violets

I can think of so many things I’d like to do “when I grow up”.

I would love to have a violet farm.

Pink ones and purple ones.

How sweet it would be to pick posies of violets to take to elderly ladies in a nursing home. They miss their gardens and their flowers. How sad it must be to live in a sterile environment with no flowers after living long years enjoying tending gardens and picking fresh flowers for their homes.

Violets are personal. It is comforting to have a fragrant little posy beside the bed.

stitching snippets

Colourful stitching gives a zing today.  Working with aqua, bright orange, cheery yellow and hot pink brightens my wintery afternoon. 

  Hand stitching is so soothing.

When my mind feels muddled and I don’t “feel” creative, I go through the motions of hand embroidery – steadily following the pattern without  thinking .

The rhythmic action allows me to ponder.

To meditate and contemplate, freeing from the nagging guilt that I am not coming up with original creativity that is more dramatic.

Stitching is a quiet achievement.

 It is good to be productive when I don’t feel productive.

Even the snippety scraps are pretty!

bouquets of blessings

I am trying my hand to grow farm fresh flowers to sell.

A little enterprise from home, making the most of here and now. We have a beautiful little property with the most marvellous soil, a plentiful supply of water from a large dam and an excellent temperate climate to grow all my favourites.

I was born in the wrong country.

Natives have no place in my garden. They are relegated to "outside the fence"!

My heart is drawn to flowers with soul. And fragrance. A must for real flowers!

Honeysuckle, sweet peas, clove-scented dianthus, old fashioned roses, jonquils and heliotrope.

And stocks. Lots of stocks! 

My hubby jokes that I have a vested interest in stocks and shares.

I love stocks and I love to share them.

Bouquets of blessings they're called.

I am trying to sell them too. It's been an interesting journey to finally grow them successfully. This is my fourth year. 

A 'slow flower' business. Real flowers grown the old fashioned way. No chemicals or hot houses. Just clean fresh country air. Maybe that's why they smell so good!

I would like to earn some money to tuck away in an adventure fund, yet I don't want to compromise my job at home as a homeschooling mama. 

So....we'll see how we go.

When I ordered the first lot of seedlings, they were two months earlier than I expected. 

Now they're flowering, so we have traditional spring flowers in the middle of winter! 

The loungeroom smells delicious with their scent.

I always planned to have these beauties as a feature flower in a bouquet.  

Last year, they all came out into flower while everything else was entrenched in winter mode.

They were quite happy to stand alone!  Majestic magenta blooms that just got bigger and bigger as the buds filled out and lengthened to about 30 cms.

This year, I thought I planned things better by planting white stocks with Queen Anne’s lace and Irish bells. Only the stocks flowered early again!

As I wandered around with white stocks in hand, I gradually gathered other bits and pieces to fill out into a beautiful bunch.  Variegated euphorbia, green cobea scandens buds,  frothy  white elderflower heads and some surprising additions of salvia buds and leaves that smell like glace pineapple.

shy peeks

Violets are making their appearance now it's wintertime.

These tiny beauties shyly poke their purple petals up through the heart shaped leaves and stand surprisingly strong on their delicate stems. Their are a delight to collect into a pretty posy.

Fiddly to pick, but their sweet fragrance is worth the labour of love.

Press the pause button

I am developing an aversion to words like

Hurry, rush, scurry, fast

Preferring instead – ponder, slow and contemplate.

It has been a semi-colon kind of an afternoon

A pause to breathe deep and catch my breath after a busy 'out & about" week.

Autumn verges on the cold snap of winter.

The last of the roses bloom giving bursts of colour and subtle fragrance against the backdrop of barren branches.

The light is low and fading with a mellow hue on this late Sunday afternoon.

Darker and damp after a shower of rain.

It is still and mild, the leaves barely holding on to their hosts. 

The air is poised on the verge of the change of season. 

Winter will arrive soon enough with a whoosh of cold wind and silent numbing frost.

Yesterday was a whole day to pause.

Not particularly productive. A bit of this and a bit of that.

A puddling, pottering, pondering day without any “have tos” on the agenda.

So relaxing.

A foreign word in today’s vocabulary.

Stop. Sit. Still.

Nap.

Becoming whole again after a scattery rattery time out and about.

Whole-some.

Time to feel wholly myself.

Not frayed or frazzled or short circuited.

To think whole thoughts.

Becoming less rare as my children grow older.

Less interruption to arrest those trains of thought and the process of following through.

A new concept after all these years.

Holy space to be quiet.

And listen.

taking time to smell the ... STOCKS!

I am not a perfectionist. That’s an advantage in a garden this size. I’d go nuts if I thought I had to have it all “just so”. Being in control is the antithesis of gardening ( and farming ) anyway isn’t it?

I am a firm believer in making the best of what you’ve got, right where you’re at.

If I waited until everything was perfect, I’d get nothing accomplished. The garden is a work in progress but I have secret hopes that one day when I grow up, I might be able to have a little sideline creating beautiful bouquets of old fashioned fragrant flowers.

So, I launched into my dream plan …. without a plan, really.

At least I prepared the soil, but there were still weeds and untamed areas all around my little plot. Let’s call it an “agricultural trial”.  An experiment.

The last two years’ stocks were some silly hybrid throwback variety that turned out to be dwarf single flowers – useless for what I had in mind. Then I tried poppies, but found out the hard way, they only last 24 hours once they’re picked.

So this was my fourth year of trowel – err – trial and error.

I tracked down the seedlings which promised to be tall, double, fragrant cerise coloured stock flowers, ideal for cutting. I had to order a mimimum of 285 of the tiny little plants. All the same colour.

I tenderly tucked them in, watered, weeded and helped them along diligently with a couple of doses of seasol. 

And waited.

The dogs tore through them, knocking them sideways, birds nibbled off some new shoots and escapee chooks scratched up a couple, but most of them came through.

‘Do what you can with what you’ve got where you are.’

That’s my new motto.

Yes, I still have plenty of weeds.

But I’ve also got beautiful stocks in all their fragrant cerise coloured glory.

Success.

Yes!

I want to be a lady in a flower shop!

I do wish I could be a florist. Or at least flit off to work as a "lady in a flower shop". Meanwhile, my heart is in the garden and I have a secret little dream tucked away to perhaps grow enough flowers to make pretty posies and beautiful bouquets that scent a home the way flowers are meant to. With spring in the air, there will be abundant flowers for the picking. And it's always fun to have some to share. It is such a cheery gift of love to give flowers. What happy work it must be to play with them all day as a business!