Fat fish, coffee beans, lots of lemons and lots of compost

Another weekend ended, another sense of achievement. 

Special thanks to our neighbour, Mitch who popped up on his tractor this morning to do some tractoring (his has a bucket, ours doesn't). Unfortunately he broke when he was helping unload the trailer and has hurt his back. Wishing you a speedy recovery Mitch.

But his handy work was well appreciated. He took out an unsuccessful garden bed to open up the patio outside the downstairs apartment. I'm going to drop some turf on this next weekend.

OK, first dilemma - fat fish. A few years ago I put about 30 fingerlings (the edible kind - sleepy cod, silver perch and eel tail catfish) into our water fountain pond. They were less than 5 cm long. They're now plate sized but, because of too many fish in the pond, general consensus is that they're over nitrogenised and potentially toxic to eat. So... what to do with the fishy wishys. Options are to drain the pond and try and catch them, then relocate them to a neighbours dam where they can live a long and happy life (Lord knows how, our driveway if very very steep). Negotiations will include fishing rights. If we do this, I'll be able to clean out the pond (read cattle trough) and start again with less, ornamental fish. Apart from begin a really nice focal point on our driveway, the bees love it and I'm more than happy to make the bees happy. I would love love love to have some bee hives but am very allergic to  stings.

Harvest time today for the turmeric. I got about 1-2 kilos and several rhizomes for replanting and sharing. That's more than $100 of turmeric. Seriously worth looking at planting, it's a lovely plant with really pretty flowers. We will chop it into 1cm chunks and freeze. 

A bit of planting... (actually, there was a lot of planting)

Some boasting (check out the size of one of my parsley)

And the gum trees are flowering (makes me think of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie - overseas visitors will need to Google this)

Oh, and Lots of Lemons they said... (tick), dwarf tree (not so apparent) 

All this gardening, of course, means excessive compost. Woo hoo!

Exciting news, out first harvest of coffee beans is nearly ready for harvesting. MOTH (man of the house) is very excited about this. Four more coffee trees being planted next weekend.

I previously posted about a couple of old baths that I mounted in old red bricks. The intention was to use them as strawberry beds (which is going really well and am expecting our first crop next season). Have also added some chilli bushes to the baths and, good news, they're going great. Never thought this companion planting combination would be so successful.

Next weekend, I'm harvesting our significant ginger crop (about 2m squared). Keen for ideas of how to preserve ginger.

And, the roses need a good pruning - they're out of control and very unattractive.

Another quiet weekend in the country - can't wait to get back to work tomorrow for a break.

Stuff I see...

Well, the list got smashed last weekend - and some! Only things not done are sprinkler system and plant pumpkins seeds. But I also went out and bought about 150 plants and MOTH helped me plant out the new garden. And we cleaned up the place to look brand new in preparation of our special visitors. Chooker moles also got some extra attention they really didn't want.

This weekend there's a whole lot of preserving going on. So far we have Wild Guava Chutney bottled, Chilli Jam on the stove for the next 12 hours and there's green PawPaw Chutney "resting" for booking tomorrow.

I also popped some pork ribs that had been marinated in BBQ Bourbon sauce into the wood fired oven this afternoon for several hours… LOOKING GOOD! Then MOTH is going to crank it up a few degrees for pizza night.

I popped out into the yard to see what I could see and there is a surprising amount of colour around for this time of year.

I need to get on top of these aphids on the lemon tree tomorrow...

 But it looks like I already have some help on the kaffir lime tree (I love ladybirds)

With the new garden bed almost done, it got a quick cat scan of approval from Max the Manx...

Included in the garden are our new coffee trees (below), a blueberry patch, plenty of herbs and other edible plants.

Here's a shot of the new finished shed… how did we ever live without this!

Oh, and we had the film crew from Totally Wild here yesterday to do a story on Rescued Donkeys. Guinness (aka Mr G for the kiddies) thought he was a filmstar!

Gotta say, it was fun - even the last part that I'm not too sure Ranger Stacey was prepared for…

Should be on TV in about 8 weeks time.

It's getting chilli...

Check out these huge thai chillis that I have just picked from the garden.

I think I'm going to have a bumper crop this year, there are literally thousands coming though and all different types. Looks like more 100 chilli chutney (it's sooo hot).