My Bright Field

  This week it was the blood plums time for harvest.  I love harvesting summer fruits but with amazingly productive trees the quantity can be overwhelming.   This year has been interesting.  With a cold start to summer some of the crops were delayed.  I understand that is why the cherries in the shops are late, huge and delicious this year (my cherry trees were old and dying so I cut the last one out recently).  In my case, the slow start seems to have set the fruit flies back a bit too, so we got quite a lot of fruit off this tree before they started ruining it.   I find it hard to choose which summer fruit I like best, they are all so yummy.  Do you have a favourite?

This weekend we went on another little adventure.  This time to Coonabarabran via train and bus.  It was a lovely experience.    What I like about trains and buses is that you ride high with big windows to look out on the countryside.  It might be countryside that is familiar (as this location is to us) but is so different from driving -- especially as I am doing all the driving at the moment so have to concentrate on the road rather than the scenery.  I am already working on where we will go next. The willy wagtails, which are frequenting our garden at the moment, also like to perch on high spots.   Do you go on train/bus excursions?

  I had my Mazda in for a service this week and saw this cute little 1964 R360 Mazda at the service centre.  My husband loves old cars.  When we are driving along and I see a vintage car I ask him what it is and he can invariably name the manufacturer, model and approximate year. He has no interest in the mechanics, just the shapes.  Hence, he is always complaining about modern cars, they all look the same he reckons.  "See that," he says, "it's a Jaguar (or some other posh car) you wouldn't know, it looks like any Japanese car." I find this knowledge of cars surprising as he has never made of point of studying them, I guess it has just been a lifelong interest.   I think my equivalent is native flowers from our local area but this is a quite recent interest (15 or so years) so I don't have a great breadth of knowledge on them.  Is there something that interests you so much that you collect the information almost unwittingly?

  Summer has arrived at last and the endless rain of recent years seems to have stopped.  Now the grass is drying off and would not even need mowing except for the dandelions that keep coming up.  The vegetable garden is getting into swing and fruit too.  There are also these onion things left by the previous owner which I don't harvest but leave grow because I like the flowers. What is happening in your garden?

Happy New Year.  I hope it is a lovely one for each of you. How did you go at Christmas.  Did you over indulge?  I was gobsmacked at the size of this dessert that my husband ordered when his brother was visiting recently. I have had the blog blahs lately, nothing new or interesting seems to be happening so I am likely to be very sporadic with my posts for while.