I suppose in my mind, in a not very conscious way, I always want to plant two kinds of flowers in my garden, one would be Hydrangea, and another, of course dahlia. They would both make great cutting flowers, to me, which would be the most important or only benefit from having a garden .

So here is a real dahlia cutting flower, from the Macedonia Temple the next door to my office. One of my colleagues, Susan, who strongly recommended me and Kath to go in and have a look after she accidentally paid a visit after her lunch walk. Apparently she passed by and saw the door open and she went in and got all impressed by the massive wood carving on the whole wall.

So Kath and I went. It is a not a very big place but very finely made. There were ladies decorating some sort of grave thing with the flowers from their own gardens for their Easter ceremony that is going to be held on Sunday morning. I couldn’t resist the lovely smell of the beautiful flowers and asked her to give me one. She gave us two, one for each.

Yesterday, after multiple times of “buying and trying and returning” several sets of lamp shades from Target (that’s why I love target) in the last 2-3 weeks, we finally agreed on this one. They are plain white fabric on outside shade and dahlia patterns on inside fabric), which means that you can only see the dahlia patterns when they are lit up. It is very pretty and effective. I really love the look, and I know it is probably to do with dahlias:-)

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I believe that I was very very mad about IKEA when I was young and poor. When the first IKEA shop opened in China, I was living in a distance about 10 minutes away (by walking). I went there quite often just to see and feel. I remember once I was the first one rushed into the store in the midnight for one of their big anniversary opening events. For years and years, I had a lot of dreams about filling a virtual place with their stuff, but the reality was, I didn’t have any money or a place to buy or accommodate any of their furniture. However I did buy some little things from time to time to get the satisfaction. Now, when I looked back, I laughed about my silliness.

Time passed by, my life has drifted from China to Australia, then from Sydney to Canberra, a place that has a population that is not enough to establish an IKEA shop. Driving for 3 hours to go to Sydney for emotional gratification is just not realistic and I can’t be that mad. I forgot about IKEA, and I had to, until recently, I finally had the excuses to fulfil my youth hood dreams. I am sure you know what I am talking about if I tell you that I paid a few hundreds bucks, without my eyes blinking, to have some furniture delivered from Sydney to Canberra from IKEA.

So I thought I was very mad, until I met this new couple friend lately. They are in the process of buying a new house in Canberra. I was so amazed to find out that they already bought the laminated floor boards while the settlement hasn’t happened yet……where do they store them? What if something goes wrong with the settlement? I am on one hand feeling glad that I am not alone, and on the other hand shocked by the fact of ”people who are actually even MADER than me”:-)

I know something is going on here. I guess I did hear people talking about the quality of IKEA furniture a lot in negative ways, but that had never logged into my mind and will never be the case. No matter how cheap the materials are, there is nobody, simply nobody can beat their design and the holistic atmosphere that IKEA created for this era. You get so many IKEA hackers and similar even better quality big homeware stores, but they are just not the same, and I simply could not find the substitution in them for a lot of things that I loved in IKEA. Just simple like that…. You think you have choices or alternatives, but there simply aren’t.

Yes, I heart IKEA big time. So I joked many times to my husband, said I could live in Canberra for the rest of my life if they opened an IKEA shop…I was actually quite serious. Just don’t know when this will happen. Maybe never……

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Due to the harvest of our grape vines, I had to share our fruit with others. David picked a whole basket of them yesterday, and according to him, this was only one tenth.

I brought them to the office this morning. People whoever passed by pinched them and praised the taste of them. By the lunch time, I noticed everyone had a small bowl of them sitting on their own desk for them to nibble.

I agreed. It tastes nothing like the green seedless grapes that you find in the market (though i love them very much). This type of grape is probably grown to make wine. They are small, sweet and take a bit patience to spit out two tiny seeds in the middle. However the flavor was great and the aroma was just unforgettable.

People think we have a orchards in our backyard, and start to worry for me what I was going to do with all these grapes and the significant picking job that we will have to do. So there was grape jam, grape jelly recipes being mentioned, and what I was truly interested was to learn how to make wine:-) But that seems to be a far far away mission, and a bit of out of the question at the moment.

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We, not having to put our hands in any part of the hard work, discovered the new things in front of our eyes every day. What else more could we ever have expected?

We had to believe, we are simply blessed.

P.S. The two jars of peach jam I made out of out peaches.

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This year I was looking for even simpler idea for in-house plants. It caught my eyes immediately when I saw mustard and water cress seeds in the pack the other day in the shop. On the pack, it doesn’t seem that they would need any soil or a lot of care. I decided to give them a go, now you can see the result from the photos, except no progression photos at different growth stage.

I used a long shallow ceramic tray for water cress, with a piece of kitchen paper towel which I wet it and folded several times to make it a few layers to fit into the shape of the bottom of the tray. There is no need to SOAK seeds, and please DO NOT SOAK THEM if you want them to survive. Just spread seeds into single layer on the top of paper towel. No worries about seeds being too crowded.

All I did other than the above was to wait. Just a little bit sprinkle of water once a day which is ample enough. I think it took a little bit longer time for them to germinate, than wheat grass, but very similar time frame I would say. Initially the seeds developed some gelatine liked water shell around each seed. Here is what I learned from my failure. Gelatinous seeds do not drain well and may decay from too much moisture. That’s why you do not need to soak them, otherwise you will kill them from the beginning. This happened to my mustard seed, sadly:-(

I guess it took about a week to see the little shoots coming up, then another week to have them grow into about 3-4 cm length. The brown seed shell eventually fell off from the leaves, and fresh green colour came out. They are very pretty with interesting curled leaves, and I left them on the bedroom window sill for a bit of lively decoration.

I think the beauty of water cress is they can grow in any small and shallow containers, even in a broken egg shell. Because they don’t need soil, it is really a no-mess and stress-free gardening project.

The only question left here is “how long they are going to last?” I am curious to find out. Hold my breath……

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