Hi All,
Well it’s that time of year again. Hasn’t it galloped up quickly this year? Merry Christmas to my merry band of faithful followers and welcome to the odd straggler that happens upon one of my posts. Here’s to a wonderful and purposeful Christmas to all of us and the approach of 2018 gives us another chance to live, to learn and to apply what we have learned to growing as human beings into the future. Love to you all and thank you for following my humble little blog. Here’s a little early morning video that we shot this morning. We hope you like it. From furthest flung Tasmania
serendipityrevisited 
Merry Christmas Fran and Company!
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Right back atcha Mr Frank 🙂
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Lovely glimpse of your Christmas morning!
The vegan Wellington you suggested for my daughter was made and went down exceedingly well – as did the chocolate cake (which was huge and I had to freeze some to prevent waste).
All the best from chilly Bewdley 😃
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Glad to hear that all of your Christmas vegan fare went down well Kim 🙂 Our Christmas food was epic and most delicious and Steve is just about to finish off the Wellington that we cobbled together using a homemade seitan roulade filled with sundried tomato and roasted red pepper cashew pesto and mushroom duxelles, topped with more duxelles and wrapped in vegan puff pastry. It was amazing! Almost as amazing as the roast potatoes (I think my very favourite recipe in the whole world 😉 ). A lovely warm simple day filled with lovely food and my wonderful son and his lovely partner rocked up impromptu for a quick visit 🙂
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Christmas is all about the unexpected – and food!
Our vegan has now gone home so we are enjoying meat again 😃
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HAHAHA! As you do 😉 I am glad you catered for her and in a most admirable fashion by the sound of it 🙂
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Merry Christmas!!
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Loved the video dear Fran.. Have a Wonderful HAPPY NEW YEAR.. May it bring in an abundance of Happiness, Health, and Peace, along with lots of Veggies and great new Videos.. 🙂
Happy New Year xxx 🥂😁😍🧡
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Thank you Sue. I must get my next post sorted but at the moment Steve and I are wading through the blackberries and doing some serious whipper snipping of fire breaks and grass on the back bush block and I am too knackered when I get in to do anything. I hope you had a lovely New Years Day 🙂
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Sounds like you are very busy but those fire breaks most important for you.. Blackberries, I have oh so many in my freezer.. And in the end I got sick of picking them I left them for the birds.. 🙂 Those and the red currents.. But my thoughtful daughter along with other gifts, bought us a berry picking tool, like a scoop with groves in so you sweep it across the berries and it gathers them up.. Plus a seed planter on wheels, Not that we can’t bend down yet.. But she is thinking of our knees.. LOL..
Thankyou our New Year was quiet, we said cheers to the TV as we watched the London Fireworks… Its the first New Year we have welcomed in for ages.. So we will see how 2018 goes.. I am always the optimist 🙂 LOL.
Happy New Year Fran and Steve.. and dont worry about a post.. Priorities and rest comes first ❤
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Hi Sue, that was a lovely gift your daughter bought for you. It shows that she puts a lot of thought into what you would both like and I am sure, whether your knees are into seed planting or not, one day you will be most happy that she bought that seed planter ;). Off to whipper snip the first paddock today!
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Yes she is so very thoughtful in all she does Fran.. And hope all went well in the Paddock.. xxx
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We stopped at the end of the first paddock and Steve headed into the city and picked up the irrigation things that we need to irrigate the orchard tomorrow. we are having a day off today (Saturday) as it’s going to be hot outside and as Tasmania has no ozone layer over it (thanks to many years of industrial nations burning fossil fuels) the sun is VERY hot when it’s over 30C so we stay well out of it. Steve also picked up a 20 litre bucket of huge apricots from a friend. I started a knit scarf yesterday with some of my homespun yarn. I wanted to do “something” with some of it. I am most pleased with it, particularly because it’s very thick yarn (being my first attempt it’s likely 12 ply 😉 ) and I am using number 10 knitting needles so it’s working up quickly and looks pretty good 🙂
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Loved the Christmas video. I viewed it first on YouTube but for some reason I can’t leave a comment on YouTube. Can’t wait to see what you will produce in 2018 gardenwise and filmwise.
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Thank you Jane 🙂
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I revisited your blog post and only just saw this reply.. Some comment replies are not always making it into my notifications column The Apricots sound Yummy.. and I can not wait to see your home spun yarn scarf Fran, One thing that number 10 needles and thick yarn your scarf will grow quickly 🙂 Happy Knitting, and have a great weekend.. xxx ❤
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I have the same thing and often comments from people who use the “Blogger” platform are thrown into the trash. I think its about time that WordPress and Blogger got along don’t you? 😉 I hope your weekend is lovely Sue. We are looking forward to a day of rain but not nearly as much as the garden is! We have a day off today as Steve needs to transfer everything from this (dying) computer to our new one so I get a day off….”YAY!” My back can recover from pickaxing the trenches for the irrigation for our orchard area. It has been wonderful just turning on a tap and being able to head back inside out of the hot sun and do other things rather than spend hours outside hand watering and the fruit trees love it. I put lots of pea straw around the outside of the trees and aside from the flock of small chicks that keep invading the back yard and scratching it up (they had best hope that they don’t meet Earl!) its been excellent this summer and the drip irrigation is not only economical, but it is delivering water directly to the roots of the plants in Sanctuary and the orchard area with minimal run off. “SCORE!” and well worth the hard work to install it! I am going to do a blog post today with some of the photos that I have been taking of all of the work that we have been doing here over the last 3 weeks. It seems like a lifetime ago since we had a day off and I am seriously going to enjoy the heck out of this one! 🙂
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Glad you are going to get much needed rain, Its been raining and damp here with heavy cloud seeing no sun for a couple of days.. January weather, cold and freezing fog patches here and there. Not nice.
Good to know you already have a New PC. and will look out for your new post.. So happy to learn all that hard work has paid off in Sanctuary .. 🙂
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Hi Fran, I have been highly entertained by your posts. How lovely to be able to walk to such beautiful beaches and soak up the early morning sunshine with Earl, Bezial and Steve.
I am sure you will be making the most of the summer holiday period tending your food garden and enjoying your home grown produce.
What plans for TAFE in 2018? I get the impression you would like to move on from film production although you now have the skills to document more of your life in a rural Tasmania.
Best wishes for 2018!
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Thank you Margaret. I hope the start to your New Year has been going extremely well 🙂 Steve and I are back to learning more about computers this year with one of our favourite lecturers and a new one who looks to be just as good. We want to keep documenting what we are doing here on film so you can hopefully see more of that soon. At the moment we are up to our eyeballs in whipper snipping the bush blocks and trying to tame the jungle area and take back Pelham 123 from the blackberry invaders so I haven’t had time to write another post although I have enough photos to populate 2! 🙂
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LOVE the video! Thanks for sharing your morning. And it was lovely to hear both the carol and the sounds of nature together. Pretty much perfect in my eyes. Have you thought of making educational videos showing how you make your various vegan dishes? Bet people would love them. And for Kim above (and you) there is a wonderful vegan dessert that I’ve made a few times and posted about. It’s on Selma’s blog (https://eclectichomelife.blogspot.ca/2015/05/crochet-and-mocha-roulade.html). A light dessert that I think would go well with other fruits inside, too. I even made one when I was in Tacoma to send to my friend’s sister in law and her husband, who has something like Crohn’s disease. I sent the baked roulade, still rolled with the parchment, a carton of whipping cream (I’m sure you have a good substitute for the dairy) and a bag of pre-sliced grapes, along with the recipe and instructions. They loved it! (I forgot about the dairy not being good for vegans, sorry).
I’m glad you had a good Christmas and I send my best wishes for the coming year to you, Steve, Bezial and Earl.
One thing seemed to be missing in the video, though . . . I didn’t see any snow! 😦
lol Much Love and Light to you all. ~ Linne
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Thank you for your lovely comment Linne 🙂 Steve and I have been working really hard for the last 9 days to knock the property into shape before we start our new school year. We wanted to hit the blackberries hard and did! Now we are whipper snipping the back block to get the grass low to reduce fire risk. I guess people need to think of Australia as the Southern “South” without the rednecks (we call them “boguns” here 😉 ) when it comes to weather. Our Christmas was pretty warm. This year has been hotter than usual and I am SO glad that we installed drip irrigation in Sanctuary! I got a tonne of berries this year which I gave a lot away and froze and today I am getting a couple of buckets of ripe apricots that I might turn into fruit leather or dry the halves to store them. Lovely recipe by the way Linne 🙂 Have a lovely day 🙂
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I love your video, it has such a feeling of peace and calm. Beautiful. And a nice counterpoint to the mad jungle clearing you have been doing since. Hope you are having a wee break now 🙂
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We have a whole day off before the next part of the attack Ms Jo where we hit the back block with dueling whipper snippers and then Steve heads down to the front of the block with his trusty chainsaw and starts logging the huge pile of logs we have for next winters firewood. At least we don’t have to pay for a gym membership 😉
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PS The tiny gooseberry plant you gave me is shooting up happily. Thank you!
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I am glad that the little pink gooseberry is loving your garden. It’s a clever gooseberry. It knows when it is being tended by a garden extraordinaire 🙂
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OM goodness!!!!!!! LOVE IT!!!! I am jumping up and down…I felt like I was there and it felt warm-it has been so cold here.SOOOOOO glad I stopped by today. It made my day to stop by your paradise:-) thank you for sharing. Wish I could sit on that beach, listening to that water lap on on the shoreline…just amazing…Happy NEW YEAR!!! love your films, keep on sharing:-)
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Thank you Robbie 🙂 It’s been warmer here than usual but not too hot so the garden has been going nuts and the dogs love going to the beach to cool off. I just wanted to share a little bit of our Christmas morning with everyone. We made a spectacular seitan, sundried tomato, roasted red pepper and cashew pesto and mushroom duxelles roulade for Christmas and we smothered it in more mushroom duxelle and wrapped it in vegan puff pastry and baked it off in one of our covered bbq’s and had it with the very best roast potatoes, roasted sweet potato, carrots and pumpkin (you call it winter squash), peas and Brussels sprouts and the most amazing red wine gravy (vegan) recipe that topped it all off perfectly. We also made an amazing vegan fruit mince bakewell tart that was absolutely delicious. We made our own fruit mince this year (as the ones from the shops are made with beef suet and are not vegan) by getting a kilo of dried mixed fruit and by throwing in a whole bottle of brandy etc. It turned out amazing, we still have a tonne of it and because of the brandy (most recipes call for 3 tbs of brandy 😉 ) it keeps forever so we can use it over icecream etc. through the year. It was a truly lovely day with excellent food. Must share the photos of that meal with everyone in the next blog post 🙂 We will keep filming and hopefully, we will get some sound equipment soon so that we can share even more with you 🙂
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Oh dear, I’m quite late with my well wishes but still, I hope you had the merriest, happiest Christmas yet and are already off to a strong start into the new year! Time shows no signs of slowing down, so I’m just grateful for the brief moments that brings us together, if only online. 🙂
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I know Ms Hannah, we have been SO busy out in the garden knocking the jungle back and taking back Pelham 123. I am still going to send you those spices. I remembered it the other day and am currently looking up where to source them from. I will be in touch soon about sending them to you and it will be great fun to see what you do with them 🙂
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