Autumn veg

The new bit of vegetable garden, the bit that was the chook shed is doing remarkably well.  The Practical Reinventor planted some species thoughtfully (potatoes, garlic, broadbeans) then added an array of seeds.  Firstly because a variety of plants produces a variety of scents and that helps to confuse and repel insect predators, and secondly because she likes a riot of species growing together, something like what happens in nature.
In this picture you can see rocket, sunflowers, assorted lettuces, kale, and probably a few others.

For perspective.  We did not plant those tomatoes and pumpkins.  They most likely won't fruit, but you have to admire their spirit!
And that is a pizza oven in the background.  Rescued by an associate from a former pizza oven, and (mostly) installed on the plinth we built something ridiculous like seven years ago.  It cooks magnificently, but takes a good three hours to heat up enough to be effective.  So we don't use it terribly much.

Arranging and rearranging

This dresser (art deco, found in an op shop, painstaking stripped of multiple layers of ceiling white) has been our main piece of kitchen storage furniture since we moved in.  But it really doesn't hold a lot.

 

So it's been sold.  Which means it needs to be emptied and huffed and puffed out of the house.

 

This will form part of its replacement.  The other bit is much prettier!

This took too long

Whenever the back verandah of Marmalade Cottage was filled in to create more indoor space, the builder (who wasn't too sure on the concepts of level, plumb, or square) used what pretty much every house of its day used: louvres.

 

They let air and light in, but you can't see through them when closed and they're most definitely not secure.

So we finally got them removed.  All five banks of them.

And put in a real window.  Which is secure and provides much better vision and air-flow.  And cost $50 off Gumtree.  Hopefully someone will want the old louvres, otherwise, it's hard rubbish collection week and they'll go on the pile.

The reinventors are particularly pleased that they're now compliant with their house insurance...

Lighter

Oh the relief.

That's five large garbage bags of stuff that we don't use.  So it's gone.

Who needs KonMari?  We just got ruthless.

Goings and comings

Joan, one of our rescued battery hens, died the other week.

She wasn't looking well on Saturday afternoon, and by Sunday morning she'd fallen off the perch.

We buried her under the mulberry tree.  The stresses of their early lives often mean battery hens die younger.  In the 18 months she'd been a member of the Marmalade Cottage CWA, she learnt how to roost at night, how to scratch for worms and slaters, the joys of dust-bathing and how much she loves fresh greens.

When she arrived, her beak and wings had been clipped and she had lots of feathers missing.  Straight away she took to life in the CWA hall, challenging for the ambitious role of deputy boss chook and feathering up beautifully.

We miss her, she had spark.

Shirley has also left, but for happier reasons.  She's gone to a young family who needed a chook who understood how to be a proper chook to teach some rescue battery hens the ropes.

Meet Beatrice.  Her former owners are moving house and their new place is not chook-friendly.

Things are a bit tense in the CWA hall as the girls work out the new pecking order.  Beatrice - having a reputation for escaping - is under house arrest until things are a bit more settled.

At the front door

When the reinventors are at the back of the house, or in the back garden or listening to music, it's impossible to hear anyone at the front door.

There has been much discussion about some sort of device to alert the reinventors of the arrival of a guest.

This is where it needs to go.

Here's the creative reinventor hard at work.

When you come to visit, you can ring our bell!

Chook update

Shirley is still being terribly pleased with herself and talks constantly to the chicks. 

She's taught them about real food, and they've embraced the varied diet that the Marmalade Cottage CWA enjoys.

Watermelon is a particular favourite.

Up the garden path

When we moved in, the front garden wasn't so much garden as wasteland.  And now we can't find a photo of it, but imagine one dead and one dying hibiscus, a couple of neglected hydrangeas and a few straggling weeds.
Now it looks like this

Much nicer, yes?

The practical reinventor had her heart set on an all white garden, in contrast with the red brick and dark green of the ivy.  The hydrangeas, being blue, were doomed.  There was outrage among all our friends.  Even with a dose of glyphosate, they survived, so they're staying.

She's all grown up!

After the departure of Horace the Rooster last weekend, we started to wonder when our last remaining chick, Shirley, would start to lay.

She's about six months old, so it's time.

And then today, we found this:

The picture doesn't really show it, but it's really small and a bit blotchy.  It was also in an odd place.  Like a chook had been caught by surprise.

We do think it's her first egg.

We're rather proud.

Upgrade

After a year of mostly managing with the free-off-Gumtree stove, the reinventors decided it was high time we got a decent one.

For $1000 off its original price and with very good reviews, we have this:

A full 900mm of Belling range.  Getting it installed involved some quite intense conversations about what should go where in the kitchen.  Gas fitting regulations mean that each burner has to be at least 20cm from any ignition point.  In our case, it was the 100-year-old jarrah window sill. 

So we moved a bench and free-standing shelves to the other side of the kitchen, took some shelves off one wall and put them up on another wall, had some new power points installed, shifted the kitchen dresser and rethought the whole barista bench.

And had this put in:

It casts very interesting shadows.

In case you were wondering,

it bakes a magnificent banana cake.  We've yet to have a disaster.  Although there are a lot of other oven settings we've not yet explored...

Chook update

A first!  Florence and Shirley's first experience free ranging.

They picked it up very quickly.

The Joan and Joyce update

So, here they are, in a very Marmalade Cottage moment: scratching through coffee chaff from the where the creative reinventor spends much of his time for fruit and veg rescued from landfill.

Joan and Joyce are steadily growing back their feathers, they roost properly and they love a dust bath.

The Marmalade Cottage CWA

Alice, Nancy and Marion have been supplying us with an egg a day since they arrived in November.  But with all the space in their enclosure the reinventors decided to increase the CWA's membership.

The reinventors are delighted to welcome Joan and Joyce.  They're Hylines rescued from the local cage egg producer and they're in a bad way.

The Creative Reinventor managed to thoroughly piss off the lady at the egg farm by announcing he'd like to rescue two hens, rather than buy them.  We guess she didn't appreciate the implication of poor treatment.  Although how you'd deny it is beyond us.

As well as having had their beaks clipped, they're low on feathers and just don't know how to be chooks.

They don't cope well with the sun - which may not be a bad thing, as we don't want them getting sunburnt before their feathers grow back - and they've never scratched around in the dirt or had a dust bath.

Alice, the boss chook, has been busy reasserting her dominance.  But there are promising signs.  Joan, being slightly more adventurous than Joyce, has ventured out into the sun and had an experimental scratch.

Neither of them has worked out that the green stuff, about which the others are so enthusiastic, is food, so they're sticking to the laying pellets.

Bless them, they're both laying us an egg every couple of days.  And even if they didn't, they'll help take care of scraps and produce us fabulous manure for growing vegies. 

If  you'd like to rescue some deserving chooks and you're in Perth, drop us a line and we'll give you the details.

The ladies have arrived!

You might remember back here, we started to build a chook house.

Over the last couple of months, it's taken shape, based on the building materials we found, scrounged and nicked from building site rubbish piles.

With the addition of some hay, it was finally ready. 

We proud to introduce, on the left Nancy Bird Walton (a Chinese Silky) in the centre Alice Anderson and on the top right, Marion Bell, who are Australorps.

Bless them, they've given us these:

As well as giving us eggs, they'll eat most of the scraps we produce, and their poo will feed the soil.  It's very good, organic practice and everybody gets what they need from the system.

What happens in spring

Plants get all excited and grow!

Sweet corn.

A second plot of broad beans, with a few marigolds peeping out from the bean foliage.

The fig tree that's been in a pot for four years.  Immediately after it went into the ground it looked awfully sick and dropped the leaves and fruit it had.  Now look!  There are least seven little figs growing there. 

This is the second plot of butter beans.  There have been enough to give great handfuls to the neighbours and they're still coming.

Potatoes.  Add to that beetroot, peas, snow peas, tomatoes, lettuces, onions, spring onions and silverbeet.  Yet to go in are capsicums, rosella, more lettuces, green beans, pumpkins, cucumbers and whatever else we can fit in.  We are rather running out of space.

We hate painting, but...

You have to admit it makes the biggest difference.  And you're always glad when it's over.
The mudroom (we believe) was last painted in the 1940s.  It spent something like 50 years as the kitchen, and it doesn't appear the walls were ever washed.  Don't think about that too much.  The last owner was a smoker.  Don't think about that either.

Here's the creative reinventor making an enormous difference.

Thus inspired, he kept going.

Getting rid of the hospital green has always been a dream.

We've had a mistint tin of this lovely, buttery, sunshiney yellow for a while.
When the plumbers put in our inside toilet they had to dig up some of our (admittedly dodgy) concrete.  Mostly that bit of the back verandah has been home to firewood or packs of insulation.

Once we'd cleaned out all the rubbish and rubble, and painted the wall behind it, we put some plants in.

So now we have a little garden right at the back door.

Treading somewhat carefully

The loungeroom floor has always been a bit... unsteady.  To be fair, the house is just shy of its hundredth birthday and it's been badly neglected, so some settling and slipping is to be expected.  We bought Marmalade Cottage for land value only - there was no receipt for restumping.
Lovely friend G has access to all sorts of demolition material and, perhaps more importantly, some very impressive skills in carpentry and general make do and mend.
Bless him, he scrounged us some jarrah from an old fence, machined it into floorboards and arrived bearing tools and goodwill on Sunday morning.
Pretty soon there was some destruction.

And more destruction.

And it got worse.

The cat was fascinated.

And then it got scary.  That's dry rot.  There's only one way to deal with it - cut out the affected bit and replace it.

The creative reinventor had not expected to be digging out his loungeroom floor.

There was one trip to the Green and Orange Temple to Lost Weekends to buy some new timber to, erm, hold up our house.   There are also some pretty interesting chocked up bits using bits of brick and concrete and more timber.  But this approach very effectively stopped the house swinging and swaying. And then the boys made it look better again.

So we had lunch to celebrate, along with L, who came over to see Marmalade Cottage for the first time, not expecting to see it in bits.  But, she took it in her (very elegant) stride.

And then the job was done - and there was rejoicing.

Now the furniture is back in place, but the reinventors are still smiling at the new solidity underfoot.

Baked, boiled, fried or chips

Way back in the beginning, the creative reinventor fell in love with the practical one when she took him out to her garden to dig potatoes for dinner.  They'd known each other about three weeks.  With Marmalade Cottage, there was never any question there'd be potatoes as a key part of the kitchen garden.

They went in today.

We decided to plant ordinary white potatoes, usually called chats or gourmet potatoes and some pretty royal blues.  The first layer of organic matter on the soil is coffee chaff, a waste product of coffee roasting, to which the creative reinventor has unlimited access.

With a layer of compost, we'll leave the potatoes to wake up and sprout leaves.  Once they've established themselves, we'll add another layer of compost and some straw, forcing the plants to grow up through that layer, and hopefully leaving behind another layer of new potatoes.  We'll keep layering three or four times before we harvest.

There will be chooks!

This is what Enid Blyton would call the bottom of the garden.  Only, in this garden we're fairly certain there are no fairies.  You can see the creative reinventor starting to build a poultry palace.

It'll be a little while yet.