Independence Days - Last Week of Autumn

Ooooh, winter is officially getting closer...

Garden:
Have dug over a patch of garden the chickens vacated a few weeks back, sprinkled it with fireplace ash, and dug up the few weeds left over (fortunately the chooks aren't too heavy and the soil remains fairly undisturbed from what it had in it previously and I make sure I don't stand on it). This patch will have garlic cloves put into it in a few weeks (need to get onto sourcing my cloves - the organic supermarket ones I have are really small, and I was hoping for larger cloves) and is on higher ground than some of the others that ended up under water last spring!

Received some more discarded herbs from yippee-I-have-relatives-who-own-a-herb-nursery that needed putting into the ground. A few are double ups on ones I already have, but I also received Bronze Fennel, Myrtle, Lemon Grass and Peppermint (will need to investigate on how they can be used). After visiting a friend last week I grabbed from her garden some nasturtium and sweet violet that I will see if I manage to get to take off.

Looked in my compost bins for the first time in ages (Simon usually empties the scraps from the house). Ewwww, it was slimy, wet and gross so very lacking in brown waste. So I piled in a heap of fallen leaves and branches, scrapped up some of the straw from the chickens coop and will add some paper when I next remember. Dug it all over (once I found my buried fork in the overgrown grass) - the soil looked lovely under the slime and plenty of lovely wormies in there. The rat *shudder* that vacated it must have found it to its liking though!

Harvesting - silverbeet, spinach and herbs (using a lot of herbs lately!).

Keeping warm:
Have discovered that the apple tree that fell down last winter and was chopped into logs burns really hot and slow. So it's nice to have some slow burners to put on once the fire is roaring.

We have a couple of skylights in our lounge which, although are double-glazed, I suspect let a lot of heat out (the ceiling is a cathedral ceiling). So yesterday decided to do something about creating an extra insulation layer and inserted some bubble wrap into them with an air pocket between the plastic and the window. Last winter I investigated into buying a similar product that was specially created for doing just that. Fortunately being on the ceiling, it doesn't look too bad and still lets in a lot of light.

Dinner:
A beef and lentil casserole is in the crockpot. Have been using the crockpot about 3 times a week lately and loving it.

Home sweet home:
Did some major deep-cleaning of the kitchen, laundry and our bedroom over the weekend. Boy did those areas need it and I was on such a roll that it was very satisfying. Was pretty disgusting down under the fridge and oven and everything had a good wipe down including all the cupboards and drawers.

Herbal Medicine study:
Well, still no further in the official study side of things, but have continued on with reading through my books and about to make up a chart of herbs, when to harvest, what parts to use, when to propagate etc - I'm sure I could buy one or download one off the net, but I know if I put in the research myself it'll be more likely to stick.