The Wombat, Spring, and the edible garden

Miss Eagle disguised as The Wombat of Upper Gully

To-day is Show and Tell over at Kelli's.

I have been s-o-o-o busy the last few weeks - for a number of reasons. The over-riding reason though has been the garden. Miss Eagle has been carrying on in the backyard like she's The Wombat of Upper Gully.
About a quarter of the backyard has been dug up and given to veges and herbs.
I have been wombatting in a most determined fashion, dear Reader, because Spring does not wait for anyone and can, at times, be quite anxious to turn into Summer and all that growing time is gone and cannot be reclaimed.
One of the difficulties in this mature garden is light. Fruit trees planted in the long ago are of great height and are heavy in branch and leaf - not to mention roots. I got quite carried away with the pruning of the plum tree to get extra space by the provision of more light. Above, can be seen a piece of the pruning I have rescued which I hope can do duty as a trellis for the snow peas whose seeds are planted beneath and around it.

I have tried to stretch my budget (if you could call it that) further this year by using a lot of seeds rather than seedlings. The wisdom of this decision will depend upon how many seeds come up, won't it?

A few notes of interest.

• I am fortunate in the provision of various bits and pieces through "hard rubbish": waste items put out on footpaths for collection. Herself says that at The Trad Pad we are not into Retail Therapy but Refuse Therapy (Opp Shops and Hard Rubbish). And, guess what? No credit cards required!


• Garden Picture No. 2 shows a white lattice propped against a plum tree. Garden Picture No. 3 shows a garden gate propped against the corner of the garden shed. These, if all goes to plan, will be trellises: the former for the ivy geraniums and the latter for golden zucchini.


• In Garden Picture No. 2 you will notice in the foreground a wire edging. Hard rubbish again - in sufficient quantity to go around the areas I have dug on either side of the shed. Herself had expressed a desire a couple of months ago for some garden edging but hadn't got to Bunning's to do anything about it. Just this week the very thing has been provided! It has a tad of rust - but we find rust in our vintage a bonus!


• Can't recall where the wire object from which the pots are hanging in Garden Picture No. 2 came from. Methinks that Herself acquired it in a swap or some long ago hard rubbish. The pots I have had for the best part of ten years and they are still going strong and they are planted with the seeds of cherry tomatoes.


• The toadstool sitting under the pots was a gift, more than a decade ago, from some very good friends. Now this sort of garden ornament is not really my style but my friends are very dear. To make it more me, I have a friend who does a very good line in frogs drawn in an Aboriginal style so I got him to draw such a one sitting on the toadstool. Now this quirky object and I have a whole lot more in common.


• In Garden Picture No. 1 the child's outdoor setting, the little wooden wheelbarrow, and the two wooden tubs are all found items. The large painted metal wheelbarrows I have had for a number of years. They came from garage sales.


• The area dug is on three sides of the tool shed with a small bed (planted with nasturtiums) on the fourth side. In these three areas are planted: sage, parsley, basil, coriander, silver beet, rocket, climbing beans, golden zucchini, beetroot, cherry tomatoes and snow peas. I have seed-boxes containing capsicums (peppers) and sugar-loaf cabbage. I need to find a home for cucumbers.


• My two yellow wheelbarrows contain: penny-royal, sage, thyme, common mint, Corsican mint, and oregano. In other parts of the garden I have other herb plantings with the addition of golden marjoram and lavender.


• I have not yet planted tomato seedlings. I can only find Gross Lisse seedlings. I am looking for heritage tomatoes such as I planted two years ago. I will take a drive into The Hills later to-day to see what I can locate up there. And maybe I'll let my fingers do the walking using this list.


• Here at The Trad Pad, we compost. We have two bins - but two older single women don't make a lot of compost very quickly. I add to our household scrap pile in the bin by adding, every few months, some additional layers. I will put in a layer of cow manure; a few months later, a layer of lime. Sometimes I find I have left a small amount of potting mix to its own devices in the tool shed, so it goes into the compost too. I didn't have quite enough from the two compost bins to provide an adequate layer over all of the dug area so there was a narrow patch on the long side of the toolshed where the rocket seeds have been planted which received cow manure. I prefer manure to blood and bone. Blood and bone is an organic fertiliser/nutrient but I prefer not to use it. If I could be assured that it comprised the remains of old and injured animals who have been killed in a humane manner, I would use it. However, most blood and bone would be the detritus from meat processing facilities which kill animals for food. So I prefer to go with cow manure because it means that an animal has not given its life for the main purpose of providing humans with food.

It hasn't all been veges and herbs. Pretty baskets a-plenty are decorating the trees in the back yard. Here are some of them. And I have not included any pictures of the succulent collection in the courtyard outside the sunroom. BTW, these wire baskets are found items!

Extracting magic dust!

To-day is Show and Tell Friday.

This is hosted by the gracious Kelli over at There's No Place Like Home.

If you pop over there, you will see the guidelines for this little weekly fiesta.

Now you can see this item from both sides - above and below.

Do you know what it is?

This is the only one that I have ever seen.

If you have one or have seen one, I would like to know.
It has a polished wood side for gripping.

The business side is corrugated or ridgy.

Down

Down

Down

HERE IS THE ANSWER

IT IS THE MAGIC DUST EXTRACTOR

I have photographed all four sides of the box.

Click on the photographs to enlarge so that you can read the print.

The photo above has the price on it - 29/6 (AUD equivalent $2.95 cents)

Decimal currency came to Australia on 14 February 1966 - 41 years ago.

This may be even older

When my aunt, Molly, died I cleared out her apartment.

This item was in it.

Don't you just love this statement -

UNCONDITIONALLY GUARANTEED TO LAST A LIFETIME

It has outlasted Molly. Will it outlast me?
~~~~~~

POSTSCRIPT

Decided to do a Google search and came back with one entry - over at Ebay Australia.

An American branch of the good ol' family tree

This is my entry in this week's Show and Tell which is hosted by Kelli at There is no place like home. I had been planning this entry and, as co-incidence would have it, the theme for this week's Photo Friday is "Old" so I am linking this post there as well.

I love looking at this picture. This woman probably died before I was born. I think the photo was probably taken in the first quarter of the twentieth century but the clothes are what we would think of as nineteenth century. To me, she looks a strong woman - strong features, strong shoulders. Do you think she looks tall? I seem to think she might be. My Aunt Molly, in the later years of her life, passed some family photographs to me. She included with the photo the following note:

• This is Auntie Cross - as we knew her. She was Mum's aunt and the mother of Charlie and Violet. I think she was Mum's mother's sister but I'm not quite sure. Charlie went off to China and used to send Mum materials, gifts - all sorts of things. You might have seen floating round the house - either yours or ours - silver ash trays with a big coin the centre and a little one near the rim - or a little pewter bowl with copper wire outside. They came from Charlie and he once sent Mum a real eggshell china tea set - you almost could read the paper through it but when you filled the cup with tea and lifted it up the tea weighed the cup down and you finished with a lap full of tea - hardly the way to treat your guests. Violet was a great friend of Mum's - she was my god-mother. For her day, she was a bit of a rebel in as much as she just refused to get married, getting very choosy about the men who approached her. Eventually she decided to go overseas. She set sail for Canada - but on a shore excursion on the way over, she fell and broke her hip. She was put into hospital in Vancouver where, of course, she knew no one. The wife of the doctor who took care of her in hospital befriended Violet and it was at her home that she met Jack Roberts - and, if he was as nice when he was young as he was when he was old, it's not surprising she married him. He was a widower and she went back to America with him. Now, in those days, if you wanted to go to America as a resident you were put on a list and had to wait until your number came up which could be years. If Violet had ever come back here for a visit, she would likely have to stay here for anything from months to years even though she was married to an American. So she didn't see any member of her family until I arrived on her doorstep back in 1960 in Columbus, Ohio. Charlie died while on some sort of patrol (I don't know what he did, actually) but there was some talk that he was murdered by natives - if you could call any Chinese natives. All over the years, Violet and Mum kept in touch sending each other letters, gifts, magazines, etc. etc. They died within a couple of weeks of each other. [This was in the mid 1960s.] Violet and Jack had one son who is called Rodney - but sometimes Dallas. I, of course, met Dal and his wife, Virginia, when I was over there and we have sent each other Xmas cards ever since. They have five children - Mum and Violet were cousins so you can work out what relationship exists between you and Dal's children. One more word about Auntie Cross - she visited us a lot when she was alive. When I became engaged to my first husband, she took me aside and offered her advice for a happy marriage - "Always", she said, "oblige your husband in the bedroom." So that is Auntie Cross who would be your great-great Aunt!

So, dear Reader, somewhere in the United States of America - almost certainly in the vicinity of Columbus, Ohio - are cousins. First cousins twice removed? Third cousins? Well, lets just settle for that quaint term, "kinfolk", shall we?

Show and Tell Friday - Home School of American Literature

Kelli, this Show and Tell is especially for you - because you home-school your kids.

This was an Ebay find. I forgot to check postage on this and it was quite a shock because the book is s-o-o thick and s-o-o heavy. A lesson learned. I am always particular about postage since this purchase. But I don't regret the purchase. It is a magnificent old book in wonderful condition.
While the book promotes American literature, it is not exclusively American as it contains the works of major English writers. In fact, the three portraits on the cover include Tennyson beside Longfellow and Hawthorne.
The words on the title page are as follows:

Home School of American Literature or Easy Steps to an Education or The Lives and Writings of our Best Authors embracing The great poets of England and America, famous novelists, distinguished essayists and historians, our humorists, noted journalists and magazine contributors, statesmen in literature, noted women in literature, popular writers for young people, great orators and public lecturers, etc./Compiled and edited by William Wilfred Bursall, A.B., Principal of Central School, Philadelphia; Rufus M Jones, A.M., Professor of Philosophy, Haverford College, and others/Embellished with nearly one hundred and fifty half-tone portraits and about 200 text illustrations by Charles Dana Gibson, Corwin K. Linson and Others/Published by Elliott Publishing Co., Philadelphia, PA.

The facing page to the title page has a photograph of "The New Congressional Library, Washington, D.C." On the obverse of the title page are the words:

Entered according to Act of Congress in the year 1897, by W.E. Scull in the office of the Librarian of Congress, in Washington. All rights reserved/All persons are warned not to infringe upon our copyright by using either the matter or the pictures in this volume.

The book has a specific section for Recitation.

I purchased the book because I have a small collection of the works of Rufus Jones, a great Quaker writer. Some people think that if Quakers had saints then Rufus Jones would be one!

I find books such as these a delight - and some more might pop up in Show and Tell!

Blessings and bliss to you Kelli and to all Show-ers and Tell-ers

Show and Tell Friday: Wedgwood

OK, OK, I am awake and I do know it's Saturday morning here in Oz but I figure I can still do my bit for Friday's Show and Tell because for Kelli - who hosts it - it is still Friday in Texas, USA. And as Knox City Queen of the Hard Rubbish, Miss Eagle has to say that Kelli's curbside baker's stand is a find. Would love to find one on a curb in my neighbourhood.

This beautiful Wedgwood fruit bowl has been in my possession for more than three decades.

As a young mum living in Toowoomba, Queensland, I used to haunt auction sales.

One auctioneer held regular sales in his own rooms.

There, behind his counter, and along a wall would be "The Sundries".

The Sundries were magic boxes full of heaven knows what.

They could be filled with useful odds and sods

or you might, as I did in this case, find buried treasure.

Then once having found the treasure you would hold your breath and hope that no-one else discovered or wanted your buried treasure.

On this day, no-one had discovered and/or wanted what I treasured.

I paid $2 for my box.

I think there were other useful things in the box but they have faded away in my memory.

This, for someone who did not have much money to spend, was an affordable wonder.

Herself has been styling corners again and this corner includes the fruit bowl full of ornamental glittered pears.