Friday, March 6, 2009

I can't believe its been 2 weeks since I blogged last! I've been so busy with other things .... at the moment I'm cleaning, sorting and organising things for a market stall this Sunday at the Baby and Kids Market I haven't been before so I'm hoping to convert some clutter into cash! It is hard to let go of baby things but really we don't have the space and they're all just gathering dust, I'm sure someone could use these things, and of course cash is always welcome in return!

Other recent happenings .....

Well, this has got to be the smallest egg I've ever seen .....! One of our superchooks laid it last week. Only 35mm long and barely registers on the scales. The kids thought it was hilarious and enjoyed playing a 'trick' on Daddy telling him he was going to have an enormous egg for his dinner ....... :-)

Other news from around the home... veggie patch looking green and healthy again, though not much edible at the moment. The big greens here are eggplants and pumpkin plants - looking great now (however I doubt whether there is enough warm weather left to grow and ripen anything on them). Still, I'll leave them for now, the weather is so weird you never know. Also planted out a little basil patch in the front, and since the photo was taken also planted out my flat-leaf parsley that I saved seed from a couple of months back. Very proud that has worked!




Also recently planted out some more Cherokee Wax beans I had germinated in pots, the last lot didn't do well so I've tried a different spot and these ones are happy! They are supposed to be bush beans so I'll see how they go without stakes.

Yesterday I caught the bowerbirds back again (those who demolished much of the patch before I surrounded it with wire and netting!) I have about 15 or so pots on the back deck with various herbs and plants in them, and I caught the bowerbirds eating our chilli plant! They've been eating the ends off all the chillies and banana capsicums then leaving the rest (gee thanks) for us. Well at least I can stop blaming the chooks now! I can't believe we spent years encouraging the native birds into our garden, and now I'm chasing them out with a broom !

Tried my hand at baking bread from scratch recently too- in a readmaker but all I've used so far is the ready made breadmix. First I tried a wholemeal loaf as thats what we usually eat, which was ok but a bit sweet, so when I made my first white loaf I tweaked the recipe and hey presto! Perfect! White bread is a rarity in our house, so the kids thought it was great. I was pretty pleased with it- tasted good, quite dense and heavy but baked perfectly. Might get a bit more adventurous witht recipes later, but it does feel good to achieve another of my goals for this year!

:-)

2 comments:

Jacqueline said...

oh my goodness that is a small egg!! Is it from a pullet or have they just forgotten what to do?! Your little veg patch is doing well - I don't think our eggplant will get there either now it is getting cool but as you say, you just can't tell! We started making bread when we moved up here and found it too hard to get to a bakery to get what we wanted - it's fun to do, though sometimes we make little bricks and sometimes they get stale very quickly but there is nothing like that smell in the house - delicious!

mountainwildlife said...

Hi Jacqui, no pullets here, full size australorps and RIR's ! well, one RIR now - see my latest post :(
Yes, that smell of baking bread is soooo good! I'm assuming homemade bread goes stale more quickly because there are no preservatives, and that I don't mind. Besides, ours is usually finished pretty quickly :-)