Today was quite spectacular – brilliant, sunny and really quite hot. Too nice to be stuck inside with assignments, so I spent the day working on getting the garden up to date because it looks like summer’s here!
It was too hot to work in the greenhouse today, so I set up a work area outside on top of the currently empty rabbit nursery hutch. With a cold bottle of water and a good audio book (Mr. Midshipman Hornblower by C. S. Forester) I spent quite a lot of time getting seedlings into tubes.
It was a lovely place to work but here in Tasmania the sun is deceptively intense. I’m quite fair skinned and burn easily so I usually wear long sleeved cotton shirts, long pants and a hat when I’m out in the yard. Silly me forgot to roll my sleeves down after I did the watering this morning and after 10 minutes sitting working, I could feel my forearms burning. It’s not too bad tonight after a shower and plenty of soothing skin cream but I really try and avoid getting too much sun.
I potted up a lot of seedlings today – especially eggplants and basil – into toilet roll tubes. It’s an effective means of recycling an otherwise useless product and because the cardboard tubes disintegrate, it pretty much eliminates transplant shock when the seedlings go out into a garden bed or into a larger pot. If you’re interested in reading more, I wrote about it here.
Later in the afternoon, I made a wonderful discovery. I was weeding the path in front of the main raspberry bed when a flash of colour caught my eye – raspberry season has officially started!
And they were delicious – worth getting a little bit of sunburn earlier in the day 😀
To finish, Bernard Black is very well settled in and getting very inquisitive about his surroundings – and eating lots!
Tomorrow is submission day for final assignments and discussions about future units. In particular, what am I going to do for my final year project. I’ve got a few ideas but I really need to run it past some of my tutors.
Lots to think about!
Debra Manskey 
Nov 21, 2016 @ 04:57:34
Its never a better day than when you have “lots to think about”. I have lots of prospective raspberries but no ripe ones yet. I figure our longer than usual winter has been responsible for that but I can’t complain as all of the other berries inside Sanctuary are flowering like crazy and with the new irrigation system, we should get quite a few this year. I recently found this excellent way to turn old paper and junk mail (which we don’t get any of as we are off the beaten track) into starter pots using the pulp and muffin pans. Here’s the link if you are interested in checking it out…
http://365daysofdiy.blogspot.com.au/2012/01/seed-starters-out-of-paper-pulp.html
Bernard is glorious (as usual) and obviously knows how to pose for the camera now. Kudos on your studies. I am glad that we get a long break in between our bouts of study or I think I would officially go mad. A blogging friend suggested that I find a way to weave in my crochet love to film for next year and I might attempt a stop motion “drama” using a crochet creature I have made as a subject. Something like an unraveling with a dramatic twist either way next year is starting to look like a breath of fresh air compared to coding and app creation and websites.
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Nov 21, 2016 @ 07:53:29
Thanks for the link but I try and avoid things that involve more processing/resources for something like this. Also, any paper that comes my way gets turned into seed envelopes 😉
No rest for me with study! Because all my work is online and I’m doing a half load, I keep going constantly. (This will be my third xmas attached to the laptop.)
Writing Poetry is my next unit, which starts next Monday, so I might get a few days off if I structure this right!!!
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Nov 22, 2016 @ 05:04:22
My friend did her Masters in Graphic Design online like you are doing your course and loved it. Three years on one course?! I think that would do my head in. We did 4 years in horticulture but most of that was with different lecturers and we had to keep popping in and having meetings with our online lecturer so I guess we had that hands on structure that you get with attendance study. I much prefer online study as you get to study when “you” feel like it. Some people just aren’t geared to 9 to 5 and studies are no different. I wish we could take our subjects online! Those days off must taste very sweet indeed 🙂
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