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Jackie's February message continued . . .
It's
rained! A whole week of mist
sifting down the gullies and steady drops galloping on the roof, which means no
more smoke through the valley, grass ankle high, mildrewed beetroot tops.... and our
phone has been out five times in four weeks ...but even with having to dash up the mountain when I want
to make a phone call or check the email, things are pretty good. You get so
rain concious in a drought. it's like we've been fed champagne and chocolates
all week. I
think the wombats are finally getting sick of wet weather thiough. There was a
large pile of sper ginat wombat droppings on the doormat this morning, which I
think is probably wombat code for: it's wet out here. let me in! She's also
attacked the umbrella, perhaps as a protest because no one has yet invented an
umbrella for wombats. But this rain means there'll be good wombat grass right
into winter, and anyway, by the size of those droppings she is certainly not
hungry! Books Ride
the Wild Wind has
just been released- a book about the partnership between human and horses,
which makes it sound very dull, but it isn't - and the illustrations are
beautiful. The
first draft of White Ship is finished- one of those books that seem to contain a
lot more than I meant to put in it- and have been having great fun with the
next Phredde book (Phredde and the
Demon Duck of Doom). Writing a Phredde book basically means sitting tapping at the
computer and giggling to myself. In this one a school excursion to the Big
Koala goes wrong and Phredde Pru
Bruce Mrs Olsen (their vampire teacher) and Miss Richards (librarian and
martial arts expert) end up 100,000 years ago and... but i'll leave that till
closer to it's release. Blood
Moon (the sequel
to In the Blood
and second in the Outlands trilogy) should go to the printer in a few weeks.
The blurb for this one reads: The body lay at the bottom of the stairs. He wore red and
green pyjamas. It took me a second to realise the red was blood. An old man, his eyes were still open. For one dreadful moment I thought he was still alive. But no one can live with a hole where their throat should be ... Danielle Forest, Virtual engineer, was looking forward to
spending some quiet time with her lover, in their stone house in the Outlands.
But someone, or something, keeps murdering members of nearby Utopias. A family
of werewolves is under suspicion and Danielle's friend Ophelia asks her to
prove their innocence. Before she can say 'silver bullet', Danielle is a
temporary resident of the Tree; - home
to the apparently friendly werewolves - and fully occupied trying to
deal with another bloody murder, the angry local community and some amorous water sprites; not to
mention her bone-loving hosts. Are the werewolves the killers Danielle seeks? Or are humans more vicious by far? This thrilling sequel to In the Blood is the second book
in the Outlands trilogy. What else?Bruce
Whately has finished the first illustrations for Diary of a Wombat that are so hilarious I almost
wet myself gazing at them outside the post office in the main street in town.
Diary of a Wombat isn't out till the end of the year- can't wait to actually
see it in book form. How did he KNOW
that Mothball wombat was as insane as that? Garden news Six
varieties of beetroot this year- red yellow orange white striped long round
etc- and each one tastes the same! The hybrid 'early' varieties do grow fastest
though, and (sadly) seem more disease resistant. The
Irish peach apples (the first to mature here, about 2 weeks earlier than
Gravenstein) are just about finished; the big 20 ouncers(cooking apples) are
starting to fall off the tree, and I wish the possums would throw a party because there is no way we can
eat them all, plus another half dozen vareities are going to mature in the next
two weeks. at least all the apples I've put in over the past two years are late
ones- mid winter apples for when you really WANT apples, and the birds do too.
At the moment they're so stuffed they haven't even nibbled a single apple on
most of the trees. Visits to the garden We
get lots of requests to visit our place, and every time I say no I feel like
the meanest hermit around, especially as I suspect I'd really like the people
who asked. But there are just too many requests to say yes to, whether it be
from a kid who loves the stories to adults who want to see how we grow avocados
and coffee in the frost. While
we can't say 'yes' to individual requests to come and visit, we do give
workshops here, (there was going to be one in January, but given heat and fires
and drought it was cancelled). If anyone really wants to see the place, the
workshops cost $500 for a four hour workshop and afternoon tea for a maximum of
20 people at a time, because that's about all we can cram into our garden- it's
too full of plants for lots of visitors. Proceeds go to various charities,
mostly involving kids or the bush, and need to be organised either by the
charity concerned or by someone
who really wants a workshop and is prepared to organise a mob of other
interested people. (ie not me!) Also beware... the road down to our place is
called The Goat Track for good reason and there's only room for about 6 cars to
park here because the rest of the flat land is crammed with garden! A Couple of Recipes
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