Mork Edmonds

Well we have done as much as we can do now. Until the windows arrive next week we are in a holding pattern on this one. Not a bad spot to be in. Thanks Kenny. 👍🔨

This little fella was a rescue pup and the local animal welfare league that we got him from recently got in touch and asked could we take a photo of him for their 2024 rescued dogs fundraising calendar. Not sure yet what month he will be the pinup pup for. 😁🐶

The “No building work on Sundays” rule always allows us some quality plant time, and this week’s project was to finish the shelf. 💚🌵

Things that happen when your mate the semi-retired builder comes to visit Part 4.

He encourages you to get flat out on the granny flat.

Main roof and walls up.

Added a deck and decked it.

Deck roof next. 👍🏚️🪚🔨

Things that happen when your mate the semi-retired builder comes to visit Part 3.

770 days ago we posted the third photo in this triptych.

At that time we were happy for steps and a deck.

In the intervening two years, one month and nine days we have come to realise that with no eaves on this eastern edge of the deck that the rain quite easily blows in. Additionally, when the cool nor’ easterterly winds blow in off the sea in summer, it can get quite gusty through this corner.

Our mate suggested filling the corner in with some windows and a set of double doors, which has proven to be a very efficient manoeuvre.

Now the water and wind-proof corner is a gloriously dry sun-trap in winter and a cool, shady nook in the drier months and cries out for the installation of a comfortable daybed from which to enjoy the space in both seasons. Stand by for that one.

In the interim, please enjoy our photographic recreation. 😁👍🐶🐶🏚️🪚🔨

Things that happen when your mate the semi-retired builder comes to visit Part 2.

Turning our seventy year old double garage into a granny flat (secondary dwelling) was always the third and final big infrastructure project scheduled for this site, and after finally emptying everything from it into the new double garage we are still building, the time has come to start the final project under the guiding influence of our more than capable visitor.

As this series of photographs show, we firstly skinned the building and then took the frame back to the floor, which we then levelled and squared before beginning the rebuild. It’s a simple layout, bathroom and bedroom at the back and combined kitchen/living up front leading onto a deck overlooking the beautiful river. Much like our little house but on an even smaller scale. 👍🏚️🔨🪚

As spring begins to reveal itself here in south east Australia, one of the most important jobs is to to top up all the garden beds with compost and mulch ahead of the inevitable long hot growing season.

Whilst it looks like the dogs are sniffing a UFO landing pad, the round lawn scar is the remnant trace of a pile of wood chip had been settling in the front yard for at least eight months and which had mellowed into a great topping for some composted green waste sourced from the local rubbish tip via free vouchers made available by the local Council.

Combined, they will both decompose and contribute to the soil health, which will ultimately benefit the plants therein via increased organic matter, increased available nutrients and increased soil moisture holding capacity.

None of this matters to the dogs however, who both seem mystified as to where the pile has gone.

Thank goodness for mulch forks, which are the most efficient method of moving this stuff, way easier than a shovel could ever hope to be. Think pitchforks folks, wide, light and able to move a big bite with one swipe.

Gardening 101. Feed the soil, not the plant. 🙏💚🐛

Things that happen when your mate the semi-retired builder comes to visit Part 1.

He constructs some built-in shelves and cabinets to store all your vinyl records, all your books and more!

We were so humbled to spend some time with these five proud ex-Matilda Australian football legends during their busy pilgrimage up and down the east coast in support of the current crop of

All are previously capped players from the Australian Women's National Football Team, and in order of appearance we have in cap number 11, the Football Federation Australia Hall of Fame inductee Leigh Wardell

Next is our long time friend Renaye Iserief in cap number 26, followed by Vicki Cerny in cap number 27, then Carol Vinson .vinson9 in cap number 55 and Gill Foster in cap number 114.

Many thanks to tour manager Andy and head of security Sharyn Frank for arranging their visit ahead of tonight’s big game against Denmark.

There endeth our social media hiatus. Apologies for our absence and many thanks to those who reached out to check on our welfare.

With the help of a keen and capable visitor, we were finally motivated to extend the back door deck and link it up with the original outdoor bathroom. We are loving the new shortcut. 👍🔨🪚

We know it might look like a sensory deprivation tank, but it is in fact our new worm farm! 🪱🪱🪱🪱

Our mate the house demolisher sourced us a fibreglass bathtub and we built a frame around it out of scrap wood recovered from the local surf club deck replacement. Swipe to see the progress in reverse. 📷

Thanks to our great and clever garden mate Dan Bakker for the inspiration and ideas. 💡

Now to fire it up and get all vermicultured. 😁👍💚

Helianthus tuberosus is our favourite species of Sunflower. It is grown not for the flower head and seed, but for the swollen edible underground roots (hence the species epithet “tuberosus”) which are sometimes called Sunroots or more commonly Jerusalem Artichokes.

The Native Americans cultivated them as a food source, cooking and baking them in the same ways as potatoes, but unlike the potato they can also be eaten raw. The tubers are harvested once the above ground portions of the plant have died back, around late Autumn.

They grow up to 3m (9.8 feet) tall and be warned…”they are known for their flatulent side effects”. Jerusalem Fartichokes more like it. 💨😁💚

Every year a team of dedicated volunteers in our little seaside town organises a Sculpture festival, and every year we are in awe of the breadth of human creativity. Please enjoy. 🌊🗿👍

Berry me deep in love, the end of Summer never looked so sweet. ❤️🖤❤️

In 1985, this “Chester Thornless” blackberry variety released to the world. Renowned as a vigorous, productive, large-fruited and late-maturing cultivar, it was named in honour of the great professor of pomology in the Department of Horticulture at the University of Illinois, Dr Chester Charles Zych, who recognised early the merits of the plant and championed its advanced testing.💚

According to British folklore, the 29th of September is the very last day of the year that you should eat blackberries, for it was on this day (Michaelmas Day) that the Archangel Michael defeated the angel Lucifer in a huge battle and banished him from heaven. When Lucifer landed in hell, it was atop a thorny blackberry bush and this apparently made him so mad that he cursed, stamped, spat, breathed fire and possibly even urinated on it.😇

Given that Michaelmas Day basically falls on the northern hemisphere’s Autumnal equinox, the southern hemisphere’s equivalent antipode date would be March 21st, and at this rate we reckon these blackberries should be ripe well before they become spoiled by Satan.😈

Q: Why was the garden bed wet?🤷‍♂️
A: Because the seaweed.🤦‍♂️

If you swipe ➡️ you will see how a pleasant Sunday morning swim led to an afternoon in the garden, removing all of the gone-to-seed lettuce and parsley plants and top dressing the beds with seaweed and straw.💚

Seaweed is a great soil conditioner and if you can keep it wet it breaks down super fast. Hence we covered it with leftover straw from our October country and western party, and then watered the whole thing in.💦💦

In a couple of weeks we will be able to plant our winter vegetable seedlings straight into these beds.🌱🌱🌱🌱

Despite their rightly-deserved reputation as drought and heat tolerant plants, even the hardiest succulents appreciate a slight respite from the sun. Our latest solution is 50% white shadecloth stretched over polypipe arches. This provides bonus hail protection too. 👍💚☀️

Hearing the sound of chainsaws and a woodchipper up the street recently, we went to investigate and to enquire as to whether the tree trimmers were looking for a place to offload their green waste for free. 🌲🪚

“Absolutely!” was their response and so after their work was done, they reversed into the front yard and tipped us out a *mini mountain of fresh mulch. 🚛

We will spread it straight onto the previously mulched ornamental garden beds as a top up, but will apply a scattering of nitrogen-rich pelletised chicken manure first so as to avoid any overall soil nutrient loss as the mulch decomposes. 🐓💩

Mulch not only helps the soil retain moisture and moderates soil temperature, it also suppresses weeds, protects the soil from the erosive impacts of wind and rain and feeds the soil with organic matter as it breaks down. Mulch can be anything from hay/straw, seaweed, mushroom compost, sugar cane waste, grass clippings, shredded paper or bark chips. Mulch can even be stones, although they will be much slower to break down! 💚

What a wonderful late summer gift, which will perfectly compliment the drip irrigation system that we have been installing. 💧👍

*Jack Russell for scale. 🐶

Merry Christmas from our old house and garden back up north. We hope you are all surrounded at this time of the year with the ones you love, be they in spirit or flesh. 💚❤️💚

Our clover brings all the bees to the yard
And they’re like…it’s better than grass
Damn right…it’s better than grass.

To mow or not to mow, that is the question…🤔
Saint Patrick would be proud.☘️🐝🇮🇪

Sometimes we grow for colour as well as cuisine.💐😁💚👍

The paradox of effort is that life is often easiest when it is hardest. 🙏

Take this task for example, and swipe to see the progress in reverse.

The new shed imposed upon the massive 550cm (18ft) turning circle of our vintage Hills Hoist rotary clothesline and hence we needed to move the line.🩱🦺🩳👕👖👚👗

In order to do this, we first needed to relocate the 650 bricks which we had previously moved from within the shed footprint and stacked around the base of the clothesline. 🧱🧱🧱

Next we had to smash up and move aside the 2.7 square metre (30 square feet) surrounding concrete slab and then dig down 60cm (2ft) to extract the base of the line and its associated concrete foundation and smash the foundation off the ground end of the line pole. ⛏🔨⛏

Then we had to dig a new 60cm (2ft) deep hole in the new location and reinstall the clothesline in it’s new position and voilà the job was done. 👍

This all took hours as you would imagine, but here’s the kicker…guess how far the clothesline actually had to move to become fully functional again? 🤷‍♂️

Answer: About 150cm (5ft). Less than a body length.🤦‍♂️

A small move but a big change. You’d think there’d be a German word for that. 😁

What is the most effort you have ever expended to achieve a small physical change which had a disproportionately large outcome. Let us know below in a comment.

All this to dry our washing. 🧺

Jack Russell for scale. 🐶

There are three of us working on the garage, two days per week.

The first photograph shows the progress after Day One and the second photograph shows the progress at the end of Day Four. All of the roof trusses have now been installed, windows too, as well as all the roof battens and the truss bottom chords and the entire structure is fully braced with plywood and steel strapping.

We are now awaiting the local Council’s building inspector to sign off on the framework and we will continue with the next episode. 👍🔨🪚

Time to make use of all that concrete and put together the jigsaw which arrived on the back of a truck last Monday. 🧩🔨🧩🪚🧩

We are building a new double garage to get our cars off the street and undercover, as well as a place to store our tools and hardware and provide a dedicated art/craft and brewing space. 🚘🚖🍺🧵🪡🎨🔨🪛🔧🗜🪓⛏🔩

The new garage will be the same size as the old shed in the back corner (7m long and 6m wide) and is set the same distance off the side boundary (466mm). Where it differs however is the entry height (which on the new garage will be 2.7m) and an internal ceiling height of 3m. Plenty tall enough to accommodate our trusty van.👍👍

The new garage will be finished to match the house (wide fibre-cement cladding boards and a corrugated steel roof) and will allow us to finally lock in the surrounding garden design.💚💚

Please swipe to see the first of our progress photographs.

On the 21st May 2021, we published a post along with the third photograph, celebrating the fact we had just stood the second wall of the house.🔨🪚

We wrote about how the whole building design was based around the river and how soothing nature can be, and we spoke of how this same feeling had been distilled into one marvellous word “eutierria”, which literally translates as “good earth feelings” (eu =good, tierra = earth). 👍🌏

At the time, one of our friends suggested that we may have just found the name for our house and it set us to thinking.🤔

Fast forward 521 days and after a year of living in our renovated cottage we have just installed our new house name sign, kindly made by a talented local friend, and the circle is complete. ⭕️

Behold the flowing eucalyptus leaves in the colours of the river, the clear textured glass salvaged from the old louvre house windows and the dapples of golden sunlight reflected off the water.☀️

May all who enter this house be filled with the blessed sense of eutierria. 💚🙏💙

Grevilleas are the third most populous genera of Australian plants with at least 260 endemic species and countless cultivars and hybrids having been developed.

Grevilleas are irresistible to nectar-eating birds and are probably the most widely cultivated Australian native plants and with numerous shape, size and colour options there is a Grevillea for almost any conceivable garden situation.

We have opted for a Grevillea hedge composed of seven small tree-sized (3-4m or 10-13ft) species which should just peek over the deck balustrade, and bring the birds to eye level.

For those interested, we opted for 2 x “Honey Gem” (orange), 3 x “Moonlight” (white) and 2 x “Flamingo” (pink). 🧡🤍💗🤍💗🤍🧡

Labour Day in Australia began 167 years ago in Sydney when on the 18th of August 1855, the Stonemasons' Society issued an ultimatum to employers saying that six months from then masons would only work an eight-hour day. Some stonemasons decided not to wait and pre-emptively went on a successful strike, thus winning the eight-hour day ahead of time. These rebels celebrated their success with a victory dinner on the 1st of October, which to this day is still celebrated as the Labour Day holiday in the state of New South Wales.

We like to celebrate the Labour Day long-weekend with our own rebel gathering and those that know will know that a global pandemic has kept us subdued for a couple of years now, and that not since we gathered 41 clowns together on the Labour Day weekend in 2019 have we really been able to celebrate the day in proper style.

Well all that changes this long weekend as we prepare to gather together again in 2022 for a few ales amongst the bales under the dual themes of “Country” and “Western”, and as we prepare for the party the dog and cat maintain a watchful eye from the same vantage point. Swipe ⬅️📸

As Jimmy Buffett once sang in reference to the Labour Day weekend show…”Come Monday it’ll be alright”.👍

Customer: Can we tidy up that little corner?🤔

Us: Sure, how about a curvy pathway?👍

Customer: And the septic tank…can you hide that?🤷‍♂️

Us: Will an octagon do?😁💚👍

How many people does it take to name a plant? 🤷‍♂️

Firstly, in the year 1787, a young Mexican botanical artist and naturalist named Atanasio Echeverría y Godoy joins a scientific expedition to survey the flora and fauna of the territories of New Spain and over the next seventeen years he paints and draws thousands of new plants and animals throughout Mexico, California, the Caribbean, Cuba and Puerto Rico. 🇲🇽

Secondly, the expedition’s lead botanist entrusts the bulk of the manuscripts and drawings to a Swiss botanist Augustin Pyramus de Candolle in 1817, and he has 1200 of the illustrations copied by local artists in Geneva. Based on the copies, in 1828 de Candolle re-classifies three of the species into a new genera which he calls Echeveria in honour of the original botanical artist. 🇨🇭

Finally, in 1901 the American botanist Joseph Nelson Rose collects a specimen while exploring in the mountains of Pachua in Mexico. He sees that it is a new species of Echeveria and describes it as Echeveria elegans, in reference to the elegant and graceful form of the plant. 🇺🇸

Voila! Please enjoy our very own Echeveria elegans in full flower. 💚😁👍

To everything there is a season, and our old Plum tree reckons it is Spring. Shall we call it now, or wait until the equinox on the 23rd of September? What do others think/do? 🤔💚🤷‍♂️

Behold the old Switcheroo! ⬅️📸➡️

Someone was giving away these twenty year old Crassula ovata plants (without pots) and we couldn’t resist, despite the work involved in extracting them and getting them home. 🪴🏠

We knew we had the perfect black pots waiting for them back at our house, but they already contained some Green Stripe Bamboo. We also knew we had an empty square terracotta pot and a similar one filled with Polianthes tuberosa (Tuberose) which had failed to flower. 🎍🎋

Therefore we figured if we just shuffled plant A out of pot B and plant B out of pot C, we could move plant C into pot A and plant D into pot B. This obviously freed up pots A and D for plants A and B, and voilà Bob’s yer Uncle and also yer Auntie’s de-facto. 🤦‍♂️

As we said….the old Switcheroo, as both photographs show. 👍😁💚