52 Blessings - Week 13

Well I’m one quarter of the way through the year with this little photo challenge and still going reasonably strong. Following on from last week’s hard yakka in the backyard, we’ve gotten a few tube stock plants from the Greening Australia Nursery at The Gap. It’s on the other side of Brisbane and a fair drive for us but well worth the effort. It is a literal gold mine for native gardening enthusiasts as they are a wholesaler which sells direct to the public. For the same price that we would expect to pay for a mature plant at a retail nursery, we got two mature plants and 12 tube stock tufted grass plants to add to our new garden bed. I really love native plants and with gorgeous coloured flowers, such as on the Melaleuca thymifolia below, they make a wonderful addition to any garden.

Just think of all the meat!

It’s a sad day in blogging world when the most exciting thing I can think of to write about is my new freezer. :$ You can blame Tina for that though, since she was desperate to see a photo of it. LOL

After years of putting up with a tiny freezer space in my fridge, I finally bit the bullet and got a dedicated vertical freezer. I can finally do a proper bulk meat shop and make my own chunky pet meat which the cats are absolutely thrilled about - if they could actually get excited about freezers, that is. For the same amount that I would pay for five days of pet meat for both cats, I can make a whole kilo which will feed them both for about a month.

Even better, it has a five star energy rating and has lovely clear plastic drawers, so no more sifting through the freezer space trying to find what I’m after. Even Mojo has given his seal of approval.

52 Blessings - Week 12

To be quite honest, this morning I woke up and couldn’t think of much to be grateful for. My muscles were sore and stiff from yesterday’s work shovelling pine bark into buckets, carting them up the driveway and up the back slope to the new garden bed. It was hard, repetitive work made worse by the midday sun and worse still by the intermittent heavy showers that would pass over. Mind you, only for long enough that the road was soon steaming in the sun that followed. I was cursing myself for the block that our house is built on…..cursing the builder for raising the level of the block….cursing the builder again for not having adequate side clearance along the side of the house so we could have the trailer in the backyard. All in all, I felt a little over it.

But this afternoon, after planting in our newly acquired grevilleas, I felt a real sense of achievement. The weeds are pretty much gone, we have a lovely new garden bed and we have done it without the aid of professionals. I’m sure that a professional landscaping could have done a better job….but there is a certain element of satisfaction gained from doing hard work yourself. I guess I’m just grateful I do have the ability to do hard work….so many others would love to be able to and cannot. It’s like my Dad used to say, be thankful for the aches and pains you feel when you are able-bodied - it means you are alive.

(Don’t ask me what that white spot is - I don’t have the foggiest!)

Slowly but surely…

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything about The Great Outdoors Project, most likely because I felt we weren’t really making any progress with it at all. Over the summer months, we’ve given the hole digging for the spa a miss - mainly because a) it is stinking hot and b) every time it rains, the hole fills back up. So instead of getting the spa in next, we decided to move onto another part of the project.

Where we live in suburbia is on a fairly steep hill and we are pretty much down at the bottom of it. That’s great if you want to go for a walk to the shops because you aren’t faced with a huge hike home afterwards but incredibly annoying in terms of lack of privacy. I used to go out in the backyard in my PJs - until I realised that all and sundry two houses up the street and more could see me! More importantly, one of my neighbours have two little dogs that bark at anything they see moving through the fence. I thought Mojo had taught them a lesson as on a previous walk outside, they started yapping at him and of course he flew at them through the tiny crack in the fence and managed to claw one on the tip of its nose. Nevertheless, they remain undeterred, so some screening foliage is definitely in order along the back fence.

Just as a reminder, this is what we are working with - a relatively small but incredibly weed infested backyard.

And hey presto, the weeds are gone after several weekends of yanking them out, mowing the remainder down and liberal quantities of Zero. I hate using pesticides and herbicides but when the job calls for it, there’s not much to be done about it. I guess it looks a bit like a disaster zone at the moment but at least there has been progress made. Eventually we’ll have “Summer Red” eucalypts right along the back fence and in the corner where I stood to take the photo, we’re going to put our fruit trees in half barrels. When it’s all finished, it will finally be a backyard I can be proud of. I’d love to be able to show you the finished product right now but I’d need a lot more mulch and half a dozen mature plants - not to mention a trailer to put it all in!

But one day I’ll be showing off the fruits of our labour…..that day is just not today.

52 Blessings - Week 9

They say necessity is the mother of all invention. So what do you do when you have the wreck of an old VW Beetle in your backyard, some pipes and a piece of corrugated iron and you don’t want to pay for removal fees?? Why you build a water feature of course! I snapped this photo while at Indigiscapes in Redlands Shire. They have some great ideas for landscaping, lovely picnic areas, a coffee shop and even a nursery with some relatively cheap buys. They’ve done a really good job with showcasing what you can achieve using solely native plants. The the VW Beetle water feature is part of the Recycle/Reuse garden display - what a nifty example of innovation!

52 Blessings - Week 8

Yes I could have put up my own curtain rod and hung my own picture frames. But I’m grateful that the man about the house did it all for me, so that I didn’t have to. He’s a bit camera shy, so I had to get a little creative with this shot.

Too darn hot!!

It’s a sweltering one in Brisbane today…..the weather bureau forecasted 32 deg.C for a top in my area today. Considering it was 31 deg.C at 10am, there was never any doubt that it would climb higher towards the afternoon. We’re now sitting at 38 deg.C and not enjoying it in the slightest. The cats are both flaked out in their relative cool spots - one under the futon in the back room here and the other on the tiles out in the kitchen. They are being rather sensible.

I just went to make sure that the cat’s water bowl was full and found that the cats aren’t the only ones finding it a bit hot to cope with at the moment. There in the middle of their water bowl was a very large one of these. The biggest jolly black house spider I have ever seen, just swimming around in their water bowl!

Needless to say, I squealed like the girl I am and dropped the bowl. How it didn’t break, I have no idea. Did I take a photo, no I did not! I just wanted spider outside ASAP so the man of the house was kind enough to take care of it for me. Meanwhile, Mojo had come bolting in from the kitchen to see what the fuss is about and has spent the last ten minutes following me around. It seems he knows that when I squeal like that, it usually means there is something to play with - he’s probably wondering where he can find his latest toy.