Friday, July 3, 2015

Veggie Garden

Love how it has turned out. Not sure if it'll get enough winter sun even though it's on the north side of our house, if not, it'll be a great summer veggie garden anyway!




We used ecowood for the garden beds, a non-toxic treated pine. We lined the bottom of the beds with newspaper that got covered in a layer of straw, dirt and a mix of straw, chicken and alpaca poo went on the top.  We've planted baby beets, broccoli, bok choy, celery, carrots, peas and herbs. 






Thursday, July 2, 2015

On the line

Finally in May… only over 12 months late

But it's sooooo good!


For the birds

We now have a full aviary.  

Living in the bottom of the aviary we have four quail - three girls and a boy.




We bought two adult and several baby budgies. 
Cam successfully bred the two adults and we have two lovely new babies. 
They're extremely ugly when they've first hatched, but after only a few weeks their looks improve.







There's also quite a bit of wild life around here. 

We've had two owls that came visiting for a few weeks, they liked our street sign and lamp post. 
Being at night, it was too hard to get a decent pic. 
But we were able to get up quite close to them.


We've got a family of kookaburras that like to hang around.





We've even had some kangaroos jump through the paddock while we've been eating breaky.


There's the resident town geese that love to create traffic hold ups 
(our town's too small to call them traffic jams)



And then threes been some other not so nice living creatures that we've seen…

She died...



Weaving with Noro


One of the yarns that I really wanted to weave with was the Noro Yarn from Japan. It's blend of different yarns like silk, mohair and wool. I wove two scarves with Silk Garden Sock Yarn. The colours are beautiful. I'm currently weaving another scarf with this yarn for myself.









Christmas in our new home

Christmas Eve saw my family come to share our first Christmas dinner in our new home.

Our old tree had died (ummmm - it was a fake one, but it died).
We considered buying a real tree this year, but saw some cool DIY Christmas trees on Pinterest so we headed bush (about 3kms away) and grabbed some *real* dead branches.




Oh the smells you can smell on sticks from the bush!






Not bad for an afternoon's work and a $6 steel bar.


I made up a faux fireplace. It's nice to have a focal point in our living room now. 
Even though there's no fire, the candles help provide a bit more of a cosy feel. And having Christmas in the middle of summer it makes sense not to have a fire raging in a fireplace at Christmas.
We hope to put in a wood heater eventually, but this will do for now. 
One day I might get around to boxing up the inside so it looks a bit better.




Getting my weave on

For my birthday I got a weaving loom. After doing weaving at school for art I fell in love with some beautiful woven scarves that I saw while pinteresting ideas for the kids to weave. I spent a few nights busy weaving to give scarves to some of my friends and my mum. I love how they turned out.















A shed, a hole and a gate

We finally got the shed up in October! Hooray!

Goodbye view from my laundry window

Ready to go

Half way there

Finished!



We also made our side fence and gate. 
We're really happy with how it's turned out. 




Hiring this hole digger made things much easier. 
Until….

#@!%!
Yep. There's the storm water pipe.