Bubbles?

The local Bad Dog Brewery has been packaging a snakebite, which is a 60/40 mix of their 642 session ale and homemade cider. They have a temporary shortage while they brew another batch, so we decided to throw a gallon of apple juice into a jug and brew some alcohol into it.

Memories of my misdirected youth spent helping my mum brew crab apple wine, well, brew almost every type of wine known to man or woman.

Hopefully this little four dollar experiment will come to fruition, one thing is for sure, we do have bubbles...

Day 77 or thereaboots....

Yesterday, a trip up to Sooke Soils before the rain started and we watched them load three cubic yards of mason rock into their truck. The owner thought it was quite funny that we had specifications for our rocks, they should be around 14" so quite moveable by hand or dolly, and they needed to be "nice" and aesthetic for our second phase (the right hand side) of the front garden.

We raced the truck home, temporarily dug up a couple of plants so the truck could back over the bed and voila, the new rocks were dumped on the grass, ready to be moved to their new locations over the summer.

The planning begins.....

Day 32 report on yesterdays garden action

Tomorrow we hope that five cubic yards of alder mulch will be delivered, so we are taking time this week to weed old zones and prepare new ones to be covered.

This is at the back of the garden, we've turned over a lot of the grass and added a cubic yard of our composted soil from last years efforts. This area will become a new blank canvas for some lovely plants and shrubs that have been biding their time in our nursery area (the raised bed at the back) and while we were at it, Karen spotted a notorious Scotch Broom behind our fir tree. Karen climbed up there and made short work of it.

At the end of the session, we sat for five minutes with our feet up before going inside to put our feet up.

Cabbage Soup

Once a week we make either a pea and ham or a cabbage soup.

This is the cabbage soup, which has a lot more than just cabbage in it.

Cabbage
Celery
Potato, Carrot, Onion (dried bulk mix)
Quinoa Soup Mix
Mexican Rice
Herbs, garlic
Salami
Chopped cooked salted pork
Beef Boullion and Oxo
Hot sauce
Tomatoes

Basically anything that may be in danger of being in the fridge too long, our basic principle is that we do not waste anything in this house.

Monday, day number.....

The overall goal in the garden is to remove the grass, and a year ago we placed a tarp over an area, which is now basically devoid of grass, so at the weekend, I moved the tarp.

The new zone, for the next 18 months or so, has been created over another patch of grass, next to the euonymous hedge that Karen just planted. If we're going to look at it for a year or so we decided to make it a feature.

The weekly shopping adventure, Monday morning, we picked up some annuals from the supermarket, and Karen potted some of them, and here is the "rockery" before they bloom.

Cheeseless until Tuesday

Here's one for Pat, who is trapped at home and will be cheeseless until Tuesday.

I wandered lonely, in search of cheese
That floats on high on Aldi's shelves
When all at once, I saw mushy peas
Besides the carrots, beneath the beans
All alone, I'm going crackers
Crackers, hhhmmm, now where's that cheese?

27 : Pancake Saturday

It is always our responsibility to keep our eyes on best before dates on things in the fridge, and this morning, milk and eggs were highlighted, so it was either scrambled eggs, or another family fave, pancakes.

Pancakes won.

Karen loves her pancakes with sugar and lemon juice, I'm more of a maple syrup and preserves fan, so we stuffed ourselves with three of each.