For valentines I picked a bunch of Belladonna lilles for Jan from our garden.  Jan bought me roses.  We shared some chocolate.  I cooked breakfast, we shared takeaway sushi lunch and Jan cooked dinner for us too Chicken Rex and Creme Brulee with some dark purple plums from Karen's garden.

We planted some amaranth seeds under Jan's window.  They're flowering.   The chickens and sheep will be happy with this crop.

I probably planted a hundred sunflowers, I only ended up with one.  Not a great picture either, it kept bouncing around.

Jan wasn't able to mow a spot in our front lawn the other day, because there are water melons growing there!

We have so many ripe grapes that I've advertised on freecycle for people to organise a time to come and take as many as they want.

We have four sets of vines around the house and they're all covered in fruit.  We have had 10 people come through taking over 10kgs of grapes away from our vines.  It hasn't made much of a dent in the crops.

Jan bought us a cheap dehydrator from the internet.   So far we've dried Lemon Verbena, Mint, Basil, Curry Plant leaves and two trays of grape leather!  I think i did it wrong as it's crunchy.  But it tastes fine.

Jan connected a power meter up to the dehydrator to see how much electricity it was using.  We used about 60c to dry the grape leather.  That plus the 2 hours labour picking and then mashing!

Jan spent a long time picking every ripe tomato we had in the patch

The most tedious bit was picking them in the garden and pulling all those stems off.  Very tedious, that's why bigger tomatoes would be better for us.

5 bags of tomato sauce (Tomatoes, chilli, basil, onions all from our garden) Some local garlic in there as well. We also used a cup to make ourselves little cottage pies for dinner too.

The existing wardrobes in the house all have only one high shelf and a clothes hanging rod in them. For the bedrooms that's mostly OK, but it's a problem in my office. I decided to install some custom shelving. Before I started, things looked like this:

 After measuring the cupboard, I pulled out the hanging rail and supports, and sketched out the shelving I wanted to build. Then, everything sat on the floor for weeks until my Christmas present finally arrived, and I could get to work:

First, I located the wall studs and marked them with some small pencil marks. There are 2 studs at standard 450mm spacing across the back wall, and the studs at the corners of the frame. Perfect for installing battens

Next, I installed the central vertical partition. It has a notch cut at the bottom to fit around the skirting board, and is attached at top and bottom with some small angle brackets:

I added the first two large shelves, which rest on battens at the back and left, and are attached on the right to the vertical MDF partition with angle brackets:

The lower vertical partition is for installing a small set of drawers:

I used a reasonably simple rabbet/dado box design for the drawers, cut with my new router mounted on the Triton workbench. It was a bit awkward to cut the correct depths, and I broke one bit after about the first half dozen cuts. I need more experience with the router to improve my joinery skills clearly. The cheap pine from Bunnings is also a bit warped which doesn't help, and I don't (yet) have a planer to fix that. In the end the drawers worked out OK though:

Finally, I installed some half-depth shelves on the right hand side. They're supported at the back by a batten. Since there was no convenient stud in the wall to attach to on the right wall, I added a support pole, bracketed to the skirting board at the bottom and to the batten for the original high shelf at the top. There's a notch cut out of the front right corner that fits around that support pole, and attached (again) with some small angle brackets.

I made the right hand shelves half depth because it's a good size for books, and because I'd like to hang some things on the inside of the right door - like my electronic component trays.

Now, to tidy up some of the junk stacked in there :)

This is the first corn cobs I've ever grown.   We microwaved them whole for 5 minutes. you just cut the end off then it all comes out without strings.   They were a little dry and floury, maybe not quite ready?  Anyway there's a fair bit more out there to harvest each day now.  Don't let the perspective fool you, these were large cobs of corn, we had them with some butter and pepper and vege salt!

It was time to start preserving some figs.  We thought fig jam would be the go.  It was nearly 6kgs of figs I was working with.

I did it up in two batches.  In the second one I added some powdered ginger.

This made 12 bottles of fig jam.   Five this size, in the fowlers jars, and the rest in smaller pop top lid jars that we could trade or give away.  We had some with our dinner too and a little bowl is in the fridge for breakfast.  YUM.