The day my teacher turned into a fraggle

Hi All,

Well the year has been zooming past and we have been filling it with all kinds of interesting things including learning how to film, how to record sound and how not to panic like Arthur Dent from ‘The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy’. We have had a much damper and cooler summer season than usual here in Tasmania and so we haven’t had to water much and the plants have done their thing and kept growing and alive which is more than we could have expected to be honest.

Growing figs and grass

One of our adventitious spuds. Not too bad considering we pulled most of them out at the beginning of the season to pinch the soil that they were growing in for the wicking beds.

The carob trees that we grew from seed and planted out at the beginning of the season have taken off and are really enjoying being out in the ground. Hopefully we have a representative of both sexes so that we can eventually harvest some carob pods.

The wicking beds have surpassed all of my expectations. Aside from a few small hiccups like not knowing that celery has very shallow roots and if they can’t reach down to the water in the wicking bed they develop hollow stems, most of the vegetables that we grew were most happy to have the ability to syphon water up through their roots whenever they so desired. We did learn late in the season that in my rapture about not having to water too much, I was still watering too much as I was top watering as well as filling the fridge reservoirs and thus the soil was pretty much sodden and I killed off my eggplants and made my chillies twitch a bit but after I stopped top watering everything settled down to grow happily

Lovely purple spring onions that we harvested and cooked in a stir fry. I have left some to go to seed as they are so pretty (and tasty!)

Garlic chives going to seed with a strawberry mate growing happily at their feet.

My tiny lemongrass plant has really loved its wicking bed freezer end and has done remarkably well considering it is a sub tropical plant and Tasmania is decidedly not sub tropical

Cardamom is also a tropical plant but again, seems to be happy enough to grow here in Tasmania. I divided a clump of tiny plants at the beginning of the season and although they were quite slow to grow they picked up when the season got warm enough for them to stretch out their arms and soak up the sun.

Our season might have been slow to start and cooler and damper than usual but we are having a cracking autumn with lovely sunny days and the plants are powering on regardless with a late burst of growing activity.  I seem to have been picking up a blog follower every week or so and I would like to appologise for the lack of regular posts but I have been enjoying pootling around the garden and studying at TAFE so much and haven’t been missing blogging for a while. I would like to say “Hi” to any new followers reading this post. Cheers for following my humble little blog and I hope you get something out of the hard slog it takes to actually read one of my mammoth blog posts.

Who needs the hassle of planting things into hanging baskets when you KNOW that they are only going to die because you forgot to water them. Just grow a hardy vine underneath them and pretty soon it will look like you have a thriving plant with no daily watering required.

I planted these broad beans a week and a half ago and look how big they have grown! Admittedly, I did soak them and sprout them prior to planting but they obviously love growing in wicking fridges.

This is the only bed of celery that has a few stems that weren’t hollow. I now know that celery needs more water and will make sure it has less soil between the plants and the water reservoir from now on. You live and learn.

Earl has had a bit of a rough trot lately that has seen him had to visit the vets quite a few times. Initially he developed a rash all over him that was starting to alarm us and it turned out that he had dog hives. We were much relieved that it wasn’t a slew of serious dog problems that spill out of Google when you search for “My dog has a rash…” ranging from mange through to some heinous cancers. We were SO relieved that we stopped off at the excellent butchers in Exeter and bought a big bag of bones for the dogs as Earl had finally learned how to not hog them all for himself and share them with Bezial.

These are bunya nut pine cones. The bunya pine is native to the hotter regions of Australia but seems quite content to live and grow here in Tasmania as I found out when I saw these massive cones underneath a magnificent specimen out near where we get our pet meat for the dogs from. Not one to waste a valuable opportunity I hightailed it out of the car and lugged them back most cautiously as they have big spikes on them!

It’s been warm enough to have Brunhilda back on and with her blissful balmy warm waftings, my enormous bunya pine cones decided to open and spill out these enormous seeds. I am going to propagate as many as I can as they are an excellent food source and the trees are very interesting (spiky) and would make a good possum proof tree in anyone’s yard. I might be able to swap them for other interesting edibles in the future.

‘Lo and behold what have we here?’ What we have folks is another visit to the pet meat butchers and 2 more cones! I might even get to sample a few of the seeds now that I am rolling in them (gingerly, those spikes are SHARP!) They are supposed to taste like chestnuts so I will report back if I try them.

Within a week Earl had eaten his way to being seriously constipated and 11 days later he was still that way after a bit of to-ing and froing with the vet but after a short stint at the vets where he had an xray and a subsequent enema he was back to his old self again and we have sworn never to buy our dogs bones again. Apparently they set like concrete in your dogs intestines. Who knew eh? Well we do now so no more bones for you Earl!

Earl after being told that he wasn’t going to be allowed to have bones any more.

Here you have 2 kinds of perennial chillies. I gave seeds of the red one to a friend and she gave me some of the yellow ones in return so now I can grow some for myself. I love the swapping economy 🙂

This is magic. An actual large red tomato harvested from one of our own tomato plants! This is unheard of on Serendipity Farm as the rats usually move in and scarf the lot. This tomato was truly delicious and tasted of warm sunshine 🙂

If you are at all interested in the title of this blog post I will reveal all now. I just wanted to string my lecturer/s along as when WordPress posts this to my Facebook feed, they are both going to be very curious about the title and may even be prompted to read my post. I guess you could say the title is a bit of a play on words as neither of my esteemed lecturers actually regressed (or perhaps the word should be ‘evolved’) into a fraggle. One of my lecturers recently had a birthday. As a Pink Floyd fan, I knew that I was going to have to have a go at crocheting him the ‘Teacher’ pattern that the very clever crocheting genius Mia Atelier created and made freely available for us all to make should we ever stumble across someone who would appreciate it.  Here’s the pattern if you would like to have a look at it or perhaps even make it yourself.

http://www.miahandcrafter.com/atelier/teacher-pink-floyd-the-wall/

I started out with plenty of time to make the teacher doll but doing my usual procrastination for the queen, I kept putting it off until I only had a few days left till my lecturers birthday and thinking that it wouldn’t take me long to race the pattern up I started hooking in earnest 2 days before. I soon realised that the pattern isn’t all that easy to follow and there were a few moments of blind panic where the pattern authors intentions were not actually all that visible at all. I fumbled my way through the problems and was going along great guns and had the finish line firmly in my sight when I suddenly came up against a brick ‘Wall’ (Pun fully intended folks 😉 ). I couldn’t, for the life of me, create the facial features. I tried. I tried for hours. I tried for almost half a day. I hooked, I sewed, I unpicked, I raged, I twitched and inevitably, looking at the time (7pm on the day before I had to hand over the merchandise) I bowed to the fact that my teacher wasn’t going to have a teacher of his own as my ‘teacher’ doll looked more like Wembley Fraggle than the teacher.

This shot is for Hannah who needs to see how big her babies have gotten this season since I planted them out into the ground!

This is the foliage of several Dioscorea elephantipes that Steve and I grew from seed when we were studying horticulture. The foliage is quite pretty and climbs up Steve’s Chinese bonsai plants.

The most interesting part of the Dioscorea elephantipes is their corky/woody caudex which is why we wanted to grow them in the first place.

Luckily, we had bought our lecturer a wonderful R2D2 cake that more than made up for the lack of a teacher doll and I had been clever enough NOT to mention that I was making the doll so he never knew how close he had come to clutching a besuited fraggle in his hot grasp. I always try to be open and honest here in my little space on the internet and will share my end result with you so long as you promise not to show my lecturer this post. (If you are reading this George, ‘I tried!’)

My teacher the fraggle. Admittedly I hadn’t done his hair, moustache or mouth at this point but when I couldn’t achieve the right facial features it seemed hardly worth soldiering on by this point…sigh…

You have to admit, the face bears a striking resemblance to Wembley Fraggle!

And this is how it was supposed to look…

Steve bought himself a wickedly sharp and most expensive new axe that he christened ‘Psycho’. The first thing that he did was get it stuck in one of the logs that he had chainsawed up earlier and when attempting to pull it out he cut his wrist quite badly. He has only just healed and today he decided to tackle psycho again and guess who cut himself again! I told him that it was his own fault as calling an axe ‘Psycho’ was only going to give it a complex so now he is thinking of another, less dangerous name, for his axe like ‘Florence’ or ‘Dougal’. Lets just hope that by renaming it he stops maiming himself!

At this stage Steve’s axe was called Psycho. I think it might be called ‘Buttercup’ now.

A fridge full of sweet potatoes. Hopefully they carry on regardless over winter as they are in a sheltered place next to the house but even if they don’t, at least I learned a lot about growing sweet potatoes this year.

We have a lot of Hungarian wax capsicums in our fridge wicking beds but we thought we were planting Hungarian wax chillies. It would seem that the label got mixed up and we ended up with the chillies milder and larger relatives.

I am off to film my documentary next week. We were allowed to borrow some sound recording equipment and a decent tripod from our course and as it’s now our Easter and term holidays are here and we have almost 3 weeks to muck around getting a feel for filming. My documentary is going to be interesting but I can’t reveal what it is about as there is a bit of a twist to it that I don’t want to share yet. I will share the Vimeo link with you all here so that you can see it, as well as Steve’s documentary also when we have finished editing them and they are ready to roll.

You can never have enough hats, shoes and avocado plants in my opinion!

Every avocado we buy from the shops I plant the stone and most of them grow. They seem quite happy to grow year round on Serendipity Farm and this is one of my seed grown babies happily growing in Sanctuary. One day we will be self sufficient in avocados of all kinds.

This is a babaco tree. It’s also called a star fruit tree and this one is living in the glasshouse at the moment. I might put it out in the garden soon and let it harden off as I want to see if it will grow in the main garden. It was out in the garden all of last winter so I can’t see why it wouldn’t be happy there.

Well I might finish up there for today folks. It’s been lovely to catch up with you all again and I don’t want to tax you too much by throwing a massive blog post at you as penance for slacking off and not posting for so long. If anyone wants to have a go at making the ‘Teacher’ doll, let me know if you get stuck as I figured out some really good fixes for the confusing bits of the pattern. I might have another go at trying to fix the facial features as the rest of the doll isn’t too bad and you know me, I am all for recycling at any cost. Well that’s it for me for today. Narf7 ‘over and out!’

My native finger lime tree seems happy enough to have set quite a few fruit this year. Lets hope they grow and we can try them.

These are the cuttings that I took from a friends fig tree in the wrong season when she was moving. If I didn’t take the cuttings I wouldn’t have another chance so I gave it a go and ended up with 2 of the fig tree cuttings striking. I planted them out early in the year in Sanctuary and they will be espaliered

This tiny newest member of our potted plant brigade was discovered growing in the roof guttering yesterday and was rescued by Steve who was on the roof at the time.