New years gifts and great balls of fire

We have now been here long enough - with plants in the ground long enough to have a few new years treats.
Our Sno-peas and Telephone peas are flowering after making it through the very hot day of new years eve.

Sno-peas

There are regular pickings of salad vegies now.

 The nearly flowering things include Dutch pole beans, butter beans, Borlotti beans, Helen's white seeded bush bean,  and  Zucchinis.

Dutch Pole beans

The strawberries are really getting going now, putting on growth and sending out a lot more flowers. The tomatoes have quite amazing large fruit, on quite small plants in some cases.

Tomatoes setting fruit well

Boysenberries are now fruiting well while the raspberries of one variety are finishing up. The Autumn fruiting raspberry still has many fruit coming along and presumably will have fruit in Autumn as well.

Boysenberries

A visit to a local stone fruit farm by the girls brought on a frenzy of preserving, stewing and drying. Rayner's farm have over 200 varieties of stone fruit and have a continuous supply of fruit for 7 months of the year. Farmers markets are their main customers. I think it is a fabulous thing because the fruit can be picked when at perfect ripeness. The Apricots are to die for . Apricots do not get any sweeter after they are picked although they may soften up. The tractor ride takes you around to the trees of the best ripeness and you all get a taste and pick from the tree if you like them.

We have also been gleaning from local roadside cherry plums and making lovely tart jams and chutneys. The last gleaning was quite an experience. On a hot windy day a piece of long bark dropped over the power lines above the busily gathering mothers and babes. An explosion of blue flames raced from the bark to the power box several times over -  amidst scattering and crying children. All very exciting for the Alice Springs visitors and maybe somehow responsible for the power outage at around the same time.

There have been many walks around the paddocks with our visitors,

often ending in the giant wombat burrow experience

giant "walk thru " wombat burrow

and the ferns and big trees in the gully below