When life gives you lemons…#3

The last way I found to use up the byproducts of the great lemon surplus of 2011 (having made lemon curd and nana’s lemon cordial) was randomly inspired by the delightfully titled Brian Malarkey’s Sage Sucker cocktail on designsponge. Brian goes down in history as having the.best.surname.ever. Malarkey – c’mon that is awesome! Apart from [...]

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When life gives you lemons…#2

…you can only consume so many of them in margaritas before someone says you have a problem. In which case it’s time to improvise. My next attempt to deal with the great lemon surplus of 2011 was to make lemon curd. Helpfully I found a Burke’s Backyard recipe for it at the same time I [...]

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When life gives you lemons…#1

Let’s gloss quickly over the fact that it’s been over 3 months since I last updated this blog :I know, I have neglected you but you know it’s not you, it’s me – I had other stuff to do…in other places. I kept meaning to call or write but there never seemed to be time [...]

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Something Thrifty: Lawn Seed Shaker

After watching a segment about Lawn Care on Better Homes and Gardens, I came away with a couple of thrifty tips and ideas. The first was the one featured in the segement – using a small plastic plant pot to spread lawn fertiliser (1:40 in the clip at the link above) as opposed to paying [...]

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What to do with loo paper rolls

According to three of my three my gardening books, you need to blanch leeks about 1 month before you harvest them. Blanching in this case means covering the stems with cardboard of some sort to make them white. You do this so you end up harvesting a white leek with green leaves, as opposed to [...]

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We save the seeds…

The seed saving experiment at casa moi has finally reached the zenith. (At the risk of over tarantino-esquing my post, one so rarely gets to use the word zenith in a sentence). I harvested oodles and oodles of pretty garlic chive flowers and dried them: The seeds (the teensy little black spots) needed a little [...]

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Some things are priceless

Golly – it’s been almost a month since I last posted. Time flies when you’re having fun (doing things like planting trees, assisting le amazant Monsieur H fix one’s reticulation, collecting prints as part of Windows on William, catching up with the Coffee Fairy on her brief stop over between London and Melbourne or preparing [...]

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Seed saving – garlic chives

I’ve planted chives and garlic chives in the planter boxes on the patio. The chives have yet to bloom, which is a shame as their purple flowers will be quite pretty if/when they do, while the garlic chives have now bloomed for a second time. Last year when my garlic chives flowered, I stood back [...]

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Rescuing wine bottles #1

Another Homemade Sunday project I’ve undertaken is to rescue the wine bottles used in my house. Instead of recycling them via the council, I have stored them until I had a big enough batch then soaked their labels off and removed the tin around the neck of the bottle:     Unless you plan to [...]

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Reusing Moccona Jars #1

The urge to collect Moccona jars is strong in my family – DIY Dad tends to buy and keep the larger ones while I usually get the smaller ones to keep spices in. Obviously at some point, one reaches critical mass for the amount of Moccona Jars one household can contain. However while DIY Dad [...]

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