Our little vegie garden

One of the major selling points of our home when we bought it was that it had a nice spacious backyard. I'd wanted to have dogs so space for them to run was important, and Noon had always wanted to have her own little vegie patch. As it turned out, though the house itself was small with only two bedrooms (more than sufficient for our needs) it had a large backyard that could accommodate both Sam and Rosie as well as a sectioned-off area for planting.

We dug up a 3m by 1m patch of ground and put in a frame of treated pine sleepers, cleared it of grass and weeds and filled it with a mixture of compost, manure and garden soil. After leaving it for a week for the soil to settle, Noon planted tomatoes, basil, eggplants, sweet peppers and lettuce.

Here are closeups of the little plants after we'd put them in. Sugar cane mulch was applied to keep the soil moist on dry days. Picture on the left shows the lettuce varieties, sweet peppers and eggplants. The right one shows the tomatoes, basil and more eggplants.

We also had some pre-existing plots along the side, in these we'd put in more basil and cherry tomato plants (in the foreground), and parsley, rosemary, sage, thyme and coriander (in the left corner background). There's also a chilli treeling in there but you can't see it coz the top edge of the photos cuts it off.

Here we have some garlic shoots just breaking out of the topsoil, with chives, lemongrass and galangal in the background.

And finally some of our snowpeas cimbing up the lattice we leaned up against the fence.

These photos were taken during the Christmas holidays. The plants have grown heaps since then, I'll have recent pics of them in the next post so stay tuned!

My new workplace

Late in the afternoon now, past the 5pm knock-off time and I'm still sitting here at my desk. Since I have my camera with me, I thought I might take some pictures to put into a post.

My little cubicle with its 3 LCD screens; one of which is part of the server infrstructure that I manage (leftmost in the pic), one of which is part of the desktop computer I am provided with, and finally one that I purchased from Dell myself just so I could have a dual-screen setup on my main computer.

Here's a closer pic of my main computer with its screens. They're both 19" Dell Ultrasharps and actually look much nicer than in the photo. I'm rather fussy about my interface devices, hence the dual-screens, ergonomic keyboard, and basic optical mouse.

I hold the position of Systems Administrator, one of a team of 4 who focus on Windows Server systems. Having said that, there are still a number of Unix systems currently under my management running Solaris and Debian. On my desktop computer I have Suse Linux installed as a virtual machine under VMWare. Keeps things interesting, don't you think? :) This is what my desktop looks like typically... *ahem* there's usually quite a few more apps open, it's just that it's getting late in the evening and I'm already off the clock now.

Time for me to head home! The wife's just called and I've got to meet her at the car.

I'll bet Sam and Rosie are getting hungry too....

New watch!

This was Noon's Christmas present! She actually got to open it early :)

I hope you've all had a good year-end break and a happy New Year. As for Noon, Sam, Rosie and myself, we spent our time mostly relaxing around the house. Had deliberately planned to keep everything nice and quiet, with trips to the park and the beach for the dogs. Was very restful, I think.

Am settling into my new job here. Surprised that I'm actually enjoying the days at work! Must be the new challenges and the friendly environment :)