Yummy Burgers

A little place called Grill'd is a great place to go with the kids for a burger. Better than taking them to one of those fast food joints. This place is great! They have such yummy burgers and chips. The chips have herbs on them and u get a selection of what looks like home made sauces. YUMMMO!! Its so nice! I have been to the one in St Kilda and the one in Bendigo and they are both great places. Definitely a place to try. And the kids meals come with pencils and a sheet of paper with activities and pictures on it to keep the kids occupied.

Another great place that i haven't been to for a while but last time i was there had some of the biggest burgers Iv seen, is Greasy Joe's, in St Kilda, Melbourne. Their food is so yumm!! They have more than just burgers and their menu is so funny. I love this place and love going there with the family. They also have a bar, so if you feel like having a nice alcoholic drink with your meal, this is a nice place to go. Its right near some nice shops, a grass area, Luna Park and St Kilda Beach. So if you feel like going somewhere for a nice relaxing dinner and then a stroll and maybe some fun at the park, this is definitely a place i like to go to. I'm definitely due for a visit!

List of Markets

Some markets that we like to go to are:

• Preston Market, open Wed 8am - 3pm; Thu 8am - 6pm; Fri 8am - 8pm; Sat 8am - 3pm
• Big Sam's St Albans Market, open Wed 7am - 2pm; Thu 7am - 6:30pm; Fri 7am - 7:30pm; Sat 7am - 1:30pm
• Daylesford Market, open Sundays from 8am - 3 or 4pm.
• The Mill Market in Daylesford, open 7 days 10am - 6pm. 

Jims Greek Tavern

I love going to Jims Greek Tavern in Collingwood. Its open till late and it is always very bizy.
I like to go with my family or friends after 9pm because it is a little quieter and you can hear yourself talking.
Every time we have gone there, they have no menu, u just choose either meat or seafood (i prefer the seafood) and they bring out plates of food of those choices to share with your table. I love the calemari chips and the pan fried scallops. Yummo!! For entree and mains for 2 people it usually costs about $80. They are also open till late.

Late Night Pancakes

Its school holidays, summer and beautiful late night weather, so as a treat for our kids, my husband and I decided to take them for a nice late night drive out to the Pancake Parlour in Doncaster. Doncaster Pancake Parlour is open 24hours 365 days. There are many Pancake Parlour's around, not all are open 24 hours, but they do stay open late so I'd recommend checking out the website and finding which one suites you.

Very Lovely and Very Yummmmmm..... 

My favourite pancakes

I love love love these pancakes!!

Ingredients:
~ 2 cups of Plain Flour
~ 4 Eggs
~ 2 cups of Milk
~ Butter for cooking
~ Butter OR lemon for spreading
~ Sugar

• Put the flour in a bowl making a well in the center. whisk/stir in the eggs and then the milk till it makes a thin smooth batter. If you feel you need a little more milk then put a little more milk. 
• Heat a pan on a high heat just to heat the pan up for a couple of minutes. then turn the heat down to a lower heat and put the butter in. It may take you 2 tries to find the right heat for your pancakes to cook nicely without getting burnt. 
• stir the butter all around the pan till the pan is covered in butter.
• Pour the pancake mixture into the pan to the size that you would like.
• I use a small pan and cook one pancake at a time, so when i pour the mixture in i also tilt the pan so that the batter runs to the edges o the pan.
• When the pancake is browned nicely underneath, flip the pancake over and brown the other side. I find that my pancakes are done nicely when they are just golden brown. No need to cook more than that. 
• Pancakes are done. now to serve on a plate and spread on butter or lemon and sprinkle sugar and roll them up like cigars and eat like a little piggy!! YUM YUM YUMMY!!!!!! 

These are better than any pancake i could ever be given anywhere. I love how i make my pancakes with the sugar and butter and i try not to eat them all the time coz i love them a little too much. LOL! ;P
I do like other pancakes with maple syrup and ice cream, but i LOVE LOVE LOVE eating these with my kids **cough** or by myself  **cough cough** ... lol ;P

My Strawberry update

On a better note, my strawberries are going good. Im getting lots of flowers and they are turning into strawberries. Very cool to watch. My kids love it. Haven't eaten anymore since the last one.
They arent ready to eat yet.
One was ready but it was rotten on the side that was touching the dirt. Ill have to get some mulch coz apparently mulch stops that from happening coz it stops the strawberries touching the dirt and it is the moist dirt that causes them to rot if they are touching it.
Another plant that is still growing is my rocket. I have allowed it to flower and it has these pretty little yellow flowers. Its very nice. My other plant that is still growing is spinach. its not going as well as the rocket though.
Im just letting everything grow. We had a few rainy days a while ago and so i didnt have to water the plants, so i just left them to do their own thing. Then one day i went to check on them and they were covered in caterpillars. I also had an aphid problem too. I squashed as many little aphids as i could and got rid of the catterpillars by hand too, but they just kept coming back.
So i made up my own little concoction that i had been told might work.

• Get a spray bottle
• Crush and chop up some garlic
• put the crushed up garlic into the spray bottle
• fill with wam-hot water
• shake shake shake...
• either leave out in the sun for a day
• or just go and spray on the leaves. 

Seemed to work for me for getting rid of the aphids, or at least controlling the numbers. But it also kept the caterpillars away. Took a week or so of spraying pretty much everyday, but it worked.
Sometimes the bottle would get clogged so i would just shake it and it would loosen whatever was blocking it.
When i ran out of water in the bottle i would just go fill the bottle up again keeping the old garlic in the bottle.
Also sometimes if the bottle would get clogged and i couldn't unclog it, i would just take the spray lid off and just pour the garlic water all over the plants and in the soil. I would even let the old garlic fall out of the bottle and let it sit in the dirt. And then i would make a new batch of garlic water with new garlic.

Whatever it is that i did with the garlic water it seemed to work. I havent had an issue with any caterpillars for a long time. But the aphids are still there. I dont think you can get rid of them completely without using chemical sprays and i didnt want to do that. Also ladybugs eat aphids, but you have to get them to come to your garden, so you would have to either plant certain plants that ladybugs are attracted to, or you can apparently buy them over the internet. I think you can buy them off ebay. Not sure if they sell them in local shops though. Not in any local shops around me anyway.

Gardening Failure

I failed miserably at my gardening. ='(

I went out and bought some fertilizer in the powder form. It looked like a white-ish/grey-is kind of loose dirt. Very bad description,i know, but that's all i can remember about it.

My plants were growing ok. They were growing slow and sort of looked like they were missing something coz they started looking miserable, so i decided that maybe they just needed a bit of fertilizer. My brother told me that he had a liquid fertilizer that would be good to use, but coz I'm impatient i decided to just go out and buy whatever i passed in the shop. Woopsy!
It wasn't the fertilizer that did the damage, it was the fact that i had no idea what i was doing and didn't really follow the instructions properly.

So...... what i did that i shall NEVER do again is i loosened the dirt in the pots so i could get my plants out as gently as possible and then i mixed the fertilizer in the dirt and then placed the plants back into the dirt. no.. noo...NO NO NO!!! Apparently that was a very very bad idea. All of the plants that i did that to died very very quickly. It was like they were burnt from the root up. Very sad moment for my garden.

The only plants that survived were 4 pots.
1 pot was rocket and spinach and the other 3 pots were my strawberries. Oh how glad i am that i didn't kill my strawberries!
The only thing i did differently with these 4 pots was i dug a hole away from where the actual root would have been and i mixed the fertilizer in just that area, thinking that maybe when I water them the fertilizer will spread slowly through the rest of the pot and less likely to damage anything. Thankfully i was right.

The reason why i did that with these 4 pots and not the rest was because they were the last pots that i did and i sort of didn't think about it till then. The other pots were smaller and i wasn't really putting that much in so i thought it would be ok. But lesson learnt the hard way.

Now i have to start again.
Another thing, I have heard that those black plastic pots are not good to use because they get too hot for the plants roots or something. So that's interesting. Must find out what pots are better to use. Probably terracotta pots are better to use but the big ones are so expensive sometimes. But if they are better to use them maybe its worth it.

Avocado Dip

Ingredients:
~ Avocado
~ Squirt of lemon juice
~ Salt
~ 1 or 2 tbsp of Natural Yogurt (just makes it go further)
~ 1tbsp Sweet Chilly Sauce

• Cut Avocado in half and take out the big seed in the middle.
• Scoop out flesh and put into a bowl.
• Mash the Avocado flesh till all smashed up.
• Squirt a bit of lemon juice and mix.
• Mix in the yogurt.
• Sprinkle the little bit of salt.
• Mix in sweet chilly sauce. 

Oh Yummy!! This one is probably my favourite!! It is my favourite "sit on the couch with some biscuits and nom nom nom" dip.

French Onion Dip

Ingredients:
~ 1 packet of French Onion Soup Mix
~ 400g tub of Sour Cream
~ and if you think that its a bit too strong of a taste you can put a spoon or 2 more of Sour Cream or Natural Plain Yogurt.

• Mix sour cream and soup mix together till it is combined.

Yep! Thats it! Easy peasy!! And everyone loved it!!
Its a good dip to do when u want to prepare something very very quickly. And it tastes so nice. Good one to make when u just want to snack on the couch.

Baba Ghanouj (Eggplant) Dip

Ingredients:
~ 1 tsp of Paprika
~ Black Pepper
~ 1/4 tsp of Cayenne (or a tiny tip of the teaspoon of hot chilly powder)
~ Salt
~ Olive Oil
~ 1/2 cup of Lemon juice
~ 2 Eggplants
~ 3 cloves of Garlic
~ 1/4 cups of Parsley
~ 4 tbsps of Natural Plain Yogurt

• Pre-heat the oven to 190 degrees C.
• Cut the eggplants in half and put them into a roasting dish and drizzle a little olive oil on them.
• Roast the eggplants for 40 minutes.
• Take them out of the oven and let them cool so that you can handle them.
• Scoop out the flesh. (I disliked this part because it was so yucky and messy. lol). 
• Put the flesh into a blender and add the black pepper, cayenne (or chilly powder), salt, olive oil, lemon juice, garlic, parsley and yogurt.
• Blend until smooth. Till it looks like something you could dip a biscuit into without getting lumps.  
• Sprinkle paprika to serve.

I didnt particularly like this dip, it just wasnt my kind of flavour, but EVERYONE who tried it LOVED it!

Tasted the strawberry..

So i picked my first strawberry and ate it .... meh, it didnt taste that good..... i hope that as the plant grows they get better in size and flavour. There are other strawberries growing so cross fingers.


And i have put crushed up egg shells around a couple of my plants, like the bean plant and one of the spinach and rocket pots, apparently it keeps the slugs and snails off coz walking on egg shells is like walking on glass. So hopefully it keeps them off, coz they ate every single thing on the bean plant. No leaves or anything left. My son was so mad at them. Haha .. Poor thing .. He feels like its taking forever for it to grow coz the slugs and snails keep eating it so hopefully the egg shells help.


Oh i have also made a compost bin out of one of those rolly bins ... i just tipped it upside down and cut a hole in the bottom ... then i drilled large holes in it and put horse manure and scraps and chicken manure and whatever else i could in it. Hopefully that goes good. Havent got a clue what im doing but i have read a few things and seen a few vids so hopefully it workd well .. lol. Once again, cross fingers. 

Water in the morning

Ok, so i have been given some advice from my brother who is a really good gardener. He has done many courses and stuff so he knows what he is on about. So he came and looked at my plants and told me that instead of watering them in the evening, water them in the morning. The plants need the water throughout the day while the sun is shining on them. So i have started watering them in the morning today, so lets cross fingers and hope that they grow alot better than what they have been. My plants havent been growing as well as they should be, so i hope this works. 

Interesting....

I read something the other day that i found very interesting and helpful when planning and organising my garden.


If you grow a plant for the fruit or root, it needs full sun. If you grow it for the leaves, stem or buds, a little shade will be just fine.

I have seen that advice on a few web sites but i put up a link to only one.

It has advice as to what veggies are good for shady areas in your garden. It pretty much says the same stuff other web sites say about the same subject. 

It only gives a small amount of advice but its all helpful i think.

In the beginning...

I tried to have a garden a long while ago, but it didn't work out the way i wanted. 
Things came up and i couldn't look after it the way it needed to be and i really neglected it and it all just died. 

Tomato Plant

I didn't have very much in my old garden. I was just trying to learn how to grow things in little pots. I think it was a herb or 2 and i think a tomato plant. All died because they were young and i had to leave the house for 2 weeks and i had no one to look after them for me. I didn't even think about the fact that i could've taken them with me. I just left them to look after themselves. LOL. Yes i know, wrong wrong wrong. But i am back to it now and have started again. 

My sons Beans

Last year i bought some seeds from Bunnings and tried to sow everything from seed. I like the thought of growing things from seed, but it didn't quite work for me. I had tomatoes and some herbs and strawberries and a few other things, and some of them started to grow. I was so happy. I had them in little containers and cut coke bottles in half and put the top part of the coke bottle over the top of the seeds, sort of like a green house. Its worked for me before and it did work for me this time too, with some of the seeds. My strawberries and rosemary and something else didn't grow, but everything else was ok. I was so excited. 
Then when they got a bit bigger i took the coke bottles off them and they were still growing ok. I was so happy i hadn't killed them. 

Left,Spinach .. Right,Rocket 

Spinach on the ends and rocket in the middle

Then i thought i would move this small standing green house that wasn't being used that i had in the front yard into the back and put my little plants in it and they would grow to be beautiful big plants, but i was so wrong. I should have just left them where they were. They all started going funny and started to die. I thought i could save them by taking them out of the green house but they just ended up dieing. I think it might have been that they were used to being out in the open, and so when i put them into the green house it was just too much of a change and too hot or something. Some of the tomatoes were ok though. I was happy about that, but then one day we had some really strong winds and my green house got blown over and everything just got thrown to the ground. 

Rosemary

Once again i decided to give it another go. 

Basil

So on my Birthday in January i got some money as a gift and decided to use that money to go buy myself something nice. So my husband took me for a drive to Daylesford and we went to a plant nursery. I bought some basil, rosemary, spinach, rocket, strawberries, and some Japanese Maples. All were very young plants. I think you call them seedlings?? and they were very cheap and looked very healthy.

Rocket

Spinach and Rocket in the background

I went to Safeway and bought some potting mix, $3.50 for a big bag, (wonderful), and then we went home and i started my little pot garden. I kept everything out in full sun and watered them everyday when the sun was going down, so at about 7pm. I did this so the plants wouldn't get sun burn because if the leaves have water on them when the sun is out it can burn the leaves or something. If i ever watered the plants in the afternoon while the sun was up i would put the end of my watering can under the plants leaves and water the dirt so no water would get on the leaves. But i never did this very often. I also had a tomato in my fridge that looked really nice and so i thought i would chop it up and plant it in a pot and hope it would grow to make tomatoes that look as good as it does. And to my great surprise, it grew! And it is still growing. It has made about 6 seedlings. and that was out in the full sun with the rest of the plants getting watered everyday. (I tried to do the same with strawberries but they just turned to rot in the dirt. Yuck!)


They are all still growing wonderfully!! 


I have moved them since to a part sun part shady place. and they were still growing great. But i thought the strawberries and tomatoes need more sun. So i have moved them into a full sun place. they seem to be growing really well. My strawberries have started growing flowers and one of the flowers started turning into a strawberry!! I was so happy when i saw that first strawberry! i cant wait till all the plants are covered in strawberries.
my son also planted beans and they are growing nicely too.

My first Strawberry flower

My first strawberry flower

I am a little impatient. I do feel like i have had these plants for ages and they are not growing fast enough, but its only been 2 months .. lol .. and so i try to remember that it takes a while and i just have to wait. The fact that my strawberry plant is growing flowers and a little tiny strawberry is enough for me to know i have to be very patient and just enjoy watching them grow. 

My first strawberry flower has turned into my first strawberry

I will reap the benefits soon enough. (Hopefully .. lol)