The House(s) of Fran_mart

 We seem to have some nice flowers around the hacienda at the moment. A Magnolia flower earnt a pic with a mass of fallen stamens. All of those flowers were at the front of the house.  There are also some out the back.  These photos were actually taken to record the New Holland Honeyeaters! And stretching the meaning of "flowers" , but I wanted to record our first multiple fruit pick of tomatoes.  This year we are well endowed with Grosse Lissies!

Nah - delete City and replace it with Village.  In fact noting that Mallacoota recently had a peak wind gusts of 79 kph on a day when Wilsons Promontory scored 148 kph (and has had high gusts >100kph on 7 of the past 8 days) perhaps replace 'windy' with breezy! Whatever.  We have come back down the hill after an interesting sunrise.  It was nice to capture an aircraft scooting from behind Mt Ainslie! A couple more early morning images showing the carpark fully lit up (but empty) at about 7am ...  .. and a line of cloud pointing at Black Mountain Tower, We experienced yet again the roadworks at Maramingo.  At least this time we only had to wait for 4 minutes! At home, the first sign of "breezy" was a couple of geranium pot plants having blown over.  The second sign was the vast number of grapefruit which had blown off the tree.  This is about half the fall.  A lot of them were very small, and others were well squidged by thei...

When the Muffin Girl last visited she brought along some things she had made in her holiday care craft sessions.  One of the was a dinosaur made from stuck together polystyrene beads.  Being very original I decided to call this Dino!  Yesterday Dino went to explore what was going on in the vegie garden.  I should point out that last year we did very little in the vegie garden as we waited for the fences to be rebuilt and the watering system to be repaired after the fire. The lack of water continued until a couple of weeks ago but we have now got liquidity from the pipes, if not from the sky so some stuff has been planted.   I took Dino to check it out.  Here he is positioned next to a broad bean: they have taken quite a while to germinate but are now up and doing.  Garlic is also sprouting nicely. The strawberry bed was hopeless last year as most of the plants were burnt.  However I am finding a few and have re-dug the bed and mulc...

After much messing about there has been major advance on shed rebuilding this week.  The first stage has been the relatively simple stuff nearest the house.  Here is the carport.  The toolshed ..  .. and the potting shed.  Also the chook house!  In Tanzania there are many human habitations less robust that this!  In the vegie garden some cherry tomatoes are expressing displeasure at the strong drying winds today.  They have been given some water to improve their attitude.  The Kipfler potatoes are looking very good ...  .. and the second sowing of spuds are good (under their coating of lucerne mulch).

Despite the continuing howling gale I got out to wield the fork a bit today.  As our vegie garden is still unfenced this wielding happened in an area which I had put some chook wire round to keep the wildlife out. As I dug a bed for snow peas I found some welcome wildlife was evident. OK, earthworms aren't very wild, but they are very welcome as they do a good job of working over the soil.  Quite a few were dug up, implying the soil was in pretty good condition. The first asparagus spears have emerged.  Yummo!  I think this is a viable bud on one of the grape vines.  If so, it will be a miracle!  Ditto this shooting stone fruit (the upper parts of the stem are gone but a bit of training and this will be fine!)  If only I could remember what it was!  Blackcurrants can apparently survive!  As can an apple tree!  (Other parts of the tree might require a little pruning.)  An ongoing form of entertainment is clearin...

I suspect that is a repeat of a Canturf sign, which is in itself a satire on a TV show.  However, there are signs of life in our garden and it needs recognition. On 6 March we decided to do some tidy up in what we refer to as the sun room bed, since it is outside our sun room!  Part of this was removing a fence I had erected in a vain effort to keep the rabbits out.  As is often the case to do do step one (remove the fence) required completion of some earlier steps.  One of these was to remove the dead foliage from the Red Hot Pokers ( Kniphofia sp. ).  As I did so I noticed nice little green shoots coming up!  These plants are quite a treasure since when they flower, typically in January ... .... they are are visited by Honeyeaters , including our only sightings of New Holland Honeyeaters. One of the particular disappointments caused by the fire was the burning of some pots containing our 'special' Irises .  However, at least one of t...

This extends the snaps I put on my facebook page today.  It's a few things that interested me around our house.  The first few photos are of Frances' fuchsias that are beginning to flower on the deck.  Its surprising (not) how much better they are going in the absence of a dose of glyphosate. In the strip below the deck is a honeysuckle, which is a Bad Invasive Weed up the block but quite attractive when constrained. The bed outside our sun-room has a variety of tubular flowers in it, which do a good job of feeding Eastern Spinebills and other honeyeaters.  Penstemons help out with this task.  As I was going out this morning a full size Gippsland Water Dragon was basking above the Creek. I find these beasts quite attractive, and very interesting when seen in close-up. Later in the day I had a sweep round the currants ...  .. and berries. The strawberries are taking a break at the moment but the Boysenberries and Loganberries...