The joy you can find in a broken fridge.

Hi All,

Well I am back for another swing, much like my fellow compatriots ACDC. My “swing” involves more fridge wicking and some photos to share with you of the state of Serendipity Farm of late. The long damp winter that we are still being influenced by (more rain today as I type this) has meant that the garden is a den of fecundity and the weeds are as high as a dinosaurs eye. They completely overtook the elephant around about June and don’t show any signs of ceasing their growth spurt any day soon.

A photo of the front garden through the deck rails but if you look a bit harder you might just spot someone visiting…

Herman the echidna has returned for the spring and is hoovering up his weights worth of ants and slaters. He should be too fat to move soon if the sheer volume of both types of insect that are scurrying around Serendipity Farm are any indication.

Check out some of our Christmas booze that we picked up recently for $2 a bottle. It looks like it is going to be a very “merry” Christmas this year down here on the river. You might want to stay away for the duration 😉

Steve and I have been beavering away in order to get our assessment packages finalised for handing in to our lecturer so that we can get this “pass” grade rolling. Last year I realised that I really knew sweet buggery-bollocks all about coding websites and decided to come back this year, with what I had already learned, and see if I could do a better job. I am really glad that I decided to suck up my failure to grasp HTML and CSS and return to the fold as this year I got it. I even made another website completely for uploading and handing in my assessment material so once I upload it to my lecturers computer I can hand it over to him and wait and see if there is anything more that he requires and fingers crossed, both Steve and I will pass and move on to George the Wunderkind’s class where we already have visions of sugarplum fairies gyrating in our heads with ideas for what we are going to attempt to produce for a short documentary each and a short drama each.

If anyone would like to check out the two websites that I have built recently I would be most happy to get any feedback at all, especially if you spot something wrong. The first link is for a local friend who has decided to start her own small business minding chooks, dogs, cats, birds etc. at your own home while you are away or on holidays.

http://holidayfarmhands.com/

The second link is my final assessment website that I created for next years lecturer George. He is an Audio Post Production Specialist and as someone who didn’t even know what “foley” was prior to taking on this task, I had a bit of background study to do prior to working on this site. Please feel free to let me know what you think of it and if you find any anomalys in either site.

http://sonicsolutions.biz/

I didn’t take this photo but it’s open source as well as Tasmanian. This is a good representation of one of our local kookaburras. They have decided that Serendipity Farm is a pretty good place to breed exponentially as there is a surplus of cheese fed other birds, eggs, lizards and other tasty morsels just waiting to be predated by their kith and kin. I used this image as I never seem to be able to catch a good photo of any of the kookaburras that call our property home so this is the best alternative.

Low tide with mirror reflective water on the Tamar River taken from our front deck

Adventitious ferns next to the water tank

We are now sitting back twiddling our collective thumbs with the most precious commodity of all on our hands…time. I have been hooking up a storm as not only did I find some scrumptious patterns for bears and floppy rabbit toys but Dr Phil (Ms Twisted) from the esteemed and most enlightening and entertaining blog “The Twisted Yarn” sent me the most innovative book for how to make hooky monsters. I am enthralled simply by how many mix and match monsters are possible and will be hooking up a storm of brightly coloured, over the top cute and crazy monsters to drop off to our local hospital for children who are sick over Christmas. I can’t think of anything worse for a child to be in hospital over the Christmas period and thanks to Dr Phil, there will be some seriously bright and demented critters to weather the storm and hopefully give them someone to make their troubles a little less troublesome.

Here’s a delicious pattern for a selection of different sized crocheted teddy bears with proper pukka names. Who couldn’t resist “Harvey, Mike and Lewis?”

Click to access Harvey-Mike-Lewis.pdf

And even though a good friend said that the following pattern looked like “demented sock monkey’s” I am guessing that there are some of you who would quite love to hook a demented sock monkey for their very own so behold, Dixie, Maddie and Lulu for your gustatory delight…

Click to access Dixie-Maddie-Lulu.pdf

Now back to the wicking beds. I jumped the gun a bit and headed out and bought some veggie seedlings. I am champing at the bit to get them into the fridge wickers but completely underestimated the tag team of rainy weather and steep slopes and the sheer unmitigated difficulty in relocating our soil stockpile from the back of a now junglescent Sanctuary down to where our fridge wickers are nestled all tastefully level and ready to get wicking. By the time Steve and I have pushed the barrow up our steep slope, shoveled a barrow full of damp mix, after first hauling out Scotch thistles taller than I am (note, removing your t-shirt and using it as a rudimentary glove because you just can’t remember to bring a glove up to haul them out isn’t anywhere near as pain free as actually remembering that glove…) and having to work standing on one leg as the other one is busy shooing eager roosters and hens who would invade Sanctuary and wreak their own particular form of destruction whilst shoveling and then trying not to skate down the wet slope with a loaded barrow and negotiating the gate under the watchful gaze of a most interested Earl who thinks he has finally figured out how to escape if we only get tired enough to forget to shut the gate and you are starting to get the picture.

The wicking bed empire of the future (well some of it. I am sure I will want more…) all lined up and nice and level (NOT an easy thing to do) taken from next to the water tank.

And this is the view taken from down next to the gate (the opposite direction)

This decent selection of spuds in the bottom of this very large black pot grew from an adventitious spud that hitchhiked a lift from Sanctuary to our front deck in a shovel full of soil and these are the tasty results.

Despite the rain and the slopes and the determined dogs and the chooks from hades, we managed to fill quarter of the wicking beds and will be attempting to have half of them completed by tomorrow. My little plants are as excited as the worms that just got relocated to burrow down into the delicious damp dark soil mix that Glad’s oak leaves and the trailer loads of aged horse manure that we get each year from a most happy horse owner turned into. I have also been burying my food scraps in the 4 wicking beds that we have already filled for the worms to enjoy at their leisure. This wicking bed lark is great fun and it certainly makes you sleep well.

Bezial meditation (scratching his back on a blackberry) next to the last of our potted babies.

A little Seaside Daisy growing in the water tank base.

Hedgerow cranesbill next to the water tank. It’s a common garden weed around here but it’s pretty so I am letting it stay for now.  I just identified this weed from a most delightful U.K. blog that I am about to add to my RSS Feed Reader. Sometimes you come across a blog that you know you will click with and this is just such a blog. Check out “Bug Woman – Adventures in London” 

In between filling wicking beds and madly completing our assessment work we have been taking long walks with the dogs in a wide variety of interesting places. I took some photos on a recent walk that I took with Earl and will share them below, along with some photos of Serendipity Farm looking vaguely attractive. Don’t get used to that view. It doesn’t last long! Anyway, less blah-blah-blah from me and more nice quiet photos of what narf, Steve, Earl and Bezial have been up to since we last chatted. I hope your neck of the woods isn’t too cold, too hot or too stressful. I thought I might share a short YouTube video with you of Earl, on our spare bed, bursting some of his birthday balloons. He is officially 6 years old now. Over the next few weeks we will be finishing off filling the wicking beds (with soil, not plants yet) and then we will hurl ourselves into the construction of a sort of fully netted poly-tunnel type structure to protect the fecund fridge wickers from the equally fecund possums. We will also be irrigating Sanctuary and planting out some of the fruit trees and nut trees that have been stuck in pots for WAY too long in the process. I plan on sharing the processes with you all here so until then, “Catch-ya later Alligator.”

Steve and Bezial meandering along Paper Beach on a recent dog walk

Earl guarding a prospective bird scaring device.

A celebration in fecundity and hope for the future.

This is one of the fridge wickers filled with mixed lettuce seedlings. The freezer section is now the home of our turmeric tubers.

Some of our veggie futures.

More veggie futures and one of the BIGGEST veggie pests I have ever seen attempting to predate one of the tomatoes!

Native pig face aka Carpobrotus edulis loaded with local bees.

Bezial contemplating just how deep he is willing to go into the water…apparently it isn’t very far.

Paper Beach is a lovely place to walk a dog. You can let them off (if they aren’t prone to running away, wreaking havoc and NEVER returning…I am looking at YOU Earl…) and at this moment in time it’s stunning from all angles.

A study in pigface and driftwood.

Another relative of pigface but this one is much smaller and from a distance, appeared to be a large shrub. It was growing on a fence.

Paper Beach again. This time, it was on the part of the walk where I get to be dragged behind a most excited Earl while Bezial pretends he is driving in a sports car through Paris with the wind in his hair in the front seat of the car being driven to the beach.

Earls favourite place on the beach. Every dog has pee’d here and this is where I realise that I will never need to go to a gym to work my biceps again…

Paper Beach is magic in Spring.

Earl’s trail

More of Earl’s trail. The walk (drag in my case) is about 3km. I walk it with Earl and Bezial drives to the actual beach with Steve as he says he is a bit past walking that far but he does get to go to the old mill with Steve, a special treat off lead. Earl can’t go ANYWHERE off lead. note the tension on the lead in both of these images. I rest my case!

Little mussel shells on the beach. Note an off leash Bezial coming to see why I am laying prostrate on the ground (stupidly)

This is the ONLY stand of blackberries that I allow to flourish inside our house fence-line. The reason I allow this is that it is completely protecting the small apple tree that it encircles from the marauding guzzling apple adoring possums who would strip it bare in no time without it’s feral cousin.

Sheer neglect and what I am insisting on calling a “Hedgerow” in our side garden.

More “Hedgerow”. The chooks favourite place to hide from the marauding kookaburra’s.

The view from the gate at the far side of the fridge wickers looking down towards Glad’s place next door. That bright green Liquidambar on the left hand side gets scoffed by the possums every year. They haven’t set upon it yet as they haven’t finished with “everything else” quite yet…

One man (Steve) mowed this meadow with his dog. Well, the dog was barking from a distance and “mow” was actually whipper snip but you get the picture 😉

We managed to carefully rehouse all of the tiny tadpoles that were swimming around in one of the fridge wickers. They are now much bigger and incredibly happy in their new home and feasting on all of the insects and leaves that drop down from the bramble and honeysuckle hedge that shelters their “pond” from the sun.

Rhododendron, loquat and oak tree all competing for space inside the relative safety of the house fence.

Earl standing in between two fridge wickers “investigating”

Earl says bollocks to standing in the middle, may as well jump into the fridge wickers and have a good sniff (and steal sticks while you are at it…)

The driveway just down from the house after Steve whipper snipped it and you can just make out my neatly raked piles of twigs and leaves that we used to fill the fridge wickers once we barrowed them around to the other side of the house.

The piles are now inside the fridge wickers and the driveway looks reasonably neat for once. I love being able to multitask and find new ways to use what would otherwise be burned. The raked leaves and twigs are now inside the base of the fridge wickers and the driveway is tidy again. A win win situation for all 🙂