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julielivingstone

~ It isn't always about getting what you want. Sometimes it's about wanting what you've got.

julielivingstone

Tag Archives: garden

Random Thoughts and Other Stuff

25 Wednesday Mar 2015

Posted by julielivingstone in Uncategorized

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competition, Fremantle, garden, photography, weather, writing

I know I’ve been really slack at posting when I come back to the WordPress site and none of it is familiar! OK, that’s not entirely true, some of it looks the same, but other bits seem totally different. When did that happen? Obviously I haven’t been paying enough attention.

More attention than the person who sent me one email recently though. To be fair, the email wasn’t directed just at me, it was a bulk mailing from a list I subscribe to. Touting a webinar on ‘better blogging’ or something like that. They lost me in the first sentence though, which read “Weather you blog for family and friends, or to promote your business…”. Their spelling mistake, not mine! Seriously, if you are going to promote yourself as advising people on how to write, please spell check more effectively than that!

OK, rant over. What else has been happening? I sent my entries off to the Sydney Royal, and I know that this year they arrived in time, because I tracked them on Australia Post. The show starts in two days, so I guess the judging is happening about now, but I’m not sure when the results come out. I’m not expecting anything great, just pleased with myself that this year I got the entries there in time. I hope at least to get to know the judges’ comments, that was one of the most instructive bits about entering some things in the Perth Royal Show a couple of years ago.

I’ve been busy working on a couple of other things, and also decorating my bedroom, as well as trying to keep the garden tidy. We had rain (the first for many weeks) about 10 days ago, and the weather is getting cooler and more pleasant, so that I can raise some enthusiasm about gardening again. I ordered some spring bulbs, so I shall have those to plant in a week or two. I have promised myself I’m going to try to look after them this year, so that hopefully they will flower for more than one year, instead of just vanishing after the first season. I ordered Dutch irises, anemones, ranunculus (ranunculi?), hyacinths, freesias, bluebells, and a few other things I’d never heard of before, but which looked good in the photo! Optimism springs eternally – I guess that’s pretty much the point about optimism, it’s always there.

Also spent a weekend in Fremantle recently, and took this photo, which I quite like. Although, it’s probably hard to take an ugly photo of boats, they’re generally attractive things.

Boats in Fremantle Fishing Boat Harbour

Fremantle Fishing Boat Harbour

There was also an exhibition of sculptures on Bather’s Beach, I think I liked this one the best.

Sculpture on Bather's Beach Fremantle, Portable Self Support Machine by Claire Bailey

Portable Self Support Machine by Claire Bailey

I’ve often thought it would be nice to have something like that in the garden – what do you think?

 

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Excuses for lack of posts

15 Friday Feb 2013

Posted by julielivingstone in Uncategorized

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competition, garden, sewing

How lax I have been! Nearly three weeks since my last post. In my defence, I haven’t been doing nothing. I put an entry into the Australian Cotton Expo in the craft section, and have been beavering away at it. It really needs to be finished by this weekend so that I can take a photo and send it in before the entries close, but I don’t think it will be. I’m now frantically trying to figure out how much I need to finish in order to be able to take photos which will look as if it’s finished, if that makes sense. The entry conditions say that you have to send a sketch or photo of your entry, so it doesn’t have to be finished, a sketch could be of something which wasn’t even started yet. No hints on here as to what my entry is, that will have to wait until the contest is done, in about April I think.

On the topic of competing, I also entered my wall hanging, Fremantle Limestone, in the Sydney Royal Show, just for a lark. At least that is already finished, I just have to find a way of packing it so that it can be posted, shouldn’t be too hard. Then I have an idea for another competition I saw mentioned recently . . . I can see this competing business is going to get a grip on me!

So, the sewing has been taking priority lately, partly also because it’s mostly too hot to do much outside. Cooler weather forecast for this Sunday though, so I hope to catch up on a few jobs. Trouble is, my ‘to do’ list never gets any shorter. Anybody got any ideas?

 

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Summer flowers, mostly blue

24 Thursday Jan 2013

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flowers, garden, summer

Blue summer flowers

Blue summer flowers

Last week was my birthday, and I was given a lovely basket of flowers. By yesterday they were looking very sad, so reluctantly I decided they had to go. I went hunting round the garden to find something to replace them, and cut some agapanthus and some plumbago, along with some purple plant I’m not sure of the name of. I was thinking how good it was to have the agapanthus and the plumbago, since nothing else flowers at this time of year, but actually when I come to look more closely I do have other flowers. Currently there are, as well as the agapanthus and the plumbago, both blue and white of the latter, zinnias, portulacas, geraniums (not as good as in the early summer, but still a few flowers), marigolds, busy lizzies (impatiens), celosias, petunias, verbenas and begonias, I think they are what used to be called bedding begonias, but I’m not sure of the proper name for them. Admittedly, the plumbago and agapanthus are the only ones which don’t get watered and still survive, if the others were not watered they wouldn’t last more than a couple of days at this time of year. Still, it does show that it is possible to have flowers during summer in our climate. Currently most of the flowering plants are in pots or tubs, and get watered every day, but I am going to work towards having drip irrigation in the garden beds, and see what flowers I can actually grow in the ground. The only difficulty then is preventing them from being trampled on or dug up by dogs, or eaten by snails in winter. Our climate changes so much, from being baked hard and dry all summer, to being lush and green in winter, and it’s difficult sometimes to have things which cope with both extremes. Even having trees creates problems, particularly the natives which are evergreen. They provide welcome shade in summer, but in winter the foliage underneath them doesn’t get much sun, and stays damp for weeks at a time, so it is a perfect haven for snails etc. The snails aren’t native, so I really should just exterminate them, but I’m not good at killing things, even lowly invertebrates. Unless, that is, they’ve just demolished my prized lilies or something like that!
Having Googled, I find that the begonias are begonia semperflorens. Mine I bought as a punnet of seedlings about two or three years ago, and they are still growing in the same pots. They look pretty sick in the winter, but flower most of the rest of the year. Same goes for the impatiens, they are growing in a bigger pot, and I think some of the plants there now are probably self-set seedlings from the originals.
I also found that the purple plant is Tradescantia pallida purpurea, I had a feeling it was some kind of tradescantia but wasn’t sure. It also grows readily, so long as it is watered, and the snails don’t get it in the winter. I have it mostly in hanging baskets, and it needs protection from frost, and ends the winter looking a bit tatty. Pull off the dead bits though, and it perks up and looks good again, and if you put the broken bits in some moist compost they will take root and grow, so I now have at least 3 pots of it, and have given away others. I took a photo of the flowers in a vase, and also a shot of the beatufiul sky blue of the plumbago

Plumbago auriculata

Plumbago auriculata

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Christmas trees and Christmas lilies

27 Thursday Dec 2012

Posted by julielivingstone in Uncategorized

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bulbs, Christmas, garden, llilies, quilting

Well, Christmas half over. We had celebrations with part of the family on the day itself, and will get together with other family on Saturday. Nothing like spreading the holiday out for as long as possible! Plus, since we haven’t had either gathering at my house I haven’t had to do very much apart from make food to take.
I’ve been making a Christmas tree table decoration out of quilt fabric to take on Saturday, from a picture sent to me by my aunt in England. She’s been making them to sell at a charity bazaar to raise funds for the local hospice. Mine isn’t quite finished yet, I’ll post a photo when it is, but I found a few examples of similar ones on the web.
One being sold on Etsy, here,
and a tutorial to make something similar here.
Since I don’t know where my aunt got the idea from I can’t credit the original designer, but they seem to be fairly common so perhaps lots of people had the same idea. My Google search also turned up some other interesting ideas, which I should put to one side and think about before next Christmas – how likely is that to actually happen!
A photo for now, the lily bulbs I planted in the spring are now flowering beautifully. They are Lilium longiflorum I think, known in Australia and possibly other places as Christmas lilies for fairly obvious reasons. I am really impressed with these, the bulbs I bought were a really good size, so I had high hopes, and they are certainly living up to it. The bulbs came from a place called Tulips with a Difference, in South West WA, and here is one of the flowers.

lily

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Winter weather and it’s almost summer

02 Sunday Dec 2012

Posted by julielivingstone in Uncategorized

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ATASDA, Christmas, craft, garden, storm, weather

I can’t believe it’s been about three weeks since my last post, where did that time go? In my defence, work has been busy, and I’ve been busy at home. Getting the garden and property in general ready for summer, cutting grass, clearing bits of dead bushes, pruning etc, in readiness for the risk of a bushfire. I added some more sprinklers to the rooftop sprinkler system, which is designed to protect the house in the event of a fire nearby, and which of course I hope I never have to use.
During last week we had two or three days of weather which was more like winter than almost summer, very strong winds, rain, and cold. Fortunately there was not much damage to my property, a couple of branches down out in the paddocks is about all. Sadly though a large dead tree which has been standing, dead, in the paddock since I moved here almost 10 years ago did fall over. By the look of it I reckon it could have been dead for 5 years easily before I moved here, so I guess it had to fall over at some point. I had planted some new replacement trees around it, and fortunately it didn’t fall on any of them, so that was lucky. They are only about 2 or 3 feet high yet though, since they only went in last winter, so they have some growing to do.
I’ve also been doing some craft stuff. I bought my new overlocker last week, but haven’t really had much chance to play with it yet. It’s a Husqvarna, here. My only reservation about it so far is that it doesn’t have a free arm, but I do still have my old Singer machine, which I think I can get serviced, and use the free arm on that. The reason for picking the Husqvarna was that the front part opens up so that you can see more easily to thread, and it also has more room to the right of the needle. Also the cutting blade is underneath, which means more space around the needle, and it comes with a five year warranty, against only one year on the Singer I was considering. I’ll write a more complete review of it when I’ve had time to play with it a bit.
Yesterday was ATASDA branch meeting, for which we were supposed to make a Christmas card to exchange. It’s been years since I did any card making, but I burrowed through my box full of bits, and found some blank cards, which was a good start. Also some tissue paper with a gold pattern on it, and some brown card. I tore the tissue to a Christmas tree shape, cut a pot shape out of the brown card, and stuck both onto a card. A few weeks ago I had picked up some flowers which had fallen from my olive trees and pressed them, so they came handyfor little stars. A gold sequin glued at the top, and a line of stitching round the edge of the tree in gold thread, and voila! I was quite pleased with the result.

Christmas cardChristmas card detail
Now I have to find something to take as a gift to Red Hats next Saturday, and I still intend to make zines to taking to writing group on Sunday, but for now, back to the garden. The storm has left more leaves and rubbish lying around, and since the forecast is for 37 degrees on Tuesday I want to get some more done before it gets too hot.

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Choices

21 Wednesday Mar 2012

Posted by julielivingstone in Uncategorized

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article, embroidery, garden, magazine, sewing, writing

The topic we were given for next month’s writing group was ‘Choices, and how they change the story of our lives’. I started off enthusiastically, and wrote a good few hundred words in my head, but when I actually started committing them to paper (screen), it wasn’t so simple. I had lots of thoughts, but finding a common thread to hang them all on was a different matter. Eventually I finished the piece, and have posted it here,

I’m not entirely happy with it, for one thing I think it’s still only a collection of thoughts, but I’ll wait and see what the rest of the group thinks. More time would have been good, but that’s a poor excuse since I started planning it straight away, and have had over two weeks since. Although I’m really keen to get on and start trying to get published, in reality I have to accept that I don’t really have a lot of time, and I might be better to ‘hasten slowly’, and work on improving quality rather than just get stuff out there.

I received the gardening magazine I’d subscribed to from the US, in fact not only the magazine but another collection of articles. I sat down and read them both right through almost immediately, and in spite of my reservations above I do think I might try and submit an article I have written. I submitted it for critiquing at last month’s meeting, and most of the comments were positive. I also think that the style of the magazine suits the style of the article, or the other way round. Watch this space!

I was turning out some stuff recently and came across some bits of embroidery that I had done years ago when my daughters were young. I took some photos, just for the record, and here is one of them. Embroidered flowersAgain, this is the photo straight as it came from the camera, I should try and see if I can improve it a bit. I’d also really like to do some more hand embroidery, having not done much for years, but it’s all about time. I should quit complaining and be more organised, then I’d have time!

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