ADVENT GREEN

We've had gardening fever of late, particularly over the past week as we rush to fill all the (reasonably) new vegetable beds in the front garden and transfer all my long-nurtured seedlings to the ground. It was truly all hands on deck. It's difficult to see from these images as all the new plants are still small but, we're done. For now. Tomorrow we head to my home town of Sydney for Christmas with family and cross our fingers that all the hard work we've put into the garden of late will result in some wonderful surprises upon our return. Thankfully our kind neighbours will water all those fragile new plants and thankfully we were home this week when the hot days hit so we could water them more than once. Yesterday was 40 degrees!

And school might be over for the year but, I've had many requests for gatherings with school friends and one of the ways we met these requests was with a day out at a relatively nearby farm (20 minutes away). We laboured the decision of whether to pick cherries, blackberries, strawberries or raspberries but when a farm worker told us that the cherries were literally dropping off the trees and that the branches were low enough for the kids to easily pick, we were sold! And cherries were literally dropping off the trees as we walked along the rows of trees. Beyond our group, we hardly saw a soul making it feel like a private, joyous pleasure. Such a wonderful We've booked in another with the same school friends. I have a feeling these school holidays (Elsa's first summer type) are going to be fantastic.

And if anyone's interested, the kids hats were made from a pattern in this book. They're a few years old now and, since the pattern is so great and I have quite the stash of fabric, I might just make another pair this summer). 

The boys on the bus driving away from the cherry-tree paddocks