Several of our gladioli blooms were weighted down by the rain yesterday and the flowers too heavy and the stems too bent to be able to reach back up toward the sky.

We rescued them.

They now grace our kitchen window ledge.

A treasured friend who adopted my beloved cat, Indiana (Indy), when I left Sydney in 2004, introduced me to this phrase:

This too shall pass.

She had it tattooed on her arm, I asked her about it, she told me it was from a fairy tale about a king who had four prospective wives and asked each one to come to him with something that would help him rule both in good and bad times. He then would choose his bride. I can’t recall what the other prospective wives bought him, probably gold and/or other material riches, but I do remember what the one who became his wife gave him, she gave him those four words, ‘this too shall pass’.

I’ve often been grateful to my friend for sharing this phrase with me, and I think a fine phrase to tattoo on yourself as a reminder to treasure the good times and weather the bad.

Today’s harvest 🌱

I hope kindness abounds today!

Happy rain soaked garden.

Back in 2005 one of my girlfriend’s married a Scotsman and it was he who introduced me to this Scottish proverb:

What is for you won’t go by you. 

So often these words have helped me let go and be rest assured that all is as it should be.

Today’s harvest 🌱

Have a wonderful day!

I love tomatoes too, they’re definitely up there with peas for me. But not for my daughter, there will be no competition from her when we harvest our tomatoes!

We are a while away from harvesting.

We have some blossoms…

…and a few baby tomatoes.

In this day of technology how can we protect our children’s minds so they can enjoy a childhood? We can’t always be around. Children together on their phones/tablets, exploring the internet, can find such scary things.

The thought of the compounding effect of exposure to scary/damaging things scares me for our young generation.

I love books.

We’re reading The Phantom Tollbooth and today we saved the princesses Rhyme and Reason from the inhabitants of Ignorance. Such an awesome book, have you read it? Can’t recommend it highly enough!

Today’s harvest 🌱

Hope the peaks make you smile today and the troughs are easy to jump across.

Fresh peas from the garden are one of our very favourite things (understatement). We look forward to pea season and have been known to pop into the local fruit store and ask, any peas yet? Until, many years ago, the fruit lady said she’d text us, and indeed she did for years but sadly they sold their fruit store last year, now we’re back fending for ourselves!

We plant as many as we can in our garden and fill bags of them when they appear (momentarily) at the supermarket.

With the bags of peas from the market, we sit in the sun and devour them, a bag at a time. Heaven.

With the peas we grow? They are much more precious, we’d be lucky to harvest a small handful each day. They are counted and equally split. How many did you pick? How many did I get? That’s not fair!!! He he, see how precious they are?

This years crop have been particularly juicy, sweet and delicious.

Truly scrumptious (my daughter saw this and started singing, and I joined in…you are truly scrumptious…scrumptious as the breeze across the bay…so delicious…you are the answer to our wishes..). The song could be about our peas! 🌼

Today’s harvest 🌱

Have a wonderful day!

We have removed most of the agapanthus from our garden, just a few remain. I have a love/dislike relationship with them. I love their colour and resilience but they are a bit rampant for my liking. Interesting snippet, in New Zealand Agapanthus are now registered as an ‘environmental weed’.

The flowers are reaching their end and I was going to cut them back this afternoon, but I noticed a couple of busy bees…

So fat, intent and busy, they made me smile. These bees are big, I would say easily twice the size of the honey bees we had when I was growing up in Australia.

Today’s harvest 🌱

Favourite moment from the past couple of days…we were out and about, I was on foot, my daughter on roller blades, she was way ahead and had stopped to wait for me at the crossing…I stretched out my arms for a hug and she raced back, smack, into my arms (like a professional speed skater). You’ll be glad to know I braced myself so she didn’t knock me over 🍃

Hope you were able to ‘kill ’em with kindness’ today (finding inspiration from my daughter’s pop music 🌼).

Something is bothering our strawberry plants, even so they are giving us a few berries…

…we might need to replace them next year.

Likewise, something was bothering me today…I started to think about something I don’t have and, with those thoughts, came all those associated feelings.

It reminded me of my daughter being sad about something she didn’t have the other day. This is what I said to her:

The quickest road to unhappiness is to look at what you don’t have and the quickest road to happiness is to look at what you do have.

Hope you find happiness in what you have today.

Like today’s harvest 😃

Blue sky

Sun

Nature

Detail

Beauty

Joy

Last summer we added an apple tree to our garden, a Golden Delicious. In October the little tree surprised us with bundles of beautiful pink and white blossoms.

And, can you believe it, in our first year, we have a crop of five apples! They are still little, about quarter the size of a tennis ball.

We are very happy with our apple tree, it settled in, immediately happy in our garden.

Talking about apples, I tasted a delicious apple at work the other day, a Sunrise, I wonder if we have room for another apple tree…?

May your day be one of those where you get to accumulate spare starlight for your pockets for that rainy day.

We have added some feijoa trees to our garden. Our first blossom.

One of our young feijoa trees in the afternoon sun.

A baby feijoa?

May the sun find your shoulders to warm today.

Freshly harvested for dinner, mesculin and fresh sweet juicy peas.

A chuckle from today: my daughter, after learning I used a new moisturiser said, “I thought you were looking younger”. Thank you for making me smile.

Our gladioli’s are starting to bloom.

Have a wonderful day!