Today we had Joy
Gallichan come and share with us from her years of growing vegetables. She gave us plenty of basic down to earth (no pun intended) advice on how to grow things, what to grow when, and how to 'attempt' to keep our gardens from simply being a
smorgasbord for pests!
In the photo is a small contraption made from cutting both ends off a 3L bottle and a tent peg. You place this around your seedlings and hold it in place with the peg. This acts as a small impromptu glasshouse and helps to keep snails off too. The little container pictured has lamb pellets in it which you just lay over the soil and then as they get wet they break down and are great fertiliser.
You can download Joy's notes
here.
You can download notes about Companion Planting
here.
"The Gardeners Prayer"
Lord, grant that in some way it may rain every day, say from about midnight, until 3 o'clock in the morning, but you see, it must be gently and warm, so it can soak in...
Grant at the same time, that it would not rain on the
campion,
alyssum,
helianthum, lavender and the others which you in your infinite wisdom know are drought loving plants - I will write their names on a bit of paper, if you like...
And grant that the sun may shine the whole day through, but not everywhere (not for instance, on gentian,
plantain lily & rhododendron), and not too much...
That there may be plenty of dew, and very little wind enough worms, no mealy bugs, slugs and snails, no mildew or fungus, and that once a week, thin liquid manure may fall from heaven. Amen.
Today we had the opportunity to bless our local grey-power community. The residents at Elmwood were totally charmed with our wee babies & toddlers while we attempted to sing our carols. Actually, I thought we sounded great! A huge thanks to Dave Barr for his accompaniment on the guitar.
Wow - what a start to the term! 
Today we celebrated our Dads! Fathers are such an important person in our children's lives, and we appreciate who our husbands are to our children (and in some cases, who our own Dads are to our children).
Fathers, we love you heaps and appreciate you so much! The kids spent some time decorating some biscuits to take home for their dads while the Mums got some time out to watch RAIN by Nooma. (If you missed it, you can catch it here). Happy Fathers Day, Dad!
Hi WonderMums,
Well, its been a while since our 'Charity Tuesday', but we wanted to say a big Thank You, for all the canned food donated for the Salvation Army food bank, as well as for all your creative card making. As you can see, we are a very skilled group of mums :)! These cards have been given to hospice patients for personal use and I'm sure are very appreciated. Faith Bullen was kind enough to share both her time and craft resources with us, and we were also able to make a card to take home. Thank you Faith! It is always such a privilige to be able to do something for someone else and we certainly enjoyed this way of giving this term. 
'Little' Theo Mark John Mawkes arrived into this world at 7.04pm on Friday the 14th May by Caesarean. Cindy and her baby boy are both healthy, although naturally, Cindy is very tired and sore recovering from the C-section. She is thrilled to have him finally here too!
