Christmas, gardens

Our cactus flowered, I was quite amazed :). 

The zucchini was the only vegetable we got into the ground this year. I was preoccupied with lying on the couch. Also because of this, they rarely get cooked & instead grow to gigantic proportions on the bush. Here is Theo demonstrating umm I don't know what.

Had a nice Christmas Eve service at our church, it was great, haven't had one of those for years (the past few years they've had a Christmas morning service).

Some nice Chrissie pics. 

And Christmas day. Even the dog gets a present :).

And the rest of the day was at Theo's parents house :). 

And then we had Boxing Day/ my sister Mim's bday/ Christmas with her. 

I made a present for someone, but I didn't get time to do another one before Christmas, so she got the 'practice' one lol ;). 

Now for a shot of my favourite nasturtium. 

And I was craving plain apple pie, so Theo made me one, complete with love hearts :). 

We Love Dirt; Floods & the New Family Member

The camera had a hissy fit & deleted the photos I took of our five metres of topsoil we had delivered last Saturday. I thought the rain might wash it away, but we wheelbarrow-ed it everywhere & have new & improved garden beds to show for it. Here's the pile of dirt, much reduced. 

We needed some outdoor activity the other night when Theo got home from work, so we went to check out the flooding river at Murchison.

And today we drove to Waranga Basin for similar activities, where every man and his dog and child seemed to be also driving up, checking it out and driving off again. Decided to have a swing while we were there. 

The man of many talents made me a very complicated dinner last night & I was most impressed. 

Last but not least, here's the latest addition to the family. Col came to visit & brought me a present. 

I think I'll call her Daisy.

Family, feathered & otherwise

I don't think I knew how sociable chooks could be. With people, anyway. Lacy has been following us everywhere. Even helping us garden. 

 Lately she doesn't follow us around so much because she has two followers of her own. Gertie we picked up at the Violet Town Market, and Dorothy was appropriated from next door because they gained eleven and said well why don't we keep one. Actually, we fostered all the half-grown ones for a night, while the big ones slept in a dog kennel, until they built the pen :). I somehow seem to have neglected taking any photos of Gertie :). 

And, just to show we treat all animals as equal (flies and centipedes don't count as an animal), Theo felt sorry for Billy being scared of the lawnmower, so he finished it off like this: 

And here are three misfits just getting along fine. 

Theo's parents have taken off on their long trek north for what's left of not-quite-winter, and we visited for dinner and Jenga. Nobody broke any bones and we all survived. Although I did tip my cup of tea on myself, which is also what I did the last time I visited there. At least this time I didn't require a change of clothes, and feel like I wet my pants...

Here's a gift my little sister brought me because I was sick for two months & she thought she'd cheer me up. Effective :)

Show and Tell Friday

Here are some of my favourite plants: my geraniums! I especially love my scented ones & am always looking for them at markets & nurseries & in people's front yards lol ;)

This one is a lemon-scented geranium. It was only planted last year & has grown heaps.

This one came from a market & was

labelled as a clove-scented geranium.

It does have a weird spicy smell.

This one came from a local nursery & the tag calls it 'Westray'. It has a strange herb-y smell, almost like fresh coriander. I love the pinky-purple coloured flowers :)

This one came from a cutting from my dad's garden. It is a peppermint scented geranium & the leaves are big and velvety-furry.

Here's the host blog here.

My sister's stash....

Today I was visiting one of my sisters, who shall remain nameless.

I mainly went to plant some things from my garden that I didn't want & she had room for. That in itself was an adventure as I had to go to the service station in my gardening clothes (shock horror) and the boot of my car was full of plants, dirt and all, which I was desperate to make them all fit in, as I didn't want them in the back seat of my car, imagining things crawling up the back of my seat on the entire trip there.

So, gumbooted and gloved up, myself and the plants came and we planted. I met the new pet goat and we generally enjoyed ourselves, hard work and all. We even discovered a smell that was suspiciously like a 'dead mouse under the floorboards' smell. I'm sure my sister really wanted you to know that. Well, she is still nameless.

Long story shorter, my sister now has a blog, well no technically I now have an additional blog, on my sister's behalf. The whole story is on the first post of that blog, but basically, she somehow manages to find all these amazing things, and some of the wonders she has amassed we feel simply need more public appreciation. And as my sister a. doesn't need more public appreciation personally, she gets enough from crazy feral neighbours; b. doesn't have internet connected currently and isn't very computer-confident; and c. wants the sources of her remarkable stash to forever remain her own private secret mystery, I am now blogging on her behalf. Or am her ghost-blogger or something. Anyway.

So, go there, enjoy the one post that is there already. And I had a good day today. (But forgot to take my camera so the goat isn't captured for posterity, yet).