What’s Flowering at our Place and our Homeschool Inspection

Everything seems to be flowering profusely this year. I don’t think that I’ve seen so many flowers on the Feijoa at one time, and the grape vine is only a sultana grape, but the bunches this year are HUGE. The Silky Oak in our back yard is spectacular, and the parrots haven’t discovered it, yet, but I’m sure that they will, and when they do, our home will be a noisy cavalcade of hungry parrots. The roses have also been flowering abundantly, and their fragrance is delicious. What else would you see in our back yard? Well, at the moment we also have a sleepy lizard – might be something to do with the amount of earwigs present in our back yard at present.

They were in the back yard, but now they’ve migrated to the orange grove, and there must be some rather tasty earwigs up there because they’ve been there for positively ages.

Tour of Our Home – Paddock

Tour of our Home

Photo Key:
Top left: side lawn with famous Hills Hoist and climbing roses along fence
Top right: Vegetable patch
Middle left: front of home from road, showing Bottlebrushes planted along side of road
Middle right: front of home taken from driveway
Bottom left: The back of our home taken from near the squatter’s tank
Bottom right: Orange grove, which includes Orange and Mandarin trees and thornless blackberry bushes

This almost concludes the tour of our home, and all that is left is the paddock, which is where we “house” all of our goats and sheep, that is, when the goats aren’t kidding, for it is much easier to house them in the yard near the house, as that is where the milking stand is, and we can shut the kids away from their mums.

The vegetable patch is a work of art, as the ground was so hard and compacted when we came here, but with gentle perseverance and determination, it has produced well. At the moment, we are growing carrots, leeks, onions, corn, beans, garlic, cauliflower and cabbages. We do have some plants coming along in the nursery.

The front of our home is very similar to when we arrived here, except that we have planted all of the garden, apart from the large trees, the lawn and the bottlebrushes. It was like an arid lunar landscape when we first arrived here almost seven years ago.

The back of our home is also remarkably similar to when we arrived, although we have replaced the fence and repainted our home, but the driveway was already rubbled, and it’s great, for even when we have massive downpours, there is no mud, and in summer there’s no dirty dirt – we only have clean dirt here.

The orange grove has been a HUGE challenge, for our Orange trees haven’t wanted to grow, but we found out that there is a magnesium deficiency in the soil, so we have been treating that with Epsom salts (magnesium sulphate), and they are finally growing. The thornless blackberries were just cuttings from the parent plants, but they are growing beautifully.

Tour of Our Home

These photos are of:
Top left – My daughter’s garden
Top right- the orchard – Orange, Almond, Apricot and Peach trees
Middle left – the rest of the orchard – Apple, Nectarine and Pear trees
Middle right – the Bushy Sugargum Hedge – well it will be when it grows. Hopefully this will cut down on soil erosion and act as a windbreak.
Bottom left – Robinias, Callistemon and Eucalypt trees
Bottom right – our driveway with lots of Sugargum trees – the best thing about these trees is that the cockies don’t devastate them because of the arsenic in them.

Tour of Back Garden

Photo Key
Back Garden – facing west to the left of back door
Back Garden – facing west to the right of back door
Back Garden – more of garden facing west to the right of back door
Back Garden – more of garden facing west to the right of back door
Silky Oak tree – about 20-25 feet to the right of back door
Garden Arch – facing west directly in front of back door
Back Garden – facing west to the left of back door (showing pool in background)

Our back garden was a real challenge with the tall trees – Silky Oak, Common Ash, Guava and Melaleuca – and virtually no garden border when we arrived here almost seven years ago. However, my husband cut out some of the path and gently curved the garden border, replacing the small stones with large sandstone rocks from some of the nearby demolished houses.

Then began the job of planting it out, as the previous people only had plants in pots (in the ground), and when they moved out, the plants went with them. We tried many and varied plants before we found anything that would actually grow there. It is very wet in winter and is in only dappled sunlight in summer. The tall trees also tended to dry out the ground rather quickly, so we have been watering using a sprinkler, and this has worked to perfection.

The swimming pool was another mammoth task, with my husband digging the hole for the deep end with a pick and shovel, and generally levelling it up. Before he even started, he had to shift the clothesline and pull the fence down – a four feet high fence with 3 feet of concrete on the bottom of the posts. While he was digging, he found old galvanised water pipes and the new polypipe, which had to be shifted, of course. We managed to erect it ourselves, and now we are reaping the reward by being able to swim whenever we want.

Near the back door is a small rockery, and we have had various plants in there, but the cats seemed to think that this was a fun place to play, so now we have planted Banksias, and they are so prickly that the cats seem to have deserted it for now.

The garden arch had a White Potato Creeper when we first arrived here, but it used to take over everything, so we have planted a Star Jasmine there instead- the perfume from it is rather overwhelming, but if you take a deep breath before walking through it, it’s fine, and the flowers are so beautiful.

In the bottom left photo, you can see the strawberries alongside the wall and the pool in the background. This home, that God has provided for us is truly what we had prayed in earnest for, even down to the Silky Oak tree in the back yard.