Before:

After:

I used these cute antique bronze daisy upholstery tacks from Bunnings:

There was Christmas, of course. This was the first Christmas that Tim and I have spent together just the two of us. For Christmas Day lunch we had lobster with prawns, cold meats and salad topped off with some fancy cheeses and crackers and a pavlova.

We had a lovely few days of Christmas lunches and Christmas dinners and despite the fact that it was just the two of us we still had all the trimmings for Christmas dinner, including my favourite Sharwood’s mango chutney with gravy soaked baked potatoes and pumpkin, roast pork with apple sauce, turkey with an apricot and herb stuffing and roast lamb with mint sauce.

Tim gave me a set of Pantone mugs. I had my eye on these as far back as September 2008 (see here) but couldn’t justify spending almost $20 each on mugs. Tim’s got a good memory. Look how nice they look on display:

And the grand poobah of them all is the ride-on mower trailer that I received from Tim. This is definitely going to come in handy for moving soil and transporting weeds and clippings. Tim’s mum also suggested that we could wash the dogs in it :)

Housewise, the main bedroom got decorated (although no wallpaper yet because I haven’t been able to find one to match the grey on the walls correctly). The windows were stripped, sanded and re-painted so they are all nice and lovely now. New window hardware was fitted and a blind was added. I want to make curtains for this window as well, perhaps in winter.

The hallway was decorated (although we’re just waiting for some picture rail to complete the hallway - it should be ready in February). New sofas, an extraordinarily comfortable mattress and a bedroom suite were ordered and they should be delivered in about 3 weeks. With these purchases, combined with the $935 car service and $900 for four new tyres for my car (yes, $225 per tyre!) I am hemorrhaging money. Perhaps its time to stop and re-group for a couple of months. Then towards the end of March I’ll be handing out more money again when the bathroom gets done.

Gardenwise, the last of the silverbeet was harvested in December. This crop has given us three or four silverbeet & fetta pies since I planted them out in about February or March 2010.

Silverbeet is a vegetable where you can keep cutting the leaves off and it will re-grow. But it will go to seed eventually. Once they go to seed you can keep cutting the seed heads off but after it goes to seed, the plant never produces lovely big deep green leaves. So it was time to say goodbye to the silverbeet. 

I also pulled up the last of the carrots and most of the leaks.

And in their place I planted pink eye potatoes, which seem to be going steadily but the bushes are not as tall or as bushy as they were last year. Seeds of corn, cucumber, lettuce, carrot and strawberry were grown in punnets.

The lettuce and carrot are growing pretty slowly so they will be transplanted out into the vegie garden in the next couple of weeks.

The cucumber seeds seemed to sprout quickly and they were transplanted into the garden to get growing. About half of the cucumbers seem to be growing very minutely – the rest aren’t doing well at all but we’ll see what happens. 

The corn also sprouted really well and it’s now in the apple crate veggie garden growing nicely, but perhaps not growing as quickly as I would like them to.  To my surprise, amongst the corns there are a few pea plants growing. It struck me as odd because I hadn’t actually planted any pea seeds this season. Then I realised that some of the pods would have fallen off the pea bush that was in this crate back in November. If I find the time I’ll transplant the little peas elsewhere so that they can get proper support to grow on. It’ll be interesting to see if they yield as many pea pods as the original bush.

I had no luck with my early tomato seeds, not one sprouted, so I purchased some seedlings instead: Grosse Lisse and Green Zebra. The bushes are nice and strong and I’m certain that we’ll get some nice juicy tomatoes from these little beauties.

I’m also hopeful about perhaps getting a few artichokes from the globe artichoke seeds that I planted last year. Look at this beauty.

Disappointingly, we didn’t get a single plum from the plum tree. The birds ate every last one of them. I bought a plastic owl and even put shiny chrismtas ornamnets on the tree to scare the birds but they didn’t seem to care. I think the tree really needs to be cut down and a net placed over it. Not sure if that will happen this year though.

Elsewhere in the garden, I’ve been training the climbing rose to braid itself up and around the lamp post that sits at the entrance of our property. In early December it finally bloomed. Since we’ve been here, it has never bloomed. To my delight it turns out it’s a pink rose! Here it is in the background:

We did a lot of general cleaning up in the garden towards the end of 2010. When I first moved here in May 2009 and had a fence put in, the fence contractors had to bulldoze a lot of vegetation (mainly reeds and weedy type bushes) in order to get the fence in. They ended up just dumping tonnes of vegetation in two huge piles at the back of our yard. It’s been on our to-do list for a while to clean up the piles. After last year spotting two tiger snakes, being within a metre of one and seeing the other poking its head over the gutter on the roof (ya!), I am now paranoid about snakes. I would forever blame myself if the dogs got bitten. So I moved this clean up project to the top of my to-do list. Next to the piles created by the fence contractors, there used to be a massive fallen tree trunk more than a metre in diameter and about 7 metres long. In October, I got someone round to take away most of the vegation mess and Tim chainsawed the fallen tree into bits so that we can use it on the fire this winter. How nice it is to have this area cleared.

Before:

After:

We have a dingo booked for next weekend so that we can level that section out and spread some nice top soil in preparation for laying some lovely green turf. Those weeds should all be dead by that time as I sprayed them last week. Next weekend will be interesting because we have about 6 projects that we need the dingo for and we only have the dingo for the two days. I wonder if it will all get done?!

So, what is on the to do list for 2011?

Some time soon – have a clean out and take some stuff to auction[done], buy pendant lights for hallway, create a step in the paving at the door of the shed [done], pave the section of courtyard currently covered with river pebbles [change of plan, we're going to build a deck in this spot instead], pave the section at the side of the house [chang of plan, I'm going to dump a couple of loads of compacted metal dust in here instead], finish spreading grass seed under the kitchen window [done], finish spreading grass seed along the length of the drive way, seed any other sections of bare patches in the lawn [done], build the final garden bed [done], fill up the garden beds and the new veggie crates [done], plant out garden beds [done] and veggie crates, install chook wire under the fence behind the shed so that Cloe stops escaping (she got out 3 times in one week in December and I had to run up and down the street calling her name and people just looked at me like I was a maniac) [done], cut remaining piles of fence palings.

End of March – bathroom renovation, laundry renovation, plasterboard entrance around front door, remove aluminium sliding door from sunroom and replace with french doors, decorate the sunroom.

August-ish – repair rotten deck.

Fun and games lay ahead!