A flower for Debbie

This beautiful waratah - the only one that flowers in our garden but has done so every year - is for Debbie, even though she's on the other side of the planet.
She has lost someone so precious to her that there are no words or wails that can express the grief and pain of it.
I can't imagine what she's going through, and I don't want to. But it's enough to send that jolt through you to remind you that nothing is forever, everything changes, and every single minute with those you love is precious.

Weird weather

I know it's the height of ordinariness to blog about the weather, but the last two days have delivered firstly some seriously whopping hailstones (thankfully only a few and the car wasn't here to get dented) yesterday, and then this morning, we had a good hour of snow. And not the wet hail that I normally get excited about and Phil dismisses as not being real snow, but big fat flakes that actually stuck around for a bit.
These were delivered by a thunderstorm, which is a combination I don't think I have ever encountered before and just added to the excitement of it all.
Some of my pics of the snow even made it onto the Sydney Morning Herald online photo gallery (not that that's much of a claim to fame, but I'll take it).
And of course, now it's bright and sunny outside and temperatures are forecast to get back into the 20s on the weekend.
Weird.

New vegipatch...waiting...

Bianca and I keep watching the new vegi patch...
Currently it has rhubarb, raspberries, gooseberries and black currents planted (my choice) which a friend pointed out sounded like bear food...Bianca thought that was apt.
There is some asparagus (bears don’t like asparagus) but we won’t be able to harvest that until we leave it for a year.
Bianca has LOTS of seedlings waiting to be bedded in a couple of weeks. Lots of multicoloured heritage varieties from Diggers Club like five colour silver beet and ten colour tomatoes. Call me old fashioned but I like my silver beet green and my tomatoes red!! We will have purple, yellow, black, green, pink, striped etc...
Included a picture of the newly grown rhubarb

New garden wall in progress

When it rains it really rains up here in the Blue Mountains. The hill that the house is sat on is mainly sandstone with shelves of ironstone so it seems that weeks after the rains the back of the house is a quagmire.
Solution: build a wall with an agricultural drain behind it!
We had to move the large tree fern that Bianca looks at from her office window and we were worried about it not surviving the move but as you can see it is growing back with lush new growth.
It will be good to have a play area at the back of the house.