Winter Wednesday #7

This winter wednesday I am happy for...

Walls! Specifically, the wall of our future laundry, which is the first wall to go up in our extension. I even helped push it up there! And then stood there holding it halfway up all by myself (plus a prop or two) while FIL rushed around to get a ladder because he'd forgotten to move that black protective plastic hanging from the roof out of the way! Nervous much? Nerves of steel, I have!


SP and I went for a bit of a drive today, and as we passed up and over the hills I had time to reflect that I actually live in quite a nice city (Australians, don't laugh! Adelaide IS nice). Surely there are not that many places in the world where we have weather as beautiful as this in the middle of Winter? OK, sure, last monday it hailed so much it banked up like snow, but in a couple of hours it had all melted, and now, a week later, the sun was out and it was hardly even muddy in our building-site-backyard. So, Adelaide, another thing to be grateful for.

More on strawbs

On Friday I promised I'd do a gardening post next, but I had my wires crossed and needed to do the second-hand love post first, then the gardening one, so you get two in one day today :)

About a week ago, or a little more maybe, I got the next round of bare-rooted strawberries in the post. This time I'd bought Cambridge Rivals and Aromas.


And in true Katie-style, and direct contradiction of my pledge to label things properly, when I unwrapped them I happily snipped the labels away from the plastic, cut away the plastic wrapping, popped my new plants in glasses of water, and then realised I hadn't paid any attention to which label went with which bundle so I didn't know which was which. Thanks to a helpful person on the Diggers' FB page I think the Aromas were the ones with more leaf, but I can't be sure.


I went off and spent my birthday money on a couple of strawberry pots (which are surprisingly hard to find!) and some terracotta dishes. I would have liked glazed pots, but there was nothing in either shape to be had. I splashed out on premium potting mix too.
I potted them up, and couldn't help thinking, as I laid out their roots, that they looked just like a group of ladies settling down to afternoon tea with their skirts spread neatly around them.




Then I took a picture as a record, and admired how lovely and tall my Aquadulce broad beans are getting in the background, and how lush the nasturtium is (on the right) and then I realised how crooked those pots are!


And then, just for fun, I took a picture of the whole potty shambles along that garden bed there :) Man, I can hardly wait to have my backyard back so I can do things properly.


Just FYI, in that first polystyrene container is 20 pots with freshly sown Anigozanthus seed. The first batch which was sown in Summer had about a 5% germination rate, and then they were all frizzled off by the heat; I'm seeing if I have more success with them in Winter. Also in this pot is half a dozen experimental Goodenia amplexans cuttings. They have no rooting hormone on them and varying amounts of stem/leaf. Basically I gave my Goodenia bush out the front a bit of a haircut and then stuck the trimmings in pots to see what will happen. (Top left fluffy plant: a Rodanthe paper daisy I couldn't resist at the garden centre the other day.)


Speaking of things out the front, here is a progress shot with my back to the house looking out to the road on the Western side of the garden. Bottom left twig is the Fuyu persimmon, top left barely visible twig is the Nightingale persimmon, along the fence is the lavender hedge, and along the wall is the latest Lomandra border which I have creeping around the corner to intersect with the lavender. Also visible are the concrete upcycled pavers I'm hoping to start setting in soon, and a pile of crap I need to get rid of.


This week I will also take a picture of the rough draft of my front garden plan for you. I've only been meaning to do it for two or three months!

It's all about balance

So, here 'tis, that retro industrial 'item' that tickled my fancy at the trash 'n' treasure shop the other day (more trash than treasures, to be honest!). It's tag called it a 'balance board', though what it really is I have no idea (Google gives me nothing). It might even be something someone has created that has no real purpose at all. But who cares? I thought it was fun, and a little bit tongue-in-cheek, though probably not to every one's taste.




It needs some love, a good dusting for a start, and a bit ironically for something with 'balance' emblazoned in yellow across the front I think it needs a border to tuck it into itself a bit. We're going to box up the back of it (as the dials stick out quite a long way behind) and put it on the wall when our new room is finished. It might look a bit more like this dodgy MS Paint number I whipped up.


And while we were at this place, D was very taken with a pile of old servo numbers they had, so we bought two of them, and they'll go up on the walls as well. They're so bright!

Who is Mogens Hansen?

SP and I drove around half of Adelaide today, indulging my love of window-shopping, this time for secondhand furniture. I won't bore you with all the ins and outs of what I love, I'll just sum up with, 'I have discovered Danish Mid-Century Modern furniture.' If you don't know what I mean, just plug that into Google Images and you'll see thousands of images of the things I mean. Specifically, I have a bee in my bonnet about finding a sofa for when our house is finished. There is a strip of funky shops on Magill Road (for those in Adelaide) which is good to have a look in (got to love an enclave where all you want to see is in the space of about 200m), and I found a couch I liked, alas, it was sold. (Pic from the shop website, for Adelaidians.)


Here's where I get confused, because I thought that was a design from the well-known Danish designer, Borge Morgensen, except it was listed as being by someone called 'Mogens Hansen,' whom I've never heard of, and who Wikipedia tells me is a 'classical philologist' (I had to Wiki that too, it's 'the study of so-called "classical" Indo-European language system'), and not a furniture designer at all, unless he moonlights as one but considering he was born in 1940 he would have been a teenager or younger when he designed this sofa. Long story short, I still like the sofa but I'm suspicious of it's provenance, and since it's been sold this is all a bit irrelevant, really!

And I also saw something today, something very retro and industrial and wonderful. I hummed and haahed over this item, then went away and thought about it some more, and considered going back for it before I decided I'd better consult D before I spent any money on something so impractical. But I wish I'd bought it on the spot. So we're going back tomorrow morning, and I'm hoping it doesn't get snapped up by some like-minded soul before then. Boy, will I regret hestitating if it's gone! It seized my attention and has fired my imagination. So, what is it? Well, I'm not telling yet, you'll have to wait and see.

(Image from here)

[Too many non-gardening posts recently, so the next one will be for we green-fingers, promise. It will involve strawberries.)

Progress report - Also Winter Wednesday

The weather has hit with a vengeance over the last few days. We had a few tricksy, balmy days last week. It was 20c, and wonderful, but it seems like Winter is making up for it twofold this week. On Monday it hailed so much that it lay about like snow in drifts and a heap of people had slidey accidents on the freeway. Today the wind is literally howling around the hills; the sound is quite eerie. And it's pouring down right now. I'm watching MIL's gardener through the window; he's pruning the roses and I feel quite badly for him! We took him a cup of tea though, and right now at least he's able to work under the shelter of the veranda. Not that it's offering much protection right now as the rain is blowing in sideways.

Over the fine days FIL was able to make a lot of progress on our extension. Check it out! The recycled wood is the darker stuff underneath the pine on top. It's ready for the walls to go on top of it now I think, next week. FIL will have a friend to help then too, which will be good. We worry a little about him working out there alone. He's also ticked off another important thing and found a plumber to do all the water and gas work.


Here's our site inspector making sure the wood was suitable.


Last night I dreamt that the floor was entirely finished and was polished concrete, but there weren't any walls yet, and then I walked across this floor and into the old house without even noticing the addition until FIL pointed it out to me. Clearly, my head was abuzz with it!


A little edit: I'm going to use this as part of the Winter Wednesday Series, not just because I'm disorganised this week ~ahem~ but also because of the beautiful blue sky in the background of that first photo. We are so lucky here.

The story of my morning tea

So I started my new nursery job yesterday. I've just had two whole days of 'induction,' which is basically a lot of talking about fire drills, and where the brooms and spades are kept and so on. Necessary, but brain-frizzling, especially when I haven't really had to concentrate on anything more onerous than the nutritional information on the back of a Rafferty's baby food packet for about two years.

Anyway, I searched high and low on my computer for an appropriate native plant picture but couldn't find one I was happy with. I did, however, find pictures of the cupcakes I made the other day, so I'll tell you about that instead.

[Alternative post titles considered: Opinions on Red Velvet Cake or Why You Should Always Check the Pantry for Ingredients Before You Begin]

Over the weekend I decided that it was high time I made a Red Velvet Cake (read the bit about the historical indicator reaction between cocoa and vinegar making the cake red coloured; how cool is that?!) Yes, I got the idea from Masterchef, I admit it. I tend to make half recipes of baked items these days, since I'm the one who tends to eat it all I figure it helps me eat a little less sugary-carby goodness (actually, what really happens is that I eat it at the same rate I usually do but it's gone in half the time, leaving me with an earlier opportunity to make something else.)

Anyway, I found a recipe (there are dozens so I won't link one). The funkiest ingredient was buttermilk, but that's OK because I happened to find powdered buttermilk in a healthfood shop a while ago and it's wonderful as a pantry backup item since buttermilk is not something I usually buy. I got started: butter, sugar, eggs, buttermilk, red food colouring, bicarb...plain flour. Plain flour? Oh, bugger, no plain flour. Oh well, I'll just use self-raising flour. It's only a half recipe after all.

I pop it in the greased tin, there's plenty of room (what's that line? "Never assume anything. It makes an Ass out of U and Me.") Into the oven. Walk away.

Some time later I can smell a distinct burning scent, wafting it's way through the living room. I glance over at the oven. Cake looks OK, nicely risen to the top of the tin, still 10 minutes left on the timer. But a few minutes later this burning smell is increasing and odious. So I look again, thinking there must be some crumbs stuck to the oven element. And indeed there is something stuck to the element, but it is not crumbs, it is half a Red Velvet Cake, which has overflowed the tin and dripped down over all the wire racks and the oven base.


It seems that bicarb soda and SR flour make a cake rise even more than I'd imagined, and wasn't it fun cleaning that lot up out of the oven?! Half the cake was actually edible and we ate it, but I didn't enjoy it. I wasn't sure if I was just imagining it or not, but I thought I could taste just a hint of the bitter extra bicarbonate.


So I wasn't satisfied. A few days later I wanted to try again, and this time with plain flour, and I thought I might make cupcakes so I could fit them into my lunch box easily (yes, I have to take a lunch box to work now.) I followed the recipe carefully, but left out the food colouring since it does nothing for the taste. I made sure to only half fill the patty pans, since I wasn't sure how much the mixture would rise if one didn't overdo the rising agents.


And they came out cute and rounded.


And they're quite nice, but to be perfectly honest - and I'm sorry to all Red Velvet aficionados - I'd rather have a little chocolate mud cake any day. The RV cake is lovely and moist, and has a good texture, but I found it a little insipid and didn't have much depth of flavour really.

However, as Matt Preston would say, there is a hero in this dish. D had been out to a friend's birthday the night before and when he was telling me what they'd ate I mostly heard 'meat meat meat beans cupcakes peanut butter icing.' What what what? Peanut butter icing? How have I never heard of this before? Cakes, biscuits, ice creams, satay sauce yes, but icing? Must. Make. Peanutbuttericing.

I tried it out: beating together about a tablespoon of margarine and the same of smooth peanut butter, then beating in about a cup of sifted icing sugar, then adding a dash of milk to get it to a better consistency (no recipe, I made it up) and Wonderment! The stuff is A.Maz.Ing.


Did I mention it was about midnight at this point and I supposed to be at my new job at 8:45am the next morning? Since it was so late, I iced a single -still warm -cupcake, scoffed it, then did my teeth and went to bed. The icing I'll make again, but I'm not so sure about the red velvet cake.


The next morning I iced a few more of the cupcakes and took one to work with me (in my pink lunchbox) to eat with my coffee at morning tea (morning tea? More wonderment! I have never had a job which let me have a sit-down morning tea before.) The job, meanwhile, I think will be good once I get my head around everything. The site is huge, and there are hundreds and hundreds of plants for me to learn about and I only know about 50 of them so far, but so many beautiful green things around me and a lovely setting. It will be a lot of work, but worth it.

Raspberries and windflowers

One of the really good things about staying at a house with a really lovely and full garden is that there is plenty of plants which can be divided and propagated and then taken over to our own garden.

Over the weekend I dug half a dozen Japanese Windflower plants out of the kitchen window patch. They're the white, single anemones and far too beautiful not to try them out at our place.
The roots are surprisingly thick and robust considering how delicate the leaves and stems are.



I've popped the whole lot into a couple of pots and they're staying outside in the rain and semi-shade. Let's hope they do well, I think they look a little seasick, hanging over the edge of the pots like that, thinking, what the hell just happened?


I also helped myself to some of the raspberries. Notice they all have leaves? It never really gets cold enough here for plants to go truely dormant.


Last year at Christmas we ate ourselves silly on the raspberries out of MIL's patch. I did plant some at our place last winter but they were eaten by insects so many times that they struggled and struggled and eventually died. I also have native raspberries planted and they are looking quite good but aren't known for an abundance of fruit. These raspberries have been potted up into a very sexy ice cream container, ready to be shifted later on in winter.


I might take some more over the week, I think, the more I have the more will survive? Right?