luna park

 On Oliver's actual Birthday (6th May) we went to Luna Park in Melbourne.
It was a bunch of fun but of course the most precious time we had all week was when Luna Park closed and we went across the road to the beach and collected shells and sea plants in the moonlight.

Six on the Sixth

It was a wild windy May Day that our beautiful one turned 6.

It was a weekend of Meteor Showers, a Scorpio Supermoon and lot's of cake.

garden juice

Loving our juice today, 

kale

tumeric

zucchini

apples

more apples

rainbow silverbeet

fresh from our garden and the apple orchard

Oliver and Pearl will not eat anything "Green" but if they can pick it and juice it they'll drink it.

the wishing portal... aka... the tip shop

We have a tip (dump, waste management facility etc) not too far from our house, it has a Tip Shop (stuff that is a little too precious for land fill) and we own a trailer...Umm

So, this creates the potential for greatness!,

and for collecting a whole heap of stuff we don't really need.

This particular tip shop is more the abandoned type where people throw their unwanted stuff into a designated area. This area is dusty and not under cover and it seems its our mission to save these unloved gems before the rain gets them.

The tip shop (so it seems) is rewarding our devotion by becoming a kind of wishing portal for us.

Obscure things we are desiring tend to just show up.

An example,just the other day we were wishing for  the following items -

• A warm box for Dave to rise his sourdough bread in during winter
• One of those layered structures for sprouting legumes
• A record player

That is exactly what we found.

We found a beautiful wooden solar cooker that a friend informed us was for rising bread/slow cooking "raw" bread. I found a sprouting tower and then we eyed this beauty

It was sitting out there in the tip wilderness, we had no idea if it worked. 

The lovely price of $5 sealed the deal,we rushed home with it full of giddy quiet hope that it would actually work (we had previously bought a very old school pale green Hoover for $1 that didn't). 

We couldn't even bare to bring it inside in case it didn't. 

We parked the trailer in the garden and Dave got the extension cord, grabbed a Grace Jones album and we held our breath.

Those smooth warm analogue tones floated over our garden.

We danced.

Then we found a home for it in our lounge room.

It's possible Jimi Hendrix was playing at this point

Thank you tip shop wishing portal, you have been so kind.

just a little Hello to all those folk in Russia reading my blog, thanks for stopping by :)

apples

I can still smell apples...

On an extra warm and beautifully sunny Sunday as part of the "Growing the Harvest Festival" we were part of a community apple picking & juice making bonanza.

We began in an apple orchard(Fuji)where we collected only the apples that had fallen down(they would of just stayed and rotted otherwise)....within 20 mins of collecting,eating apples and chatting to the farmer a bunch of us had collected a trailer load plus a few extra baskets, so satisfying!

 

 

Our loot was hauled back to The Hub community garden plot (for an afternoon juicing) and we went back to town to share a community lunch of yum pumpkin soup under the Big Oak Tree

The apples were prepped and then went into an apple pulper (kind of diced the apples ready for pressing)...it was powered by bicycles (which were powered by children)....The pulp was then wrapped in calico and layered. Then pressed....!

Gosh...the juice was ridiculously delicious!

It was poured into bottles for folk to take home, and with all that drinking and bottling there was still such a huge amount of apples left.

At the end of the day, unsure of what to do with such abundance it was suggested an apple juice bath may be the go...

In the end we decided to continue juicing next weekend.

We took a bounty of bottles and baskets of apples home. Then took off to Vaughn Springs and collected some Mineral Water and made delicious Apple Mineral water concoctions. 

Our house smells so sweet!