Saturday, October 31, 2009
Saturday morning in the park
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
A bit of Pashley info
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Marathons get the thumbs-up
Friday, October 23, 2009
And finally... the Marathons
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
What a difference a service makes!
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Brooks love and joy...
Saturday, October 17, 2009
A trip down the coast
Thursday, October 15, 2009
A gripping yarn
Mmm, Brooks. What an excellent way to use up spare saddle leather and bike spokes!
How hard can it be... (2)
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Postman Pat's Brooks delivery
Mustn't speak ill...
Monday, October 12, 2009
the mortgage minefield
Thursday, October 8, 2009
When old flames sputter and go all waxy...
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Kitted out for a ride to the grocery store
Nothing like a wet weekend...
The pink roses are out the front, tumbling over lattice and providing amazing scent when you walk past them.
The irises and all the other photos are taken in our back courtyard garden. You'll see sorrel growing next to the irises. It likes lots of water so has gone ballistic this week; I'll have to cut some of it back to give the other herbs and the tomatoes a chance. You can make a wonderful sauce with sorrel that goes well with chicken and fish, or use the younger leaves in salads. You can blanche the leaves with spinach to pad out your veggies on the dinner table as well. The older leaves can be a bit bitter to eat raw.
The red and white flowers are salvias; in this case, Hotlips, with its big pouting lips. I love salvias - I have six different ones in my garden and another three at my mother's. Some are ornamental, like Hotlips, some are edible like sage officinalis, but with the bigger ones there's a lovely trick you can do with the flowers: pull one off carefully and suck it at the base - you'll get a hit of nectar :-). The native honeyeaters love them just as much as I do.
Lots of herbs doing their stuff now too; the borage is in bright blue flower, and apparently planting blue flowers at the ends of your veggie beds attracts the nasties away from your veggies and onto the blue flowers. The blue flowers don't seem to suffer as a result! The blue also attracts bees which apparently then buzz around your veggies and fruit. I have rosemary planted at the other end; that will soon be covered in blue flowers too. Borage flowers are a visual way to dress up your salads or put into a drink like Pimm's. They are edible; they're not a taste sensation but not unpleasant either.
I have young tomato plants in, so the next thing will be to plant some basil in between them - this helps keep fruit flies at bay. There are also some marvellous, but not cheap, products in the EcoNaturalure range which I use to control fruit flies. I use a lot of the Eco products by this manufacturer - they really are fantastic, they're organic, there are no nasty chemicals (I figure we put enough chemicals into our bodies unthinkingly, unwittingly and often without our knowledge or consent unless we are really viligent about reading packaging labels and the manufacturers are truly honest about just what goes into things).
Saturday, October 3, 2009
Philips, you're listening!
Friday, October 2, 2009
And before the rain gets them...
...I picked some roses from the garden this morning. I have a climbing rose out the front, which a friend gave me as a tubestock. In three years it's gone totally rampant and is sweetly scented. It's just starting to look lovely. And out the back a beautiful old-fashioned rose from the same friend; it wasn't thriving in her garden, which is surprising as she has the greenest fingers I know. Anyway it seems to like the cold winters and slightly less humid air in this part of the city and is covered in buds. It's strongly scented, too - so when you walk past this vase you whiff in the most wonderful rosy smell.