Flee! Natural disaster or monstrous apparition....

The good people of Flinders Island were today seen cramming themselves onto aircraft, boarding every available vessel including the SS Bathtub, or, in desperation, flinging themselves into the sea and paddling for safer offshore islands after a strange whiter-than-ghost-pale apparition was sighted("so pale it was almost luminous," said Flinder's resident and now panic-stricken refugee, Carol Goodegg, once she'd finished shaking from shock). "Such things are not natural and shouldn't be allowed," said courageous heroine Rosemary Tellemwhatfor, who loosed several shots at the thing from the black lagoon seen hauling grass out of the daisy patch on the semi-lawn in front of a certain residence on Palana Road. "It was too horrible to contemplate," said a nameless Aurora worker who barely manage to survive his meter-reading. "I think I deserve danger pay, and not to have to wash the ute."

Ok I won't ever take my shirt off to work in the garden again. It's been winter for a while, but it got quite warm for manual labour today, enough to have me strip of my T-shirt for a while. And it's not over yet, as I still have to fill the new raised bed. I have a feeing this will involve carrying a lot of compost. We got our seeds from Phoenix seeds today - the post here (which is fast and reliable, never fails to amaze me)

I now have Seakale, Strawberry spinach, Radicchio, Salsify, Scorzonera, Red onions, Cos Verdi lettuce, to plant tomorrow, or ASAP. Waiting in the wings are Tamarillo, Cossack pineapple, 4 of versions of tomato, and Collective farm woman melons and Siberian watermelons, and asparagus (Martha Washington). Of course I have carrots, broad beans, peas, lettuce, beets, silverbeet, bulb fennel, parsnips, spinach (doing badly) and broccoli, leeks, spring onions, garlic and red onions and some chinese cabbage I won't grow again in a hurry, and parsley, mint, thyme, and some very feeble sage, and tarragon, all growing. The green beans, zucchini, and pumpkin seeds are waiting too. I've also got banana passionfruit seeds and regular ones, I hope to get growing. Potatoes too need to get sorted, but I am seriously considering doing them as a field crop, other than some in the tyre-towers as new potatoes. Some ofthese will have to go into pots as they are perennials, not for harvest this year.

But I'll try and keep my shirt on :-) Oh and I made pumpkin and poppyseed rolls for the next 3 days... and our various visitors ate them all. Oh well. At least my food is popular, and we have drop-in visitors. Pumpkin has an interesting effect on dough, making it more chewy (not in an unpleasant sense, just making the texture looser but more elastic - maybe the fibes in it?). It does add rather appealing pale golden colour to the finished product.