Missoni Accomplished

I've always loved colour - and maximalism - in both fashion and homewares, so it's no surprise I'm a big Missoni fan. 

I've been slowly building a little collection of towels and scarves over the years, so I almost wet my pants when I heard about their collaboration with Target in the US.

Of course I wasn't the only one - with their pop up store during New York fashion week being cleared out in an hour, the online sale crashing their website, and items appearing on eBay for astronomical prices.

How gorgeous is Margherita Missoni in their TV ad?

Anyway, despite some serious delays and a bit of a PR disaster (their social media team took a beating on twitter), my online order went through, and with the help of Parcel It On my package arrived today! (Target US don't ship to Australia - and Parcel It On are a package forwarding service that I've used before and can highly recommend!)

That's a lots of zig-zags! (ps - it's not all for me)

My verdict - the towels seem like surprisingly good quality - the cosmetic bags not so much. My favourite was a little zig zag knit dress - as soon as I put it on I had to do a little go-go dance - it's so 60's! I won't be wearing it head to toe like in the ad- mm well not outside the house at least.

Oh Deery Me - Suburban Deer in Minnippi Parklands

Yes the deer puns were flying thick and fast today.

I'd heard rumours of wild deer living in Minnippi Parklands for years but had always presumed they were urban legends, having never met anyone who had sighted them first hand. Until my London-dwelling friend was taking a stroll last week and came across one wandering aimlessly across the sports fields.

So we set out yesterday afternoon at dusk with high hopes and my superzoom camera... we were hunting for tracks and wandering through the bush for about an hour without finding so much as a gecko, but then on our way back to the carpark Mr T spotted this guy. (girl?)

Pretty amazing hey?

I even managed to get some video footage. Please excuse Mr T's narration - I suppose wild animals beg for a bit of David Attenborough.



Apparently there are up to 30 wild deer living in the parklands - and have even been known to roam the nearby streets! Where did they all come from? No ideer. (sorry couldn't resist).

You Have Good Soil!

I often find myself blaming the soil when a plant in our veggie plot doesn't do well "oh we don't have very good soil, there are big chunks of clay, the builders dumped cruddy soil there, blah blah blah."

I know - boo hoo. It's too late to dig it all up and start again so I just do my best adding compost (all that dirty straw from the chicken coop goes into the compost heap), mulching, watering with worm juice and seasol, and chucking out the big clay clods when I come across them.

But I read something encouraging this week.

I've had Organic: Don Burke's Guide to Growing Organic Food for a little while, but like all good books  - its seems to reveal something new with revisit.

In his chapter on soil preparation - he notes that you can't buy great soil in Australia - that soils sold by nurseries are alluvial silts (which according to old Donny fail to develop proper soil structure and won't allow roots enough oxygen to breathe).

My fave bit was:

"Your own soil is good. It is the best soil that you can ever get. Work that soil up with compost, manures, gypsum etc and it will be perfect. So many people say that their soil is no good because it is clay. Clay soils are amongst the best soils in the world! Never let any of your soil leave your property. It is pure gold."

Good old Don. So - no more blaming the soil. Which I guess leaves the rest up to me...

A Ripe Mulberry

I've always had a soft spot for the English luxury house Mulberry (I share my surname with one of their gorgeous satchels and often fancy it was named after me) but now I'm developing a thing for the actual berries too.

After reading this post over on Mud Pie I was hungry to sample the fruits of my own tree. It had been covered in berries for weeks but they were all green - so last week at the first sight of one turning red I plucked it from the tree and hungrily gobbled it up. It was tangy and bitter and not quite ripe. I hastily googled how long it takes for mulberries to ripen - and discovered than unripe berries are hallucinogenic. Great. I panicked for a second but thankfully I didn't spend the rest of the evening in a psychedelic stupor.

So I was a little more patient for this second berry and actually waited for it to turn black. 

Doesn't it look divine? So plump and glossy! I'm happy to report it's flavour was a huge improvement from the first under-ripe mulberry.

Apparently mulberries aren't commonly available in stores because they're so delicate and would get bruised in the packing and transportation processes. Although a part of me thinks that the farmers just never have enough to sell - the berries simply get plucked off the tree and eaten straight away!

Perfect Petals

After the flower failure in my last post it's nice to have some more successful blooms to display. (Although I've decided that roses must be like pancakes - the first one is always a dud).

The below gerbera was a gift last year that I repotted into the below teacup saucer-pot. It promptly shrivelled up and died, and got taken over by various weeds. I'd like to think it was some innate inner gardening know-how that guided me to nurse it back to life - but I simply left it to its own devices over the past few months - and shazam! Up popped these two lovelies.

In other garden news these amaryllis (spent a while googling red trumpet flower bulb to figure out what they were called) have sprung up again - they were quite the surprise last year.

Are you noticing a trend? Why is it all the neglected plants seem to flower beautifully and the ones I dote on behave like spoilt brats?