus trees. There are about 5 which have survived and grown well, but they do try to take over!

The limes are gowing fresh and juicy at the moment. We have mandarins and lemons ripening up too. 

I have some elephant garlic to grow, when the temperatures drop a bit more, and I need to decide on other winter vegetables - we love snow peas so I want a lot of them!

It feels so good to be energised after the hot summer, and I am looking forward to seeing my garden green up soon. 

 

This was a struggle, but it is done

This was a struggle, but it is done

As a quilt, it is not complicated in its design.  It is built around a panel I had in my stash, and fabrics I already had and it is simple. I thought 'someone will be happy to have this to keep them warm and make their bed look nice, so I will give it to the Community Quilt group at my guild".

Why did it take ssooooooo long?

I got the top done quickly enough, and started to piece together a back from leftovers in my stash- panels and blocks made and rejected from other projects. This was harder, much harder.

But the real problem was that it needed to be precisely centred against the front, and my technology of registering the quilt and pinning it was just not precise enough. I pinned it together twice before I gave up, bought a large piece of neutral fabric and pinned it for the third time!

I quilted it on my vintage Singer 306 in straight-ish lines across the blocks and put the binding on by machine too, as my hands are not happy with hand sewing these days. 
 

Today I am going to tidy up the sewing room and process the leftovers of this quilt before moving on to a new project. The 306 needs a clean and some oil too. 

This will be delivered to the community quilt group this month. They give away over a thousand quilts per year to shelters, rehab centres and hospitals. 

It's a journey-; late summer

"it's a journey"

Thanks to Brenna Quinlan who drew this illustration for download from her webpage. I love the way it sees so many of the habits we build as contributing to our slow living, simple living one-planet way of life. 

We find we have our seasons of activity -right now it is a beginning of harvesting and preserving, as the weather gradually cools and the days get a bit shorter. 

I have been able to do some gardening this week. Most of everything is still alive! I am taking cuttings, planting some seeds, tidying up after the heat. 

School is back and that means our Wednedsay babysitting gig is back too. 

I have been trying to finish this quilt for weeks! I have pinned it to the back twice now, and today I will be unpinning it and putting a plain wide back on it. I am hoping for a smooth run from here on! Talk about SLOW! Well, it is right or it is not and I want it to be right.

We managed to get a few bunches of grapes from the grapevine before the birds got them all. Well, the grapevines out the front are for shade mostly. 

DH helped me to do a summer prune of the lime tree, to reduce its height. In the process we have harvested a basket of small tart limes. I have cut some into quarters and flash frozen some for cold drinks -lime 'ice cubes". DH tried a new recipe for lime pickle, but I don't think he is happy with it. The lime peel stayed quite hard, and he found it very salty. I haven't tried it yet -it does say that it should be allowed to stand for a month before we try to eat it. 

DH also got inspired to make mango chutney again. Hooray! 

And a delicious tomato chutney.

I borrowed this book from the library, and we all loved it so much we have bought a copy for our own. 

Marri blossoms in flower are quite spectacular. These ones are at the play centre, where I volunteer in the garden. I have been looking for the golden yellow flowers of the Illyarrie but so far the blooms have been too high in the canopy for me to get a good picture. There is one around the corner from here, and I am keeping my eye on it. 

Thanks for visiting my blog. Hopefully next time I will have a quilt to show you!

It is hot out here-January 2025. The tough get quilting and tidying

Hello again, from a hot Perth Western Australia in the first month of 2025. We are in full summer mode -but even the beach might be too hot for a walk in the morning these days. If it is too hot for the beach, it is probably too hot to work in the garden too. I keep up the watering, and wait for better days. 

We had a week of cyclone-induced humidity and low cloud last week which was weird. When you are used to very hot but very low humidity days with lots of sunshine, and a sea breeze every afternoon, a week without those things is a shock. 

This was my first attempt at foccacia, using the King Arthur Bread company recipe. It was yummy, and I now have a new cast iron pan to cook it in -thanks to Father Christmas, but the oven has been playing up and won't be fixed until later this week so I haven't tried to do it again. 

I heartily recommend this large book about Robodebt by Rick Morton, called Mean Streak. It goes into detail about who knew what and when about the government disaster which claimed debts based on faulty mathematics from unsuspecting welfare recipients. It is a sad story, but there are heroes who kept their moral compass pointed to courage and compassion and truth, no matter how powerful were the voices telling us that it was otherwise. 

I have spent most of January tidying up my sewing room, with the help of the wonderful Karen Brown of Just Get It Done Quilts and her yearly "Declutter Challenge". It is now clear that my bad habit of taking out fabric to test them in a new quilt scheme, then stuffing them back into a drawer, was a really, really bad idea. I couldn't tell what fabrics I had, and they were crumpled and a mess. Quilting is easier in a organised work place. I have promised myself that I won't do that again! 

Fabrics have been sorted -scraps even thrown out.

In the spirit of 'using it up' I finally unpacked a panel which had been in a bag for far too long, and determined that it was either going to be in a quilt soon, or I would throw it out. This is the result. Some scrappy 9 patches, squares of shell fabric and a top is made. I am now, in my now tidy sewing room, working on a pieced back. This thing needs to be a quilt, not just a top, and off to the WAQA Community Quilts group for donation. 

This is the pieced back of the quilt. More scraps in here, but it would have been a lot quicker to use a whole cloth back! 

Do you ever pick things up from the side of the road? I noticed this shelf one day, and immediately drove back home to get the DH. He also thought it was something with potential, so he cleaned it up and painted it and installed it in my sewing room. I love it! It has cleaned up a lot of equipment that I like to be handy but don't want cluttering up my workspaces. 

Tidying up also has arrived at my computer desk, where I have found that this desk tidy which I made out of a shoe box, has transformed the clutter and takes up very little space. The deep box of the shoe box was cut in half on an angle and a small triangle shape removed, then the two ends were inserted into the lid. I saw the idea on pinterest I think. 

I hope I will be back at my blog more often in 2025. It has been a way I document my life, and its simple joys. Wishing you the same joys for 2025. 

 

How to decorate and refresh without shopping

I love being creative-I quilt, I garden and cook, and I decorate. I love to change things around inside my home -a shelf or  a mantle might get cleaned off and a new collection of items put there to entice the eye and the brain.

As someone who loves living simply, I try to do this without following decorating trends or buying new things. If you can make your house a home even if there is not a lot of money, you are on a budget or just sick of shopping, are there any things you can do to decorate and refresh? 

Well the first thing I try to make myself do is just tidy up!

It always surprising how a clean floor and a bit of dusting and straightening makes everything feel calmer and nicer. The same goes for opening windows to let fresh air inside, and cleaning up pet clutter. The cat tray is a mega issue for my happiness unless it is fresh. I think Dora prefers it that way too! 

I am quite conscious of things which are out of place and find it hard to work or relax in cluttered spaces. This is not true of everyone who lives in my house, but as it bothers me they are usually pretty good at putting things away, and I reckon that if it bothers me and not them, it is up to me to fix it. 

Long time ago I found help from Flylady and her cleaning routines. I actually read her book which I got from the library! We were parents of young children and both had to work long hours. The house was so messy that when we had a break in and the police came, I had to say "No, they didn't trash the place, it always looks like this'. Embarrasing much? 

Flylady mottos and practices are still part of my life. A five minute pickup does make things better. Cleaning your sink and making your bed does calm the space and help you feel in control. "Focus makes you fabulous".  Lately I have found Dana K White's podcast "A Slob Comes Clean" is very useful too. 

Apart from tidying up, which has its own real and cheap magic to perform what can you do?

A LIST OF STRATEGIES

1. Instead of buying cut flowers

If you look at online decorators blogs you will find plants and flowers feature in the inspirational photos. Flowers cheer any space up, but there are only a few times when I am certainly going to spend $35 on a bunch of supermarket flowers. Instead I do the following things:

• bring in a pot plant for a few days -some of them stay if they like the space, others need a long time outside and a few days inside 

• cut some green leaves and stick them in a vase or jar or pot or anything. If you have only a few pieces, they can go in a tiny vase or an eggcup or a medicine bottle. 

• go for a walk and collect some sticks and dead branches or seed heads to spread on a shelf 

• Use local flowers, seeds and cones that you find in your garden. In Western Australia it is a crime to take these from the bush, but we can have lovely things at home in our garden, like this hardenbergia growing over a stump of a dead tree in my garden. 

• Make one or more crafted flowers-and have fun at the same time!

• raid the collection of fake flowers -do you have any? I keep some in the cupboard and mix them up with real leaves -they look more realistic that way. In my climate there are times when flowers are hard to come by in the garden- the height of summer, for example, when the heat browns everything off. Fake flowers or dried flowers can fill a gap -but I don't leave them out until they are dusty! A swish in warm water will revive silk ones, but dried ones need to be taken outside and given a shake. Moving them around makes them feel different too. 

• Use fruit instead. Bright lemons, green olives in a wooden bowl or basket, anything you have. 

2.  It is dark in here!

Natural light is one of those things that architects get good money for designing into a space. You can't do much if it is dark and dreary outside, or if your house faces to a blank wall, without expensive alterations. Here are some ideas which are cheaper than those major changes:

• Open the curtains or blinds to the maximum they will go. I am shocked how often people live without even noticing the free light which they could have if only they pushed everything up, away and against the wall. This might include re-arranging furniture to maximise the light from a window. If there is foliage in the way outside, time to prune it down! I don't like furniture to block natural light if it is at all possible to put it somewhere else. 

• Check where you can encourage light to bounce from outside to inside. We had a dark brown floor on our entry porch, but when we tiled it with left over white tiles, the afternoon sun bounced off the tiles, to the porch ceiling and into our dark loungeroom. It was also safer to come up to the house because the step was easier to see. A colourbond shed in the garden shines light into our kitchen and brightens things out there. 

• Mirrors can bounce light around -try putting one in a place where it can collect light from a nearby window and push it towards the dark space.

• Add table lamps -I often get mine from op shops or the tip shop. Maybe add a nice shade if it is worth it. Fitted with a LED globe they are cheap to run.

• Can you make a colour change to something lighter? Cushions, rugs and curtains are not too hard to move around and some of them can be home made too. They can brighten a space. 

3. I am bored and this place feels tired 

Sometimes I just need novelty! What I do then is fall back on the old 'move things around or shop at home" to make a tablescape. The above is one I made around Halloween -a book I already owned, a couple of lanterns from the garden, a  gargoyle from the op shop and some magpie feathers found in the park. Other ideas include- 

• move pictures from one room to another 
• move the furniture around 
• put music on, open the windows, light a candle
• Choose a theme land make a tiny vignette on a table or shelf. You don't need to wait for a large holiday -if you have a collection of woodland animals, or cats, or a stack of quilts- put them somewhere new and admire them again. 

• Cook something nice and make the house feel welcoming! 

FINALLY! 

Recently I wanted to do my refresh thing and came up with a theme of "Mad scientist's Victorian library". I already had leather lounge chairs, book cases, and a mantle piece with an old clock. I raided my collections for wooden boxes for the mantle and bottles that looks like I have been collecting nature specimens.

I cleared off the console and added beautiful books, a book stand and a globe which I found in an op shop. All of this makes me happy! 

I will probably change this around again soon. Maybe for Halloween? 

Hope you found this post helpful to inspire you to keep your place looking nice too. 

Day bed gets its first overnight occupant

We have an old 1970s house and so, among its 'features" is a nook in the lounge room which was designed to be a bar. Yes, really -a bar! Drink bottles and a counter and such I guess. 

Don't know if anyone ever used it as such. We are the third family to live here. We have used it as a computer area for a while, and then when we were given DH's dad's piano, it found its home here in the nook.

Now that the DS and the DDILaw have just built their dream home complete with  a Music Room so I felt it was time for the piano to go to a new home. The musician son and grand daughter will certainly appreciate it.

What should the nook in the lounge room now be used for?  Well, we gave it some thought. We have been using a folding bed in DH's study for when the grandchildren come for a sleepover, and I thought we could perhaps have a daybed in the nook for them to use. It should be easier for us, as there will be no dragging the folding bed in and out of the shed, to set it up each time. It should be more comfortable for them. 

Here is the daybed in situ. Getting it here required a number of steps:

1. Moving the piano -specialist removalists required

2. Cleaning the floor where the piano had been

3. Chucking out stuff and tidying bookshelves -this was quite an operation!

4. Finding the bed we liked and could afford, and ordering it

5. Buying an nice mattress. 

6. Buying new sheets and pillows

7. Building the bed after it was delivered. DH and DD made it together, even though DH is still recovering from his second Knee Replacement.

8. Making the bed and decorating with pillows and stuff

I must say, though, that it is a lovely thing to lie on with a book and a rug! It won't be just used for the guests. This is a lovely space. 

 

Our cat thinks it a bit nice, too.

This week it was school holidays and the DGson came for a sleepover. He announced next day that it was 'the best bed I have ever slept on!".

There is a bit of work left to do. Most of the pillows on the bed in the photo were pinched from other places in the house. I am recovering from bursitis, but gradually will be making new cushions for the bed, using pillows found in opshops, when the shoulder improves. 

We are happy with this new feature in our loungeroom. 

Verging on the verge -and other garden stuff

 A couple of years ago, listening to a permaculture podcast about water and soil, I thought "I have too much brick paving on this block".  It gets hot in summer, it is ugly, it offers nothing for biodiversity. Within days I was on my knees pulling up the brick paving on our verge. The neighbours thought I was insane!

I started stacking bricks up down the driveway. A few at a time, a couple of days a week. The stacks got higher and higher. What on earth was I going to do with them? Fortunately, my son and daughter in law wanted some brick paving at their place, so they took the bricks away and helped me get the last of them up. 

I didn't do much preparation for a garden, apart from spreading a couple of loads of mulch on the top of the compacted yellow sand below the brick paving. The soil was so compacted that I needed an auger to drill through it to start planting. Quite a few things died, but some of them lived and are now thriving. Several more loads of mulch have begun to get the soil organisms growing again. Gradually I realised that I needed to use a sprinkler one morning per week for 10 minutes to keep things alive over our summer. We have a challenging summer!

 The garden keeps growing, though, so when we did the Great Retaining Wall we had leftover rocks. Some of these were bordering the garden near the house, but They were pretty bad at retaining the soil which l fell out onto the path and they were uneven. As part of our retaining wall project, we pulled them up. 

I didn't want the rocks in the garden any more, so we advertised them as "Free" and pretty quickly they were snapped up by someone was happy to get them to use to build a waterfall at their place. 

DH then used the old concrete retaining wall blocks in the old retaining wall on our eastern boundary, and made this lovely wall under the grapevine out the front. 

More Plants!

Over the autumn our city council offered free native seedlings suitable for verge gardens. I got a pack of 10, and planted 9 - gave one away because it was a grevillea and I am allergic to them. They will help to fill up the spaces in the verge garden and will be habitat for wild birds and insects. I am eager to watch them grow now the rains have com. 

The verge still has one extra parking space for visitors. It is well known in the neighbourhood because this is where I put excess produce and people come and help themselves. The limes are followed by grapefruit and lemons and olives. 

On Mother's day I was given 5 kangaroo paws of various colours.  They should do well here, despite the harsh conditions. 

I am hoping to see a lot more pretty verges like this one in our suburb. Maybe this one can  be a bit of inspiration!