My good news

If you're a regular reader, you might have noticed a hint a couple of weeks ago that I had some good news. Well, now I'm in a position to tell you what it is.
I have a new job!
I'm don't believe in fate, or at least I don't think I do. I think when you see what you want you need to go out and get it.
The story goes like this: Back at the end of May I was at work at the Big Hotel on a Saturday night (actually, a Sunday morning.) It was 2:30am, or thereabouts, and we were packing up. I was tired and grumpy, and like a flash I thought, what am I doing? WHAT am I doing here? I've been working as a waitress for over ten years now, and I think that's long enough, considering the waitressing was only ever supposed to be a temporary gig so I could 'get overseas.' So, that Sunday I thought I should update my resume, and while I was there I thought I should have a little look online to see what was around. And there it was. My job. And I knew it was mine the minute I saw it, 'sales and nursery assistant' at a well known, long established Australian native plant nursery. My heart nearly stopped when I saw that the date for applications had closed the Friday before. Oh no! But, it was time to behave like an adult. So I rang the nursery on Monday morning to ask if I could put in an application anyway and they said I could, and with the help of some friends and my MIL, I madly wrote my first 'real' application and sent it off that day. There was a long wait before I knew I had an interview, and another long wait before I knew I'd been successful, and weeks more before I was given a start date - early July - and I never wanted to get my hopes up in case the whole thing fell through, even though I was pretty sure I had it. Then I had to wait for my current boss to get home from a cold Scandinavian holiday so I could talk to her, now I can finally let people know that I'm on my way to a new career.
I'm happy; I'm nervous; I'm excited. This is it, this is my 'thing,' and it's not just theoretical and dreamed about anymore, it's the real deal. I'll get to spend all day at work surrounded by plants, talking about plants, looking after plants. Can't do much better than that; onwards and upwards!


[So is that Fate? Deciding it's time to change, and there is the change right there, ready and waiting for you? What do you think?]

Looking back.

I have no gardening to talk about today. We went out for lunch with a couple of visiting family members (Hello, you two!), and as we got home it started to drizzle a little, and two minutes later it was pouring. Sideways. So we spent the afternoon inside, which looks a bit like a dry cleaners' thanks to the mountains of laundry attempting to dry, draped over the table and chairs and couch.

Anyway, when I can I try to take part in the Weekend Rewind at the Pink Fibro Blog. Nights like tonight are good, when SP has consented to actually go to sleep at a reasonable hour, and even stay asleep for a decent interval, so not only do I put my link up, but I actually get to read a goodly number of blogs by people I might not have found otherwise, but I even get to thinking about my own post, about travel, broadly, and the Philippines more specifically. The Philippines - that land that I can never remember how to spell, two Ls, or is it two Ps, or is it both? - taught me something important about travel: You won't like everywhere.

When I started travelling at 17, everywhere I went was tinted with gold, the food was fantastic, the people were wonderful, etc etc. Of course, there were the bad parts too. The poverty which rose up and slapped us in our Western faces, the occasional dodgy meal (although my Stomach of Steel saved me many times), the horrendous and frequent road accidents and so on, but overall I wore my rose coloured glasses and managed to gloss over the scuffed parts.

Then, in 2008, we went to the Philippines. I have mentally divided the trip into two parts. The first part is Palawan, which I 'rewound' today here: Palawan. Palawan, on the far western side of the Philippine archipelago, is beautiful. It's my kind of Asia: dusty streets, palm trees and papaya, happy kids, bamboo huts, nice food, noisy markets, deserted beaches, and monkeys.

The second part of our trip I call 'everywhere else.' I like to blame the food. From north to south, on the half a dozen different islands we visited, the food was universally terrible. Meals stand out for being exceptionally awful, rather than good. Not only did they taste bad, on several occasions they were actually poisonous. There's nothing quite like choosing to eat at Pizza Hut three days in a row because it seems to be the best option in town! But really, it was more than the food. The constant presence of guns bothered me a lot. We never felt very connected with anyone or anywhere. Don't get me wrong, there were good things about the Philippines. We were lucky enough to see the famous Banaue rice terraces on a glorious clear day, tarsiers proved to be quite cute, and the overnight ferry trip from Cebu back to Manila is a stand out memory from all our travels. I will never get over the amazement as our fellow passengers stared up at the full moon overhead as we glided through the islands. A ferry of that size cannot possibly be silent, yet I remember that night as being hushed and full of low murmurs, as though people didn't dare to speak too loudly on deck (inside, however, was the karaoke machine where all bets were off.)

All in all, the Philippines was the first time we have ever changed our flights and left early. After a salmonella-laden chicken sandwich, we decided to withdraw, not very gracefully, and we went to Singapore for a couple of whirlwind nights instead.

But, anyway, I learnt something. I won't love everywhere in the world, some places I just won't 'get,' and that's perfectly OK. Admitting that once seemed somewhat shameful. How could this backpacker who loves everywhere have not loved this land of 94 million faces and stories and places? But I didn't, and it doesn't matter. There's still the entire rest of the world to see, and man, I'm looking forward to it!

Wot chu lookin' at?

Lurgy lurking

I've got The Dreaded Lurgy (MIL had it, then SP had it, then me, D next?). Still, I am pretty robust, generally speaking, and feel vastly better already compared to very early this morning, which I put down to my famous 'stomach of steel.'

The plan for today, before I was struck down and confined to bed for the day, was to pot up the cuttings I took the other day, which are waiting calmly and greenly for me on the kitchen windowsill. I noticed them when I was lying on the floor trying not to be sick, or pass out (my body, at that moment, couldn't seem to make up it's mind. Fortunately, after a few minutes 'resting' on the cold lino, I did neither.)


From left to right I have: Penstemon (magenta flowers as in yesterday's bouquet, see the photo below), then a big pelagonium, then a little ground cover-type pelagonium I have fallen in love with (see here, halfway down, bright fuchsia-coloured flowers, green-grey leaves), then another big pelagonium. Or are they geraniums? Anyway, I don't know exactly what they are but they are all dense, very leafy mounding types, rather than the leggy sort.

I found some pots in the shed, I have a new bag of potting mix, and I've even gone all out and bought a little bag of rooting powder to help them along (after staring blankly at the rooting gels on the shelves in a certain Humongous Hardware Store and wondering if my cuttings were hard wood, soft wood, or medium wood.) As you may have guessed, I'm a propagation newbie. I've tried a few things here and there, but without much success, apart from a furry peppermint geranium which I merely snapped a few bits from the mother plant, poked them in the ground and then forgot about them. Some things need no care or knowledge at all!

So wish me luck, both that I'm up and about tomorrow, and that this bumbling gardener successfully propagates at least one or two plants out of this bunch.

Winter Wednesday #3

Today's scruffy Winter bouquet is brought to you by leftover roses, magenta Penstemon, and stems of leafy Correa alba, in celebration of Winter Wednesdays, because even now it's nice to know there's enough out there in the garden to make a bundle of flowers.

Stay warm, folks xx

We'll still have to go to the Green Grocers for...

Rewinding this on July 1st 2011, not because it's a funny post, because, let's face it, I'm not a funny writer, but because quite often in this gardening gig you need to have a sense of humour or you'd give up completely.

We'll still have to go to the Green Grocers for...

... our sweet potato, because, clearly, I've not yet got the hang of growing it!


The sweet potato (kumara) in the background is one we bought from our friendly neighbourhood vegetable wholesaler this afternoon. It was an especially big one, granted. I weighed it and it was 1010 grams. Then I weighed our minute harvest, which is from two plants, and in total the weighed a mere 118 grams.
But nothing is wasted: I scrubbed them clean, and they were tossed whole into the pot with a free range chicken, some kipflers, a lemon and big slug of verjuice, and they tasted so good, so very, very good, that I really, really wished they had done a little better. They were so much brighter and deeper in colour than our bought whopper, and so much more intensely flavoured.
I think the lesson here is that next time, I should do a little more reading and preparation before I plant them, rather than just chucking them in the ground and hoping for the best!

A package full of promise

On Friday I got something lovely in the mail: 10 'Kamu' bare-rooted strawberries.


I did the right thing and took them straight out of their plastic packaging and popped them in a glass of water to wait until I could plant them (actually, you're supposed to put them in the fridge, but it's so cold here I think the kitchen windowsill is good enough, especially overnight).


Today I was able to plant them, I'm sure they've been unfurling their leaves already. I have to say that these mail-order (internet-mail-order) strawberries have a far superior and stronger looking root system than the poor dears I bought in packets from a hardware store last year.


I had to scrounge around to find enough pots. The actual strawberry pot is on indefinite loan to me from MIL (nice new pots are expensive, have you noticed?!); I evicted some shabby parsley from it to make way for it's new inhabitants. The other pots I unearthed from the shed. They might prove to be a little too small, but I figured better to get them planted up ASAP and if they outgrow their flats I'll upgrade them to the penthouse suite later.
(For my own record purposes, they are planted in a mix of new premium potting mix, old used potting mix, compost from a bag, and a big sprinkling of dynamic lifter pellets)


Here they are settling in to their new homes, hanging out of the windows and enjoying the fresh air.


This one, in the maroon pot, has suffered a small toddler-related incident already, not irreparably, thankfully!


[Last night, very late, I was left to my own devices on the internet, unsupervised, looking at plant sites, my credit card muttering to me in distress from across the room. I caved: I have also ordered 10 Cambridge Rival and 10 Aroma strawberries, and I might have ordered a fig tree or two as well... Can't have too many fruit plants about the place, I figure.]

Little veggie update

Just a wee update of what's going on in our veggie patch at home. More pictures than text: here we go :)

The garlic is doing quite well, needs a bit more of a weed but I've gotten rid of the worst of them.


My experimental Greenfeast peas look great in their tangles.


The broad beans - Aquadulce - have taken off. They're much more delicate and fragile looking than the variety I planted last year (I can't remember what sort that was, but it wasn't Aquadulce).


The pepino is looking blousey and lush, and it has striped violet and white flowers! I don't know how well it will set fruit, it's very cold outside and there aren't very many insects about for pollination.


And even though I pulled out most of the pea-straw peas a couple of weeks ago, I did leave one little patch to their own devices (mainly because they weren't in the way of anything else) and look how beautiful their flowers are, like dancing faeries.


SP thinks it's all super interesting. All the drizzle has been keeping us inside, and my poor little bird is bouncing off the walls a bit. She doesn't like being confined like that.


And last, but not least, I picked the little pumpkins and we ate them last night. I made that mistake of planting out a few varieties and not writing down which was where, and so of course I've forgotten which one this was. Most of them did nothing, but this wee plant made a couple of fruits. I think it might have been the Golden Nugget, but maybe it was just a plant which felt like making very small fruits? The little ones were too small and fiddly for me to be bothered with so they've gone to the fish tank for fish food. The bigger ones fit nicely in my hands, tennis ball sized, I cut them into slices and roasted them with Australian olive oil and a touch of salt. Pretty good! But if only they'd been more than two of them!


I've made a couple of gardening resolutions for next Spring:

1. Write things down! Make diagrams of what I've planted where, because my memory will surely fail me.

2. Plant fewer varieties of pumpkins, but more of each variety (ie not one butternut, one kent, one golden nugget etc, but maybe four butternuts, four kents...) and put some in the front garden where there are more flowers to attract the pollinators.