New native garden for the duck pen

We have been passing a beautiful chook enclosure for the last couple of years on our afternoon walks. It's in north katoomba and is made up almost entirely of native plants. It's looks great and is perfect of poultry because they don't really bother with natives. So we have been planning our own version - and then we saw how wonderfully the indigenous "bush tucker" garden has taken off at the local community gardens that we decided this weekend to just 'bite the bullet' and do it in our duck enclosure. Luckily we had two truck loads of chip left over from our neighbours demolishing of a pine tree and used that to make paths. We then popped over to Weber Nursery at Mount Boyce near Blackheath and bought about 20 tube stock of natives. About 15 minutes after we finished planting it started to rain! - Perfect start to their new life. Here's a pic...

Catalan Easter Cake

Rainy day sunday in the Blue Mountains and I decided to do some baking. Lots of easter recipes are starting to appear and so I chose a lovely decadent looking cake - a Catalan Easter Cake from this months Masterchef magazine. According to the magazine "in Spain this cake is given to godchildren and decorated with eggs to indicate their age" . With I thought was a smashingly lovely idea. A special ingredient used in the cake icing is orange-blossom water - a scented water made in the middle east made purely from Orange blossoms infused in water. I found a beautiful one at our local deli from Iran - brand Pariya (www.pariya.com).

Here's mine...

Raspberries are here!

After several months of working on the raspberry garden that actually started about a year ago (see this post) we now have a full crop of Raspberries flowing. The sucklings from the community gardens have taken off and are fruiting like mad! Also the bed preparation - 3 months of growing buckwheat as a green manure to prepare the bed before planting must be paying off. I am very happy as this is my long term goal to have a full raspberry crop every year. I have been saving Raspberry recipes for a few years...so smiles all around.

And on another note - who knew Ducks loved succulents. I now have banned our ducks from coming anywhere near the succulent garden.

Progress

With the very wet summer, followed by incredible heat my garden hasn't been as inspiring as it was last year. The tomatoes have only just started to ripen - the cucumbers are struggling (this time last year we had a huge crop). The corn and beans are doing well... The berrys (raspberries mainly) started fruiting this year..so hopefully next year it will be bumper.