Happy New Year!!

2013 a new year and a new journey for us all. I was very glad to say good bye to 2012 for many reasons, but i have learn't a lot from it as well. I know many of you have made resolutions for the new year but this is something i do not do, i set goals instead. I feel that most resolutions set each year fail within the first few weeks or are forgotten or not stuck to, so why bother.
I am still putting together my goals for 2013 but most of the goals will be set around home improvements. I will share my goal list once i have finished.

Last year I was able to achieve a few things which I am happy with and they were:

1. Having solar power connected which was done in Feb 2012, 8 panels all up.
2. Having a new large 4 door pantry cupboard built in to the kitchen for my stock pile and supplies.
3. Getting a 1000ltr water tank set up for the vege garden which sadly due the they lack of rain in the past month is now empty, so im thinking of now sourcing another tank for a backup.
4. Lastly i purchased a much needed new laptop just before Christmas as my poor old 10.1" was showing its age and so very slow, but i did manage to run the business on the poor little thing.

All of the improvements done to the house and extras have been done by saving up the profits from my little EBAY store The-Rose-Garden-Boutique. If you have a look you will see that everything sold in the store is handmade by me.

This years goals will hopefully be funded once again by the business, its a great feeling seeing what all my hard work as brought the family home.

Its been a long time.

Its been a long time since my last post and a lot as happened since then.
Such as:
My son and partner moved out of our home and into their new house early November and are settling in nicely.
 My daughter has finished year 12 so no more school routine in this house, well not until she starts uni in 2014 as she is having a gap year in 2013.

Im looking forward to the new year as i have less of a work load with 2 less people in the house to cook for and look after. Son 19 will be moving back into the big bedroom, once its painted which will then give me back my office room which i had to move out of 18 months ago when the family grew from 4 to 6. I have big plans for my new office and i have said to the family that i am never going to give up my office again :) Once things start falling into place with painting and decorating my office room i will place pics on the blog for all to see. Im so excited about it.

I have also had my family of ducks expand, a while ago i put on a short post showing a photo of my pair of ducks Molly and Mickey. Well they have become parents. I had a friend incubate 10 eggs about 7 months ago and we ended up with 7 ducklings. 4 boys and 3 girls. Prior to these babies hatching the breeder that my adults came from also incubated some of my eggs and ended up with 8 ducklings. She kept one beautiful Indian Runner boy with a huge feather crest on top of his head (dad is crested) and the breeder gave me one of the girls from that hatch. I was able to sell the 4 boys to a lovely lady i met on facebook nd she send me photos of them, which is nice to see that they are doing well. This now gives me 6 ducks all up, 5 girls and dad.

Dad is standing at the right side of the pool and mum is the darkest one in the pool, the girl standing at top corner is the older one from the breeder.

Each day i go out and collect up to 5 duck eggs and several chicken eggs, they are very productive creatures and its said that ducks lay more eggs in a life time than chickens do, so now my only problem is what to do with all these eggs. I use them in all my cooking and last week we made a beautiful Pavlova which used 8 egg whites and the yokes went into the fried rice for dinner. We will be making another Pavlova for Christmas lunch and im thinking of making homemade ice cream using the yokes, something i have never made before.

Before i finish this post i thought i would share my Cherry harvest from last week. We ended up with around 1.5kg of fruit which has not been our biggest harvest but considering we pruned the tree back this year and ants got to a lot of them it was not to bad. They were big and sweet and we enjoyed them very much.

 

Sorry about the poor photo, its was taken with my phone.

This im sure will be the last post before Christmas and maybe the last for the year but i plan to be around more next year and share the progress of the office renovations and posts about my productive garden and more.

Have a safe Christmas and a Happy New Year. XXX

Water tank update, vege garden and my ducks

Well it has been a while since my last blog but i have some exciting news. My water tank has been set up.

It will hold a 1000 LTRS of water when full. It does have some water in it now as you can see in the photo its a little dirty, but its only for the garden. In the future I will also be using it to fill the bath for my 2 ducks Mickey & Molly.

Molly in the front has a deformed beak, its called cross beak but it doesn't effect him at all he manages to gobble down his food without a problem. They are both grown up now and Mickey started laying eggs for me on Feb 1st. They are both Indian Runner Ducks and Molly is a crested, hence the tuft of top of his head. I will try to get more pics of them soon and do a blog about them in the future.