Light Graffiti

Mom came over for dinner yesterday and we had a go off light graffiti. You turn on the camera in a dark room with a low ISO (whatever that means) and a slow shutter speed, and then stand facing the camera and jump around like a loony drawing pictures with a torch.

This is a lovely house with a tree. The door is running way from the rest of the building.

And this is a vaguely recognisable attempt at music on a stave. Clearly practise is called for. 

Picture Frame!

We have lots of lovely pictures to hang up around the house, but no frames for any of them, so we recently looked into getting them framed. It turns out this costs a fortune, so we're going to have a crack off it ourselves. The first picture to get framed is going to be a nice one Hugh got for me in Bali last year. It's a stretched canvas, but he had to take the canvas off the frame coming through customs, so step 1 is making another canvas stretcher. 

Sophie and Jess came over to give a hand. We cut pieces of timber down to the correct size using a saw and a mitre box. Pretty time consuming, but very satisfying to make it all manually. Next time we'll definitely borrow John's powered mitre saw. 

Here are the pieces cut and ready for assembly. Jess is desperately trying to avoid the picture. 

Sophie brandishes her saw arsenal.

And here's me with the and Sophie with the first corner stuck together.

It was a bit trickier than I expected. First we held the 2 outer pieces together really hard while Sophie ran a 4mm drill through the outside at a 45 degree angle. Then we spread glue everywhere and stuck a 4mm dowel through. The little corner piece is to give extra strength, and also to make sure that everything is aligned properly. The elastic bands everywhere are holding it together. Now to wait for it to dry. I'm starting to see why it is so expensive to get this done professionally!

Vegetable Rotation Plan

We have 4 main beds for growing vegetables in, so a 4 bed rotation plan makes lots of sense. Growing the same stuff in the same spot each year makes it very easy for diseases to build up in the soil. Rotating everything over 4 or even 6 years means that the diseases that attack specific plant families don't have a chance to get any footing. In our allotment in London the previous occupant had grown alliums all over the plot and they went to seed. By the time we got it, the whole place was rife with white root rot, so no alliums would grow.

I've checked the spacing in the square foot gardening guide for each of these. Some seem quite adventurous - 16 onions in a square foot, for example. My squares are only 25cm though, instead of the 30cm that would match a foot, so I'll probably reduce the spacing a tiny bit for anything that looks like it would get very cramped.

We filled and reticulated the 4 main beds this weekend, so planting will start any day now!

Herbs!

We finally get to start planting, now that the garden is pretty much there. First of all, Hugh ran a pick-axe through the bases of the beds to break up the compacted gravel. Worms and things like that will hopefully appear once there is nice fresh soil to be had, so having an inch of solid lime in the way wouldn't help much. Also we needed to break the weed fabric for the same reason. 

Here are 2 metal tins I found in the shed for growing mint in. Mint will grow all over the place if it is not contained, so i put some drainage holes in the bottom and a few bits of broken pottery. This make it easier for water to escape, so the mint doesn't end up in a bog.

Then pop them into the bed ...

And add loads of soil. This is veggie mix from Soil World. A ute load costs $56 and it ended up filling 2 1m x 1m beds and 1 2m x 1m bed. Not bad for giving everything a great start!

These brown pipes are suitable for reticulating under mulch. They have drip holes along the length of the pipe, but they way they are made is like a valve system. When the water isn't flowing, it still holds a bit of pressure so dirt can't get in.

We have added a switch to the black pipe leading into this bed. This is so we can turn off the water if we need to while the bed is fallow at any time. Probably not necessary for perennial herbs, but who knows where we may move these to in the future. All the beds will get this.

And then tadaah - herbs! We have divided the bed into a grid using thumb tacks and twine. Easier than wood, but just as easy to see.

Haunching

We got all the paving haunched this weekend so now it's pretty much done. There's still a lot of sand we need to sweep off, but there's no harm in that staying for a bit longer, as it fills up all the cracks between pavers. Hugh has turned into an expert cement mixer. Here he is with our trusty wheelbarrow

And here he is tucking cement in between the paving and the wall. It took a few hours to get through it all, and we got a fair few blobs of cement onto the pavers, but all in all it was easy enough. The mistake blobs brush off easily when it's dry, so now it's all ready to go with the planting! 

You can just about see our fruit sticks in the background. They are gradually filling up the space along the borders. No fruit this year except for a few teeny weeny peaches, but we should start getting a few bits and pieces next summer.

Loads of Concerts

It's been a busy few weeks of concerts in JSR. The school built a new organ in the chapel last year and it is finally complete and being played loads. It sounds amazing. It has been set up with a volume perfect for the chapel, and each note is perfectly clear. Even the low notes which are usually lost in a blasty mess are amazingly clear. 

This is the staff concert, where each music teacher is given the chance to show off their skills and instrument to win more students. All these pictures as blurry as I really have no idea how to take photos in the dark, but you can still pretty much see what's going on. 

Hugh's trombone quartet. 

Here is Nicole on clarinet accompanied by Jonathan on piano and Hugh turning pages.

And Jamil, Hugh and Andrew doing some unaccompanied singing.

This is all the staff who performed playing "You've got a friend in me" at the end.

And here is the star instrument of the moment, the beautiful new organ. Jonathan played an opening recital last weekend and it was amazing. He also played Peter and the Wolf with brass quintet yesterday, where Hugh played trombone. It was a really good arrangement. Jonathan was the bird, among many other things, and Hugh was the cat.