We have just completed the 2nd of our sericite porcelain workshops. They both went well and everyone seemed to get something out of it.
We advertised it as intermediate to advanced level, and everyone was suitably skilled to be able to handle the slightly more complex and difficult advanced techniques.
We were aiming to teach those advanced techniques, and everyone was keen to extend their skills.
The weather has cooled down a lot recently, so we had to light the stove to get the air a bit warmer in the studio over night to speed up the drying process. At the end of the first days throwing. I lit the fire and kept it going until after 10pm with the ceiling fan running all night. With this combination of warm air and moving air , we managed to get nearly all the pots dry enough to start turning on Sunday morning.
As my contribution to our shared lunchtime meals. I cooked a couple of tarts to be shared for our lunches.
I made one savory home grown spinach and cheese tart from our garden with 3 cheeses. Ricotta, for the main filling with finely diced fetta for a little bit of texture, then some gorgonzola for a little of that tangy flavour that it imparts.
The other tart was sweet for after lunch, and made from our home grown and preserved quinces in an almond frangipane base.
Both made in blind baked puff pastry casings. They dissapeared pretty quickly. It’s a very good feeling to be able to share our preserved summer garden goodness and excess with others.
During the week inbetween the workshops, I continued to make and fire my sgraffito porcelain pieces that I have been working on for a while.
It’s good to see more of them coming out of the kiln now, all shiny and transparent with the images of the bowerbirds stealing our cherries from the Chekov orchard.
I will be taking part in the ‘Pop-Up’ Southern Highlands Arts Trail Open Studios sale on the long weekend of 8th, 9th and 10th of June. Save the date!.
We have completed the 2nd wheel throwing weekend workshop here in the new pottery.
We are recently returned from the Easter long weekend at the National Folk Festival in Canberra. Beautiful music, and a chance to catch up with old friends that we haven’t seem since last years festival.
Now it’s back to work in the pottery finishing off some sgraffito pots that I left unfinished in the pottery damp cupboard. It’s a great luxury to have a damp cupboard in the pottery. We managed to get by without one for the past 48 years here in Balmoral Village in all 3 of our previous potteries, where we lived and worked on earth floors. I am very grateful to my friend John Edye, who sold me his beautifully crafted wooden damp cupboard with a water bath in the floor. It looks good and works a treat. Thank you John.
I’m enjoying the sgraffito decorating technique that I learnt from my friend Warren Hogden a few months ago, when Warren and Janine taught a sgraffito slip decorating workshop here. I was the TA, assisting at that workshop. But I was really engaged and enthused, so have tried my hand at this lovely, gentle technique, and I’m really enjoying it.
Thank you Warren and Janine.
I’ve been engaged with the idea of the bower birds stealing cherries from the orchard.
We have just completed another weekend workshop. This time a throwing class. I advertised one and filled two weekends, so we will back in the studio again with the 2nd group next weekend for the 2nd one.
Everyone seemed to enjoy them selves and got something out of it. We had Len Smith here with us for the weekend to have 3 tutors for the 8 students. Len has so much teaching experience, it’s great for the students to have a third point of view. He’s also great company.
I spent the week pugging clay and prepping the throwing room, and during the time in-between, I kept on with my sgraffito decoration, and got a solar powered, stoneware glaze firing done.
These red and black cups are experiments in a combination of Sgraffito and inlay.
Just black slip inlay on these cups.
Just sgraffito on this bowl
In the evenings, I made another batch of tomato passata. I have now run out of our re-cycled ‘pop top’ jars and so I have started to use the old ‘Fowler’s’ vacuum jars with clip top lids. I made a 7 litre boiler full, and reduced it down to 5 litres, enough to fill 7 of our No.27 Fowler’s jars. I have no idea how Fowlers came up with their numbering system, but as they are so old, I suspect that it represents fluid ounces?
I Googled it and 27 imperial fluid ounces = 770 mls. So that sounds like it ought to be right.
I also made this weeks loaf of rye bread.
For the workshop lunch, I made a flan or tart with a baked cottage cheese base and a ratatouille topping. That didn’t last very long.
The coming week will be more of the same as we repeat it all over again.
The workshop is all cleaned and mopped and ready to go.
The workshop looks beautiful tonight in the glow of the pink sunset.
It’s the end of summer, and all of the fruit is finished in the orchards, this month we have been busy with other jobs.
I have been going to build a new chicken run and chook house for a long time. The old one was very small, built in just one day straight after the fire by our good friends Cintia and Andy who came to volunteer their help at what ever was most needed. The old, very solid, and palatial chicken house was attached to the garden shed, which was part of the pottery extension. In the fire everything burnt to the ground.
Andy and Cintia knocked up the replacement house out of whatever we could find on site that wasn’t burnt. At 1.8 metres square, it wasn’t really very big, but was OK for just 2 surviving chooks.
This weeks new chicken mansion is built into the gap between the new orchard and the old mud brick garden shed. It has access through a small gate into the covered orchard, where the chickens can explore and scratch all day in safety, without being swooped on, or chased by local dogs or foxes.
Janine suggested to paint it pink, so I thought to name it ‘Gallus Hilton’. Then she thought it might be better pale mauve, So it might get called ‘The Gallus Palace’.
What ever we call it, the new chook shed and run is the best one of the 4 that I have built here over the 48 years here. It’s still rusty recycled iron colour. I re-used the old corrugated roofing iron that we took off the Old School roof when Andy helped me to re-roof it last year. 130 year old roofing iron still has a lot of life left in it yet, as well as so much embedded history on this site.
It did occur to me that it is a bit strange that a man over 60 might need 4 different ladders to build a simple chook shed
This new run is 6m x 4m. So plenty big enough to be comfortable if we are away and they are locked in. It is completely fabricated out of steel, so shouldn’t burn in the next fire.
When its too hot outside in the middle of the day or raining, then I divide my time between the kitchen preserving excess garden produce, or over in the pottery.
The sweet basil crop in peaking just now in the garden, so its time to make pesto.
In the pottery, I’ve been extending my sgraffito on sericite work to include the negative/positive slip inlay. I tried mixing the two techniques and introducing some underglaze colour as well. I don’t know how these will turn out, as I’m packing the glaze kiln tomorrow.
I’ve found that the sorts of sgraffito tools for sale here are somewhat limited, so I have been forging and hammering my own from rusty nails. They are rather nice, somewhat rustic and I can make them any size.
Janine has been using our current excess of passion fruit to make passion fruit and cream flummery. It’s quite easy to make, just passion fruit and cream whipped up together and then frozen. Janine takes it out of the freezer every so often and re-whips it to keep it light and fluffy while it freezes.
It goes quite well with our excess of blueberries as a desert.
Janine and I have been kept very busy dealing with all the summer produce from the garden and orchards. Nothing new there. We’ve been doing it for almost 50 years. But this last few years/summers, have been hot and wet, so everything has grown it’s head off. It’s a lot to keep up with. Especially as we age and find it harder to drum up the energy. The intention and enthusiasm is still strong, so we need to find ways of working smarter.
I cooked up a few early hard pears from the orchard in some red wine with a spoon full of sugar and a fragment of cinnamon bark, then laid them into an almond flan. Pretty yummy for morning tea. This is one of the best reason why we garden! So that we can eat amazing, wholesome, natural, un-sprayed fruit flans.
We had the organic gardening group here last weekend to help is with several gardening jobs around the property.
I spent a few hours picking citrus stink bugs off the citrus trees with the assistance of our friend Helen from the group We half filled a bucket with the little buggers.
A bucket half full of stink bugs in a solution of detergent and bleach.
There are 16 trees in the citrus grove, so it took a while. I also pruned off a lot of the taller branches from the bigger trees, to keep them within standing reach. I’m too old to climb ladders now – unless I really need to.
I picked all the prunes of the d’Agen tree and filled a 1/3 of a bucket. I cut them in half and semi-dried them in the oven. It took a couple of sessions. I made a cottage cheese and prune tart with some of them and bottled the rest in brandy for a similar use later in the year.
While climbing through the spiky branches of some of the citrus trees, looking for bugs and sniping off tall shoots. I managed to tear my ancient gardening straw hat and hanky combo to shreds. This hat and even older hanky (which was bright fire-engine red in its youth) was my ‘legionnaires’ head and neck shade when working outside The straw hat was 2nd hand about 7 yeas ago, so has earned its keep. I decided that it was past repair now, having seen so many summers of use, and it was 2nd hand to begin with, so I composted it!
I splurged and bought a brand new ‘ear-muffler-compatible’ work hat and added another one of my very old hankies as a neck shade. I recycled our son Geordie’s old nappy safety pins off the old hat. Re-purpose, re-use, and re-cycle. In fact, something old, something new, something repurposed, something blue. A true marriage of convenience. Those nappy pins have served us well, as our son is 40 years old now! If I keep them long enough, they can work just as hard on their last job, keeping my incontinence nappies in place in another 10 or 15 years when I become senile?
Our visiting organic gardener friends did some weeding and pruning in the veggie garden, and a few of them harvested all the fallen hazelnuts from under the trees so that we can get in there and mow the long grass. They also pruned off all the vigorous extraneous shoots from their bases. Hazels want to become dense hedges. It’s their nature. Up until the fire in 2019, we had cut them all back to just one main leading shoot and stem or trunk. But after the fire, they were burnt to ground level, so had to regrow from scratch. We were too busy rebuilding to worry about pruning the hazels. I was just glad to see them regrow. When I get the time??? – if ever, I’ll get stuck in there and cut them back to just one leader.
The petrol powered, ride-on mower, has broken two drive belts in two weeks. These modern belts seem to last only 8 to 9 years these days. It took several days to get them ordered in and fitted on each occasion, so the grass had grown very high and lush in its absence.
We have just completed a further step in our drive to go completely solar electric. I bought an electric ride-on mower. I have only had it for one day so far, and it did some pretty heavy mowing through dense grass. I got 1 hr, 20 mins of mowing out of the battery, ( that’s enough on a hot day) and almost completed all the ‘tame’ flat lawn around the house. I’ll report back in a month or so and give a follow-up on its performance. We now have a solar electric ride-on, push mower, strimmer, and chainsaw.
I haven’t given any up-date on our plug-in electric hybrid car recently. Nothing to report. It has just had its 5th year service, and has exceeded our expectations. It works perfectly. It does everything that we need and ask of it. We occasionally have to put some petrol in the fuel tank. About $20 to $30 every quarter, as it is a plug-in hybrid. But for the most part, we drive 90/95% of the time on our own solar roof top electricity. It was a perfect choice for us. I’m so glad that we did it when we did. This model is no longer available. They are all fully electric now and cost twice as much! Our early adoption of solar electric driving has proved to be a good decision.
We have been having 30oC days recently, so in the heat of the day, when it is too hot to be outside in the garden. I spend a few hours in the pottery, continuing with the sgraffito work that we started, inspired by Warren Hogden a couple of months ago. All the early work on tiles and square plates made at Warren and Janine’s weekend workshop, were all fired at cone 6, 1200 oC.
All the work that I have been making since then is all sericite porcelain, so I’m hoping that there will be a nice graphic interface with the light shining through the translucent porcelain body from the inside, creating a lovely glow, and vice versa.
I’m really enjoying it. It’s a lot of fun, and such a change for me.
December brings on the summer and the stone fruit harvest. We have all of the newly planted, now 4 years old. stone fruit trees in the new post fire orchard coming into fruit. We chose to plant all dwarf rootstock, low chill, hot weather tolerant, varieties. They are doing really well and everyone of them has fruit on them this year. Some of them set fruit from year one, but as this isn’t good for the health of the tree, I picked all the fruit off, bar one piece, just get a taste of what was to come. Fruit trees do better if they are left to grow on for a few years and put all their energies into developing a sound, strong branch structure and deep root system. As their first 3 years were all very wet here with the la nina event coinciding with their planting, They grew very well indeed and we hardly had to water them very often.
So now we have a surfeit of peaches and nectarines, on these pretty little bundles of red and green. All the fruit needs to be eaten now or very soon, so we have fruit salad for breakfast.
BBQ’d peaches and or nectarines with dinner, and stewed fruit for desert. There is always a pressing problem with the fruit fly. I was a bit slow in getting all the fruit fly trap and lures re-charged with refreshed baits this year, so there is a bit of fly in the fruit. We cut this out and cook it up to kill the wrigglers. The rest of the otherwise undamaged fruit is stewed for breakfast or desert.
This old fly trap has about 100 dead male fruit flies in the bottom from the early spring flourishing. I empty them out and replace the old bleached white bait with a new bright pink one. We have about 14 of these traps of various ages. I bought a few new ones each year, as the orchard grew. now I just buy refills for the bait.
You can tell their ages by the bleached out colour of their lids.
We picked the very last of the broad beans. I thought that I had picked them all last week, but I only had a boy-look. Janine went back through the crop and found another meal for us. I decided to cook that very old favourite of pork and beans. So called favourite of the cowboys on the trail in the old west. I first became aware of this combination watching old black and white western cow boy movies as a kid. I had no idea what it all meant, but it did cross my mind briefly – very briefly. Why were they eating pig when they were herding cattle?
Why weren’t they herding pigs if that is what they wanted to eat? Fortunately, my nascent and emerging tiny brain managed to accept and cope with this difficult dilemma, and moved on.
Now fast forward to my early interest in cooking and coming across the wonderful Italian recipe of chorizo, beans and tomatoes, obviously with extra chilli and garlic, it goes without saying. It’s become one of our springtime/hungry gap favourites. The beans are usually all dried from last summer, as is the bottle of reduced tomato sugo or passata. As we don’t have our own pig, just chickens. I use what we have in the fridge. At this time, we only have some bacon, so that is what I use. With the shops being a good 50 km round trip away, we don’t drive there frivolously. So bacon it is.
Home grown beans, home grown sweet basil, home grown garlic and home made passata from home grown tomatoes. WARNING! A pig was harmed in the making of this meal.
Desert is fresh picked cling stone yellow fleshed peaches soused with a dash of amoretto half an hour before. Perfection!
These days I’m up in the early mornings from 5.30 and work outside until the sun gets too hot, possibly around 9.00am. Sometimes I am out in the garden working, or more recently. I have been updating our fire fighting capacity with extra sprinklers on the walls of the pottery, barn and big work shed. I have installed the ‘spare’ fire fighting pump that I used to transfer water from dam to dam.
It is now more or less permanently in place to protect the pottery and barn with a high pressure water sprinkler system. This system used to be powered by an electric pump, I found out at my expense that electric pumps are useless in an emergency, even though I have solar power and a battery, when the fire came and burnt the pottery, it shorted out the power to the barn and only then did it catch fire.
So now everything is dual powered. We have electric pumps for hand watering the garden beds and running the roof cooling sprinkler on top of the roof. But for fighting is completely petrol driven and independent. Because you cant let petrol engines sit idle. They need to be started and run regularly. I have every thing in a dual system now, so that I can start up the fire pump when we are both want to water the garden and orchard trees at the same time. The fire pump handle that duel drain on its reserves of power with no problem, whereas the one horsepower electric pump struggles.
Inspired by all the talk of the Roselle spaghetti junction new motorway tunnel. I installed my own water fed spaghetti junction.
Situated directly behind, and close coupled to, the two 25,000 litre water tanks, it should be safe from fire there? Only time will tell. If you look hard at the image of the pottery shed, you will see the water misting out of the wall sprinklers along the verandah and up on the roof.
I’ve been spending the hottest part of the day inside working on the ongoing sgraffito project. I’ve finally run out of pre-slipped, press moulded dished and tiles. I’ll have to get on the wheel again soon and make more shapes to decorate.
We have been going through a very dry time recently, with the onset of the summer heat and reports confirming that we are entering another el-nino period.
All a bit glum really, but then the rains finally came. We had about 150mm. that’s about 6 inches in the old money. I had recently spent a few days pumping water from one almost empty dam up to another, slowly accumulating what was left of our water in the 4 dams, all eventually up to the one small dam near the house, where we have both a high pressure, petrol driven, fire fighting pump, and a small electric pump that is mostly used for watering the garden.
I managed to get that little dam about 1/4 to 1/3rd full. not a bad effort. That would have been just enough to see us through the first half of summer.
Before the rains.
After the rain.
But now, since the down pour, we have 4 dams all about 3/4 full. The little house dam that started from 1/3rd full, over flowed down into the next dam in the series. A lot of that water I pushed up hill 2 weeks ago flowed back. A waste of a couple of gallons of petrol. I still buy petrol for the pumps, the chain saws, the mowers and diesel for the tractor. So we are not fully weaned off the dirty oil economy. I worked out recently that I spend a little bit more money on the fuel for the mowers and chain saws, than I do putting petrol in our Plug-in hybrid car, simply because we make sure that we keep the car fully charged off our solar panels, so we rarely ever need to put petrol in it. About $30 every 3 months, where as I spend about $100 twice a year filling up the fuel drums for the garden appliances.
We have recently bought a solar charged electric push mower, plus a whipper-snipper thingy, and a solar charged electric chain saw. So I expect that my visits to the petrol station will decrease accordingly. I still need diesel for the tractor and petrol for the ride on mower.
Since the weekend workshops of the last two weekends, Janine and I have spent a good part of each day during the week in the pottery consolidating our sgraffito skills and developing a few new designs, to include in our next batch of work. I would have liked to spend more time in the pottery, being creative and self absorbed. Once you start to draw and decorate the surface, the time just flashes past and it gets late so early. We have to stop to do the watering. There will be more time tomorrow to get a bit more done. There is always enough time for everything. We just have to learn to allocate out time and and as we age to allocate our limited energy.
There is so much to do around the garden and orchards. We have had to start watering by hand again since the rains stopped and the temperature has been going up – just touching on 40 degrees today. Even hotter in the west. Hand watering all the gardens and orchard trees. It takes us both over an hour to do a quick once-over, just to keep everything alive. It takes a lot longer to give specific beds a really good soak while we are at it.
We could probably buy vegetables much cheaper from one of the rip-off, price gouging supermarkets. But they wouldn’t so clean, fresh, healthy, organic and immediately delivered straight from the garden and onto the plate. There is something so very, even intensely, powerful in growing your own food. Not just the self reliance of it, but the intimate nature of the activity. It grounds me here in this place. I’m intimately here and now on this ground. This has become my little all-encompassing environment. My statement of belonging. I’ve sculptured this place into being as what is is now. It’s peaceful, abundant, pretty, and very functional as a home art space and garden.
We are just coming to the end of ‘the hungry gap’. That time of the year when most of the winter food in the garden is coming to an end, but the new spring planted summer crops haven’t started producing yet. We have been eating the last of our carrots, beetroots and cabbages, and have just picked the last of the broad beans along with the first of the new season zucchinis. Tomatoes have set on the bushes, but are still very green. It is always a challenge to get one ripe red tomato before Xmas.
maybe not this year, due to our being away and not getting that head start early on at the end of winter, or the first weeks of spring.
One very nice treat for this time of the year is the summer fruit crop. We are harvesting strawberries, blue berries, peaches, nectarines and plums. That equals fruit salad for breakfast for the next month.
I love the summer garden, but I don’t like the 40 degree days, or the potential for bush fires that are always in the realm of possibility when the wind picks up from the west.
The shelves have been re-stocked. The Pan Forte cake is mixed and is ready to bake. The coffee is freshly ground.
We are ready for the 2nd Open Studio Sale Weekend starting tomorrow. What could possibly go wrong? Hopefully nothing, as we had 22mm of rain yesterday which has freshened up the garden and topped up the water tanks.
Today started with a heavy mist from yesterdays rain. Regrettably, the rain wasn’t strong enough to flood the gutters and pour down the dirt road and flow into our dam. Most of it soaked in, but that is also very good for the garden and all our fruit trees, some of which had started to drop fruit in the prolonged dry spell. The lawn had turned brown and started to ’crunch’ underfoot it was so dry. However, it is amazing what a little rain will do. What was left of the burnt off grass has turned to a flush of green again over night. One blessing is that as it is only millimetres high, it doesn’t need mowing. There is always a bright side. The welcome rain has watered the english cottage garden flowers along the front of the pottery, so everything is looking bright and perky.
All the shelves are full and the gallery is looking good.
Call in and see us over the weekend if you are in the area. Stop for some cake and coffee if you have time, we’d love to catch up.
The veggie garden has been woefully neglected recently. It still feeds us well from our previous plantings, but because we were away for a lot of August and September. It was pointless planting any seeds in such dry weather, and then not being here to water and nurture them. So we missed out on our spring planting this year. I would normally have started seeds off in mid to late August, and then planted out in late September while keeping an eye on the frosts and possibly using our portable home made closh system of wire and shrink-wrap frames. However, as we have been so busy since our return, I have only just found time to work in the garden again. i found time in-between pumping water uphill to weed out and replant a few beds.
I have had to resort to buying seedlings in punnets this year, so as to get some advanced tomatoes in the ground, along with zucchini, egg plants and lettuce. I also planted out seeds of the same for a follow up planting in December. It will be a smaller vegetable garden this summer. But you can’t do everything.
Buying punnets is a bit of a come-down, but I’m only human and needs as needs must. My own home grown seedlings are on their way.
Nothing is ever finished, nothing is perfect, and nothing lasts. Enjoy the moment.
Today we finished off the last truffle of the season. It was romantic, mysterious, fragrant, exotic and delectable. It really elevates the humble scrambled egg into something special without taking anything away, just adding loads of romance and aroma. The warmth of the freshly cooked eggs releases so many aromatic oils and esters from the tiny black fungus. It fills my nostrils as I bend over doing the shaving. It’s a good thing that we only get to eat these delicious little morsels in the winter months, otherwise we may become somewhat blasé about it all. As it is, they are still a very special seasonal treat, If somewhat expensive. We can only afford to live this decadent gourmet lifestyle on our frugal budget because we have a son in the industry.
We are also probably making our last batch of marmalade too, as we have picked most of the Seville oranges now and eaten nearly all of the other citrus fruit. Although this is the beginning of spring, it is also the end of winter in another way, so it’s the end of the winter crops like citrus. We try and live with the seasons, so that’s it for the big citrus splurge in our diet.
It is one of the blessings of living in the Southern Highlands, that we have 4 distinct seasons. For instance, this morning we had another frost. This might possibly be our last really cold morning, but you never know with the climate emergency developing as it is, anything could happen.
I peel off the thin yellow layer of the skin without taking too much of the pith. I want the pith off! With my pile of curly peels, I end up with what can only be called ‘bitter and twisted’ .
Janine removes the pith and cuts up the juicy centre to add to the pan. The first pan is on for 30 mins. before we get the 2nd pan on the stove and the difference in colour is dramatic, it gets richer and deeper as it cooks. We try to use as little sugar as possible, while not making it too bitter and acidic, we also need enough sugar to make it ’set’. It takes about an hour of steady simmer to get it to thicken sufficiently. It’s worth all the effort, it tastes delicious, with just the right consistency. Seville oranges aren’t all that nice on their own. They are OK, but they really come into their own when it comes to making marmalade.
The stone fruit orchard is growing up well. This is its 3rd year and the trees are starting to look a lot more settled and established, with thicker trunks. I have been pruning them into open vase shapes where possible, but some of them have a very narrow vertical habit. They are all grafted onto ‘dwarf’ rootstocks, so they are keeping to a compact size. Most of them are now about 1.5 to 1.8 metres high, with an expected total height of 2.5 metres eventually. But I am well aware that plants can’t read their own labels! So there are bound to be variations.
We had a really great 1st Weekend workshop in the new pottery. It worked very well. The new studio is a great space to teach in. The light is good and the layout works ergonomically for 10 people, 8 students and 2 teachers. After everyone left I got stuck in and started making more pots for myself. The Open Studios, Arts Trail is coming up at the end of the year, so I need to get back to work making pots for that. I started back at it by making 30 straight sided mugs.
I spent a few days since the recent weekend workshop, in the afternoons, in my spare time, splitting and dressing sandstone blocks, to make some garden bed edging along the recently finished slate capping on the big sandstone retaining wall around the new pottery. It’s just another one of those jobs that has been in the offing and waiting for the ‘right’ time. I chose this ‘right’ time from what is left of my other time! Once the little wall was in place I shoveled in a load of top soil and planted seeds and a few seedlings to make the edging look a bit more settled and finished. I sprinkled in a packet of English Cottage Garden seed mix for good measure and 30 caper seeds, one every 600mm. Capers need an elevated, well drained, sun baked, dry, harsh environment to thrive. They take 2 years to establish, then persist for many more as long as they are cut back and pruned hard in the winter to stimulate good growth in the spring and summer, as flowers and fruit are produced on the new years growth. The elevated and exposed wall seemed like a pretty good place to try them out. I have read in a few books that they thrive on top of stone walls in the Med’s dry summers. I have no expectations, but if something comes of it, I’ll be pleased. If not, then I’ll chalk it down to another one of life’s enriching experiences. The stones look nice anyway, regardless of whether the plants grow or not!
After the soil was shoveled into the new beds, Edna the chicken, who had been helping me all day, came along and decided to help me some more by scratching a lot of it out again. I had to make some impromptu wire covers to protect the small seedlings from being excavated!
I’m happy with the result. 3 days work and $50 bucks goes a long way. I’m hoping that it will look greener in time for the November Arts Trail, Open Studios event.
Tonight my Fingers Smell of Garlic 
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