Flowers and vegies

One of the pleasures of being out here is the range of flowers and fruit/vegetables we grow.  In Winter it can seem a bit desperate, but the rest of the year there is always something to look at/eat or pick.  I'll begin with a section of the view from my study window.

It features Pink lilies, white daisies and some Crocosmia
 A close up of the Crocosmia: while it is nice to look at when in flower it is very invasive.
On the subject of Lilies ...
The next three images are various forms of Begonia.


Where are the fucshias you ask? Unfortunately we had a small disaster with herbicide residue so the fuschias are in plant hospital - hopefully only for this season.

Let us move towards the edible section.  Although some people would disagree, we do not regard any part of a globe artichoke as edible.  Possibly our views might change if we found one after being without food for a few weeks, but as that isn't the case we just enjoy the pretty flowers.
For the first time in several years we have a crop of plums.
And what a crop: so far I reckon we have given away 3 kilos and cooked/frozen another 3.  And that has barely put a dent in them.
We also have some nice peaches.
The strawberries are also having a second crop.

 Frances found one very small tomato a couple of days ago and I got this one on Sunday.
 So we are now moving into the shape of crops to come.  Here are a couple of varieties of tomato ....

 ..  a flower on some form of pepper  ...
 ... and sundry cucurbits going for world domination.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Insects from pine trees

Image
This afternoon (13/1/2015) we were looking out of our sunroom and noticed a strange bit of mist.  On getting my binoculars on the case I found it to be a cloud of tens of thousand of insects.  They appeared with naked eye to be flying away, but with binoculars I thought they were circling. Here are some images In the second one it may be possible to see there are two streams coming from the top of each tree. There was a loud buzzing noise but that could just be several thousand wings. Earlier in the day Frances had been to some nearby willows and they were infested with many little black soft bodied insects.  Perhaps they shifted to the pines and were swarming? Help!! Any information welcome. A colleague, from Wamboin, had noticed a similat phenomenon, but involvng eucalypts rather than pines!  Here are the photos he took with his phone. I have consulted some expert friends.   Their responses were: I would have gone for chironomids. I rec...
Read more

A tour of the West (part 1)

Image
A friend from my time in the UN sent me some photos of her family trip along Route 66.  They did this is a large camperwagon rather than a Chevy Corvette (apparently the kids jacked up about being offered a trip in the trunk).  It seems to have been a very good trip for them and most interesting to see their photos.  It was also educational for me, as I found out the German for rocking chair (schaukelstuhl, since you ask). They did 7200 miles in 30 days - a pretty serious bit of distance. This made me think of the trips we did in 1981 when living in Denver.  Frances initiated that idea by getting a book about the National Parks of the West  and marking interesting places.  I then worked out a route on a Rand-McNally Road Atlas (GPS was unknown then  - as were iPhones, personal computers and the internet).  From memory, taking nearly the whole Summer school holidays we covered about 10,000 miles in 70 days.  Here, approximately,  are ...
Read more

Maslins beach rules

Image
Anyone who was in Adelaide in the 1970s will be having a good nudge nudge at that title.  However the beach is really nice even though it is the haunt (in Summer ) of naked people.  (As an aside one of the 'van park staff was talking to some other guests and commented that the sights on the beach in Summer were not at all exciting.)  In April it is the haunt of seniors, many of them exercising their dogs, and thus a far more attractive place. Getting to the beach was a walk of about 1km along roads, from our van.  The second half of this went past a rather daggy looking paddock with many formed ridges in it, as though it was irrigated, although a water sources wasn't evident.  The paddock got interesting towards the end as some green parrots appeared.  Thanks to Frances eye for detail we have subsequently identified these as Elegant Parrots: my first lifer for 2014.    The locale is indicated by the red lines in this mudmap: Here are the bird...
Read more