A trip away, Marmalade and some yard repairs.

Hi Everyone,
Back again, finally.
I  am finding it hard to get time to actually sit down at the computer and post. Not that I don't want to, but when I  get time I tend to sit in a chair and promptly fall asleep.
Today I am in town  printing the local free monthly newspaper which takes about 5 hours, I thought I would catch up.
We  had a quick trip to Sydney recently, to see our son  graduate from a course he was doing.

As we  come into Lithgow  you  see these gorgeous old arched Bridges in the distance, so we took a detour in to have a closer look at them.

The scenery is beautiful as  you cross over the Blue Mountains, and I always especially love the old convict built bridge on the highway close to the top.

We had booked a hotel  near where  we were to attend the ceremony , with the knowledge that it was an extremely busy noisy road, but convenience in the city far outweighed the bad, so imagine our suprise when we  walked into our room and found not only quietness(double glazed windows and great insulation) but this amazing  full  width view out the back window.

We had a wonderful  short  time away, but had to return home all too soon.
A good friend  offered me a bag of mixed citrus( grapefruits, oranges,tangellos, lemons and limes).

I looked up a few marmalade recipes and eventually settled on two different  ones.
The first one required  the  peel to be grated,

Then the white pith had to be removed off the fruit,

The fruit was then chopped and as many of the seeds removed as possible. and all placed into a pot

I used equal weight of fruit  and white sugar and boiled until the gelling stage was reached when tested.
Meanwhile I prepared my jars.

Then I filled them with the red hot marmalade.

I then water bathed the jars  for 10 minutes to seal.

These were covered with water and the lid placed on after the photo was taken.

The second recipe I used was just slicing the fruit up finely, and removing seeds and cooking the same way. This resulted in a slightly bitter marmalade with  longer slithers of peel though it as you can see in some of the jars above..
After the concrete truck had   reaked havoc with our yard after he delivered the concrete to our new back verandah we realised after the first fall of rain  we had that he had smashed all our underground  storm water pipe as he had drove the truck over them.

So Brian dug it all up,  purchased a new length of pvc pipe to replace the cracked and smashed areas and fitted it.

I spent several days carting wheelbarrow loads of  soil to fill in the deep tracks all over the yard that the truck created as he  nearly got his truck stuck.

We nearly have it back in order , and with recent rain the regrowth hopefully will be speedy.
The wattle trees  have been blooming beautifully,

And I picked this  lovely bunch the other day and teamed it with a few  gum leaves to make  this bouquet.

We have been having a few issues with pest control, and  Brian has been setting a few traps around,  the rat that he thought he had turned out to be this cute little fellow,

I got him out for a quick cuddle, but "somehow" he escaped and got away( he was just a baby ! )
We also had been having  mice issues, so  we set up some live catch traps in the shed. The mice at our place have a keen interest in Nutella chocolate hazelnut spread and the first night we caught 8 in the silver trap and 1 in the blue trap.

The chickens and  turkeys do a wonderful job also with pest control, Brian got a load of wood the other day for us and parked the ute up the back and within minutes the chickens were up in the back pecking away at anything moving that may have fallen out of the wood.

It has been a busy few weeks, time is flying and we are moving on with jobs that I will update in the next post.
Until we meet again down the track, please take care of you and yours,
Cheers,
Jane.