Keeping the Pests out of the Vegetables.

Three of a Kind.

One more from the collection for a Kaleidoscope.

Another Butterfly Kaleidoscope.

Sausages for Lunch?

The New Water Tank Arrives.

Corn Silk

Happy Faces.

Today's Picking.

Butterfly Kaleidoscope 3

Perfect Peace.

Butterfly Kaleidoscope 2

First Flowering.

Kaleidoscoped Butterfly 1

I've always loved kaleidoscopes and always been fascinated by butterflies, so I decided to scan into Photoshop the patterned underside of one of the Australian butterflies in my collection and play around with a kaleidoscope filter. Here is one of the results.

Cool Creek

A Bug on a Buddleia

Twin Baby Augergines.

Big Buckle

While it's been too hot to venture outside I've been doing a lot of tidying up, sorting out magazines to chuck, books to pass on and items to find new homes for. I have no idea where this big buckle came from. The tongue is a bit rusty, but the rest appears to be made of brass. Now I wonder what its story is and where it came from.

Vegetable Cover Up.

With a temperature of 43C predicted for today, we decided to cover up as many of our precious vegetables as we could to protect them from being fried to a crisp in the sun.

With old sheets and pieces of fabric bought for future dyeing exercises we covered up most of the more sensitive plants. Hopefully it will be worthwhile and the vegetables can be saved!

Polly

New Fronds at Last

Future Produce.

More Produce.

Parsnips!

Although the very thin root ends of the parsnips won't be worth peeling and eating, the tops will be delicious. Such long roots are the result of having new raised vegetable beds with very friable soil. Amazing!

Making Gingerbread Dinosaurs

New Butterlies for a New Year

To start off the New Year here is a recent photo of some Imperial Blue butterflies emerging from their chrysalids. These butterflies aren't particularly rare where they occur, but to see them as they emerged, fresh and new was very special. These butterflies not only prefer a particular type of wattle tree, they only pupate on selected trees of the species. There were quite a few trees where I found these emerging butterflies, but there were chrysalids on only one or two. The Chrysalids are attended by a particular species of ant, so it may be that those ants only visited these few trees.