Marigold

First snow peas

Meet the Residents of The New Worm Palace

Red Cabbage beauty

Photo of me and my vegie garden at Washington Street.

The New Worm Palace

Grafts on the apple tree

Here is the Granny Smith graft that Owen put on our apple tree here at Washington Street. As you can see it has sprouted and going really well. He also graft Pink Lady and Gala on to the same tree but they haven't sprouted yet although one of the gala grafts looks like it's about to. It's very exciting.

Yvonne at Oatlands Open Day

Here I am with our stall. We didn't sell any of the cookbooks but we did give away heaps of spiral apples (probably about 10-12kg worth). Kids and adults alike were very curious about the apple peeler/corer/slicer device and took order forms to think about getting one at home. It's great seeing kids get excited about an apple and even line up for one.

There were lots of people in Oatlands on the day and it was a great event overall. There was a monster market, art/collector/quilt displays, animals, garage sales a parade, shops open with specials, face painting, food, BBQ's etc etc. It's great having the whole town as a venue rather than just an oval like the usual case for fair or shows. It really shows off the amazing number of historical buildings in Oatlands and gets people walking around the town.

Sugar in drinks display at Oatlands Open day

Oatlands Open Day on Sunday was a success. It was a fabulously sunny day and when ended up having our stall outdoors. This is my display of how much sugar is in coke, cordial and water, if you had one drink every day for a week (ie. 390ml bottl of coke, 300ml glass of cordial or 500ml bottle of water). The signs read: Cordial, 55 teaspoons of sugar, Cola Soft drink (not to implicate any single company!) 72 teaspoons of sugar and Water, 0 teaspoons of sugar. I weigh and measured the sugar in teaspoons myself and so it may be out slightly and the figures are for a week of having the one of the drinks a day. The visuals are enough to explain the point.

My very scientific seed raising mix experiment

All these pots contain tomato seedlings - except for a few zucchini's at the back. The square icecream containers have Rouge de Marmande tomato seeds/seedlings in them but with different types of seed raising mixes. They were all sown at the same time and place in the same conditions (ie. the mini greenhouse). The brown container 2nd from the left is doing the best - it contains 4 parts sifted compost and 1 part sand. The blue container next to it contains what i call the "Expert mix", which is 3 parts peat, 2 parts san and 1 part sifted compost. The AJ mix is in the orangy yellow colour container and it has 1 part worm castings and 1 part sand, and unfortunately (and suprisingly) has only one tomato seedling plus a rogue pumkin sprouted from the worm castings.

My homemade mini-greenhouse

My mini green house containing the seed raising experiment

Eat fruit and vegetables

I thought i'd mention my work in this blog. This picture could represent the efforts dietitians may go to to make vegetables more exciting to children.

This sunday I'm having a stall at "Oatlands Open Day" as part of my dietitian position based in Oatlands. I'm going to sell healthy cookbooks (they are quite good ones), have free spiral apples for the kids made using the appler peeler/corer/slicer device, and have some different drinks with piles of sugar to represent how much you would be having if you had, say a can of coke everyday for a week. Part of the purpose of the stall is just to be out there amongst the community and meet people and let them know who I am. It should be fun in a way, although it's on a Sunday so probably not something I would do if not getting paid for it. I don't get overtime pay or anything but can take a day's flextime another time. I'll take monday October 24th off instead.

Tomato seedlings and The New Worm Palace

The tomato seeds have come up in my mini-greenhouse. The Seed Raising Mix experiment is going well although unfortunately the AJ (Andrew James) mix isn't going too well (50:50 Worm castings:sand), i think only one has sprouted. Andrew, I reckon you would have thought differently when you saw the texture of the mix because it clumps together and also form a bit of a crust on the surface when it dries a bit. If I had been able to keep the moisture even it would have been good because i have some seedlings that have come up in pure worm castings i a margarine container on the window seal of my bedroom.

My worms have now been move into their new "Worm Palace". The Worm Palace is the commercially manufactured worm farm which has three stackable compartments and so the worm can move upwards when they fill up the bottom tray, then eventually i can take this away and it should be full of worm castings with no worms or food remaining in it. Yay! I think the worm will be happy to have more room to move.

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

I've just finished reading The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Ofcourse I read Prince Caspian before this. The Voyage.. was a fantastic story and I enjoyed it more than Prince Caspian (which was still good, just not as good as the other books so far). It has so many more adventures in it and is less predictable than Prince Caspian (well in fact it's not really predictable at all). The Chronicles of Narnia are a great way to re-ignite the imagination, I still can't believe myself that I hadn't read them when I was younger. The BBC mini-series was to blame although i enjoyed that a great deal even when they played repeats.