Waiting for spring . . .

It’s been a couple of months since my last post so there is quite a lot to report.  We are surviving the winter, which has been quite extreme at times, but more on that later.  Sitting in my favourite chair by the fire helps ease the pain.  Sometimes even falling asleep in that same favourite chair after a big meal, life is tough.  I have even managed to catch up on five books I have been meaning to read but haven’t had the time.

I sometimes remember back to when I used to work for that silly old Federal Government.  Stories I hear from former colleagues seem surreal to me now as my life is so far removed from that reality.  I only hope that they eventually get to realise their dreams and get away from the stresses related to efficiency dividends, nepotism, favouritism, economic rationalism, and other isms.  It is all meaningless when viewed in the context of the Tao, grasshopper.

Now back to our reality, I finished my two-year Diploma of Counselling last week so can now be unleashed on the unsuspecting public.  My post-graduate studies resume in eight weeks with Creative Writing at RMIT and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University.  Bryon is still plugging away at his BA (Fine Art) and has spent this week doing six paintings looking out our backdoor.  I am sure there is a purpose to these exercises, but this is known only to his tutors.  I prefer this painting of flowers that he did the week before.  They are one of his passions and I think it shows in this work.  I can’t wait till our garden looks like this.

Once the weather started to cool we have had an amazing assortment of mushrooms and toad stools burst out of the leaf litter in the surrounding forest.  Here are just a few and we seem to discover more each day that we have never seen before.  It is very exciting as they are amazingly diverse and colourful, and much more stimulating than following the media antics of our elected members.  The blind velvet worms (Tasmanipatus anophthalmus) that were found on this property in 1987 live in the leaf litter and rotten logs that lay on the forest floor.  They are an endangered species so Bryon and I have developed a management plan for Banksia Hollow to help ensure their survival.

The other thing that seems to have come to the fore lately are frogs.  Here is a cute little fella that we met the other day, he may even be a toad, I’ll leave that to the experts.  Bryon flipped him over to show his bright red belly (don’t worry he is still alive)!!  We have to be very careful at the moment as there seems to be a frog under every log or rock that we turn in the garden and no doubt some are threatened species.

We have been working on the possum proof fence, and hope to have it finished in a couple of weeks so we can plant out the orchard and extend the vegetable garden.  We have already begun to lay out the beds for the ornamental garden and have chosen a place for the large buddha.  It is great to be able to work with a blank canvas, but the granite that underlays our house site makes for hard work when fencing and there is very little dirt so we are having to make our own.

We have been picking up a lot of red jasper, quartz and other stones since we moved here and seem to find quite a lot in the few inches of overburden on the rock shelf.  We will find some use for them in the ponds or garden walls once we get to that stage.

We finally harvested the last of the tomatoes only two weeks ago and have removed most of last years plants from the greenhouse ready for the next round.  There are a couple of tomato plants that seem to want to persist so we have left them to shoot and now they are flowering (see below), maybe there will be early tomatoes if the frosts don’t hit us too hard.

We are still sourcing most of our food from the garden.  There have been some intrusions by some small creäture who seems to like eating the turnips off level with the ground but luckily most of the garden is surviving.  We have a secret liquid that we spray around the boundary which seems to deter the bigger marsupials.  Here are some of our yellow and white carrots and red and white beetroot.

I have started my garlic early in pots and they are thriving.  The  soil we mix up seems to be very fertile.  It is composed of fennel mulch, charcoal, coarse sand and compost.  We will soon be planting seed for many more food plants but they will have to stay in the green house or under cold frames until the risk of frost diminishes.

Now, what discussion in Tasmania would be complete without mentioning the weather.  The rain has been incredible from our perspective.  After watering out five tonnes a week to keep the garden alive in Bagdad, we now face the problem of plants rotting off due to the high ground water.  We had 87mm in one night and then it rained for eight days straight, I did think briefly about designs for an Ark.  Each time we do a post hole for the fence we seem to strike water at about 60cm.  We no complain!!  After not having enough water it is a wonderful problem to have too much.  The tanks are overflowing.  This shot shows the raindrops resting on top of the pond weed, they are like small diamonds and look amazing when the sun lights them up.

This shot shows the view to the south of the house.  I was trying to capture the clear green freshness after the rains, but I guess you had to have been here.  It just smelled so wonderful and every shade of green imaginable was on view (note the rainbow top left).  I sat on a stump out the back for ages just looking at it (you can tell we don’t have TV can’t you)?

Now what is happening with the house?  As advised in my last post it is at lock-up stage and now wrapped in corrugated iron until the double glazing arrives in February when it will emerge like a butterfly from its cocoon.  We are continuing on with small jobs and have managed to paint the blue cladding a nice shade of grey/green which we mixed from numerous leftover paint tins.  Of course the council has very strict rules about what colour you can paint your house when you are in an environmentally sensitive area but that is OK as who wouldn’t want to paint their house the colour of calf shit.  At least it blends in with its surroundings.

Here are a couple of shots of the perigee moon that we had recently.  The first one I took with the zoom lens just as it appeared over Mt Elephant, we had had a warning call that it looked spectacular from friends on the other side of the mountain so I had the camera ready.  The second shot is taken with the 72X zoom.  For those of you that were too busy watching crap on the telly and missed it, the perigee is when the moon is closest to us in its elliptical orbit and this one coincided with a full moon, so it was a supermoon, 14% bigger and 30% brighter than usual.  To cap it all off there have been three Aurora Australis visible here in the past fortnight.  Due to us being so far north it is just a diffuse green glow on the southern horizon, but still worth watching.

Let’s talk some more about the weather.  We had two days in a row this week with minus six degrees celsius and the frost had formed in the tree tops down in the hollow.  This is known as a hoarfrost and we had two in a row, but fortunately are now back to normal everyday frosts which are only minus two degrees and only forming on the ground.

Another interesting phenomenon is the ground water that soaks into the surface of the rock shelf that surrounds the house.  When it freezes it forms ice crystals that rise like stalagmites through holes in the porous surface of the rock.  They lift the dirt and even small rocks up and make a unusal pattern.  The crystals then melt and leave a network of hollow dirt structures all across the ground.  The second photo has a match head to show the scale.

Anyway, dear readers, that is all I have time for now.  But as you can see life goes on at Banksia Hollow blissfully unaware of the troubles of the world.  We have had many visitors lately and are kept busy with the social whirl that is all part of living in St Marys.  I couldn’t imagine being anywhere else (oh, perhaps on a warm beach in southern Italy) but you get the idea.  And the best part . . . Liz is back from holidays and Mt Elephant Fudge Cafe is open three days a week so we can get our caffeine fix and some cake or vegan chocolates.

Now let’s finish with a shot of today’s baking, three gorgeous sourdough breads, vegan chocolate muffins and a delightful little cake with a crumble topping, I had better go as my taste buds are all aquiver.  As a recent guest commented, “Bryon is such a good cook, and Nev is such a good eater!”