"Balmoral Park" farm garden

This morning I found our beautiful young white turkey gobbler dead in the pen! We suspect a snake as the eggs have also disappeared, even those that the hens were sitting on. This afternoon i found five baby turkeys hatched in the chook tractor, we didn't really know when these might hatch so it was a nice suprise. Funny it was on the same day.

Despite the small amount of time I now have to spend in the garden it is still amazingly productive. Thanks to all the previous work and lots of perennial crops, we are once again getting most of our fruit and vegetables from the garden. There are still oranges, lemons and limes on the trees and the mulberries have started. In the vegetable garden the asparagus is the star, we have been getting lots of fat, juicy, sweet stalks for about six weeks now. It is lovely to eat. We have had a few meals of late that are pretty much all from our place. A warm duck salad with snow peas and asparagus and a little blood orange and beetroot salad a couple of weeks ago. Yesterday a warm potato and asparagus salad with homemade mayonnaise, delicious. I hadn't planned to use any of our potatoes yet but the horrible twenty eight spotted lady beetles have made a real mess of some of them so  I decided to pull them out, the tiny potatoes are really nice to eat so all was not lost.  ...

I wish you could smell my garden, it is divine. Citrus blossoms, Frangipani and lavender are the predominant perfumes. Last night it was a little warmer than it has been and when I walked in the back gate the perfume of the garden enveloped me. You could just stand and breathe in the wonder of it all. This spring the garden is full of little birds, darting between the bushes and larger birds feasting on the grevillias. The bees are humming loudly most of the time as well. The roses are just starting to bloom, so far they are looking quite spectacular.   We had a good show or orchids despite the neglect or some suggest because of it. Not quite as good as last year though so I plan to look after them a bit better this year.   The yellow broom is looking lovely as well.  This is a new geranium, quite spectacular I think.  These orange poppies come up everyyear and put on quite a show. The citrus trees still have quite a lot of fruit on ...