Happy Easter 2024!

 I am having a lovely relaxing Easter holiday this year. On Good Friday we celebrated with hot cross buns after dinner. They were yummy. 

Then on Easter Sunday, mum, dad and I went to my sister's for the afternoon. She made a delicious Easter meal of succulent roast lamb cooked with red capsicums and aubergines. This was served with crispy roast vegetables (kumara and potatoes) and green vegetables (runner beans and sprouting broccoli).

I took nibbles to start the meal with, which included; hummus and toasted pita bread triangles, hot smoked salmon crostini, olives and cream cheese stuffed pepperdews. 

My brother brought a cheese board and crackers, and my sister's friends made a Limoncello trifle and a raspberry-filled Bakewell cake.

Today I spent a lot of my time in the garden dead-heading hebes, then pruning back the osteospermums. They had become leggy and had lots of new leaves at the base of the stems.  I also watered the yellow cherry-guava tree which is full of fruit. I have harvested a few kilos so far and there is plenty of new fruit starting to ripen.

The blueberries have finished fruiting now that it is Autumn. I really enjoyed picking the blueberries to go with my breakfast of yoghurt and granola every day. And I also made blueberry muffins.

Last week dad and I went to the garden centre and bought lots of plants for inside the house and for the garden. 

For the house we got a purple-blue double African violet, and a burgundy coloured single one. Miniature cyclamens, white, pink and red. Plus a red gerbera. For outdoors we bought a yellow abutilon (Chinese lantern) bush.

We also have two different penstemons to plant, geraniums, canna lilies, fuchsias, a red and a yellow carpet rose and red monarda (bee balm).

Then there are the Spring bulbs to plant; anemones, ranunculi, bluebells and freesias.

Dad is gradually preparing flower beds. It is hard work to dig because the soil is very dry and rock hard. Some areas are black clay and others grey, sandy and gravelly. There are no worms to be seen. We will need to add a lot of compost. 

The arborist that trimmed our trees and hedges, said he would give us mulch and deliver it to us for free if we like. We need to figure out where he can dump the mulch load and where we can store it while it ages.

We didn't have much luck with our peach, apple and pear harvest. A lot of the fruit started rotting on the trees. We managed to pick some slightly ripe apples and pears before this happened though. The arborist said that the trees are old, neglected and diseased. The quince tree is on its last legs and needs to be removed.

The apricot tree didn't flower at all. And the black Doris plum tree, which had masses of blossom in Spring, didn't set any fruit. But it did look wonderful! 

There are not many fruit forming on the feijoa tree. Dad has fed and watered it, but ideally the tree should have been planted in a sunny spot. We have plenty of figs though and I managed to pick the grand total of ten raspberries! 

It was too dry for the boysenberries this year. We didn't know if we had enough water to spare in our tanks as it is our first year of living here. But we have worked out that we should have enough water for the garden next year.

Gardening in a new place is a steep learning curve for us :o) 

I hope that you are having a wonderful time this Easter.

Hugs, Rose xxx

Happy New Year to you! 2024

Sending you warm wishes for a happy New Year filled with love and joy. May your heart be light, your days be bright and your year be just right.

Have the happiest New Year!

Hugs, Rose xxx

I wish you a Merry Christmas

 

I will catch up with you soon.

Hugs, Rose x 

I have been making Christmas decorations

 

I have spent the past few weeks busily enjoying myself getting ready for Christmas. The Christmas presents are all bought and wrapped, and I have since been focusing on the Christmas Eve lunch table setting.

Instead of Christmas crackers, this year I wanted to make something myself as a gift to our guests. So, after many hours searching on Pinterest, I found free templates of little Christmas box houses and paper Christmas trees, designed by Gunnor Karita from the Wings of Whimsy blog.

I downloaded the templates, scaled them, and printed them onto glossy photo paper. They were easy to cut out, fold and glue together.

.

I filled each little Christmas house box with Hershey's kisses. I found Christmas mint truffle ones that are wrapped in a cute snowflake foil. Then I placed one box on top of each folded napkin.

I also printed off some Santa jokes to put inside each box.

The little Christmas boxes can be hung on the Christmas tree too as shown in my first photo.

For the centre of the table, I made a little village of paper gingerbread houses and fir trees.

I treated myself to a set of new handmade placemats which are made out of white-washed rattan. Plus, I bought a white cotton tablecloth and napkins which have a hemstitched border. They were all in the pre-Christmas sales and the napkins worked out to be free once all the discounts were applied!

The pre-Christmas lunch menu is written and all I need to do now is wash the plates and cutlery, which were in storage since we moved house. Then I have a bit of last-minute grocery shopping to do for fresh vegetables and a few odds and ends. 

I ordered the non-perishables online from the supermarket and they have already been delivered. And I am expecting a selection of cheeses to be delivered on Friday.

This is the most organised and relaxed I have been before Christmas. I have been enjoying watching Christmas-themed vlogs on YouTube, plus reading the December edition of The Simple Things magazine on my iPad via our library. I really enjoy reading that magazine.

I hope that you are enjoying the days leading up to Christmas too!

Hugs, Rose x

It's the first day of Summer today!

Happy first day of Summer! 

December the 1st is the first day of Summer in New Zealand. It has been a lovely warm 24 degrees C today, slightly overcast and no wind. A perfect day to start putting the Christmas tree up, decorating the house and opening door number one of my advent calendar.

I walked around the garden, barefoot, this afternoon, with Otto following me. He is such a curious cat, watching what I am doing all the time, apart from when he is running up the trees or climbing onto the roof of the house! 

In the garden I found a few ripe boysenberries and raspberries, which tasted delicious, lovely and juicy and full of flavour. The small passionfruit vine is flowering and there is one fruit forming already.

The Feijoa (pineapple guava) is full of red flowers, but I didn't see any Tui birds nearby to pollinate them. Hopefully the Tuis will find them so we can enjoy feijoas this year.

The Pohutukawa tree overhanging our fence from next door, is absolutely full of flower buds. It's going to look spectacular when the red flowers are open. Nice and Christmassy.

I hope that you are enjoying the first day of advent too.

Do you follow any traditions for December the first?

Hugs, Rose x

Busy time for cats - making new cushions

 

The last couple of weeks have been very busy for Otto. He has been supervising me while I made some new cushions. The supervision was necessary because it has been well over 20 years since I made cushions with zips in. I used a YouTube tutorial to refresh my memory. Here is a link to the tutorial that I found easy to follow.

Supervision is exhausting work for a cat. Otto had to lie down a lot to rest on the material as I moved it. Then he had to thoroughly inspect my cushion template and test it for size.

Examining the placement of every pin proved to be a lot of fun for Otto, as did trying to catch the scissors as I cut the material.

When the first cushion was finished, Otto insisted on testing it for comfort and promptly fell asleep! I took it that he approved and that the cushion passed quality control :o)

 

I chose the bird (blue-faced honeyeater) patterned material initially to make cushions for our new outdoor furniture. The material is 100% cotton canvas and was designed by Jocelyn Proust, an Australian designer. 

When I placed a finished cushion on the settee in our living room, I liked how it looked there with the cream throw rug and the dark brown leather of the settee. The background of the material is a pastel sage-green and the stalks of the plants are a light pastel dusky-rose. I decided to keep these cushions for the living room instead of using them outdoors. 

I made 3 of the bird cushions then decided that I needed contrasting cushions with a bit more colour to lift the room. So, I went back to the shop and looked at all the furnishing fabric options. I settled on the dusky-rose pink velvet material, which I hoped toned in well with the bird material. 

The shop assistant wasn't too sure of my choice of colour. However, I liked the colour combination and I asked several other customers what they thought. They said it was a perfect match, they loved the combination too.

I bought enough of the velvet to make three cushions. I have made one already and will make the other two over the weekend.

I am daydreaming about adding some smaller cream-coloured cushions, maybe hand knitted moss-stitch, or crewel work in cream-on-cream. Maybe one day :o) 

What do you think would go with my cushions? Any ideas?

Hugs, Rose x

More Spring surprises in my garden

 

Lords and ladies - arum italicum 

We found large round clumps of white-veined, spearheaded leaves sprouting up under the trees in our garden. We had no idea what type of plant they were. 

I thought that maybe they were calla lilies, so decided to leave them until they flowered. We didn't want to dig up flowers thinking they were weeds.

Then one morning dad called me to have a look at the unusual creamy-yellow flowers that had appeared. On seeing them I knew immediately that they were lords and ladies, also known as cuckoo pint, arum italicum. This is a poisonous weed that we don't want in our garden. We have a lot of work ahead of us to get rid of it.

Willow tree catkins

A more pleasant surprise was to find that the weeping willow trees were flowering. They had long yellow fluffy caterpillar-like catkins all over them. I haven't seen willow flowers like this before. The only ones that I have seen are the furry, silver catkins of pussy willows.

Ornamental quince flowers?

These coral-orange coloured flowers have grown over the fence from our neighbour's garden and are really pretty. The shrub has been flowering for over a month now. I think that it may be an ornamental quince, but I'm not sure.

Bugleweed - ajuga reptans 

The bugleweed has produced dozens of beautiful dark blue flower spikes with unusual square stalks.

Japanese maple leaves - acer palmatum

I love the new maroon-coloured leaves that have opened up on the Japanese maple. I am not used to new leaves being anything other than bright green, so was surprised when these ones unfurled from their tight little buds.

Another big surprise for me was to find that, what I thought was a dead, leafless olive tree, was not in-fact dead, nor was it an olive tree.

Over the past few weeks its new leaves appeared. I didn't look closely at them, I just thought that they were silvery-grey-green olive tree leaves. But when I decided to photograph the tree, to show you the olive tree that had come back to life, I noticed that the leaves were furry.

Most definitely not an olive tree! 

I have no idea of which type of tree this is, nor if it will produce flowers and fruit. Do you have any ideas about what this tree is?

What has been happening in your garden this month?

See you again soon.

Hugs, Rose x