I have seeds from a long red chilli drying in a bowl on a window shelf. Mandarin and orange peel is drying on the kitchen bench. Empty egg shell cartons are being stacked ready for a sprinkling of spring and summer seeds.


There's a garden hand fork jutting from soil at the back and front doors for an impromptu five minutes of weeding. Sprigs of fallen wattle or the dried remains of gifted bouquets fill posy vases and jars, and garden guides and seed catalogues adorn the coffee table.

My favourite gardening reads are the P.J. Hurley's This Week in Your Garden, a compilation of newspaper gardening columns from the 1950s, and The Garden Lover's Log, with monthly notes from Olive Mellor, written in 1940 and sold as a fundraiser for Red Cross.

For August, the recommendations are to plant seeds for spring and summer flowers, including antirrhinum (better known to us as snapdragons), aster, ageratum, begonia, carnation, clarkia, didiscus, gaillardia, godetia, African and French marigolds, nasturtiums, petunia, phlox, pyrethrum, scabious, verbena and zinnia.

For the vegetable patch, the seed recommendations are broad beans, cabbage, carrot, celery, leek, lettuce, onions ("for spring onions only"), peas, potatoes and turnips.


Enjoy the rest of your 'almost spring' weekend

I'll happily trade garden produce for a cuppa
Play with your poo paper
What farmers are doing to save our bacon (okay, maybe just dinner)
All my favourite flavours in a cake

Can you feel it? Can you feel spring on its way? Even though it's the middle of winter, I am already thinking about planting out spring seeds and how I'll keep water up to new growth.
There's a jug next to the kitchen sink to catch what water we can and buckets in the shower to water trees already showing the signs of water stress. I know the forecast and I know it's not good, but even so, I am looking to signs of what the garden can tolerate, taking cues from the Spanish countryside we walked through in a warm spring just a few months ago and now, no doubt, sweltering under record heatwave temperatures. We'll have the same here in just a few short months and I am walking the garden every week, looking at what will stay and what will need to go.

IN JULY:

I WENT TO... I didn't stray far from home this month. Rather, I've been enjoying this gorgeous, although dry, winter weather. It was 22C at home today: t-shirt weather when you're in the garden.

I ATE... at the Patonga Hotel. It's not the first time I've eaten there, but on a glorious winter's day, there's nothing better to spend time with friends, walking from Pearl Beach to brunch at the hotel. Breakfast is served until 11.30am, and it's an extensive, brunchy kinda menu.

I OP SHOPPED... Now that we're staying put and not moving into our teeny, tiny unit, I've ventured into op shops empty handed and brought home a few small treasures, including a stash of American Cook's Illustrated magazines from the 1990s that I'll read before returning.

I MADE... I finished sewing in the ends and working the seams on a knitted vest and have started a toe-up socks pattern: my first attempt at two-at-a-time, toe-up socks. I can see that once you get the hang of the entanglement of wool and circular needles, they can be quite addictive.

I READ... That stack of books from last month isn't getting any smaller, though I have made my way through a couple and gave up on others, happily taking them back to the local library.

It's too damn hot to be in the garden during the middle of the day but I find moments or shade enough to weed, plant new seeds, clip and generally keep on top of things, like ratty rosemary shrubs and salad vegetables that have bolted to seed.

The garden has always been a personal space, though companionable weeding is always welcomed. It's a source of pride to see new shoots or fresh blooms, or to pluck herbs and vegetables for a home-cooked meal. And, when it's too hot and humid to be outside, I can while away hours with my gardening bibles - mostly old Yates guides - for inspiration on what I should be looking ahead to plant or maintain.

It's taken me almost two decades to get the garden to the stage where it delights with each season and I seem to be more conscious of the passing of them than ever before.

I've sat among this flowery scene every chance I've had in November, knowing there are a few short weeks when it will be at its best. Already the hippeastrums have faded and are falling. The jasmine has lost all its scent and the flowers are dropping. Herbs are already bolting and what were lush beds of mint, spearmint, oregano and thyme have grown tall and ratty. I am waiting for them to flower and serve the bees before I cut them back down.

In their place, a frangipani is budding, the evening primrose holds the last of the day's light to blanket the garden in a soft pink glow and I can see the bulge of new pomegranates. Here's to another a fleeting month in the garden.

IN NOVEMBER: 

I WENT TO... Patonga Beach and camped with five women I've met through Girl Guides, some firm friends and some new friends. The weather was glorious, the waters were calm along the tidal creek and the campsite was a good size and with shade for us to spread out and loll about. We're all Guide leaders, so camping without kids to look after and teach was a real treat (though, we're usually more than happy to camp with the kids too).

I ATE... at the newly opened The Boathouse Hotel, in the old Patonga Hotel. One of the joys of camping without the kids was being able to go to the pub, order a beer or cocktail and merrily make your way back to your tent.

I OP SHOPPED... Vintage cookbooks from the 1970s. I've cooked from The Busy Woman's Cookbook. The biscuit and slice cookbook will get a workout before Christmas.

I MADE... Christmas decor with grandkidlet No.1. We haven't seen Miss 6 much this year and when we did see her regularly there were always a request for paints, glue and the prized object of glitter. Now she's at school, the desire to do crafts at Nana and Cracker's house has dropped away. She stuck with it for a few moments, but the short attention span of a six-year-old is held these days by dress-up. Fortunately, the op shops have delivered that in spades. I delight in leaving pieces around the house for her to 'discover': big hats, even bigger sunglasses, silk scarves with fringing that tickles, sparkly gloves, clacky mules. She's a miniature eccentric Iris Apfel by the end of the day.

I READ... Pages and pages of academic papers and exam notes. The library will be getting a good workout over the Christmas break. Anything but an academic paper.

When I was a kid, I knew it was spring because I was itching to go to camp. I loved that week of long days outdoors, campfire cooking, sleeping under canvas and returning home tanned and tired.

Those days seem such a luxury and so, so far away. I have got to work out how to recreate that feeling. For now, I'll appreciate these little signs of spring, and promise of the coming summer.

1. The lawn needs mowing. For months, nothing, and then bindi-eyes, grass up to your ankles and weeds, so many weeds.
2. Everything in my garden is bolting to seed. 
3. There are strawberries. 
4. Spring storms. We've had a few rumble through already.
5. Salads and barbecued snags are appearing on the menu. They'll be in high rotation soon.
6. The alarm goes off at 5am, but my daylight saving-denial is real and the body says it's 4am.
7. It's too warm to wear a jacket on the way to work, but still cool enough at night to want Uggs.
8. Early season mangoes. Mmmmm. Mangoes.
9. The jasmine, olive tree and hippeastrums are about to flower. The echiums, pictured, have been flowering for weeks.
10. I am getting invitations to end-of-year celebrations. 
11. All the fashion magazines have swimwear spreads.
12. You start the morning walk in track pants but change into shorts as soon as you arrive home.
13. There are more people out walking in the morning (must have seen those swimwear spreads). 
14. It's still daylight when the evening news is on.
15. You're thinking about the summer season and plans for Christmas.

There is something wholesome, straight-to-the-point and down-to-earth about a gardener. My mother and my maternal grandfather were gardeners and they, along with every true gardener I know, have no qualms about speaking the obvious and saying what must be done.

Daylight Saving knocks me around. I can never get beyond a feeling of being rushed and running on empty.

I know people love it and living on the coast, you’d think I’d have grown to love it too. I’m going to try and embrace it this year. I’ve been thinking I’ll use that time in the evening to take a walk and listen to a podcast or perhaps spend an hour in the garden. You can do a lot with an hour in the garden a few times a day. I thought I might even drive to the beach and take an evening dip when the weather gets warmer.

I’ve been thinking about routines a lot of late. I was telling a friend this week the routine I have to juggle full-time study, part-time work and the regular stuff - like running a household, keeping a garden, keeping up with family and making time for the grandkidlets - has meant keeping a tight rein on the diary. I plan things that should be spontaneous weeks, if not months, in advance. An overseas holiday to Malaysia, for example, was booked in February for September. I had to sync the plan with a uni schedule that meant finishing an exam on the Friday, flying Saturday, returning the following Sunday and showing up for the next trimester’s course work on the Monday. That trip was five weeks ago and I still haven’t downloaded my holiday pics.

Friends and family phone and ask whether I am studying before diving in for a natter. Often I am, but I hate friends feel they have to apologise for cutting into my day. The truth is I want them to. Online study is a pretty lonely and isolating experience. I see much, much more of my study and a computer screen than I’d like to.

And even though my routine has “very little fat in it” it’s so completely different to routines I’ve kept in the past. The full-time commuting routine meant getting up at 5am every day, travelling two hours each way and cramming 'something' into every little moment of available time in the evenings before crashing on Friday night to gingerly resurface on Sunday.

And that was completely different to the routine of having children at home and keeping up with grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning, washing, ironing, dropping kid off and picking them up and making sure the family hummed along, happy and harmonious (or something close to that). My sister and brother-in-law are firmly in that routine right now and it’s hard. I spent a week with them last month and my life is a luxury of time compared to that routine.

Whatever the routine, I am amazed how we learn to adjust and adapt. I am watching while one of my stepdaughters prepares to bring a second child into the world, and I marvel at how she and her partner, and the whole family, will expand to absorb the new.

And speaking of new routines, Daylight Saving and summer, can you believe it’s October and about 12 weeks until Christmas and the end of the year? My head hurts at what’s got to be done at work and for my MBA before then.

• If you’re game to add a weekend away to your scheduling crisis, come play at Jamboree with me. Last I saw there were still a handful of tickets left.

• Get the gang together, eat cake and do something sweet and good in a world that’s, quite frankly, gone to shit.

• 12 weeks until Christmas freaks me out. There’s just not enough making time, but I still really want to do this ornament swap. I am telling myself no, but you could sign up.

• Right now you can donate any Country Road-branded clothing at a Red Cross Shop and get a voucher to spend on new Country Road clobber. What goes around, comes around.

One minute life is puffing along quite nicely with routines in place and everything in order and then, BAM! You've put your hand up for a project here or to volunteer there and things get a little crazy.

And even though things have got a little off track, I wouldn't have it any other way. The 'busy' traps we find ourselves in are just in our heads. If we untangle them, the 'business' comes from what we commit to. That busy job in the city - two hours from home? I agreed to that. That weekend of Girl Guide camp? Yup, that was me. The half-finished cardigan I am knitting? I cast it on. The full-time study? Dinner for the extended family? The weekend away to support a loved one's passion project? Yes. Yes and yes. They were all decisions I made, and could have chosen not to make.

I like my life. I like the things I do. The people I spend time with. The places I go. I'm pretty damn lucky to have so many easy choices to do, or not to do, and there's always more things I can choose, or not choose. I did make a list of things I wanted to do this year. It was a bucket list for the soul, and so far, it's going pretty well.

How's your 'to-do', or 'not to-do' list going?

1. Go to a craft camp I've booked to go to Wild Rumpus' Jamboree in October.
2. Use a slow stitching and mending technique Oooh, I must share this. I mended a long-line sleeveless trench using a Japanese Boro Sashiko stitch.
3. Draw my op shop finds 
4. Pass the first year of my MBA
5. Read a book each month that is unrelated to work or study
6. Spend an average 15mins in the garden each day
7. Hold a garage sale
8. Camp in autumn I camped this weekend. It was a Girl Guide camp and it was winter, but I am counting it.
9. Camp in spring
10. Travel overseas A trip has been booked for September.
11. Lose 5kg
12. Spend a weekend in Melbourne with my Mum
13. Visit my Nana in Brisbane
14. Knit a Jenny Kee pattern
15. Host a camp cooking event for my Girl Guide #girlgang
16. Make a Pussy Hat Done, and I've been wearing it.
17. Host a Pussy Hat knitting workshop
18. Host a mandala stitching workshop
19. Cook from a recipe that’s new to me once a week I am keeping up and going above and beyond with this one. I'm digging into new recipe books and old favourites.
20. Cook a fancy dinner once a month I haven't got the Damask tablecloth out, but my new-to-me weekly dinners have strayed into 'fancy' territory.
21. Strike a frangipani I think I've done this. It's got little leaves on it.
22. Join a produce swap at least once a quarter Winning with this one. It's June and I've been to two produce swaps.
23. Ride my bike more I have done one long ride and had the bike serviced. That counts, right?
24. Swim in the ocean more
25. See more of my niece and nephew
26. Create an op shop guide to the Central Coast
27. Get my Girl Guide canoeing qualifications (for about the third time, I always let them lapse )
28. Do an overnight hike
29. Spend a weekend at Brunswick Heads Done and done and will be doing it again.
30. Use a solar dye pot
31. Go back to yoga classes One class down.
32. Write a short story
33. Read more poetry
34. Go to live music gigs I started with tickets to Martha Wainwright. Here's to more soon.
35. Write more letters to my letter-writing friends
36. Try straw-bale gardening
37. Learn more about bee-keeping
38. Make sourdough bread
39. Write and host a webinar
40. Play with my film cameras more
41. Try calligraphy
42. Pick up the printmaking tools again and crack out some prints
43. Make my own muesli

Hi, how are you? Happy to see these clear skies and the back of weeks of rain, cyclones and flooding? Me too. I'm venturing back out into the garden and watching passionfruit grow plump, salvias give a pre-winter show and wondering how to tackle the pruning that will need to be done this season following a tropical growth spurt.


Things to make and do: I scored a box of old pharmacy and tiny food jars for $5 at a car boot sale years ago. There's pretty red and purple salvias in the garden at the moment. I'll make a show of them soon, I think.

Things to cook and eat: It's mushroom season. I know families have been into the Central Coast hinterland looking for pine mushrooms but I am happy to buy mushies from the local farmers market and you can practically smell the earthy deliciousness of this recipe.



Things to drop dough on: Ordered and on its way.

Things to hang on the wall: Wall art doesn't need to be 2D.
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And just like that March is behind us, Daylight Saving is over and we're two weeks out from Easter. How does it happen?
Are you, like me, somewhere back in January, or worse, 2016?

This month slipped by so quickly, I had to think hard about all that's happened.

IN MARCH:

I WENT TO... Twilight at Taronga to see Martha Wainwright perform. After two weeks of rain we had a single perfect evening of clear skies. With a dear friend who had flown in from interstate, we enjoyed wine, cheese, biscuits, olives and smoked almonds on the Taronga Zoo lawn and lounged through an Indian Summer evening of great company and great music.

I ATE... Salads from the Arthur Street Kitchen Neighbourhood Cook Book. Every single salad I've made has been delicious. I make enough for dinner and lunch leftovers the next day, which has made me the envy of work colleagues.

I OP SHOPPED... A new pair of jeans, a Chinese doll, Milly Molly Mandy books, a 1950s biscuit tin, a pretty basket and four teeny weeny Tupperware containers. You can see them all here.

I MADE... I finished a bright pink pussy hat for winter wearing and have cast on a 1970s cardigan pattern.

I READ... I am making my way through book two of Elena Ferrente's Neapolitan series. Slowly. Much faster, and more interesting, reading is about Sylvia Plath's life in New York as a guest editor of Mademoiselle. 

Between being 'head down, bum up' in study and assignments, and rising early for the work commute, I'm knackered. Trying to find a balance isn't easy, but making small, incremental steps toward bigger projects keeps me sane.

CLEAN IN FITS AND FARTS

PRUNE IN PARTS

KNIT A LINE OFF THE CHART

A PAGE OR TWO KEEPS YOU SMART

A CONVERSATION WITH HEART

MAKE DINNER TIME AN ART

I've made jam from a glut of green tomatoes that, with so much rain, were going to split.
I've made chutney from a glut of red tomatoes, that had already split.
I made harissa paste from a glut of chillies.
I am making yummy salads from the Arthur Street Kitchen Neighbourhood cook book.
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If you planted broad beans for a spring crop, you probably have a glut right about now. This Moroccan dip is a tasty way to eat your way through a broad bean glut, without the hassle of having to double shell.

Gardener extraordinaire and chef Stephanie Alexander's recipe for byessar - a Moroccan dip - comes from The Cook's Companion. This and The Kitchen Garden Companion are, along with a Margaret Fulton cook book, my most referenced cooking bibles.

Stephanie recommends serving this dip with toasted pita bread and fat black olives. I have to admit, we didn't even get to garnishing ours.

INGREDIENTS

1kg broad beans, shelled
2 cloves garlic, chopped to a paste
1 teaspoon chopped oregano
1 teaspoon ground cumin
150ml extra virgin olive oil
salt and ground black pepper

WHAT TO DO

Once your broad beans are shelled place them into a rolling boil of salted water and boil for 15mins. You'll want to reserve the cooking water for later on so drain over a pan or heat-proof bowl to collect it. Let the beans and water cool a little and then tip half a cup of the reserved water into a blender along with the beans and all the other ingredients. Blitz it. If it's stodgy, add a little extra water until the dip's the right consistency.

Stephanie's directions actually suggest garnishing with a slurp of olive oil and a shake each of paprika, chilli powder and ground cumin, topping it all off with finely chopped spring onions.

Yum!

The garden is my favourite place to be at the moment. The star jasmine bloomed this week and the clivia is standing tall and the first bloom started to unfurl today. Bees are buzzing around the echium and the tomatoes, cucumber, zucchini, chilli plants, artichoke, broad beans and other edibles are in various stages of growth. I'll be getting out there every chance I get.

IN OCTOBER:

I WENT TO... Brisbane for the Commonwealth of Australian Governments (COAG) Summit for Reducing Violence Against Women and their Children. I was a delegate representing Girl Guides NSW & ACT and there at the request of the NSW Government. I have much to say about policies that protect women and their children from violence, support women to leave domestic violence and, of course, to stop the root cause of family violence - and these are many and complex.

However, I also have great pride in representing the only global organisation listening to girls and young women and responding to their experiences of violence with a view to supporting them to create safe environments, at home, at school and in their communities.

That organisation is the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts, or as you may know it, Girl Guides. Check it out. Join even.

I ATE... Lost Boys in Brisbane's Fortitude Valley was a welcome hidey-hole in the middle of a busy couple of days working across multiple offices in the city. I am inspired to try my hand at recreating the cafe and bar's thyme-infused lemonade. Ask for it. It's not on the menu.

I OP SHOPPED... I always have to refer back to Instagram to remind myself what I found at the op shops. This month a number of vintage cook books were added to my collection, and my button box grew with beads from my favourite Salvos Store and glass buttons from Vinnies. My favourite find was a gorgeous silk, 1960s era dress from my local Red Cross Store.

I MADE... I've been busy stitching Christmas ornaments to give to friends and have started on Christmas gifts using thrifted finds.

I READ... Brooklyn, by Colm Toibin. Now I really want to see the movie. Have you seen it? What should I read next?