Summer

Summer is here ... sort of. Grey, muggy and cloudy. The garden was doing pretty well - seedlings up of beans, pumpkin, tomatoes (both purposeful and rogue), a few other things. Corn is doing well. We went down to Warrnambool & Port Fairy for a couple of days to visit the folks, got back and discovered that the chooks got out of their carefully constructed enclosure and ate through everything but the corn, which was behind a fence. Fortunately, I have the lettuces and a few more tomatoes in the front garden, so all is not lost.
Potatoes died off in the star-picket and chookwire so I harvested them. Twenty, and all small. I think maybe I should have been a tad less frugal with the water. More baths for the boys?

We got a new bed (for the bedroom, not the garden) a little while back, so the old one is out in the shed in pieces. When put together its like a box, so seems to me it's going to become a garden bed. Nice size for a square foot garden actually - about 4'x6'. Will try one. Our neighbours across the road were discarding some wooden venetians, so they'll become part of the bed as well, laying out the grid.

It's nearly Christmas, and I'm not as prepared as I hoped to be. Reilly's getting a big-boy bed, and I have to find the thing, buy it, have it delivered and set it up on Christmas Eve. Would *like* to do it and transfer him into it from the cot while he's asleep, but he doesn't sleep that soundly. If it was Gareth, I could hammer the thing together in his bedroom and he wouldn't notice till morning, even if he got up to use the toilet. Still have to organise Ros's subscription too, and maybe a voucher for Mike's glasswork. We'll see. *I* want a permablitz for my Christmas present, but it ain't gonna happen this year.

Have re-read Linda Cockburn's "Living the Good Life". Skipped the botulism story this time. I love the fact that even though they didn't manage to reach the goal of no expenditure, they kept going and did a ripper of a job of it. Makes me feel like it's a perfectly normal thing to want to do. Biggest issue is the expenditure building up for it - solar power, big tanks. But it's something we both want to aim at; even if we don't become self-sufficient (we're not likely to here on our 1/16 acre with Edwardian house and 60% of one income for the setting up of it) but the stories of the blowouts, the failures, buying goat food and saying "bugger it all" on a relatively regular basis make the whole thing more human and less 'out there' somehow. Plus, anyone who likes Vanilla Coke and Black Forest chocolate is allright by me.