Back at the Farm.

I have been away for a few days, it was wonderful, but I am glad to be home, if only briefly.

So much has happened since I was last here. The Gorgeous Boy and I went to visit our dear friends The Great Dane and Gemini for a few days. They have both had a birthday recently and a wedding anniversary coming up so we were invited to join them and their family to help them celebrate. I probably didn't mention but I wasn't born in this wonderful country. I came here over thirty years ago for a working holiday and met the GB and chose to call Australia home but that's a whole other story ;-) As I left my family behind in England it warms my heart to be invited to join this family celebrate. I have a wonderful husband, a beautiful daughter,a fantastic son and the cutest little grand daughter that a girl could ask for, I love my family, I am truly blessed. To have good friends as well is the icing on the cake.


I dropped Tiggy off for the weekend to stay with Mama and The Princess and headed south. What was I thinking !!!! To leave it until after lunch on the Friday of a long weekend and join the holiday traffic on the Bruce highway! Some days I am just so blond I don't deserve to be allowed out! By the time I had reached the Gateway Bridge I was well into peak traffic. I could have climbed out of the car and walked that last ten kilometers or so quicker than I drove it. Our friends live in the Redlands, an area southeast of the city. We lived in the same area for many years and I love it down there. GB came down on the train from the city and I picked him up from the station...from then on it was all rest and relaxation.


We dined out on Friday night at a local Thai restaurant. Went out for morning tea the next day at Hawkins...a garden nursery where they served the most delicious coffee and lemon tart, had the most enormous seafood lunch and just sat around and chatted for the rest of the day. Saturday night the Great Dane cooked up a joint of venison that I had brought down from the farm. I am new to cooking venison and am looking for different ways to serve it. The great Dane is a very good chef so I watched over his shoulder as he roasted the marinated joint draped with bacon, glazed it with redcurrant jelly and made a light sauce to go with it. Yum. Thank you Jorgen. It was good :-)


Sunday, The Gorgeous boy and I popped out to pick up a couple of things for the BBQ and bumped into another couple of friends of ours who we hadn't seen for about four years. We sat and had a cup of coffee with them and caught up with all the latest news. I don't get to go out for coffee very often since we moved out to the farm so it was a great novelty. Twice in one weekend. How decadent !! One grumble though. At "Gloria Jeans" they served the tea and coffee in paper cups. Very tacky and not at all environmentally friendly :-( I was disappointed)

We arrived back just in time before the lunch guests arrived. A lovely afternoon and the weather was beautiful. If it sounds like we did nothing but eat, drink and sit around......well that's about the size of it! I told you....I had a wonderfully relaxing weekend :-) GB and I took Cooch (the dog) out for a walk along the esplanade to "blow the cobwebs away" but that was it.


We headed back to our little granny flat mid day on Monday. Tiggy was soooooooooo glad to see us. He has been glued to my heels ever since. I spent a couple of hours dashing around the garden after the lawn mower to try to burn up some of the excess calories that I consumed over the weekend but I fear that even if I mowed for 48 hours it still wouldn't be enough!!!


This morning I loaded up the car and headed home to the farm. On went the washing machine and I headed over to the garden to see how everything had fared in my absence. While that cats away the mice will play !!! Whose been eating all the strawberries? Who has nibbled most the leaves off the passion fruit vine? Who ate the cherry tomatoes? Mice ? Wallabies? Deer ? Sigh. Will it never end this year?

I did manage to crop these. I am so glad that we fenced off the veggie garden last month. Mushroom omelet and salad for a light dinner tonight I think.

In the picture below is the banana bed. A raised garden with a circle in the middle made of fencing and shade cloth that we use as a compost bin. We throw in all the vegetable scraps and garden waste and as it breaks down it feeds the bananas (they are very heavy feeders). Some tomatoes popped up on one side where we were going to plant a different variety of bananas. They are growing so fast and look so strong that I am inspired to build another bed especially for "heavy feeders" like tomatoes and rhubarb. I shall talk to GB about it and see what he thinks.

Enough for today! Please come and visit tomorrow as I am baking a cake. I don't make cakes very often but would like to invite you to join me and celebrate. Mariana from Through my Kitchen Window has been kind enough to present me with an award and I am so excited I want to share it with you. See you there :-)