Janine and I have been down in Canberra for the past week for the National Folk Festival. So many great performances, not to mention the many surprising and engaging side acts performing on the green and in the little spaces between venues.

The Spooky Men’s Chorale are always keenly anticipated to see what they have come up with over the past year, but I love all of their back catalogue too. A huge delight was a group of school kids from Tate in Victoria, playing amazing music with such enthusiasm on home made wooden marimbas. Amazingly uplifting and energising. While we were in Canberra, we took the time to visit the National Gallery and see the Aboriginal painting show.

Since we have been back, it was straight into the garden to do a big cleanup and compost all the spent summer plants and make room for the autumn planting of carrots, beetroot and peas. Plus more cabbages and cauliflowers.

I have made a special effort to select the larges knobs of our own home grown garlic, but as last years crop was a bit poor, I decided to buy in a couple of cloves of a few different new garlic varieties to help bolster our range. During the drought years, a decade or more, I collected and grew a range of different garlic varieties some did better than others in different years, but all did reasonably OK. I got used to selecting the largest and healthiest knobs for re-planting. I had a good range in my collection. hard stem, soft stem, large white, small purple, plus red skin and crimson and pink varieties. Then the weather changed, and it has been above average rain for the past 7 years since the fire and covid. Now, in these wetter years, my old reliable varieties aren’t as reliable any more and have almost disappeared. The knobs so small that, there isn’t any use in replanting them. So I’m back to buying in seed garlic again.

This year I’ve planted; Dynamite, dungansky, early purple and Spanish roja, as well as Moulin Rouge.

We’ll know in September what the best adapted varieties are for this year. I guess that it all depends on the weather.

We have been shelling and roasting hazelnuts, then picking the first of our huge crop of avocados and Kiwifruits.

The planted out rows or garlic in the new bed. 260 cloves planted out. Not every one will grow to fruition. i try and grow enough garlic to last us all year, but it never quite works out that way.