Today is a day where I feel I should put my gardening post in the 'Rant, Complain, Talk' community. It's freezing outside and I have a cold so my resilience has hit the floor, and all I keep thinking about is how I wished I'd booked a holiday to Bali these holidays or moved to the tropics! The chicken coop is wet and slippery with mud and shit, one keeps busting out and scratching up my garlic, and to top things off, the blackbirds are scratching up any seedlings I put in, so that I've had to build kinda wire tunnels to protect the rows. Two whole trays of self seeded fennel I pulled out to grown on in seed trays were ripped to shreds by the buggers - yes, I've learnt now to slide them under a scrap of fencing. The seed trays, not the blackbirds.
Self seeded fennel sprouting up everywhere.
I'll turn my mind away from it now that I've had my little rant, and focus on the positives. Early this Autumn Jamie pruned the lime tree and I made all the young limes into a delicious lime pickle - I'm a bit of an addict, and make a lactofermented version with some pickle spice I buy at the local indian grocers, with some fresh fennel and onion seeds added for good measure. Honestly I live off this stuff (that and my lacto fermented chilli hot sauce, which is the absolute bomb shizzle - even my son says it was 'legit' which I'm pretty sure was a compliment).
Lime Pickle
It's definitely mid winter here so things are growing slowly. I've been eating a lot of broad bean tops in salads and soups or pasta sauces - not many people know you can use them as a vegetable. I have tons of lettuce everywhere which makes me laugh when they're so expensive at the supermarket now. Can't argue enough that many local producers are better than large monocultures up north that get hammered by various events reducing supply.
The good thing about husbands is that they can turn over a patch with a fork in about ten minutes when it can take me all day. I prefer no dig but the chooks had been in there making it all patchy and lumpy and the green manure was kinda patchy. It'll be covered with mulch for the rest of winter to prep it for the spring grow. Pretty satisfying, if a rather boring picture.
The other cool thing, lest you think I'm being totally moany (it's winter, and I have a cold, just in case you didn't catch my moaniness the first time lol) is that six months after hatching a clutch of 14 colourful easteregger eggs, 9 of which were born and four of which were roosters, I ended up with one laying blue eggs. Woo hoo. The others lay brown so I can't complain, more exciting than white! You'll notice my Victorian winter uniform above - flanno (that's Aussie for a flannel shirt), jeans, woolly socks and Redback boots.
Here is my selfie for this week - if you think I'm looking like a mushroom, you'd be right. Languishing in the winter dark, fat and dumpy, and covered in soil. Just kidding of course, that's not really me, it's an actual mushroom I found in my polytunnel.
To be honest, I wrote this earlier in the week and intended to finish it, but a lot has happened since then. First of all it wasn't just a cold - it was COVID, caught at my cousin's memorial. Here's a picture of Mikey next to a tree. He was a creative soul and a troubled one, a horticulturalist and a nature lover. I've been thinking about him a lot lately in the garden. 48 is far too young to die.
By the week's end I was feeling a bit better and have been out in the garden, and have a part 2 planned which is less grumpy, although I'm still shaking my fist at rabbits and blackbirds...
I hope you are all loving your summer gardens in the north, and if you're in the south, hope you are staying warm and not as grumpy as me!
Hope you can join in the #gardenjournal challenge for July - it goes for just over a week and you can read the details pinned to my blog or over at 
