Well things seem to be actually settling into some kind of routine around here. Just in time for the school holidays! *facepalm* The weather has been a bit kinder the last week (at least in our part of the world) and there has been no heavy rains, wild winds, or freezing mornings. It’s actually the type of morning I love – sunny but cool enough that I can be out there without dying from the heat.
I was out there checking on my cuttings and plants, I lost a lot over last summer in the heat, and then the torrential rain, heat, rain, and repeat. I don’t have that many flowering plants on the go at the moment, I started to build up a bit of stock of shade/indoor plants and succulents, and I’m happy with the shade plants but the succulents don’t “spark joy” so I don’t think I’ll do more of those. The Ctenthe plants that I thought I’d lost from a certain over-exuberant puppy have started to get some nice regrowth on them, so I’m happy about that. And my parent gave me what I think is a variegated Ctenthe so I should be able to propagate that soon as well 🙂
We lost a lot of our vegie and herb plants as well – we only have 2 asparagus plants left, the herb garden got taken over by weeds so Mr T dug that up and then replaced a couple of things, the top bed is pretty bare apart from weeds and maybe one or two lettuce plants -maybe I shouldn’t advertise that with the cost of lettuce in the shops at the moment 😉 – and the bottom bed has a few tomato seedlings, snow peas and what I thought were climbing beans but they don’t seem to want to climb! I think I’ll try and get out over the weekend and get some more winter crops in. Oh and in our bed that has the compost bins I planted out some garlic, we have a couple of eggplants (they seem to self seed and keep coming back) and I have one lone zucchini seedling.
One of the reasons I haven’t been out in the garden as much is that I have been setting up / expanding a couple of other ways that I earn an income – virtual assistance and parent helper. I talked a bit about my virtual assistance work and expanding that here, and I need to update that page as I now have my website ready to go. I plan to “open the doors” in the new Financial Year (so in a couple of weeks!). The parent helper work comes from an idea I had at the end of last year (or maybe before that) because I know how hard it is for families trying to juggle work, children, and also trying to have some kind of life outside of those two things. My particular interest is to help parents in the early years of having children when it is most intense with sleepless nights and little time for any self care or downtime, and parents that don’t have any support network from family. I’ve been doing this “unofficially” for a while so earlier this year decided I’d start expanding this service as well. So why both? Well, because I enjoy both and I plan to only work with a few clients in each area so I’m hoping that they can work well together. If not I guess I decide which one I like better!
So that pretty much sums up what has been happening for me around the homestead – I’m also trying to keep focusing on food waste and making the most of the food we buy particularly as it sounds like times are going to get tougher financially before they get better! Oh! Something I did at the end of last month but didn’t include in that update… we had an area of our kitchen extension that was very messy. I’d used an old book case to store some appliances on and bakery things on the shelves. I liked how easy it was to access the appliances but didn’t like how it all looked so I purchased a set of drawers from Amart which gives me a nice look, they are wide/deep enough so I can put my most used appliances on top and then put all the smaller appliances, baking equipment, etc, in the drawers.
Bayside Homestead 