Africanaussie

My two daughters are together for Thanksgiving this year, and since we are a family scattered all around the world this is a rare occurance.  I think you need to have lived through a couple of  American Thanksgivings to really appreciate the holiday, and I am grateful that I did experience living in America for many years.   Happy Thanksgiving everyone! After a busy week and weekend we went and sat on the beach with some brie and fresh bread for a couple of hours.  Very relaxing. You might have noticed that I now have all my blogs tabbed across the top of this one blog.  I have wanted to do this for ages.  Just this last week I e-mailed  Joan at  bluemountainsjournal  and she very kindly sent me the instructions.  It was easy peasy!  Gosh I am so thankful to be a part of this blogging community, thank you Joan. On yet another note I am going to be in the grow your blog party again this year.  Please sign up if you are interested - it is great fun, and you will find lots of

Last night we had a little rain, and it was lovely to walk around this morning and see how the garden had drunk it all up.  We have stage two water restrictions at the moment - unheard of at this time of year here in the wet tropics......  The grass is brown and dry and crunchy underfoot.  The wet season is taking its time arriving, it is muggy and hot as we wait. The kookaburra like to sit on the fence post surveying where their next meal will be coming from.  With this dry weather my poor dear hubby is on a conintual quest to mulch up all the leaves.  All my bins are full, and yet they continue to drop.  The evodia tree is in bloom - so pretty as the flowers from along the branches.  This tree hosts the ulysses butterfly and lots of other nectar feeding birds.  Look at the flowers close-up - arent they awesome?  They start out like little pink origami boxes, and then the white loops arrive and pop!  they open up! The lady slipper orchid vine also loves this time of ye

I have been avoiding facing up to the weeds out in the veggie patch.  The more you avoid them the more rampant they become so this weekend I made weeding a priority.  As I go through the beds I throw the weeds onto my weed mat paths.  Once done, I simply turn the weed mat over and voila!  the weeds are gone :)  Making weed tea attracts mosquitos in this climate, and yet I dont want to throw anything that comes out of my garden away.  doesnt it look nice  and clean now?  I also moved one of the worm bins into a more accessible area, right here in the asparagus bed.  This one has a bucket on top with fresh yummy veggies to entice the worms to move up.  That will leave the castings in the lower bucket that I can add to plants that need an extra boost.  I think the lime tree might need some boosting.  Not sure what is going on -one of the branches has started dying and there are these white spots all over the dying branch.  I cut back the dead part and sprayed with soapy water with a b

Once again it is time to link up with Lizzie at the Garden Share collective I looked back on last month where I was saying how dry it was, and it is still dry!  We had a few sprinkles, but watering the garden is something that we just do not do here!  I put up an extra shade cloth, but really need to purchase in some sugar cane mulch for the veggie patch.  I have been using my compost, but it is not enough.  We have never seen so many leaves falling, all the compost bins are continually topped up, I have to keep adding water so that they can rot down. I have two shade cloths up, and the only thing I am trying to do is keep the weeds at bay. The yellow cherrry tomatoes are still producing, and I have two types of eggplant the tsalonika long purple and a little round thai  white one that I got from a  lady at the markets. Both growing in wicking beds. The asparagus bed was quite over run when I returned so that had to be attended to.  I had mulched well before leaving for my tr