Wild Hope Homestead

This week I have gotten quite a bit done in the garden, which is most pleasing. We had a few beautiful days and although we’ve had a lot of time with family this week, I made the most of my gardening time before the rain returned. I planted my new ‘Royal Rosa’ apricot tree in The Cedar Pen and then I tackled the blackcurrant bushes.

When I was last at Bunnings they had two specimens of the ‘Royal Rosa’ apricot tree that I wanted, so I thought I better nab one.

The Cedar Pen now contains an almond tree (front) and an apricot tree (back). They both need pruning but I’ll wait until things get warmer and drier.

It sounded simple in my head: dig the blackcurrants out of the wooden planter and plant them in The Maple Garden. I widened The Maple Garden by digging out some lawn to make a nice circular edge and give more space for the blackcurrants. I dug out one little stump and hacked through a bunch of roots while digging my holes. Then I proceeded to simply dig the blackcurrants out of the planter one by one.

These three blackcurrant bushes just needed to go…

… in here. Things are never that straightforward.

Ha. Of course, the blackcurrants would not budge from the planter because they’d been in there way too long and the contents of the planter were a mass of thick, intertwined roots that were growing through the bottom of the planter. I had to push the hefty planter on its side and hack each plant out with a spade, combined with intense tugging, cutting and grunty sound effects. The Little Fulla ‘helped’ by putting small shovelfuls of dirt back into the planter and on top of it. I finally got ’em all out, one by one. After trimming the broken and long roots the blackcurrants were planted in their new home, surrounded by a mulch of old chicken bedding and pruned. I can’t remember the last time I pruned them because I was always going to do it after I planted them. Oops! But considering they had been left half wild and pushed around all over the place in the planter box, only one of them had particularly badly angled branches.

More views of the blackcurrant bushes in The Maple Garden.

Now the planter box is out of the way in the Plum Tree Garden. This garden bed is slowly getting filled in with plants. You know what else is getting filled in? My plum tree hole. With water. Again! I fear this tree might not get planted until spring. Are we doomed for annoying rain all winter?

Just as it was starting to dry out, the plum tree hole got a new batch of water in it.

It may not look like much now, but one day this Leptospermum scoparium ‘Red Falls’ will be a sight to behold.

This is a little something I picked up while we were on holiday. Because what’s a holiday without buying a plant? It is a prostrate, cascading manuka with red flowers, Leptospermum scoparium ‘Red Falls’.

And now, we move onto pruning of a different kind. My hair. I’m not very good at cutting my hair in a timely fashion. I put it off again and again because I’d rather be doing things outside and it does take me a while to cut it myself. But, my hair was getting very long, heavy and untidy and I was just tying it up all the time, so it needed a good chop. I wanted to cut it short. My original hair cutting afternoon turned into a compost-shoveling, gardening afternoon, because I had to make the most of the nice weather. The next day was rainy and cold, so it was hair cutting afternoon. Since I was aiming for a shorter hairstyle than I’ve had in quite a while, I had to watch some YouTube videos to figure out what I wanted to do. In classic Twiglet style, I wanted a bit of this one and a bit of that one to make up my own version. So helpful. By this time, The Little Fulla’s nap was already half over. But I was doing it! Mistake #1: Do not start cutting your hair part-way through the small child’s nap, especially if you are learning a new style.

This was my hair on a good day, after I’d washed it, but usually, it was sticking out all over the place because the layering was all off.

And this is how boofy it went after combing it, ready for cutting. So much hair.

I feel like something’s missing…

Part-way through my trying-to-watch-hair-cutting-videos-while-cutting-my-hair hair cut, The Little Fulla woke up. Surprise, surprise. The hair cutting slowed down drastically as the small child demanded attention and did predictable things like trying to grab all the hair cutting tools and getting his fingers shut in a drawer. There was frustration, there was crying, there was hair everywhere. The sink was brown. The Husband came home and I still hadn’t finished and then things got even more messy because I was going out after dinner. Mistake #2: Do not start cutting your hair on the afternoon before the evening you are going out to a women’s event. Thankfully, I roughly finished my hair cut and a quick fringe before I had to go out and it was just long enough to tie it up and hide it before I could tidy it up properly. Yuss! The next day I finished tidying up the layering and did a proper fringe. Mistake #3: When you have a small child, do not cut your hair on a weekday, just do it on the weekend when you have backup.

I chopped it off!

So, that was a good example of what not to do, but after all the child-interrupted time it took to cut my hair in a new, short style, I am actually really happy with it. It is so much lighter and more manageable and I feel like a new, fresh me. One of my friends said, “You don’t look like a mum anymore”, which is a lovely complement, because mum-to-mum I know exactly what she means. It is hard for young mums to find time to do nice things for themselves, like having a hair cut or even allowing time to think about what they want to look like. Hair is often just a thing that gets stuffed up out of the way or chopped off as simply as possible. Why not make some time to do something for yourself today? You are so worth it. Just try to avoid my handy mistakes.