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.

Garden and Ducks

The garden is finally getting some sun after what feels like weeks of cloudy wet weather. The bean arch has almost connected in the middle! Here are a few shots of my vege patch. Followed by a photo from today of our remaining duckling of the two that have been born so far to the ducks. (versus the ducklings born to the chooks! - read back on entries!)
And the duckling (around 4 days old). The 2nd died yesterday.

New ducklings

Very exciting news. Our new ducklings have been hatching over the past 24 hours. The first one was discovered when I picked up our black chook off the nest just to get new chook eggs that have been laid (the chooks have been laying on top of her - quite undignified and we need to collect them each day) , quite expecting to see our duck eggs still under her (our fertile duck eggs that were placed under her when she went broody a few weeks back). And instead a small tiny black duckling was sitting there staring at me! Looking under the other chook soon revealed a couple of others including a cute little yellow one. The remaining two were hatched over night, and now we have 3 very clucky chooks, with 5 baby ducklings between them. We have had to put one of the more nasty bully mum chooks in a 'cage' for a couple of days - as she kept kicking one of the other 'mums' off her ducklings. She was even spied pecking at the yellow one. So she's been banished. We now just have quiet little Plum (our Araucana) and Blackie (an Australorp), looking after the brood. Plum has done the full hard yards, being broody for 28 days. Blackie has been broody for about 20 days, and Pearl - the one who has been banished, has only been broody for about 10. So in fact she's still broody and probably it's why she's getting nasty. (although A believe's she's just a plain nasty chook, born like that, will die like that!) We read that putting them in a cage for a couple of days can stop the broodiness. We'll see.

In the meantime, the actual two ducks - who have been broody for about 3 weeks are happily guarding another set of eggs, with Charlie their drake always near by. Those girls are quite happy sharing the one beautiful nest. And with all this rain, it's slowly getting flooded!

The ducklings...


The Ducks....

Bushwalking

Bushwalking in Spring in the Blue Mountains keeps providing us with little suprises. Last week we spotted an awesome stick insect on a branch, and today we stepped over a Blotched Blue Tongue Lizard, and soon after spied a hoof print - either a wild pig, or wild deer. Neither of which I knew hung out in our local bush. :)

Beans running away!

The runner beans are off and running. It happened overnight - a couple of days of hot weather and it's literally grabbed the string and run up about 30cm in about 30hours. Is that possible? Both sides. (here it is about a month ago when I first built it) I'm very excited to the prospect of having a living arch of beans this summer.

First signs of Asparagus

Some very exciting news today. I was having a closer look at the first little asparagus I had spied shooting up out of my ferny asparagus plant and realised it was in fact coming up from the actual asparagus roots I had bought and planted about 6 weeks ago. I had planted them as directed spreading the roots out over a small mound dug in the soil and covered up with soil. I wasn't sure if I was suppose to fully cover them with soil - and maybe I was? However looking around at them the other day we were certain they were dead. But today having a quick glance at the garden - ever hopeful - 3 of the four have shot up asparagus! Small tiny thin asparagus, but asparagus still!. So maybe they will eventually take off...they last for 20 years...so I am excited something is growing :) Now just have to wait to see what the ferny stuff does. (another purchase, but completely different from the roots I bought). I'm encouraged, because I am following instructions and just having faith. Being patient and just waiting. It's working!

Here they are...

Verge Garden - updated

I just thought I would post an updated photo of the verge garden nearly six weeks on from building and planting. (click here to read all the posts about it so far)
Here is a before and after so far...

Sunday baking

I love Sundays. I've fallen into the habit of doing baking on Sundays more often than not - it seems so old fashioned. But I can see all the reasons that people through time have done baking on Sundays. It's calm. It's festive. Friends pop over. Weekdays can be too busy. I find it relaxing to cook and really enjoy just trying a new recipe to test the duck eggs with! We have so many...too many. The damn ducks! ;) Today I found the best so far. It uses 6 egg yolks and whites separately. That's a half dozen in one go! Coconut Friands with Lime Curd. YUM. YUM. YUM.

And this morning after our morning walk I also constructed a bird feeder. They are eating the duck food anyway, with our cat looking on threateningly I wanted to at least provide them somewhere a little out of reach. I get that feeding the birds can be frowned upon, but we will be using this for when the weather is just too awful for them! The poor baby birds can be heard screeching from the tree tops calling for their supper. Forgive me ! I made it out of a rescued rusted old flu thrown as rubbish in nearby bush and a big old flattish rock we had lying around. It's dug a way into the ground to stabilise it. The inspiration actually came from Chris Clarke's extra-ordinary bushfire house that he built after the tragic bushfires in Victoria last year. His newly built house was burned down 6 days after finishing it. So he started rebuilding a new one and what resulted is amazing. Click here to view pix of Chris Clarke's house..

Anyway - here's my bird feeder.

Mini glasshouse

Today we went for an afternoon drive to Blackheath - just 15mins west across the top of the mountain from Katoomba. Our main purpose was to visit the nursery to buy some plant goodies which we did, however we stopped in a little funny second hand shop just across from the railway tracks on the south side that we quite like visiting. It's very quirky, the guy who runs it had an old gramaphone playing on high rotation the whole time we were there....Some strange woman screeching from beyond the grave...it sounded around 1930s. But outside the shop he had these new little kitsch glasshouses for seedlings which i just couldn't pass up! It's exactly what I've been looking for but didn't know. There were three different sizes and I bought the largest. I've been looking for some sort of glasshouse type thing, after discovering the joys of seedling growing and was tempted to buy an old window we saw today at a garage sale. Old windows can be used on an angle propped up in the garden as a kind of halfway idea. But this was perfect and reasonably cheap ($35). So in my seedlings go!

Birthday party food

With A's birthday yesterday we had a special food celebration. Gorgeous fish and fennel pie, followed by Apple Pie (first one I have ever made), followed by chocolate birthday cake. YUM. And speaking of birthday cakes - below is a pic of A's 9 year old's birthday cupcakes, decorated by her and my niece a few weeks ago. Gotta love kids and creativity. These are beautiful.
and the makings of my first apple pie, taken from a very very old Woman's Weekly cook book - you know the ones, before they got all "donna hay" on us!

drowned parrots

We've just come out of the other end of days and days of rain, which brought a few extra birds into our yard looking for food. The poor king parrots around our house were very hungry - even the magpies were coming into the front yard calling for food. We don't normally feed the native birds, but when they are sad and wet, and we can hear the babies calling in the trees...well....enough to say a couple of bird feeders later we had flocks visiting. We know that the previous people in our house use to feed the birds, and 3 years on, every spring they still come visiting. We've also had a migrating flock of long-billed corellas visiting the park opposite. The beak curves all the way down like a long digging shovel which they use to dig up critters out of the earth and their chirp is like a wicked laugh! It's very funny. They're quite rare in the blue mountains - not normally stopping in these parts. We also had a beautiful eastern spinebill fluttering around one of the sedums plants looking for pollen. With all the rain a lot of the pollen tends to be washed away.

One of our family of parrots....you can see how wet this one is...

Through the rain and mist, the eastern spinebill

A visiting long-billed corella...

Willow arch for beans

Yesterday A's 9yr old and I went down to the community gardens to cut down some noxious Pussy Willow from near the stream there. This is a type of willow which has destructive tendencies along the streams and swamps of The Blue Mountains. However! The long bendy sucklings of the willow make for perfect arch building. I've been planning an arch for my scarlet runner beans to grow up and over, and decided to build one, rather than spend more $. After watching some quick tutorials from the web on square lashing knots I have now built the main structure. :) It's pretty solid - I used garden stakes bashed into the ground as the foundation and then tied to each a willow suckling on each side. Bent them down in the middle and tied that together. I used mainly wire in variations of the square lashing knot because - well...wire is wire. I will soon tie more cross sticks to create a better grid for the beans to climb up. One thing that A has advised however is to watch out for the sucklings taking root! Apparently they just need a bit of water, put them in the ground and watch out! So I will probably take down the arch at the end of the season to avoid this....

Wheelbarrow from the old ladies at the garage sale

Yesterday in the middle of the snow 'blizzard' we went garage sale hunting. We came across a very non descript brick house with the small sign outside. We went down the drive way and around to behind the house where there were three old ladies sitting in the underneath 'garage'. And there in front of them were about 10 painted old vintage wheelbarrows with various plants in them. The little sign said $15-$20. I couldn't believe it meant for a whole wheelbarrow - I thought perhaps the plants. After a lovely conversation where we learned her husband was tired of wheeling them around everywhere - we parted with $15 and wheeled our new one back up the driveway and on to the ute to take home. The paintings are quite kitsch but we love them, so they are remaining as is! Here it is...[that's charlie our duck in the background) (complete with the succulents that came with it)

It's Snowing - like a blizzard!

Unbelievable snow falls in katoomba today - yesterday it was 20 degrees...tomorrow more of the same - but today! - It's the heaviest snow fall for a couple of years.

Cicada visit

Our very naughty cat just brought in this beautiful cicada. It's about 2 inches long. It's now back out in the elements....The beautiful gold wings almost looked fake.

Nest boxes for Parrots

We have noticed a Galah couple nesting in the top of nearby sewerage vent pipe thing. Apart from the pooy smell that will waft up during summer, it's also quite dangerous and sadly a sign that there must be few hollows left around our area. So I built a new nest box (specific size for parrots) for the large population of parrots and rosellas we have in our garden. I took the instructions from the Sustainable blue Mountains website. The hardest part was mounting it to the tree - it's about 15-20 feet up and we had to fully extend our ladder and then climb on a branch to manage it. I used wire put through plastic pipe to protect the tree. It's not perfect by any stretch ! I meant to connect it to a spring at one end to really attach it well - but it was too dangerously high for me to get a good grip or hold of anything. If I catch any birds nesting there over the coming year I will be sure to post a pic!

From various for blog

From various for blog

Pipsqueak pear in flower - and it's beautiful

Our miniature pear plant is in flower - and it's beautiful. I love spring. This pear (aka Pipsqueak Pear) is a really small pear tree about a 1.5 high - but fruits full juicy pears! We can't wait.

From various for blog