Little Things

I lost track of recording things to be happy about this week. I was concentrating too much on the bleakness. But there were good things along the way.

Some nice blossom on Tuesday morning:

On Thursday I spotted an echidna beside the road and stopped to photograph it before it disappeared into the vegetation: 

On Friday the evening temperature was high enough (7 degrees, not very high!) for me to put out my moth light and see if any moths turned up. Several did.

I've spent a bit of time this week sorting out my walk-in wardrobe - rearranging the shelves, throwing out stuff, and boxing up stuff to send to the op-shop. At the moment it is still more chaos than organisation, as not everything that I pulled off the shelves has found its new place yet. Give it a few more days...

On Saturday I was glad I have another camera when my main one decided I needed more arty photos: 

That is two baby magpies in a tree. Not quite the result I wanted! The poor camera seems to have had it.
 

So here is some more new blossom this morning, taken with a different camera:

 Hope your week has been full of little drops of happiness.

Spring!

 From the garden for the first day of spring:

 

Signs of Spring

 A sunny day with a top temperature of 17.6 C. Spring is in the air!

 

This is a Turkestan tulip, Tulipa turkestanica:

We have a pot of these beside the front door. There were no flowers this morning, but a few have popped open this afternoon.

Plum blossom, with a small native bee:

 

Almond blossom:

 

Daffodils are opening up everywhere:

 

Grape hyacinths with a European honey bee:

 

And lastly, my Coral Charm peony is exploding out of the ground:

 

Spring is definitely on the way!

Timesoup

I read an article this morning that suggested we aren't living in a timeline, but in a timesoup. "As the hours, days, weeks and months become a blur, it’s no longer clear if time is passing too quickly, or too slowly." That resonates with me!

I have no idea how much time has passed. I am very surprised at how long it is since I wrote a blog post. It was last month and we are now almost two weeks in to this month. 

We had snow on the 4th August:

 

I never wrote a stash report at the end of July, although when I went searching through my blog apparently I didn't do one at the end of June either. How did that happen?

Stash report for the end of July:

Thread:
No spools emptied, none added.
Year to date - no change.

Dress fabric:
None used, none added.
Year to date - up 4.25m.

Quilt fabric:
1.8m used, 0.5m added
Year to date - down 7.64m. 

But I've just realised that I never added into my spreadsheet any fabric used for face masks, so more fabric has been used than I have recorded.

 

There are signs spring is coming, such as more daffodils opening:

 

 Although the liquidambar still hung onto two red autumn leaves:

The tulips that took 3 weeks to travel 60kms back in May/June have started to pop up:

I planted the bulbs in a pot which just fits in my wombat planter. There were 3 tulips up when I took this photo 5 days ago, but by yesterday there were 5 up. I haven't looked at them this morning. 

This plum tree is the first tree in the orchard to have any blossom:

Photo taken on 10th August, when a birthday was celebrated in a very low-key isolated way.

Each day we watch for the new virus case numbers, hoping that the current restrictions will bring the numbers down, and worrying about what will happen if they don't. Doing too much worrying.

Some wildflowers are appearing:

Nodding greenhood orchid above, tall greenhood orchid below:

Nature is following its normal timeline, even if the humans are lost in timesoup.

Peach Blossom

Pretty pink:

Notice the chook lurking in the background? She and her friends have been eating the low-hanging blossom on the almond and apricot trees, and now she is waiting for lower blossoms on this tree as well.

I overlooked these dainty hoop petticoat daffodils when I posted about the daffodils open for the first day of spring.

They were open then, but they are tiny and I didn't notice them.

This one is much larger, and just opened today:

Spring is springing all over the place.

Spring!

A beautiful morning for the first day of spring.

Apricot blossom:

Grape hyacinths:

Spring stars:

Regular hyacinth:

Daffodils:

Warm enough for the bees to fly. Here's one in the almond blossom:

The top temperatures for the last week show that spring actually arrived on Friday (colours are the colours used in my temperature quilt a couple of years ago):

1/09/2019     16.5    green
31/08/2019   15.4    green
30/08/2019   16.2    green
29/08/2019     8.8    blue
28/08/2019     9.1    blue
27/08/2019    12.8    aqua/teal
26/08/2019    11.1    aqua/teal

But that doesn't show that this afternoon as I was going to visit my father for Fathers Day the temperature plummeted back to 8, heavy rain fell, and we were back to winter.


Stash at the end of August:

Thread:
 No spools emptied, none added.
Year to date - down 10 spools.

Dress fabric:
2 metres used, 1 added.
Year to date - down 4.25m.

Quilt fabric:
Used 3.2m, none added
Year to date - up 0.5m.

Springing

A touch of orange:

The first of the third layer of tulips is opening, and it appears to be orange! I'm surprised how long the flowers are lasting. The first pink ones opened three weeks ago, and they still look pretty good.

More tulips elsewhere in the garden:

You know spring has arrived when you start seeing butterflies, but this one seems to have had quite a rough time:

Its wings are very tattered. But it seemed to be getting a good feed of nectar among the spring stars and the lavender:

And look! I hadn't noticed, but there is more blossom in the orchard.

Cherry blossom:

And a nashi pear:

Spring is Springing

Peach blossom in the orchard:

More daffodils in the front "lawn":

And now there are four tulips open in the layered pot:

They have streaks of darker pink that weren't obvious when the first one opened (in my last post).

Orchard Update

So far there is blossom on the almond, nectarine, and plum trees. The perfume of the blossom is lovely. And on warmer days the bees are busy amongst the blossom.

It is very hard to get a good photo of it, as the trees are still small, and spread far apart. But the blossom season should last for a while, as there are still quite a few trees with just buds.

Outside the orchard, more of spring. 

 Grape hyacinths above, and a clump of daffodils that seems to have multiplied well since last year:

End of Winter

First apricot blossom open on the last day of winter:

Almond Blossom

Almond flowers open on a beautiful spring day.

Second Blossom

The almond tree still hasn't any open blossom. A plum has become the second tree to begin flowering:

Another little touch of spring elsewhere in the garden:

Snowflakes (Leucojum) in the rain.

First Blossom

In previous years the almond trees have been the first to blossom in spring, but this year it is a nectarine:

Springing

Everywhere I look, spring is happening.

My Japanese maple leaves are popping out:

Apple blossom:

This one's a crab apple in the charbagh, but out in the orchard blossom is opening on the regular apples too.

Flower in the fish pond:

This plant was a bonus growing in a waterlily we bought last year. It is Aponogeton distachyos, or water hawthorn. And in the fishpond, there are some baby goldfish! Very hard to catch sight of them, much less photograph them. But it seems our goldfish are happy in their big pond.

My redbud buds are opening:

The flowers look like funny little animal faces.