Farewell to the tomatoes and the cucumbers …There will be no more sad stories of how many buckets I picked that day.  The vines are all gone.  I gave the last of the green tomatoes and cucumbers to my sister, Vickie, who made green tomato chutney and cucumber relish with them.   I cooked up the last of the red tomatoes but, somehow, missed this guy so I decided to immortalise him.  There is one cucumber left and he is about to go in the bin.  We are having commercial pizza tonight.

Farewell to the Doc who has decided to put down his pen and blog no more.  All the very best, Doc.  I hope you and Sandee remain well.

Blogging is time-consuming and demanding with, to be honest, very little tangible reward.  I decided to do it because I like to take photos, love playing with Photoshop and, for some reason, needed some impetus to take photos.  What better way than to start a food and gardening blog (which are my other interests)?  That way, I would have to take photos.  It has worked .  My little Canon Photoshop G6 has been flat-out since I started.  I am no great shakes at any of these so I don’t really know what made me think I would be good at blogging but, of course, we don’t have to be good at things to have fun.

And farewell to Maus and me!!  Well, bon voyage, really.  We leave on our long anticipated holiday tomorrow.  All going well, we will be back mid-July. We are hoping that Lebanon stays safe and does not get any more entwined in Syria’s war.  War is no good to anyone.

The preparation for this holiday has taken so much work.  It is amazing how many things you have to organise just to leave the country.  It is doubly worse for us with two houses to clean (we are not the best of housekeepers usually), three dogs to wash and clip and cook for, and produce to pick and process.

We picked 215 kilos of olives which reaped 36.5 litres of oil.  We picked for three days.  I have frozen all the pomegranates seeds (I didn’t have time to do anything else) but, alas, the lemons remain on the trees.

We have been so busy which that is why there has been a reduction in the number of posts recently.

When we come back, there will be weeding and pruning the roses, setting up the second vegie patch and painting our fence in Perth.  It never stops, does it?

Thanks to Vickie, Eric, Sandra and Merle for looking after Maggie, Lily and Jules.  Looking after someone else’s dog is burden enough but when there are three and one has recently had a cruciate ligament operation, the burden is manifold.  Thank you so much.

Anyway, see you all in July.  Please return.  If you haven’t subscribed but check out the blog from time to time, now is a good time.  That way, you will get notification when I get back (lucky you)  .