Belinda Moore

The rainy season has started… Things are growing wildly, including the lawn. And the children - they just won’t stop growing either!

AT HOME: The paint arrived! It’s all been tinted and checked and we’re making plans of which room to attack first. Where we’d planned to start is a bit wet with the recent rain, so we might give the bathroom a go - it’s small and could do with some brightening up!

We’ve had a lot of visitors lately, and been swimming in the creek often. It’s wonderful to explore and play in our amazing big backyard! We were lucky enough to spot a platypus in a different part of the creek yesterday.

Christmas was quite lovely. A relaxing day overall, with simple gifts, good food, good wine and great company. I much prefer quiet Christmases! I’m already planning for next Christmas, when we’ll likely visit family.

We had a quiet little birthday party on the 26th. And have a quiet, relaxing New Years’ Eve planned as well… Quite a few quiet celebrations going on around here!

AT WORK: I’ve been writing future columns for Natural Child magazine. It’s nice to get back to writing a little, as my energies have been focused elsewhere for months.

Spiral Garden now has a News site! I was very busy with orders during December, and didn’t update the main site much at all. I will manage to fix a few things and add more content during January. There’s also an exciting Special Offer for January - check your Newsletter for details! Not a subscriber? Contact me to be added to the mailing list.

ON THE FARM: We planted another 20 fruit and nut trees in the past couple of weeks. It was a great relief to get them in the ground. We now have over 50 food-producing trees in two different areas. I posted about it on my garden blog.

The chicken flock continues to grow, with three orphan chicks arriving this month. I think they are bantams. Our black frizzy bantam was broody, so she is looking after them. Two of our young roosters started to crow, so we need to think about their future. We hope their sisters start to lay soon!

Some plastic tore off the greenhouse during a storm a couple of weeks ago. It has been replaced with shade cloth now. Everything is flourishing in there, it’s wonderful!

The bushfood of the month is the Atherton Raspberry (Rubus fraxinifolius), which is yummy eaten fresh. I might even make some raspberry jam in January! Speaking of jam, I have a lot of rosellas awaiting processing, so had best get to those as well. I think next month’s bush food will be the Cherry Guavas…
HOME ED: We have really been enjoying the holidays, though with our more relaxed routine of 2007, it’s not so different! All activities have finished now until February or later, so it’s nice to have more free days. We’ve been filling in some goal sheets for the new year and talking about activities to try. Our big girl wants to get a job, so she’s thinking hard and talking to people about that one.