Action packed long weekend

So the mulberry thinks its spring. This black fruited white mulberry was always a little earlier than the white fruited white mulberry near our back fence. Sometimes it suffers the consequences and gets caught by a late frost - which is predicted for this week. 

 The Asparagus are also showing signs of life especially the ones i have been growing in pots. My neighbour plants which get a bit more sun than mine are up and she is picking. However i'm in no rush to get Asparagus as there is plenty of Broccoli to be had as well as cabbages, sno peas and fennel. We picked some great bulbs of our 2 year old fennel plants from out at the garden plot on the weekend. If you let them grow , the following year that will produce bulbs on the end of long stems.

 Another surprising thing about the fennel was that when i dug over the bed next to them fo rthe tomatoes - there were lots of roots up to 1m away from the fennel plants. I 'd never had thought they would travel so far, even in good soil like that. I planted the tomatoes (grosse lisse) just out of reach of these roots just incase there was an effect from the fennel roots releasing nasty anti nutrients.

At the garden plot there was more work to be done than i had thought. We turned over the compost heap for the last time,

 planted tomatoes, potatoes, french beans, zucchinis, snake beans. I also mulched  the carrots with native Enneapogon grass which is everywhere after the rain this year. I find it very hard to bring myself to buy Hay for mulch when it has travelled so far and when we have perfectly good natural suplies of it growing all around us. I am a scavenger at heart which helps.

camping on Emily creek overnight was great fun and the kids just ran off and made their own fun. We just had to fend off the toottery babies walking around the campfire - and luckily this was successful. The treed were full of budgies and they seemed quite unperterbed by the fact that we had camped there. They still used the same roost trees  above our tent. The morning chorus was quite lovely to listen to as we lied in the swags. A small walk through the bush near the river revealed stacks of Litte Button quails, blasting off from unexpected points on the ground and making me jump. The other exciting find was that Brown quails are back after an abscence of about 7 years. They appeared in Central Australia after the big rains in 2000 and 2001 but then disappeared. The fact that they are back again means we have had a pretty good season

planted thai long green eggplants that i received from Mareeba seedsavers. I had been wanting to try these for a while as i think that they are much more heat resistant than the large purple eggplants that we have grown in the past. The large purple one tend to produce great buckets in the Autumn afte rthe hottest weather is over - that is if they are not eaten by grasshoppers. Eggplants are a very favourite of theirs!