So there I was, barely two days off the plane from California, as sick as a dog, coughing my lungs out.... But I had booked this day off my “day job” more than a month ago in order to go on a little mission to get more plants, so the show had to go on! A little excursion to Diggers Club’s nursery in Dromana led to a few great finds!

We were all still pretty jet-lagged… The children were up at 4:00am already; their body-clocks still way out of whack. I was feeling like death warmed up, coughing and spluttering like an old tractor that doesn’t want to start. We almost called it off; in fact we did, but then by 8:00 after we had done breakfast, tea, some planning, tea, some lying around, tea, some more useless stuff – we suddenly realized, we don’t really have another day to do it. So scarfs, hats, jumpers, flasks of tea, our carefully planned shopping list all in the car, we headed off to Queenscliff. We weren’t far away when we turned back to fetch the Dutch Blitz cards – a fun game we started playing over the holidays. On the way, the children cycled through some oldies – Elvis, ABBA, Neil Diamond, Bruce Springsteen, the Police and a few more. Good education!

Luckily the ferry ride breaks up the trip, so even though it’s more than an hour and-a-half journey, it felt like we arrived at Dromana quite quickly.

Diggers nursery

At the nursery we had our normal interesting time – we found some great plants we needed on our list, we didn’t find a few plants we really wanted and of course, we discovered a few new plants that would be really interesting either at Dreamland or at Homeland. This post in particular is about the plants we got for Homeland. Of course, we had a lot of helping hands loading and pulling trolleys around the nursery.

Concorde!

One of the main things on our shopping list was to get grapes for our new second “vineyard” at Homeland. Great was our joy when we found the following:

• Concorde (x2)
• Saturn (x2)
• Crimson seedless (x2)
• Black muscat (x2)

Well, that’s all we have space for this time round… We have been looking for Concordes all over our area, and were so stoked when we found them! It’s a pity we don’t have space for 10.

I’m quite excited that this time round I did all the trellising and wiring myself. It’s obviously a lot easier when you have an example on-site to follow. So watch this space for some summer yumness in a few years’ time.

One for the medicine chest

Another tree we didn’t have on our shopping list, but which we were very glad to stumble upon was a Gingko Biloba. This is such a useful medicinal tree! One of our aims is to not only get more self-sustainable with regards to food and water, but also in terms of natural herbs and medicines. This tree has so many uses, it will be a great asset. Reputedly it is hardy enough for our area too.

We also got a lot of seed, some vegetable seedlings for Homeland and a few interesting plants for Dreamland, but that’s all news for another two posts!

After a great lunch at the Fork-to-Fork restaurant we retraced out steps and took the joyful ferry ride home. Now for some more fun planting.