Summer

Summer may be here now. Temperatures during the day are getting to around that mid 30 C mark and last night it didn't drop back to the low teens that we have been getting over the last couple of months. This is good for the vegetable garden especially the cucumbers and tomatoes which have started coming on.

The cucumbers took off a day or two ago and we gave away a bag full for the first time this season. The recipients were our dairy farmers who love fresh cucumber when it has small immature seeds. There is a pleasure in sharing abundance and we ask nothing in return.

By this time last year we had been passing on several bag fulls of cucumbers and some tomatoes. The tomato bushes are still not in full swing although we now get enough for a decent feed at night. I'm not sure if we will have enough for bottling which is fine as we keep more than a years supply in stock. After December the problem will be fruit fly. Still the best pleasure is that fresh juicy tomato slice with salt and pepper.

Every year is different. The interesting thing is that irrespective of the type of season something always does well. If it's a rainy one the grass grows and cattle get feed and even if the fruit doesn't thrive on the trees at least the trees grow foliage which provide benefits next year. If it's hot and dry the fruit grows really well and we gorge ourselves or are able put some aside. If it's cool we are comfortable and more work gets done about the property. There is never a 100% downside. Just a matter of having a flexible strategy and planning ahead to overcome the short term situation.

There is something about December and the approaching Christmas period. Maybe it is a hangover from when we were kids and school finished and we stayed home for weeks on end. It seemed to last forever. Running around exploring the local drainage system, hours at the beach getting fried and sometimes packing the car and going away with the family to somewhere exotic like the Gold Coast.

Now much older the focus is a tidy up around the place so we look respectable for visitors and there is an unconscious winding down of work across the river. Not that there is any shortage of jobs over there but the heart is not in it in December. There is a move to relax more as well. A little more time reading or watching some DVDs.

Somewhere in the intervening years full time work intruded and the several weeks of holidays disappeared only cropping up occasionally as a week or two if work permitted. If you don't have children you don't notice the holidays don't appear. But now we have commenced a re-enactment of those early days of laze and joy.