I'm On A Boat!

This is the ladies E-Grade 8 that I coxed this weekend in Bunberry. They are great craic and quite a tidy crew. Lauren is the stroke and is laughing away here at my t-shirt that says "One speed - go!" Note how 2 at the back is having a nice little look at her blade. Eyes forwards in the boat! Square early! Watch your timing ladies!

And this is Hugh's quad crew getting ready making sure that nothing is going to fall off. Greg, the big tall guy on the left, is cursed in races. Every race he was in suffered a crab, including his C grade skull. Eek. The other lads here are Dave, who started with Hugh, and James, who is club captain. 

Spring is truly sprung

All our photos these days are taken in the late evening so they are pretty dark, but this is one of the first signs of spring in the garden. Our peach stick has started blossoming. Strange that it blossoms before having leaves, but there we go. Judging by the number of blossoms, we are going to have a nice few fruit this year. Note how we have mulched the bed underneath like good water-conserving Aussies. Everything dries up to a crisp here without watering and mulching. It's quite different to gardening at home where the focus is on drainage and weeding.

Paving Animal!

Richard is back this week to lay a section of paving between the chicken coop and the palm trees. Look how massive it looks now that he has the area cleared! On the first day he cleared loads of rocks and general mess and dug the area down to a level to match the coop base. Check out the pile of sand below he removed - it's nearly 6 foot high! Then yesterday he put down weed fabric, covered with gravel, compressed, and got most of the sand in place. He's amazing! Today he'll be finishing the sand and starting putting down the paving. Now to think of what to do with our new grey mountain.

Grey slabs, your days are numbered.

These slabs have been in our garden for 50 years, and I reckon it's time for them time for them to go. Next week the amazing Richard will start laying lovely red half brick pagers. Very exciting! We've spent the last few weeks collecting various pavers from friends and recyclers on gumtree. Come Sunday morning we will have transported approximately 2500 of them. W'ere getting very efficient at it. Perhaps we should go into business.

Springtime!

I've still not quite gotten used to the seasons here, but I think it's around springtime, so planting begins! In the bottom picture we have planted rows of carrots and lettuce directly into the ground. They are just starting to poke their heads out now, but are too tiny to catch on my phone camera.

In the top picture we have seedlings planted in trays. These are all alliums - leeks and onions and things like that. When they start growing they have a little string loop that breaks through the surface first. Just about visible in this picture. When they are a few inches tall and around half the thickness of a pencil we'll put them in the ground next to the carrots.

We are going to build raised vegetable beds at some stage, but for the moment the ground servers perfectly.

Extreme gardening

I put this picture of our garden up on Facebook a while back and a friend commented that they didn't realise we were moving to the third world. Sometimes I think we may be making the house worse!