Creating, collecting & recycling textiles & papercrafts. I love preserving the past for the future.

Monday 17 October 2011

Sweet peas, salvia and lavender

Spring has sprung!


I picked these this morning.
There's a crazy un-seasonal cool easterly wind blowing, so they are a bit battered looking.
Sweet peas are nearly my favourite, right up there with pansies.
They flower later up here on The Darling Downs than what I am used to in the sub-tropics.
The great thing is that they self seeded, so they came up just where they were last year and the trellis was ready and waiting, but the crop was much thicker.
The salvia was dormant throughout the long cold winter but has sprung into action the last couple of weeks and is nearly at its peak now, however will flower well until April I would think. Then I will cut it back again, it will lay dormant and the cycle will repeat.
As for the lavender, it loves the cold and flowered all winter.
After a good pruning at end of winter it has surged ahead and all the bushes
are laden with beautiful lavender heads.
The fragrance wafting throughout the house......sweet peas mixed with lavender is just heavenly.
It's a very respectable 19c here today and I wish it would never get any warmer.
Oh I do dread the summer.
However I have heard that the La Nina weather pattern has returned (I think it only briefly disappeared for a couple of months in winter) and it's looking like we could be in for a cooler and wetter than normal summer (just like the last year with the terrible flooding experienced in Queensland and some other Australian states).
 Let's hope that we do not experience the devastation of flooding and all the negatives
that come with it again this year.
The people, the local, state and federal governments and the economy
just would not be able to take it again.