Storms, a cooked modem and belated Christmas greetings.

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas with your families. We had a lightning storm the night before Christmas Eve and our internet modem and back up battery were cooked when lightning hit close to the house so I didn't get a chance to wish everyone a Happy Christmas.

A bit behind

 Well, the start of 2023 has been a tad disappointing as I finally succumbed to COVID at the end of December and spent the first week of the new year in bed. At first I thought I had a bad flu and it didn't enter my mind that I had the virus until I lost my sense of taste and smell a few days later and thought I had better do  a test and sure enough I was positive. 

Happy Christmas

 It is nearly the end of yet another month and, as it is only a few days until Christmas, I just want to wish everyone a very happy and blessed Christmas and I hope that 2023 brings you much joy and good health. 

Dear Summer ~ goodbye and good riddance!

It is the last day of summer and like most Aussies, I am well and truly over it! Here in South East Queensland we have seen practically no rain for over two months and the ground is as hard as a rock. I have let the veggies go apart from one lone cucumber plant with has a total of two cucumbers growing on it and once they are ready to pick the plant will come out.

Goodbye summer!

Well...aren't all of us in Australia happy to say goodbye to summer! We have had such a mixed bag of weather this month in Queensland with a dreadful prolonged heatwave, followed by a sudden drop of about 20 degrees in the temperature, then there was the fog and the recent downpour of nearly four inches of rain here which caused some flooding around the area. Currently Townsville, which is normally called 'Brownsville' by the locals due to the lack of rain, is coping with some seriously high rain totals causing flooding in low lying areas and there is more to come.

Out of kilter

Does anyone use the expression 'Out of kilter' any more? I remember my parents saying that quite regularly many years ago during conversations. I think that describes how I feel at the moment. Last week's terrible heatwave meant that each day was spent just finding ways to survive the heat and everything else got put on hold. It was too hot to cook sourdough, too hot to put the dehydrator on, too hot to cook a meal in our Western facing kitchen and so on.

Another week of heat!

As Aussies who watch the news may be aware, Queensland is in for heatwave conditions this week and records are expected to tumble. After our recent very cool weather it is all a bit of a shock but there is no way to escape the heat short of taking a trip to Tasmania, or Canada or Alaska so plans are in place to survive it including a trip to the cinema if it all gets too much.  How lovely and cool all that snow looks at the winter Olympics. Strangely enough the Craft Alive show has been held the second year in the row during a heatwave and thankfully I was able to go there yesterday when the temperature was a 'cool' 30C and certainly not as hot as it will be tomorrow at 38C.

Summer, Winter, Summer, Winter!

What extraordinary weather we had last week! On Wednesday it was 35C and then the temperature plummeted to 15C on Friday and we were back to winter weather. Apparently it was the coldest February day for many years. I was glad I hadn't packed away my winter jumpers and track pants as they were certainly needed as was the rain that arrived with the cooler weather.

After the rain...

This past week has been a wet one for many areas of Queensland and while we didn't receive anything like the rainfall totals experienced by those on the coast etc. we did manage to pick up some decent totals. Some areas of the garden are like a jungle which gets me down as I can't dig out all the weeds as some have just grown so tall and thick so I took a break from attacking it all to see how the flowers and veggies have benefited from the recent rain.

A Timely Reminder

We lost power last night and for some reason this often happens to our suburb but not neighbouring ones where the lights are brightly shining while we are in darkness. A storm wasn't the culprit and we have no idea what was the cause but it was a timely reminder that we need to get ready for storm season here in Queensland which gets somewhat battered during summer.

The storm before the calm

Well there wasn't too much calm before the band of storms rolled across our region late yesterday. I think everyone was just plain exhausted and crabby from the unbearable heat during our second heatwave in just a few weeks. New Years Eve was so hot I thought I may not survive to see the first day of 2017 :-) However, after the four inches of rain that fell here last night it has cooled down once again and we can all breathe easily as the calm returns.

 

Heatwave--GO AWAY!

I don't want to sound like I am having a winge but I am of course...it is just too hot for our normally cool temperate region! Day after day of 36C (96.8F) heat tends to become a bit hard to take when you aren't used to it and especially if you live in an old timber house with no aircon. However, there are only two days left of above 30C weather and then we will be back to normal once again. I guess if you lived in an area where these temperatures were common in summer it would be wise to invest in aircon.

A dismal end of summer garden

If you would like to read about successful and thriving vegetable gardens then you might just like to click onto the next blog in your feed as there is nothing to inspire you in this blog post. Normally at this time of the year I am trying to find ways to use up all the cucumbers, tomatoes etc. that are growing but not this summer. I didn't think we had a terribly hot summer apart from a week of dreadful humidity and a couple of days when it was 35C or 36C but perhaps we didn't get as much rain as we normally do. It can get a tad discouraging but I thought I would make a note of how dismal the garden is looking this particular year for future reference.  Firstly though I will show you a couple of photos of a double rainbow that appeared on Sunday as there were storms around but not here unfortunately.

Cooking sourdough in a slow cooker

Well, it has been hot, hot, hot for the last couple of days. I mean 36C may not seem hot to someone from Perth, Adelaide and definitely Mt.Isa where the 'normal' summer temperature is 40C or upwards but it is definitely hot for us in our supposedly cool temperature climate. As it was quite mild last week when I took Gertrude, my sourdough starter, out of the fridge to wake her up and she wasn't happy and didn't co-operate until a couple of days later when she was ready to bake, I thought I would wake her up during a heatwave to see what happened. Well, she woke up in a hurry and was ready for baking in no time. The only problem was it was too hot to turn the oven on in 36C heat!

Going up?

While I was up north last month we had lots of rain here and when I came home all I seemed to hear around the neighbourhood were lawn mowers as everyone was trying to mow the jungle their lawn had turned into before the next rainy day. One day it was particularly noisy with the sound of chain saws and mulchers making a racket and I took a stroll outside to investigate and saw some very adventurous men lopping a massively high Gum tree so grabbed my camera to take some photos.

The Miracle of Rain

Well...at last the rain came! It has been so very dry here for so long and it was nice to have a couple of rainy days even though the storms were a bit scary after seeing the destruction caused by the super cell that hit our capital city of Brisbane just over a week ago. Thankfully there hasn't been any damage in our area apart from flash flooding. Isn't it wonderful though what a difference rain makes to the garden?

A Little Bit of Summery Goodness

Earlier this year after eating a rockmelon (cantaloupe), my husband saved and dried the seeds then planted them to see whether they would grow....and grow they did!

End of summer flowers

I am continuing to record what is growing in the garden at the end of summer so that I remember next year. During the drought preceding the floods of 2011, we didn't plant flowering plants that required a lot of water and began to grow quite a few succulents instead. However we still have quite a few varieties of dahlias, a very old hydrangea bush, bromeliads and a few other plants with pretty flowers.

 

Summer Stocktake: Fruit and Vegetables

As summer is coming to a close, I thought I would take a photographic record of some of the fruit and vegetables we have growing at the moment as I am trying to learn more about the best plants to grow at certain times. We have a number of fruit trees 'down the back' where I don't venture too much and I would like to try and save some of the fruit down there from fruit fly in the future. This year for the first time, we have picked quite a lot of figs after sewing calico bags and putting them over much of the fruit. It wasn't pretty but it was effective in the main.

Roll on autumn!

Roll on autumn...that's what I say!!! We are having our second heatwave this month and today the temperature rose to 38 degrees Celsius. At least it wasn't 39.5 like it was a couple of weeks ago. I know that our southern states have had temps in the mid 40s and honestly, I really don't know how they survived. It is hard to believe that a few months ago I was complaining about the constant foggy weather in one of my first blog posts last June.