Hand Balm

It feels like so long ago that I started playing around with beeswax and infused oils to make my own lip balm and hand balm. My latest batch is a lovely green thanks to the oil I put in the back of a cupboard to infuse in 2020!

This one is a mix of coconut, sesame, macadamia and olive oils infused with marshmallow, calendula and comfrey.

If you want to make your own I use the instructions from Grow Forage Cook Ferment.

If you want to see how I used to dry my herbs check out this post. We've got a bay window in our new house so I'll have to figure out a new drying rack!

Laminated colouring pages

Our daughter loves to draw on things purely so she can clean it off, which is really frustrating her when it comes to colouring pages. Not to mention her cloth of choice is a wet wipe which just doesn't end well for the paper.

My solution was pulling out the laminator and ripping some pages out of her colouring books so she can draw and clean to her hearts content! And to make it even easier, the Bluey one from Crayola is all loose pages already.

I just love a super quick and easy project, especially when there isn't a mess to clean up. Added bonus is that the laminator is very interesting to a two year old!

Too many garden projects

 As per usual I keep starting new projects which means I'm not getting anything finished!

I've got a crazy paver path going in to meet the gravel driveway of the carport. This is replacing the trip hazard of a very large paver sitting high, then a smaller paver sunk down lower which then creates a step up to the concrete slab along the front of the house! This is clay soil and it's all still settling around the septic tank that was put in before we bought the house. I'll let this settle, but no doubt it will need a proper base. What you can't see is the rocks in this area growing so many weeds that I still need to deal with...

We bought a playground for our daughter's birthday that I still haven't finished assembling - or decided where it's going. It also needs a fence around it as the property is not fully fenced. And after the crazy winds blew it over, we have some repairs to add to that list!

I planted my first 'tree', and it's not fun thanks to the dry, hard clay. For this one I added gypsum and a bag of compost that I forked through while I decide what my plan is going to be for planting future trees. This one is the arrowroot pot guild so the tree is just a mulberry cutting that I poked in the pot right before we moved. You can see it desperately needed to be in the ground (or at least given more water and fertiliser)!

Then there is the pit that was put in before we bought the house. So much bare soil, so many weeds to pull, and a round bale of mulch to finish spreading. I was meant to finish mulching before I started planting flowers, but I had to put some sunflowers in. Oh and then I was given some bulbs that were already sprouting, needless to say there is still a lot to do over the pit, but at least there are pretty flowers now.

And I've also got lots of bare dirt/and weeds where the trucks and excavators were driving. Thankfully we have a grey water sprinkler which I moved around regularly so the grass has covered most of the paths. You can even see our completed project in the background - a fence for Archie! This puppy pen area hasn't grown much so I've added grass seed and left the grey water hose there to help it along - the test patch is very thick and almost ready for it's first hair cut.

Frogs everywhere!

 While I am missing the blue tongues we had at our old house, I am enjoying the wallabies, heaps of birds, little red tailed skinks and it is still a novelty finding bandicoot holes everywhere! And now that we're rural, we have neighbours with horses, cows, sheep and alpacas.

Archie lets the whole neighbourhood know when he sees a frog! Of all the things he obsessively barks about at night, I'm surprised it's frogs - I wish he would scare off the rabbits snacking on my plants instead!

There are many others we've seen, or rescued from inside, and the ones we hear but never see. They're certainly enjoying all my pot plants - especially the birds nest fern and the pitcher plant, along will all my self watering pots. I need to build one of those frog hotels to encourage them to keep away from Archie.