Fruit, Fruit, Glorious Fruit!

Well, Steve and I are on a diet.  It's a good time of year to do this as there are plenty of bits and pieces in the salad line that are growing in the garden.  Apart from the chicken and cheese, everything on this lunch plate is from the garden, which makes us very happy.

 Our stone fruit continues to be magnificent, after the nice lot of yellow nectarines we picked at New Year, we were blessed with 5kg of luscious apricots.

 And today we have just started picking the flat white peaches....oh my god they are sensational, so juicy and sweet!  We have waited very patiently for these peaches, this is the fourth fruiting season since we planted the tree, and apart from about 8 tiny fruit the very first year, the tree had all sorts of problems with leaf curl the following two seasons, so badly that the tree was weakened and dropped all its fruit.  This year the spring weather has been better and the leaf curl was not quite so prevalent, and finally we are being rewarded with lots of lovely lovely fruit.  Great for dieting, a delicious treat instead of fattening things.

 I've been to the Albany Summer School the past week, doing an art course run by a children's book illustrator Gabriel Evans....if you want to check out his work, click here.  We learned mainly water colour techniques (which was a huge learning curve for me as I knew nothing), things like skin tones, shadowing,

 interesting skies, scribble techniques for shading, wet wash, dry wash, loads of stuff.  Although parts of it overwhelmed me, I enjoyed the course very much and felt I learned heaps and heaps.  Now to keep practising!

 Speaking of chickens, our escapee chicken thinks she is a kangaroo.  Not only does she continue to escape every day, she spends most of her time hanging out with the kangaroo mob, going right up to them totally unconcerned.  Here, one of the joeys is a bit taken aback at the sight of someone with feathers, but after a sniff they ignored each other.

 Here's one of this year's joeys, looking all chubby with her fluffy baby fur.  Her mum is Split, grazing behind.

 Do you remember me telling you about our alpha male Ben, that he got into a fight with another huge male just after Christmas?  He was a right mess, a bad throat wound and a damaged mouth as well as being very very sore.  The photo below shows Ben back in October when he was a magnificent specimen of a huge male kangaroo.  He had lost quite a bit of weight after this photo when the breeding season started, presumably too busy chasing the girls to eat, but he still looked pretty good early in December.

 Poor old Ben, he disappeared for a few days after the fight but then he dragged himself back to our place, poor bugger could barely walk, and started following us around, (which unnerved us as big male roos can be dangerous, but he was only able to move as slow as a snail so that was okay) desperate for food.  We realised that he couldn't eat, or rather couldn't graze, he was holding his mouth half open so we wondered if he had a broken jaw.  He's a pitiful sight, I'm sure you agree.

 So, we had a decision to make, do we ignore him and let nature take its course, do we find someone with a gun and put him out of his misery, or do we look after him?  Well, we don't cope well with seeing an animal slowly dying before our eyes, so we decided to start looking after him.  We had to plan carefully how we would feed him as male roos are not to be trifled with, not even sick ones.

 So, every morning, after checking carefully where he is, we put out half a bucket of roo muesli for him, alongside the 50lt water bucket that we always have in the paddock for the roos to drink.  His mouth is slowly recovering and in the last week he is able to chew much better than before.  He still doesn't seem to be able to graze, as in bringing his front teeth together to bite grass, but he can eat the loose stuff we give him.

 So he spends most of his time in the same spot, where we put the food.  This is good actually, as he has stopped following us.  He has a little mate with him too, the smaller roo, his name is Nash, is a two year old joey whose mother disappeared a few months ago.  He is independent but normally at this age he would still be hanging around at least near his mother, so he is appreciating a bit of food too, as he is on his own. 

 So Ben is looking better, he has put a tiny bit of weight back on, he is eating better, but is still moving very slowly like an ancient old man.  He spends most of his day lying down against that fence, or tucked under the lime tree, then gets up and has a feed and a drink then repeats this all day.  He goes away at night, presumably into the bush.  He has definitely lost his alpha male status.  The big boys don't keep that status very long, I think he's been the alpha male for 18 months.  Anyway, we are happy that he's not starving to death. The chicken checks up on Ben a few times very day too, she goes right up to him.  He could easily squish her but he tolerates her cheekiness.

I've done a bit of crochet lately, I made another market bag for shopping.

 And I want a couple of large, round, fat cushions for our settees, so this is the front of the first one.  I still have to sew it into a cushion but the crochet is finished.

 And I had a lovely time doing the jigsaw Michelle gave me for Christmas.  I love busy jigsaws and this one was wonderful!

Until next time.... xx