At Chez Stutters lately

I don't quite know what happened, but I've been neglecting this blog in a way I never meant to.

On the other hand, I'm almost totally up to date with Project Life - okay, so there's some journalling to do here and there, but in general, I'm up to date.  (So up to date that I actually did last week's spread on Sunday, when the week hadn't even finished yet.)

But here's some news and photos from around the place.

Cats
It was our Bion's first birthday yesterday - he is officially no longer a kitten!  I love this photo of him, even though it's a few months old.

The Garden

OMG the garden!  Beans are sprouting, the zuchinni has the beginnings of flowers, the snow peas are growing like crazy, and even the cucumber has finally woken up.  

These photos were taken a week ago: the lettuce has grown *lots* since then.  We're able to make a salad every night now, I'd say.  And the perpetual basil is almost enough for a pesto.

Craft
I'm working on a purple and black skull slouch hat for M for Halloween.  She found the pattern and asked if I thought I could make it: it looked a little complicated, but it's turned out to be mostly straightfoward, and I'm really enjoying it.  It's actually much further along than this photo would suggest: I'm onto the fourth row of skulls and the first decrease.  It's a fascinating pattern because it begins at the brim and works up to the crown, where most hats I've seen work the other way.

And on Sunday I got out the sewing machine and started working on some Halloween bunting.  I'm planning a blog post on the bunting itself, but I'm now away until the 25th of October, which won't leave me much time to get it done (the bunting, not the post) before Halloween.  There are many more flags than I had kind of thought - which was my fault for the choices I made - but still.

Meanwhile - I'm at a work conference this week down in Melbourne.  I'm hoping to finish the hat and a bunch of poppies this week, as well as start working up some blogposts for the future.

The Chez Stutters Garden - September 2014

Since the beginning of September, we've really kicked into gear with the garden.  In the ordinary course of events it's possible that we may have started too early with some of the planting, but it's so much warmer than "usual" earlier than usual that I think we're beyond the threat of frosts.  (It's now almost October, so maybe we weren't quite as reckless with planting things like tomatoes as some people may have thought us.)

Anyway:

This is the Chez Stutters Mk 2 garden.  Three vegetable beds, two citrus trees in the ground, and lots of pots.

If you follow me on Instagram you will have met Groot, the raspberry cane.

This is Groot on September 25th

This is Groot on September 28th

 You can see why he got his name.

We also have an Imperial Mandarin called ... The Mandarin (funny, that) and almost had a Washington Navel orange called Ichabod.  We left him at the store and will get one next week.  Who will possibly be called Ichabod or Ichabod II.  (We are not sure when we became these people.  Apparently our plants have names.)

A selection of pots, containing (from the left) a tomato and basil, basil, basil, perennial basil (M is looking forward to when she can make pesto), lavender and a nastursium.

Sadly that's kind of the extent of the photos of the garden at the moment.  I'll work on some more for next week.

Week 38 at Chez Stutters

Thanks to the new Project Life App I already have last week's layout planned, with the equivalent of sticky notes to remind me what I want to journal about.

But I figure that you readers out there - if there are any :-) - might still like an update.

It was the last week of school, which meant M had various activity days and evening commitments with groups of exchange students, etc.  On Thursday night I went to the AGM of the Emergency Relief organisation run by my local church.  A dear friend who lives in Sydney was the guest speaker, and although her schedule was very tight for her visit, I managed to have a few minutes with her at the end of the meeting.  And her address was characteristically awesome.

Friday night the Swans played North Melbourne to get into the AFL Grand Final, so everything was planned around that.  Friday was also the Scottish Independence Referendum, which we both took ludicrously personally even though neither of us have that much direct connection to Scotland.  Actually Friday was a pretty big day, as M got her contract renewed for another twelve months (hooray!) and M's brother and his boyfriend announced their engagement.  So happy for them!  (Huh, I'm starting to think I'll need an insert for this week after all.  Mostly just to cover Friday.)

Saturday was a gardening day - I hope to have a garden tour up later this week - and then Sunday was church, more gardening, and then an amazing free concert at the Botanic Gardens with The Idea of North - an acapella group that I have adored for 15 years and never seen live.  It was brilliant - and amazing to get a concert like that for free!

A little more gardening once we got home (seriously - we did heaps this weekend!) and then it was time to start thinking about the work week ahead: at least for me.  M is on school holidays, of course.

Currently Creating - 18th September 2014

I really didn't mean for my Currently Creative posts to die in August.  I really did mean to keep them up.  But...

Anyway, we're back, so I'd like to get going from here on in: and I'll warn you now that gardening is being included as creative.

 I think this is the only piece of crochet I've properly finished in the past couple of months.  I also have a purple neckwarmer scarf for me, but I still need to put the buttons on that for it to be finished.

This is a Swans bobble scarf made for my Swans-fan GF.  

I was quite proud of the creativity used in this PL card for my August wrap-up layout.

We got this potting table from ALDI and build it with a minimum of drama (sadly the drawer will not open).  I also started some seedlings, and some cat grass for the kitty boys.  We've also got a bunch of vegetable seedlings planted, including lots of basil.  I'll try to document the garden properly NEXT week.

In addition to all this, the Write Around the Murray writing festival last weekend had its annual effect of at least temporarily kicking me in the butt re: my writing.  I'm trying very hard at the moment to put in at least 30 minutes of writing per day (not counting blog posts).

Make me happy... BEDiM Day 19

So, this was actually yesterday's prompt... Ten things that make me happy

1.  Top Gear - I hate that this makes me happy, but it does.  Top Gear (the real one, not the Australian one) makes me happy.  Despite the fact that I hate it the homophobia, racism and sexism of Clarkson, in particular.

2.  Pro cycling.  See previous posts.  An additional love is #trolldj on SBS - the people who choose the music for when you come back from the ad breaks. They're snarky and awesome and I love that we get even more #trolldj with extra Giro coverage.

3.  KikkiK - the Swedish design stationary store. It's a very good thing there isn't a KikkiK store up here or I'd be entirely broke and swimming in stationery.

4.  Project Life - even though I'm so far behind.

5. Tea2 - as I write this I'm guzzling down my umpteenth cup of T2's Lemongrass and Ginger tea, made in the Teamaker, which is also awesome.

6. Our new house. It's awesome, and I love it and it's ours. So much love.

7. Cooking. The kitchen of our new place makes me want to cook, which is fabulous, because I love cooking, and the kitchen in the old place didn't encourage cooking.  I may even get around to baking one of these days.

8.  Good coffee. When I have the chance, I go to the Deli Bean for a morning coffee, but I also have the joy of a wonderful coffee machine at home.

9. Flowers. In particular daffodils and tulips. My GF puts up with me planting flowers because she knows it makes me happy, and at the moment we have a bunch of tulips on the kitchen bench for the same reason. Yay!

10.  First and foremost, my girl. She makes me laugh when I'm down; she buys me presents even when she shouldn't; she buys me purple tulips and cooks and cleans the house, and she hugs me and tells me that everything will be okay when I'm being neurotic, which is too much of the time. She puts up with all my faults and foibles, and on top of all these things, she loves me. I don't entirely know why. But I love her too. Lots and lots.

Sunday evening update... BEDiM Day 18

I'm sitting on the sofa watching Masterchef, while the GF works on the second of three Fantastic furniture bookcases, the last furniture-related stage of moving in.

Update on the washing machine: still not fixed. It's an electrical fault that will hopefully be fixed this week. 

Update on the garden: things are growing! We could have had spinach from the garden with dinner tonight, but we were too lazy to go out and pick it. We're planning to use the thyme in a tomato dish during the week. 

Update on Blog Every Day in May: I've missed a couple of days, but no more than two, I'm sure. Personally, I feel like I'm doing okay. 

And Cadel Evans is now in the Maglia Rosa at the Giro. :-)

Beginning the Chez Stutters Garden - BEDiM Day 4

I'm going off prompt today, because we've just spent the last hour and a half out in the garden for the first time since we moved in, and this did start out as a gardening blog

Unlike Chez Stutters 1, where it felt easy to just start digging and planting, Chez Stutters 2 has a very small lawn and large patches of concrete.  We've got some raised garden beds to put together that can go on top of the concrete, but today's gardening was pretty much all planting in pots.

We're going to have flowers at the front door and herbs at the back, which we started today with rosemary and a bay tree.  At the front door, along with mostly pansies, there's a pot of nastursium, which counts as both flowers and edibles, obviously :-)

Today we also got three little garden gnomes.  I know - garden gnomes!  But Bunnings had Smurfs and the Seven Dwarves and Beatrix Potter, and once it was obvious that the GF was determined to get Dopey and a gardening Smurf, I figured I could at least get Jemima Puddleduck to join the party.

It was cold out there, and beginning to get dark, but at the same time, it was so very nice to be gardening again after what feels like quite a long time.

Every day in May: Day 1, goals

Via one of my new favourite bloggers, Kellie Winnell, comes the "Blog every day in May" challenge from Sunday of Love Happy Daily (I love discovering more Australian bloggers.  I'm getting less and less tolerant of the North American orientation of just about everything - Easter isn't in Spring all over the world, people!)

It probably seems weird to pick up a crazy project like blogging every day for 31 days when I've not been able to blog three times a month so far this year.  But hey, when have I not done crazy projects?  And there are so many things that I want to be blogging about.  Project Life, our new house, the way that we're developing routines in our fabulous new house.

So, this morning, before I go and get into a full day of final cleaning of the old house, I'm giving myself the length of time of episode 2 of the Jim Henson Creature Shop Challenge (I love this show!) to post the blog for this morning's prompt - goals.

My May goals are

• post every day in May
• get my craft room set up
• catch up on Project Life (the move has meant I've done little to none in April, simply because there's been no time at all to get photos printed)
• get our herb garden planted
• track my spending in preparation for a budgeting effort in June.

And I honestly think that's enough!

Edit: Actually, I forgot a couple. 

* complete a full closet purge

* read the Metaxas 'Bonhoffer' in time for book club, and chase down some progressive/liberal reviews. 

New Year, New Plans

It's been a while since I posted here, but one of my goals for 2014 is to post to each of my blogs at the very least once a month.

And since I last posted there's been a lot of changes in my house/craft/garden/organisey life.

In April - hopefully - Chez Stutters will be relocating.  We're in the process of buying a house, which is rather scary, even if I am used to the processes because of the whole used-to-be-a-lawyer thing.  We're not moving far, but the house will be bigger and give us the chance to organise differently and do a lot of things we're looking forward to. 

In the meantime, we need to declutter, sort, and pack up the house, and do a whole lot of work in our sadly neglected garden (poor garden) to get it up to a standard that won't upset our landlord when we leave.  Then we get to move into our wonderful new house and organise it.  I might even be getting a craft room!

This would be good, because, in October, almost entirely due to the influence of my friend Mel at Subversive Reader I got seriously stuck into Project Life scrapbooking.  I really love this method, which is a lot less time-consuming (the way I do it) than traditional scrapbooking, which I haven't done much of for ages.  There will be posts on this in the future, you can be guaranteed.

An update

Yes, I know - there have been no posts since New Year's Day.

One definite element of that is the current state of the garden.  Which is not great.  And since we had such fun posting photos of our lush, green garden for you to see, I feel bad now that the garden is no longer lush or green.

We've been having some very hot weather - starting back in December, right around the time of M's graduation and a visit from her parents.  A time when we were very busy, and watering the garden wasn't exactly at the top of our to-do list.  Oops.

Minty and Coloniser (with random flower
in foreground) in happier (and younger) days.

While that one is our fault, the state of the garden since is mostly not.  The weather has been unpredictable, and far hotter than recent years.  Plants that have sailed through previous summers are visibly burned this year, just from the sun and the heat.  Remus Lupin may not have made it through (although Teddy is still struggling along, surrounded by the Coloniser.  For all that we laugh about the Coloniser, it seems to have provided Teddy with sufficient cover from the heat that he will survive where the far stronger Remus is struggling.)

Our zuchinni plants are producing at a great rate - possibly too great a rate - and there are lots of cherry tomatoes around the place.  Other than that, though, it's a very non-productive garden right now.

My plan is to wait until mid-late March (either Labour Day or Easter weekends, depending on the weather) to cover pretty much the whole garden with compost from our bin, then newspaper and zuchinni leaves (a hint from the One Magic Square book), water it well for three weeks, and then start on the winter planting, hopefully with some vaugely recovered and partly healthy soil involved.  I think it's going to be a complete restart on everything from Minty and Coloniser onwards - if Minty makes it through summer.

The Indira Challenge

via Sydney Morning Herald

Indira Naidoo is my role model.

I remember watching her when she was an ABC TV presenter, and I'm not sure whether she was ever a BTN presenter, but whether she was or not, she was a role model of my youth.  Even if it was just as the weekend newsreader for ABC.  I thought she was completely and utterly awesome, and still do think that.  And now I have her garden-and-cook-book.

Anyway.  (Should that be my catchprase?)

Anyway.

Indira set a challenge in her awesome book about her balcony garden: try to include something from your garden in every meal.

I'll focus on evening meals (I suspect Indira meant the same) and I know we don't manage to include something from the garden in every single evening meal, but I am going to try.  Particularly this summer, but from now on I'll be looking at Indira's book, Stephanie Alexander's book and the classic Yates Garden Guide, and doing my best to
plan ahea
d
(inside family joke)

and work towards having a four-seasons garden if we possible can.

That's the next goal.  The current goal?  The Indira challenge: use something from our garden in as many evening meals per week as possible.

Dinner - and a plan for summer

We decided tonight that we wanted to have salad for dinner rather than the pasta we had planned. The temperature reached 28.5 degrees today, which is nowhere near the highs we will get later in the year, but we declared it too hot to cook.

Anyway: the salad includes: lettuce, rocket, spinach, mint, coriander (all from our garden) as well as brie, walnuts, onion and bacon.  We also had garlic bread, which could also have been turned into croutons and this is what will happen next time.

It was totally delicious, and so much of it was from our garden!

This is something we really need to keep doing this summer: lots and lots of salads.  We still have cos lettuces that haven't got to the point of picking yet, as well as baby spinach we planted in The Wall this week.  I may separate out the lettuces from the first 6-pocket to the top two of the second six-pocket just to give them a little more room to grow.  'Cause we want lots of lettuce this summer.  And other things, too!

Mystery and rogue plants

Our jungle of rogue tomatoes,
pumpkins, and the three-quarters hidden
compost bin.  Christmas Day, 2011

So, after the disappearance of Mystery Plant #1 AND all our cucumbers, I'm somewhat wary of blogging about our mystery plants.  I don't want them to disappear just because I blogged about them.  (Yes, I'm paranoid.)

However, those we've already pulled out cannot be affected by the blogging jinx, and today I discovered a rogue tomato plant.  We'd decided quite some time ago that we would pull out any rogue tomato plants.  Rogue tomatoes come from supermarket tomatoes, which are not the greatest in terms of eating quality, especially in the second generation.  Last year we had three rogue pumpkins and two rogue tomatoes (I think) and the tomatoes in particular took over the back garden  (see photo) for no real profit of taste or quality.

So, we figured we'd pull any and all rogue tomatoes we found.  Today we found our first - and pulled it - and a suspected second, that we're going to leave for a few days, just to confirm that it IS a tomato, and then we'll pull it.

This weekend's intended purchases include:

• additions to the wall planters from the Hume Murray Farmers Market, with a focus on sorrel (advised by Indira Naidoo's book), Vietnamese mint and/or baby spinach;
• two Diosmas to replace the shrubs that were transplanted from the backyard to the front and have never really thrived
• possibly some more Petunias, because I want to have lots of flowers out my front window.

Wall planter update

So, this was the six-pocket planter the day we planted it:

And this was the six-pocket planter today:

Pretty much everything is going ridiculously well.  Including (knock on wood) the coriander.

Update on Mystery Plant #1

Mystery Plant #1 has vanished.

So, apparently, have all three cucumber plants.

Meanwhile, today we will be planting another cherry tomato (because the first is looking stressed, and clearly the best way to ensure that it picks up and provides us with far too many tomatoes is to plant a second plant), and setting up a fourth wall planter with dill (at the moment) and other plants to come following next week's Farmer's Market.

The two Jamies (and the one and only Indira)

Yesterday afternoon was a tale of two Jamies; Jamie Oliver and Jamie Durie.

We went out in the afternoon to Trade Secret to pick up the Jamie Oliver 3-in-1 peeler (with julienne and soft-fruit blades) which we'd been looking at for a while and finally bought because summer is coming on and we want to have salads to eat during the week etc).

We also went to Big W to buy an additional wall planter, having bought two Jamie Durie 3-pocket planters on Saturday and planted them up early Sunday afternoon.  They look and seem to work well (so far), and we were impressed enough to decide we wanted another one.  Knowing that we eventually want to move back to a city at some point in time, and knowing that we're both happier in Inner City rather than suburbia, I'm keen on thinking about gardening in small/confined spaces.  It's not as though we've got unlimited space now, of course.  Comparatively, we have a fairly small growing space (although it's a lot more than we had when we first moved in - a story for another time) and these 12 (two 3-pocket and one 6-pocket) planter pockets give us more herbs (mostly) than we could otherwise have.

So, to keep up the garden stocktake begun in this post - we've now added (in the Jamie Durie wall planters)

The first two Jamie Durie planters,
hung from our fence with hooks
from Bunnings

• Vietnamese mint
• Chives
• French tarragon
• a Strawberry plant
• two petunias
• two nastursiums
• lettuces
• marjorum
• chives (transplanted from last year's attempt at home-made wall planters - I think that deserves its own post)
• mint
• coriander

The six-pocket planter.

I must point out that part of the inspiration for our wall-hung gardens came from Indira Naidoo, who I remember as a newsreader from from my youth.  I thought she was awesome then, and now that I have her cookbook/patio garden book, I only think her even more awesome.  She'll no doubt feature later in this blog (we keep saying that we'll choose a feature cookbook each week to menu plan from, but we haven't quite gotten there yet.)

Introducing: The Lupins

Remus Lupin early in the 2011 season

When we were planning the back garden I wanted a small part to be a flower garden, because I love flowers.  For the OH, gardening is a brand new experience, and while she can understand growing things to eat, she doesn't get growing flowers yet.  And my small flower garden has had to cede ground to the edibles as we've become more confident and have wanted to grow more (lettuces are in the middle of the flower garden this year), but I've also added edible flowers (yay, nastursiums!)

One of the flowers the OH has taken a great deal of interest in, however, have been the lupins.  She's a Harry Potter fan, I'm a semi-fan.  I've read all the books, seen all the movies, and love certain elements, but still don't consider myself a full-on fan.  And yet, the three lupin plants we planted last year were quickly dubbed Remus, Tonks and Teddy.

Sadly, Tonks didn't survive the summer (or the final novel - sigh).  She simply never flourished.  Remus has grown the best of the three, and Teddy did well but never flowered, and has had to be saved from weeds a few times.  At the moment, Teddy is under attack from a ground cover I planted called "White Surprise" (I can't find the scientific name right now (recording such things is part of the reason for this blog) that we've nicknamed the Coloniser because it's taking over so darn well.  I don't want to let him be overtaken, not when Remus is doing so well (two flowers blooming at the moment).

We planted another three lupins last week, and we haven't yet named them.  Suggestions so far have been that one ought to be Sirius, the "honorary" Lupin; the werewolves from True Blood (which OH watches but I don't), names from Melissa de la Cruz's new Werewolf series...  I've just realised that if we call one Sirius, another should be Bill, which leaves one Lupin and/or werewolf to be named, although I suppose we could go with Fleur, who married Bill...

Our Garden (without any actual up-to-date pictures)

Welcome.

Stephanie Alexander's Kitchen
Garden Companion

I wanted a way to document our vegetable garden as it grows, beyond making occasional notes in the Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden journal which I don't update on a reasonable frequency.  And so here we are.

I don't yet have decent photos of this years garden, however: so far we have planted the following -

• snow peas
• green beans
• zucchini
• capsicum
• basil
• nasturtiums
• lettuce
• cucumber
• spinach
• cherry tomato

We also (well, it was mostly me - the Other Half doesn't understand flowers) planted lupins (see more below) and a punnet of petunias are awaiting my pleasure - which will hopefully occur tomorrow.

We transplanted the mint, which was struggling in its pot; and we already had sage, rocket, parsley, and oregano.

A half-blooming Lupin (Remus)
from last year.

We have a pot given to us by my cousins with a bay tree, thyme, and some struggling chives; and somewhere in another pot should be some rosemary.   

Meanwhile, in the flower part of the garden, the Minty is doing beautifully, Coloniser (aka "White Surprise") is taking things over, and the bulbs are doing beautifully.

So, that's the garden as it stands.  

Perhaps at some point I'll draw a plan.  Also, tomorrow I will do a separate post about our Lupin family.  Because I love our Lupin family.