Labour Weekend – Day 2

It was overcast this morning so we just potted around in the garden for awhile then after lunch the sun was out, & in, & out again so we went for a ramble along the boardwalk of our local mangroves swamp! Very inspiring – not! I’m not holding out much hope for a better day tomorrow, mainly because rain is forecast!

Here’s a few photos of our garden, I thought it best to get in with the photos now before the insects & diseases take over once more! I would rather not use chemicals to spray on the garden, especially the stuff we eat, so by the end of the summer it’s not looking so hot!

This is the new raised herb garden we put in down the side of the house, it only gets the sun during the middle of the day so not sure how they’re going to go here. Still a few places to add more yet, when we find some we don’t already have.

The lettuces in the hydroponics are starting to grow once again, that’s rocket in the front, it sprouted up and went to seed within a few weeks! More lettuces will be added soon so we have new ones coming on regularly.

This is what our garden looked like this time last year before Dennis retired. Look at those weeds!

And this is what it looks like now, much better with  the new raised vegetable garden in the middle. On the right is a retaining wall with a fence on top of that, our next door neighbours are behind the trellised fence in the background. Not very large but just a nice size for us. When we first shifted in 10 years ago we planted four slow growing palm trees across the back of our garden. It’s taken 10 years for them to have grown this much! One of them died so now we have this gap in which we’ve tried to grow other things but never had much success because this part of the garden is usually in shade most of the year except in the middle of summer. So now we’re hoping to at least get a good crop of peas, beans, tomatoes, silverbeet and beetroot.

In the background is the olive tree which is covered in little olives. Would you believe in the foreground is a miniature rose! Years & years ago it was planted in the corner of one of the steps leading up into the garden and it has never flowered. I kept on saying don’t pull it out I want to see it flower and it just grew bigger & bigger until this year I gave it a good talking to and said ‘ok this is it, you flower this year or I’m pulling you up’ and blow me down it’s absolutely covered in buds! Not the most inspiring of blooms though, a flat white one.

Seedling lettuces getting a bit of sun and in the background is a blueberry bush, there are two of those also covered in pretty white flowers that will <hopefully> eventually turn into blueberries.

 

One of my favourite plants – Coprosma Golden Glow. Transplanted after being in a pot and just shot up overnight. You might think we have funny looking soil in our garden, up until last year the whole garden was covered in weedmat underneath wood chips. We decided to pull up the weedmat and start again, there was so much wood chip that in the end we left some of it hoping it would rot down eventually.

Another miniature rose, buds are orange, flowers open to yellow and fades away to nearly white.

This is the New Guinea Impatiens ‘Red Fox’ that I bought yesterday, I can’t get a decent photo of it without the colour being overblown. It’s definately bright orange when you see it next to a red one.

Two climbers, purple pelargonium and an apricot rose.

The Avondale Mangroves Boardwalk.

Dead supermarket trolley! See what I mean – not that inspiring?

Mangrove fruit.

 

Dawn was the drive behind getting this boardwalk made, beats me why?

Labour Weekend – Day 1

Our long holiday weekend was off to a good start weatherwise today, one out of the box. We went for a stroll around one of our local parks, had a picnic lunch and then called into the garden centre for a chaotic browse for plants to spruce up our garden for summer. Half of Auckland had the same idea, as I said very chaotic! We ended up with three herbs, a rainbow coloured silverbeet, three bright orange impatiens, 12 strawberry plants and a pop out strawberry container to grow them in!

This is an old b&w picture of the area taken in 1921, many years before it was developed into the beautiful park it is today. I lived nearby when I was growing up and us kids used to go there to catch tadpoles and bring them home in glass jars. I don’t ever recall any of them ever becoming a frog though!

Two Pukeko – Porphyrio porphyrio melanotus – bickering over a piece of bread.

I was fascinated with how they held the bread in their loooong toes to peck at it.

Huge eels in the lake, very fat & overfed!

Enough said!

Very large fish, don’t know what they are but look at that gorgeous gold colour.

Baby black swans, shame about the water being so muddy. Hey, it looks a bit like a painting rather than photo doesn’t it?

The playground was crowded.

Mother Australasian Coot – Fulica atra australis – feeding her baby.

 

These two swans were characters, they’d swim out together from the shore, then one would peel off to the right and the other to the left, turn around, meet in the middle and then race each other back to the shore as fast as they could! Bored teenagers I bet!

There were lots of people out & about, various nationalities and persuasions, all out walking their children, their dogs, feeding the birds & eels, picnicking and generally taking in the delights of a lovely day.

Hey, what’s a Melbourne tram doing in Auckland?

This young girl sat here the whole time we had our picnic, in quiet contemplation just staring into the water, romance problems perhaps?

Hoping for just such a lovely day tomorrow.

Dentist again

On Tuesday I had an appointment with the Bone Research Study that I’m participating in at the hospital. I had to fast for the blood tests so I was really hungry by the time I arrived there at 10am. After three more bone density scans and blood & urine samples (why didn’t they tell me that before I went when I arrived!!) they gave me breakfast, very nice too. I had intended on taking my camera with me because we were going to walk in the domain afterwards but darn it I forgot it! It was another lovely day so the walk was very enjoyable.

Yesterday I made sure I had the camera with me on my second visit to the dentist in Newmarket. The weather has been wonderful lately so we detoured on the way to the train on our way home. I had the most decadent chocolate filled croissant with my mocha for lunch, at this rate I’ll need to walk forever.

There’s a lot of construction work going on in Newmarket at the moment, a new train station etc etc, it was so noisy and dusty that we made a quick getaway in the end, after a few snaps.

The murder house.

Spring beauty.

‘Sliver’,  the Virginia King sculpture on the corner of Khyber Pass Road and Broadway.

A new bus service I hadn’t seen before, Waka Pacific. I liked the design painted on the bus - it reflects the Maori population of the Papakura area. The colours and shapes represent the water, air and land. There are also references to the area’s three pa sites.

Lunch in the sun. Behind the temporary blue wall is a lovely little park called Lumsden Green that must be having work done on it. The Green occupies a triangle of land at the intersection of Parnell Road, Broadway and Khyber Pass which had been put aside as a reserve in 1878. The park is ornamented by a modernist fountain, a 19th century canon and a stainless steel sculpture by Marte Szirmay installed in 1969 to mark the Centenary of the Newmarket Highway district. The park is named in honour of David Lumsden, the last Mayor of Newmarket before amalgamation with Auckland City in 1989.

Appetising food in the window of the Dondon Rikka Japanese Restaurant in Short St.

Where I live!

 

Nearly home, a little oasis in the midst of traffic chaos in New Lynn.