Eponymous

This needs no explanation.

Thanks Ali for the limes and Fi for the grapefruit.  Along with a similar pot of lemonade fruit, there are an extra 20 jars of marmalade on the shelves in the mud room of Marmalade Cottage.

A little tart

Marmalade Cottage doesn't have its own cumquat tree, but lots of friends do. 

The reinventors' favourite way with cumquats is simmered in a sugar syrup until soft, then bottled with a generous slosh of booze.  In this case marsala.  They'll be superb in a couple of months.

Dough

The reinventors haven't bought a loaf of bread for a few years now.  We've been experimented with a fairly standard dough recipe.  The latest success is expresso choc chip raisin bread.
Messy but delicious!

Sap rising

Spring at Marmalade Cottage is rather gorgeous, if you can look past the lush growth of weeds.

Waaaaay back at the beginning, the Creative Reinventor told the Practical one he loved the fragrance of jonquils.  So, in the 10 gardens they've had together, she's planted him a jonquil patch.  This is one of the few to be appreciated for a second year.

The white Californian Poppies have seeded for their third season.

The roses are in no doubt it's spring.

Paws for thought

Sometimes there's a tennis ball that needs chasing, and you just have to run through the freshly cut grass.

Defeating the chooks

Even though the chooks won't eat garlic, they have absolutely no respect for the reinventors' efforts at growing food and will scratch it out of the ground.

Laying fine chicken wire across the ground before the plants erupt from the soil is one way to protect them.

Finally, it's winter

Winter in Perth is a bit of a joke - usually it's sunny and 22 degrees during the day, and we almost never get a frost.
With climate creep, the roses refuse to stop blooming and the hydrangeas refuse to lose their leaves even when the new ones are budding up the stems.
So the practical reinventor took matters into her own hands.
A severe prune for the hydrangeas and the roses.

With these saved to adorn a mantlepiece.

Soon there will be the creative reinventor's favourite jonquils along with a variety of ranunculus, anenome and daffodungles.

Baking delights!

Sourdough bread is one of those holy grails of self-sufficiency - grow your own yeast, rather than having to buy it.  It's notoriously difficult to get a good one.  But!  If you happen to have a friend who has a good one (in this case, passed on from someone met on holiday) who's willing to share, it's a sure thing.

So, here is Marmalade Cottage's first ever sourdough loaf on its first prove.

Second prove.

And baked.

And the proof will be in tomorrow's breakfast...

All is calm

With Bernard's, erm, demise, the hens are getting back into a rhythm.

The reinventors, and although they've been too polite to say, we suspect the neighbours too, are quite pleased not to be rudely awakened before dawn.

Alice's feathers have grown back nicely, and Enid is much less skittish.

Great survivor

It was touch and go for all of summer, but the little lemon tree has survived, and with judicial application of the creative reinventor's wee, is now thriving.

We're working our way through the lemons - the skin is too thin for preserving in salt, but they're very juicy.

Digression

The practical reinventor is a bit jealous of all her sewing friends who have sewing blogs, but given the irregularity of posts here, isn't going to start one. So here's a random sewing post.

  

This is a Lekala pattern, so while it's been drafted according to the practical reinventor's dimensions, its instructions are all but unintelligible.  Fortunately, it's not too complicated a design and most of the pattern markings are clear enough.  The green is broadcloth, bought for $6 a metre and the birdies are what's left of a dress that never stood a chance.

Usually the practical reinventor just wings her buttonholes with the zigzag foot, but this time, she busted out the proper foot.  And, yes, reluctantly, it does a better job.

  

It was the perfect project for these metal flower buttons.

 

And it will go nicely with the sensible tweed Miss Marple skirt she made last week.

The vine that gave its all

The pumpkin vine that grew out of chook shed muckings out has finally died.  But not before it gave us 16 fruit.

We think that might be a record.  It is for us.

Even though the last few fruit are fairly small, they're ripe and sweet.

We've saved some seeds for next year.  Just in case the chook shed muckings out of spring don't contain any pumpkins.

And now we can all get some sleep

Bernard is no more.

The reinventors have been working up to this for some time and now its done and we're feeling a bit out of sorts.

The agreement has always been that we will not keep roosters.  It isn't fair on the neighbours and it's unpleasant for the hens.  (Poor Alice has lost a significant amount of feathers thanks to Bernard's attentions.)

So when the chicken-who-started-life-as-Marjorie declared himself vigourously as male,  his fate was sealed.  It was just a matter of when.

We consulted every nonna we could find and debated the merits of axe versus a quick grab-and-jerk to break his neck versus fashioning a killing funnel.  In the end our bucket arrangement didn't work and we had to improvise.

It was mercifully quick, although the cliches about headless chooks are disturbingly accurate.  Then the messy bit began.

We put him in a pot of boiling water for a minute, hosed him off and proceeded to get him ready for the pot.  It's not nice - you rip all the feathers off, and there are a lot, not just big ones that are easy to grab, but lots of little downy ones that once you pull them out, stick to the skin.  Then there's the butchering bit - taking out the crop (we managed to rupture it, yuck), chopping off the feet, removing the innards. 

But there is a recognisable chook sitting in our fridge.  It's not as plump as what you find wrapped in plastic in the meat department, but I know exactly what it ate (grain, veg and snails, slugs and assorted bugs from the garden) and what chemicals it ingested (none).

Now we just have to decide how we're going to eat him.

No crapitalism here

The reinventors hate the modern push to buy, buy, buy: replacing perfectly serviceable stuff with newer stuff just because it's newer.

There's almost nothing new in Marmalade Cottage - even our animals are rescued!

Rarely do we have a problem with our thrifted, rescued and second-hand stuff.  Except last night.

The dishwasher, an elderly, but prestigious brand, has given us three and a half years faithful service, moving house with us twice.  But it died.

Straight to Gumtree, it was!  With a free one waiting on a verge, that, apparently worked.  Except it didn't

Sigh.

But there was, of course, another one, a suburb away.  And off we trotted.

This one is quite new, immaculately clean, efficient and very quiet.  It was $100.

Seriously - why would anyone buy new?

It's all a bit confusing

This is Enid's first egg.  It fits into a teaspoon and is a little irregular in texture and colour, but it was neatly laid in the middle of the nesting box.

Enid has always been Enid, likewise Violet is still Violet.  But Gordon appears to be Geraldine and Marjorie is most definitely Bernard.

Shows what we know about chicken sexing!