Bananas galore and garden haul

As you can see I am tracking my banana from start to eating. It seemed to take forever for the first Cavendish to ripen.

Two weeks later the heart has grown longer and in comparison with the Cavendish this heart is HUGE so I will be expecting a big bunch. You can see the status of the growth from this first sighting on July 12th

Cavendish Banana is hanging in there

I went out to water the fruit trees and saw all these goodies. I had not taken much notice and voila fruit everywhere.  Large one is a lots a lemon tree, Kefir lime, Nagami and Calamondine cumquat. The trees are no taller than I am so I wasnt taking much notice to see if they were fruiting.

My Uncle Max potted up an Amberella tree for me. We used to eat it in Fiji and I cant wait for it to fruit so I can make pickle with it.

Happy gardening all

Lady Finger Banana 1st bunch

 I've been watching and watching out for my first banana from the Lady Finger tree and today I was rewarded for my persistence. I believe this was planted before Sep 2021 because the photo below was dated 1 Sep 2021

May 2022 this photo was taken, does not look much larger 4 months later

Fast forward to 12 July 2022 (today) after watching for months, I finally spot the heart of the bunch of bananas appearing. the first sign was that the tree was leaning

So up go the two pieces of wood to secure the lean

So we shall see how long it takes from heart to bunch for eating. 

Stay tuned!!!

Notebooks Stash

There was talk on a forum I am a member of about stationery. I took out my notebooks and was amazed to see how many I owned. So I took a photo to show how pretty some of them are.

Some of them have never been used, errr most of them. I know I will never run out of paper if covid lockdown hit us again.

Pineapple, Papaya, Ginger Jam

I thought I'd try making pineapple papaya jam. I had a recipe from a Pacific Island friend who had made it and it tasted really good. Of course I added other stuff that I had just bought off a friend from the island - ginger and lemons. Sadly the 9 pineapples I bought had rot in them so I only ended up with about 1 pineapple worth. 

Luckily I had two bottles of pineapple soaking in coconut juice and boy was it smelling nice, I love coconut and the smell. 

I think they are Meyer lemons, they are huge and organic

This is the spoilt pineapple that I had to throw in the compost, so not thrilled, never trust a sale

A friend gave me some mulberries that I had frozen so I cooked them up with some blueberries I found as well. they look good, hope they taste good too

Pineapple Pawpaw Ginger Jam

1 large pineapple

1 large papaya

8 cups raw or white sugar (I only used 1 cup as it was sweet enough)

juice of 1 large lemon

1 tsp ground cinnamon

1/4 tsp ground nutmeg

1/4 tsp ground clove

2 - 3 tsp grated Ginger

45 - 50 minutes simmer all of the above in a pot until the right consistency of thickness. 

Skim froth off the top if there is any.

Put into sterilised bottles. 

I place my bottles upside down to start with so the hot jam can sterilise the lid as well

 

WOYWW 673

So my NEW old table arrived just after I took those photos for last weeks WOYWW. Don't you love old wooden tables. It went up for sale on Facebook for $150 and came with a bench and 3 cushion covered chairs. 

I love sturdy tables to craft on, Those fold up tables wobble when you go to stamp and you don's get a good impression. I used to think it was me and my lack of hand strength.

You can see the length of the two tables. I'll use the rectangle table to craft on as it has space, a friend is coming over for a crafting weekend soon so I'll attempt to keep that table clean LOL.

The oval table will be used to house the essentials and crafting on my own.

I've been working on decorated envelopes. Early this year I challenged myself to the 365 Challenge where you write one letter/postcard a day and send to someone for 2022. 

I decided to make decorated envelopes as well to go with them.

If you'd like to be on my 365 challenge list please send me an email with your address and I will add you to my list bridget.larsen@gmail.com

Check out The Worlds smallest postal service

Hope over to Stamping Ground to see more desks and what crafty people are doing

WOYWW 672 Finally

As Julia said in her WOYWW 671 entry ‘if you want to get a job done, give to a busy person’ the following happened to me while I did a 4 week full time Mon- Fri job.

It's been 2 long years since I showed my "Desk" craft area in our new house. We've been in this house almost 5 years now and I am still unpacking boxes.

My last WOYWW was 572 on May 20 - 2020, then the pandemic hit and everything went south.

I needed a reason to get this show on the road so I invite my good friend Rhonda to come for a weekend stay over soon. I gave myself 3 months to clean up and just didn't stop for 3 weeks straight cleaning up.

I feel so much better, I keep sitting in my "new" craft room in wonder that this is now as permanent as can be and I wont have to move for the next 30 years.

I have had it tidy in the last 5 years then it really went to gross as you can see from the before photos.

Before photos:

Could barely get into the craft room with the hallway blocked with stuff

After

Ahhh can finally see the floor and move freely, will be cleared even more during the weekend

My music desk, gotta have a music desk so I can listen to books or music while I craft

My colouring in station

I will have a dedicated tools section when I get a new wooden table, much more stable than these fold up ones.

Hop on over to the Stamping Ground to see more desks.

Breakfast at Tiffanys (nah its on the island and amazing) T for Tuesday

 It's been a long time since I participated in T for Tuesday although I haven't stopped having tea.

Every Saturday or Sunday Hubby and I have a "Breakfast Date" at the local cafe Blue Parrot Cafe.

This breakfast was shared with a very good friend Kana after we attended a Pilates session. I had never done a Pilates session before. I had to google it to see what I was getting myself into.

I found out there were parts of my body that didn't want to turn or bend. It was so good to stretch it all out. I did get abit nauseous towards the end and the instructor explained that it is a way of letting out all those baddies in my body. I ended up with a headache a few hours later too.

I will definitely go back again, I will do it via you tube until I can attend the next in person session.

So this was what Kana and I went to after our Pilates, breakfast at our local Cafe. They always serve good food and the staff and owners are pleasant and very committed to providing good food and service.

We had scrambled egg on Turkish bread with tomato and avocado and spinach yum.

Come back on Wednesday to see my next craft room ready to rock n roll and churn out some crafty bits

Hope over to Bluebeard and Elizabeth to see what Teas are out there.

Covid 19

So what a world we are in now with Covid-19 and Ukraine.

I was very scared to catch covid because I have mild asthma and diabetes, have managed to not catch covid for 2 years until Jan 31-2022 when I had the worst sore throat that I'd ever experienced. It felt like I had swallowed a razor blade. I knew in my heart that it was Covid so I took a RAT test and there was a faint second line. At first I wouldn't believe that it was positive so waited 2 days to be able to go to a testing station to get a PCR test. 

Luckily we had stocked panadol and nurofen, two medicines that we needed and ate like lollies. the panadol helped with the headaches and the nurofen helped with the body aches. Wish I had dry throat cough medicine too because my throat was very sore. So I made this throat tonic that I found on a blog by Down to Earth  

3 - 4 inch long piece of ginger

2 lemons thinly sliced

1 litre water

1/2 cup raw honey

In a medium saucepan add the water, ginger and lemons and bring to a boil. Gently simmer for 20 minutes. Turn off the heat, put the lid on the saucepan and let it sit for two hours. Add honey, stir until its completely dissolved and pour into a sterilised bottle.

You can keep the ginger and lemon and recycle it, going through the above process again. The flavour wont be as strong but its definitely worth getting two batches.

To make up the tonic for use, make a hot tea with it by adding boiling water to 2 tablespoon s of syrup, add it to the black tea using the same amount or make it into a cold drink.

I hope you dont get covid, its not very pleasant, I reckon we got the middle version. 

I wrote down everything that happened to me:

Garden bed

 Well gardening has started back again after our deluge. I had this garden bed built by Len The Worm Farmer ages ago and didn't have time to get it going. This weekend hubby and I got stuck into filling it.

Firstly with stones to give it some drainage, underneath is cardboard to stop the weeds from coming up.

Then we put mulch in which I forgot to take a photo of

The stones are about 2 inches deep

The height of the bed

Mushroom compost in with valleys so I was able to put some food scraps in them and will cover them with used coffee grinds. then I will add some potting soil, manure, worm castings.

As you can see I have a long way to fill up the bed. It will be the healthiest bed we have put it because I started it with good stuff

Garden Club Jo's garden take two

Those of you who read my blog have seen this garden that I attended in one of the two Garden Clubs I belong to on Macleay Island. Jo and I are members of both clubs.  

The club these photos were taken at yesterday, we call Len's Garden Club (The Worm farm Man), <hubby calls it Len's Harem because Len is the only male (until yesterday) who attends and the rest are women. But yesterday we had 4 men attend woohoo.

As you can see many of Jo's flowers were in bloom in March compared to November photos in the links below.

Please enjoy the wonderful garden of Jo's. Jo is also a garden designer and goes under the name of 

PIMP MY BUSHES Jo has teamed up with Sheridan a Horticulturist. 

Give them a call if you want your garden designed.

Jo 0403 822 990 - Sheridan 0449 267 020

Here are the March photos to enjoy:

November this was Jo's garden you can see below in the links:

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Cavendish Banana First Bunch - The beginning and the end of it

 Well my patience paid out after 4 long years of my serious gardening foray. This Cavendish banana sprouted out a bunch of bananas in September last year. 

July 2019 is when this photo was taken and the banana tree had taken off after dying in a pot and coming back to life. The minute I planted it in ground it took off and grew

I reckon the chicken had a lot to do with its success

Silly me went and put a raised garden bed around it lol. Now there are 4 suckers growing and I need to remove the garden bed.

Sep 9th 2021 this appeared, it was wonderful to watch each section turn into a hand of banana

Today I went to visit and saw this, almost cried. the bunch of banana which weighed around 25kg was too heavy for the tree and fell over even though I had a piece of 2 x 4 wood holding the tree up. 

There are about 7 hands on this bunch and the bananas are still really hard.

I found another wasps nest in the making of that same chilli tree today so I removed the chilli tree