Lovely holidays

Me and The Dude are generally pretty bad at organising holidays but we have just spent a week outside Dunsborough with his sister and her family.  It is always lovely to get away and the Dunsborough-Yallingup area of Western Australia is just beautiful.  Even though it's getting cooler we had a couple of great days at the beach and then there are the wineries and breweries when lunch is needed.  I can thoroughly recommend the Eagle Bay Brewery - Princess and Soldier loved the sand pit!

The only slight downside was being with an almost 2 year old that doesn't sleep through the night.  I had to work very had at keeping my mouth shut and not offering unsolicited advice along the lines of "he's old enough, you just have to let him figure it out on his own". Having two babies pretty close together certainly stamped some of the gentler parenting ideas out of me.

I have been busy in the garden lately turning the sandpit that surrounds our house into something green.  There is a master plan that is going to take some time to implement so for the time being I am just having fun planting any bit of ground with vegetables, herbs and flowers.  This is the north side of the house, which I didn't think got much sun and wouldn't produce very good results.  Here is Soldier is helping get the soil ready.

 

We live on the top of a limestone hill so the soil is really just crushed limestone (aka sand) with lots of rocks in it.  I have a very low key approach to gardening which involves throwing likely looking things (manure, Dynamic Lifter, crushed rock minerals) on top of the sand, digging them in if I have the energy (I ran out about half way through this bed) and putting seedlings in.  I am a disciple of Jackie French and her book Backyard Self-Sufficiency which advocates a pretty low key approach so I feel justified in not being too scientific about things.  So that was about 4 weeks ago, here is what it looks like now...

So lush and green.  I will admit that some of the green is winter grass but I have been picking salads from here and am eagerly awaiting the arrival of my first cauliflower.  And here is a pumpkin that sprung up from the compost.  I see a future with lots of pumpkin soup!

I have been slow on the crafting front but I do have a giant granny square blanket that's almost finished, an emergency baby gift that is coming together pretty quickly.  You can have a peek when it is done.

And just for a bit of a lift, isn't this a gorgeous photo? We were in Kings Park for a BBQ and the sun coming through the trees was just delightful.

xx