House and Garden

The garden, all in pots so daily watering is required.























I love the patterns these spiders weave in their webs, I don't know how they change the colour of their thread though.



















Yes this is still my laundry, outside in the company of lava lizards.








Felix's school work table is a popular place. The dining table has become the lego table as we eat all our meals at a little table in the porch area. We watch the geckos hunting moths on the insect screens there at night.






We wouldn't grace the pages of any house and garden magazine but it's our wee home while we are here. I just had to grow something while I was here as I missed being able to harvest fresh organic vegetables from our garden. Grant bought some compost from the council which proved to be a little complicated as he had to show them his passport before he could purchase it. He certainly had a good workout on the way home with it loaded in the bike trailer. We planted lettuce, tomatoes, zucchini and capsicums. The lettuce germinated in less than 2 days but didn't turn out to be that nice to eat, even the finches won't eat them. The tomatoes are fruiting now and they are actually pretty awful, very tasteless which we put down to the variety as the plants have grown well. The zucchini have produced very little and again were very bland, unlike the kings seeds variety we grew in southland. The capsicums have turned out the best by far, we have already eaten a number of sweet, crisp ones and I still marvel at how well they are growing outside, the climate here is ideal for them.
Have included a few photos of the house, we have done our best to make it feel like home. The lino on the floor is pretty terrible and it always looks really dirty, which is partly the colour and partly that it probably is grubby! Hard to keep floors clean with so much indoor outdoor living and 3 children in and out with bare feet. The floors in the kitchen and bathroom are white tiles which if you combine a tiny bit of water and some dusty feet turn very quickly into a bad look. We share our house with huge numbers of ants, they are everywhere. Locals call one of the species crazy ants as they are very small and run around very haphazardly. The kitchen is also home to a lot of cockroaches that come out to play at night. Even though the house feels small we are lucky compared to what some people have here.