Devilish Mischief

February is usually hot as hell, with a good string of 8-10 days in the high 40s. But not this year. Seems the devil went on holidays. Not only did the mercury not even hit 40 for the entire month, they even got rain. And on the night I returned home we had a massive storm and 62mm in one hour!! (average annual rainfall is 400mm if you want to put that in perspective).

Needless to say, the garden looks magnificent!!

It's green!

There are papayas galore. Dragonfruit ripening and still more flower spikes developing. Rocket everywhere....

Cucumber vines

Just lush as.

The mango tree looks really happy with lots of new growth, but the trunk still needs to thicken up as it's as weak as.

Back from holidays, the devil decided to play games. Nasty games.

Mid March we had a cyclone come through. Same day as Cyclone Pam was destroying Port Vila in Vanuatu, little Cyclone Olwyn snuck down the west coast, wreaked havoc up in Carnarvon (they had no water or electricity for 3 days) but was a complete fizzle by the time it got to us. Phew!

A week or so later, and we got hit by a freak storm with really scary swirling winds and huge hailstones. Enough to fill an esky and make a few dozen margaritas!

It ripped my shade sail to kingdom come, tore my TV aerial off the ridge cap and scared the bejesus out of me.

And then it has continued to rain almost every day for the last week. It's still warm though, which means it's quite pleasant, and a perfect opportunity to get out and do a bit of weed whacking whilst the ground is nice and soft. Except for the flies....

This is awesome lovely weather, but so not normal for this time of year. It's 2 months ahead of schedule.

My garden, aside from having to recover from an absolute beating from those huge hail stones, is loving it. Lots of new asparagus spears coming up. Snow peas sprouting, tomato plants powering, new eggplants fruiting (Freddie's plant is winning) and the dragon fruit is putting out its fifth set of flower spikes since December. Yum yum!

Who knows what the next month will bring?