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.