I had to come back and post my success after a thirty minute blitz before I went to BaBs today. It’s looking even better now, so yay! No notes at flickr this time

Appears there’s a Kitchen Dare meme making the rounds, so here you have it!

If you click through the photo, you should end up on my flickr page, and if you hover over the pic I’ve added notes to explain myself!

So, if you’re reading this, “I dare ya!”

Well, some news about the nest/baby bird thing.  Our mama blackbird had laid 2 eggs, but only one had hatched.  Would you believe he has already grown and left the nest?!  Yes!  And mama blackbird has since re-feathered her nest and is back to sitting inside?  Now, I don’t know if she is sitting on the other unhatched egg, or re-laying, or just cruising.  Hey, maybe it’s the baby hanging out in the nest, I don’t know.  Anyone know anything about blackbirds?  All I know for sure is that I love having them in our yard - they have the sweetest little song that just makes the garden seem so alive and relaxing all at once.

Speaking of the garden, last weekend I harvested some oregano to try my hand at drying.  Not much, about a bunch of say, 20 stems, which are hanging in a dry spot in the kitchen.  The oregano looks so nice and fresh in this picture, but right now I have to admit it doesn’t look to appetising at all!  Just kind of curling and shriveling up into nothing.  It smells nice, though, and I can’t wait to use it once it’s nice and dry, crushed over fresh sliced tomatoes and feta drizzled in olive oil.  Mmmm, or our other family favourite, which is on roasted potatoes.

Ah, a bit of a potato update!  The shoots are just taking off growing.  And so green - probably the lushest thing in the garden at the moment.  Alex has covered the pots with some netting in a bid to keep out possums, birds or *ahem* babies.  I’ve been keeping up with Pagan Rach’s blog and her 28 spot ladybird plight and hoping it doesn’t happen to us.  Wonder about cabbage moths, are they interested in potatoes?  Anyway, keen as anything to see what potatoes we actually manage to grow.  Check out how much they’ve grown since my last post on potatoes!

Ah now, here we have my current curiosity.  Do you think this will become a lemon?  Because right now, this is what ALL of our buds look like.  I think the tree may be in it’s second year, so maybe it’s not ready to make actual fruit yet.  Saying that, I’ve seen smaller lemon trees than ours in Bunnings with actual lemons on them, so I’m not sure what the situation is here.  Apparently sheep poo is a winner for lemons, but I’m scared of poo in the garden! LOL (so much for that dog idea :P)

Lastly, some new life in the flower boxes.

I have no idea what this is or was or is going to be.  The flower box is just outside the dining room window, meant to be a lovely view with some gorgeous flowering plants peeking in to us, but right now, they are all, um, you know, dead-ish.  Once I spotted this new growth, I picked off all the dead browness, so let’s see what kind of flowers come from this plant.  Something purple, I think?

Well, I suppose something positive had to come out of the two day heat wave! I think it was about two weeks ago that Alex planted the potato seeds into our big black pots and we’ve all been patiently waiting to see if they would shoot up.

The seeds came from the Slow Food Victoria showbag we got at the Royal Melbourne Show back in September. The guy at the show said the potatoes were ready to plant when “your bum doesn’t get cold when you sit on the ground”. Right. Time was getting on and we hadn’t yet planted the seeds, but when we finally did plant them, I wasn’t too confident.

Then, last night, Alex was out trying to get things in order before the stormy night, and lo and behold, he discovered our little shoots. So, now we wait. Apparently you wait for the shoots to grow into a “canopy” which you water, and under the ground the potatoes grow and grow until finally once the canopy starts to die off, the potatoes are ready to harvest.

So they say.

Here are a couple of photos of our three pots with potato shoots, oh, and a teeny tiny tomato!

On Tuesday, after an early afternoon with family and friends (Melbourne Cup Day BBQ in the park), we got home to attack this bush-shrub-tropical-agapanthus thing in the front yard. The entire front right corner of the garden was just a mess of leaves, and somewhere in that mess of leaves was the water meter which we had to make accessible for meter readings. The other reason we wanted to pull up that front corner was to make room for a fruit tree of some kind (more on that later).

It took about three hours to pull up most of the shrubbery and left us with the root mass that is most certainly agapanthus… and an un-before seen tap! Alex got stuck right into it with his compost fork and did some damage… to the compost fork! It’s still functional, and can probably be put back into shape, but even if not it’s still usable in the compost.

I’m not sure how or what or when we might be rid of the roots, but I think it’s safe to say that for now, we’ve all had enough of each taking a hack at the root ball; it’s been three days since anyone’s touched it.

As for the maybe fruit tree, so far the possibility is olive or avocado, as out the back we have lemon, bay and fig. I’d love something more fruit-y, like peaches or apricots, but I’m not sure the possums would allow. We’re leaning toward avocado as we don’t tend to eat olives much as a family, and can you imagine picking a heap of tiny olives compared to the size of avocados? I know what I’d prefer! What else could we plant… hm… About a block away, there is a house with three lemon trees in the front yard, not off to the side on the boundary, like we’ve got planned, but right smack in the middle. Then again, I shouldn’t get too dreamy about that as we are still considering pulling up the entire front lawn for a bigger vegie patch (our house is south-facing).

I’ll finish up this post with photos from that day, which include Alex and M hard at work, the compost fork and some friends from the root mass…