Every house should have one!

In a spontaneous act of... spontenaity, the reinventors picked up a pizza and a bottle of plonk and went to see an outdoor movie.

Paddington.

It's so terribly English, with rather lovely quirks and some pretty amusing CGI.  Nicole Kidman is completely wooden as the baddie, but you can ignore her.

Best of all, it features marmalade, and in a big way.

Every house should have a marmalade day every year.  Perhaps even more than one.

Under the sun

Summer in Perth is nasty.  Marmalade Cottage bakes and the reinventors are pretty pleased if they manage to have 75 per cent of the garden survive the season.  They apply wetting agent and spread mulch liberally.  There is no reticulation so they spend lots of time holding a hose.

Last year, the Creative Reinventor's mum found a shade house at a garage sale and for the second year it's been installed over the main vegie garden.

This is what grows in the shade.

Butter beans

Zucchini

Figs

The silverbeet still goes to seed, but that means next year's crop is already planted.

Absolutely no idea what these might be.


















As well as the aforementioned wetting agent and mulch, we mucked out the chook pen and dug that in, then scattered about a dozen or so packets of expired seeds.

Exciting, isn't it? 

Visitors.

Yesterday it was hot.  Nasty on the concrete, and baking even in the shade.  These guys turned up.  The practical reinventor, about to go out, found them on the path between Marmalade Cottage and Daphne's place.

They're domestic ducks and only just starting to lose their fuzz for proper feathers.

We've no idea - really no idea - whose they might be.  Given their age, we suspect they were Christmas presents, which might explain them wandering loose on the street, as they're approaching adulthood and are a bit less cute than they were.

 They still squeak.

We put some big tubs of water in the front garden, where there's shade and hidey holes under the hydrangeas, and expected them to disappear.

They quite happily tucked into some chook food and snoofled about in the mud when we watered.

There's an ad on Gumtree and postings on several local facebook pages, but not a peep.

The Creative Reinventor would dearly love to keep them, but accedes that with two dogs, a cat and seven chooks, Marmalade Cottage is at capacity.

If no-one claims them in the next day or so, they'll go up the hill to lovely friend J's house where there are three ducks already.

A very Marmalade Cottage Christmas

Random photos from Christmas 2014 at Marmalade Cottage.

The Creative Reinventor's youngest sporting a fleece hat (wholly inappropriate for Christmas in Perth, but cute nonetheless).

Christmas breakfast - buttermilk pancakes, smoked salmon, sour cream and excellent coffee.

Jodie the neurotic kelpie snoozing in the sewing room as the Practical Reinventor hurriedly finished sewing gifts.

Last minute decision to sew a new top with fabric that was off grain and rolled in a most difficult fashion.  

The only iPad case like it anywhere!  A present for the Creative Reinventor.