We have finally had some warm, sunny weather, and the soggy ground has started to dry up at last. The birds are singing and nesting, the insects are buzzing…..and the weeds are growing!!

We have had a very vocal pair of Striated Pardalotes near the shed the last few days- their call is amazing, and carries all the way up to the house!

Apart from weeding, pruning the roses now the risk of frost has passed, and generally tidying up after the cold and wet, we also had a new project! When we moved into McCarthy Park 2, we vowed to reduce the amount of lawn, and therefore the need to water it. We replanting the ‘oval’, a lawned circle in the driveway, with native plants, and while we have had to do some replanting in areas, it is looking fabulous!

So the latest area to plant is along 60 metres of the neighbour’s fence line. This will give us (and them) greater privacy, and in the process reduces another whole section of lawn! We need to keep a considerable amount as part of our bushfire protection zone, but look forward to this new section of 125 native plants taking off.

The plants we chose are deliberately bushy, screen type plants that should eventually completely hide the fence line. As they grow, we will gradually work on killing off the lawn around them, but decided to leave it for now……. hopefully that works!

The chooks are laying well, and despite giving plenty of eggs away to family and friends, we have still had an excess….so…. pickled eggs!

Pickled eggs is a great, delicious way to preserve for a short while, though they do take up a lot of space in the fridge!

We cook the quail eggs and hen eggs separately, but then pickle them together. They are delicious!

The rhubarb is growing like crazy at the moment, before it gets too hot, so lots of preserving is happening.

We have had the odd mishap however…….. perhaps the jars have been reused too many times!

Yummy! We love a bit of rhubarb on our porridge, hence just using small jars to preserve.

After a long, dry summer in Perth (8 months with no rain), winter has finally arrived. The gardens are looking refreshed (as are the weeds unfortunately!), and the rainwater tanks are looking much healthier.

The ‘pumpkin palace’ had provided plenty of zucchini, tomatoes, eggplant, rockmelon, green beans and of course pumpkin over the summer, and once we had harvested the last pumpkin, it was opened up to the chooks for the coming few months.

This rotation system is working well- the previous season’s pumpkin palace has been eaten down, fertilised and received lots of scraps, buried fish, carcasses etc so after a clean up it will be ready for the next round of planting.

We used to use a three way rotation, but find the two way pumpkin palace rotation we currently use works well. We manage to grow so many greens in the two aquaponics systems, we tend to use these two large beds for things like pumpkin and zucchini that take up lots of space!

Those beautiful dragon fruit flower buds got bigger and bigger every day!

It was so exciting, as we have never had flowers before. Just the one plant, had six gorgeous buds…….

……. with one opening one night and the other five a couple of nights later. Out we went with the head torch and paintbrush to assist with the pollination.

We were so excited, and so were the bees- they loved the flowers!

We were very hopeful that the pollination was successful, but unfortunately it wasn’t! The flowers fell off, and then the bit that should have been the fruit!

While that was so disappointing, we are looking forward to a winter that doesn’t mean we start from scratch yet again, followed by more flowering next summer!