One Month Till Spring

It is hard to believe that we are almost at the end of July with just one month of winter left. We have had a mixture of cold, wet and windy days and also frosty mornings which give way to a beautiful sunny day.

A cold, windy and rainy Sunday

Well the forecast was for a wet winter and the Weather Bureau just might be right! It was fascinating watching the radar over the weekend and seeing the rain band move from the North West of Queensland to the South East then over the border into New South Wales. The Mt.Isa Show was on last Saturday and I believe some events had to be cancelled after the rain arrived. I did warn my son-in-law it was coming :-) He calls me his weatherman/lady. Anyway, I think the children did have a few hours there before it got too wet. It was just overcast here in the South East but you could tell there was rain coming.

Mulberry Cobbler with no added sugar

As we still have heaps of mulberries on our tree I have tried out a couple more recipes by replacing the sugar with dextrose and doing a bit of experimenting. I was very happy with the taste of the Mulberry and Yoghurt Dessert I made last week and we actually had it again tonight. May as well make good use of the mulberries while we have them. Another similar recipe I found was for a Mulberry Cobbler so I changed a few ingredients around and was quite happy with the result as well.

Mulberry and Yoghurt Dessert

While I was decluttering old magazines this week I came across some recipes I must have pulled out of magazines the last time I decluttered and which I had completely forgotten about so obviously they had never been trialled. As our mulberry tree is heavy laden with fruit at the moment, I was excited to see a berry dessert recipe from a 2004 copy of Super Food Ideas called Lucy and Mollie's Very Berry Dessert. So I changed the ingredients around to use the berries we had available and also substituted the sugar with Dextrose and ended up with a very tasty dessert.

Garden downsizing

The gardening CEO has been making plans lately to reduce the amount of work required to look after the many plants and trees he has planted over the past 35+ years. One of the trees targeted for removal is the Mulberry tree as we weren't able to eat much of the fruit this year due to flying fox damage. 

Wildlife everywhere!

I don't usually take a lot of notice of the wildlife around here although I do look out for snakes during the warm weather just in case any of them are lurking around in the back yard. Our resident Blue Tongue Lizards have given me a fright on more than one occasion when I thought they were snakes. Lately however, I have seen a number of birds for the first time and the most interesting of them are the Tawny Frogmouths which have a nest in our neighbour's pine tree.

Our huge King White Mulberry Tree

Have you ever seen a King White or Shahtoot Mulberry tree (Morus Macroura)? At least that is what we think it is after doing a Google search and coming up with this search result. The photos of the fruit look the same so hopefully it isn't a case of mistaken identity again....and I did have my glasses on this time. :-)