bits and pieces

A weekend filled with a miscellany of activities and observations...

• I'm cross at the blackbirds. They have rooted out all but 2 sprouting sugar snap peas, and played havoc with the broad beans in the vegie patch
• Dearest ran in the Great Puffing Billy Train Race. It's a 13.6km run from Belgrave to Emerald, mostly alongside the track that Puffing Billy, our local steam train runs on. He managed to beat the second train of the morning, called the 'girls train' (grrr...?) because it's the one the women have to try to beat to win the race. As he didn't beat that one last year, very pleased with himself he was too. And now is sore, tired and on the couch with a Scotch.
• Re-learning that spending a day lying on the couch with a good book is actually a feasible thing to do on a weekend.
• Delighting in playing games with my kids. You know, the simple ones: catching/rolling/throwing a ball. Puzzles. Bikes. Reading a little story.
• Excitement at plans to turn half of our driveway into a vegie garden!

and

• Beginning birthday planning for Poppy. Five feels so BIG!

Savings

Leo single-handedly harvested our dried beans we'd saved for seed the other evening. With intent concentration in every line of his little body (oh those capable little baby boy fingers!), he tried out different ways of opening the pods, plucking beans and dropping them into his bowl. Then we had belly laughs when we blew away the chaff.

From. Our. Own. Patch.

We are so excited!

We have harvested the very first potatoes that we grew our very own selves!!

They are a variety called pink fir apples, and are best when boiled or steamed. Yummy, knobbly, slightly pink, and best of all: the kids ate loads and asked for more!

We are grateful to have a harvest at all. At first, it seemed that our spuds were not going to work out. We tried growing them in tyres, starting out with one soil-filled tyre, and adding more tyres full of soil/mulch as the plants grew, as suggested in various permaculture/organic gardening books we know and love...but they didn't work so well. The potato plants died off before they could flower, and seemed to rot, stem and all. I did some web research to see if we were having our very own Irish Potato Famine, but no, something went inexplicably wrong with our spuds.

So, we decided to just dismantle the tyre towers and grub through to see whether there was anything in there. And lo! We found some spuds! There wasn't the bumper crop that the tyre-growing potato contingent had spruiked, but there was a modest bucketful. Enough to get us and the kids excited, anyway.