Lychees

The season of plenty official kicked off on sunday evening, with the rising of the Pleiades in the southern hemisphere night sky. But we've been enjoying the glut of fruits for a few weeks now. Aside from the 12kg of tahitian goosberries that I've got stashed away in jars now, it's lychee season. This year is not a bumper crop, but Tattie Monique has still got a reasonable amount on her trees.

 

Fresh lychees are pretty awesome, we're all agreed on that, albeit a little fiddly to peel.

Heimana, in particular, has been gorging herself.

The even greater thing about lychees is that you can use a lychee seed (and a match-stick, it's all very Blue Peter) to make a remarkably good spinning top (see tutorial), so the fun never ends!

 

November rush!

The November rush is finally subsiding to a trickle, and so I can take the time to blog a bit!
November has been as wet as it has been busy, which is great for the garden, take a load of the amaryllis out front. With the dry weather and dying cuttings I was bit discouraged, but now I'm inspired me to continue begging and borrowing new plants for the garden - the recent arrivals are geraniums and get this strawberries, not to mention the tamarinds that have sprouted up!
Matotea has also insisted that we try to sprout pink beans from the kitchen, and you know what it worked like a dream.......only snag is that there's no treasure or giant popped up, yet! Strawberries, however, almost make up for it, they give a decent give load of fruit at the neighbours house and Matotea was
over the moon to be allowed to pick a few ripe ones along with the runners that we're trying to get growing. Roll on next years strawberry jam!

Last week was a school holiday here and the guesthouse was heaving all week, whatsmore there were lots and lots of kids for Mato and Heimana to play with, just a slight compensation for the fact that everytime Mato's on holiday we are rushed off our feet (she also had the bouncy castle up and a new paddling pool to cushion the blow)!

 

This november has been the busiest I've ever seen it, and while it's a lot calmer this week it's not dead either, so it's all good news for us. We don't have much of a break before Christmas, which is already sneaking up on us. I've already done my online Christmas shopping, in the hopes that the post will get here for Santa..... I'm also hankering for a couple of days in Tahiti, enoying the 'Big Smoke' and supermarkets.......maybe for early december when we're going to close for a few days to replace our leaky roof, which will be a big relief to get done!