Mish Mash

School is back, two weeks down so far and I have to say I'm very much enjoying teacher Pre Primary two days a week this year.  I have taught Pre Primary before and I did love it then too so I shouldn't be surprised.  It is nice though, having my ex students from last year again as well as some others and what is even better is the lack of hard work that the Kindy students bring at the beginning of the year.  Pre Primary students already know how to sit down, listen, put up their hand, follow instructions, behave, cut, count, glue, tidy up and really, everything that you'd need for a smooth running classroom at the beginning of the year.  My one half a day with brand new Kindy kids is putting me in bed by 8pm due to the sheer amount of full-on-ness they bring to the room.  And then times that by 20 little bodies.  

There has been a plethora of school related photos of instagram lately because my life has been taken over by preparation of new resources, planning lessons and neverending checklists.

In other news, my mystery surprise veggie which everyone who commented thought was a pumpkin, seems to be said pumpkin of the butternut variety and has just begun to fruit.  I found this one this morning when I was heading out to the car.  I've been looking each day at the flowers and wondering when they are going to start vegetablising but this sneaky one obviously has been doing so for a while whilst hiding under a nice big shady leaf.  I'm a bit concerned it might bake sitting on the pathway like that but we'll just wait and see.  There are a few other flowers that are starting to look a bit vegetablish at one end too.  It's all a bit exciting.  Pumpkin bread, pumpkin scones and pumpkin and corn fritters might be featuring a bit in however long it takes for them to grow and ripen. 

Finally, in some craft news, there isn't realllly any news because of the complete take over of my life by school work but on the nights where I have been awake past 8pm and not dead on the couch or busy cutting for 3 hours (my Tuesday night this week) I have managed a little bit more of my Bertie Couch Blanket, only the last 2 rows of purple this week but it has still come a long way since you last saw it at just two rows long in total! It's getting to the stage where the weather really needs to cool down before I get much further on it.  Hot days and a lap length blanket draped on me are not necessarily too enjoyable.

 

Veggie Surprise

 

There are some areas of our garden that are pretty much just sand.  Hydrophobic sand that is so scared of water that it just shunts it across its surface to a section more accepting.  So we've been working (a little bit, quite sporadically) on improving it.  We've added clay particles and cow poo and I got MR to dig me a hole and I was chucking veggie scraps in it and covering them over to add some nice organic matter so that maybe, some time in the future, we might be able to get something to grow there. 

A few weeks after doing that for about a week and then forgetting, I remembered and went to chuck out some more scraps only to find a little plant growing in one corner.  It looked like a veggie plant to me so I gave it some water and threw the scraps elsewhere.  A couple of months later it is now huge, taking up a whole corner of our garden that was previously just sand and had nothing growing it in.  It is starting to spread its tendrils out across the path to our front door.  And the flowers have opened now too, they are about the size of my palm.  I've been nursing it through the heat, watering it in the morning before I go out and in the afternoon when I get home to droopy wilted leaves and it seems to be coping okay.  I'm hoping that all those flowers do turn into tasty homegrown veggies.

I have no idea what it is, having only ever grown tomatoes and peas before.  MR reckons a pumpkin and that is possible because I do remember throwing pumpkin gizzards into the hole.  I'm hoping for cucumber though because I don't really eat pumpkin very often.  Maybe I'll have to start.

Any ideas what it is?