Brown life, brim full

Went for a wander this evening to enjoy the damp autumn with Yarrow and was amazed to find so many different fungi budding up through leaf litter and pine needles, even in the nooks and dark places of our own garden. Along the railway tracks and under our nasturtiums, soft nutbrown homes for wee folk. 

It feels utterly magic - thinking of the soil crept through and rich with fungi, trading sugars with the finest hair roots of trees and carrying it miles, literally! to trees further down the line... Fungi and tiny soil creatures and questing roots, crystals of water brimful with minerals, huge monsters of worms churning through, the whole thing heaving and boiling and bursting with life! 

The fungi budding up like periscopes, hiding in the dark, enjoying the damp and the fire colours of autumn. 

Surely this little one is waiting for its fairy to come home 

and light a candle in its window...

... while these wait for impish hobgoblins!

Rain can be a girl's best friend

Beautiful rain! A dripping garden and filling tank. Pearls of water fat and opalescent in the crease of round nasturtium leaves, chooks fluffed up and snuggled into each other, the orchard misty and the smell of wet earth. 

Rain like diamonds caught in the lace of fine leaf fronds.

 

Initially passionate

Weeks and weeks ago Cam scratched Yarrow's initials into one of the passionfuit that are growing higgeldy-piggeldy over the chook yard. It scarred up and kept growing...

And now they're ready, lovely and sweet and tangy,
and Yarrow has his very own one to play with.

Old fashioned Easter for newly-fashioned boy

Oooo, the joy of being a Mum and getting to make special things special! Ro's first Easter, and I found at the bottom of a drawer some dyes and stickers my Oma sent me two years ago to make German Easter eggs with him, like we used to when we were little... 

We used to make Easter nests 4 weeks before, and get one small chocolate egg each Sunday in the lead up... It being autumn in Oz at Easter time rather than spring, we used to make our nests out of curling, crunching leaves - and then on Easter morning - eggs! bunnies! and hard-boiled dyed eggs with the cutest little old-fashioned stickers. 

Dying our chickens' eggs, stickers at the ready...

So lovely!

We used to dye them, all four of us kids together with Mum, in margarine containers with paddle-pop sticks, heaps and heaps of them, and give cartons of Easter colours to friends.   

This is the hole that Jack bit!

Here Ro demonstrates his new bite: his first two teeth came through on our recent premiere wedding anniversaire, and now a top one is peeking through...

On the same day: a top tooth, he crawled, and ate a whole bowl of food! Methinks he is getting so grown up - and there's years and years of this to go! 

The littlest biker of them all

Cam came home tonight with a bike seat for Ro! We all saddled up and rolled on down to the creek, the first time I've ridden a bike in aaaages, was such fun! Ro wasn't very keen on the helmet but he loved zooming along, and peeking at me on my bike from under Dad's arm.



Thank goodness for whoever it was that invented gears, coming back up our very steep and very long driveway!

An Irish native peace tree

We made up the garden for the Southern Cross Permaculture Institute by the river at the Sustainable Living Festival last month, with natives and fruit trees and herbs, a lovely grapefruit tree in its pot bowling over regularly in the wind! Ro was very happy sitting under the tree in the dirt on his Bolivian blanket from Mel and Tobes, laughing with everyone who came to have a rest in the garden, having his naps in his pram in the tent at the back.

A woman from Ireland and her husband came by and bought some of the beautiful natives and donated them to us to plant; they had planned to come to Australia to live but her mother was dying so they were going back to Ireland.

Cam and Ro planted them along the path to the chookhouse, where they’ll become part of the support for the future edible forest garden (fixing nitrogen in the soil, protection from wind etc), and meanwhile just be beautiful in themselves as well.

May our Irish woman and her mother have much peace.