Early birthday gifties for me :-)

My birthday is later in the week (on World Environment Day, no less ;-), so I went out with my hubby and girls yesterday to buy a pressie.

I had originally wanted a home brew kit, but they had recently been on special in several shops - and aren't now - and I'm too stingy thrifty to want to spend $20+ more than I have to, so it has been put on the backburner until the next time they are on sale.

Instead, I asked for - and received - a subscription to Warm Earth magazine, my favourite organic gardening mag. Incidentally, Warm Earth can now be purchased (at a discount) as a PDF file, saving paper and delivery costs! Bravo! Pity I like to curl up with my magazine and a cuppa, well away from my computer... *Ahem*

Anyhoo, the girls like to present something physical, so if was off to the local plant nursery (yay!), where I finally found some Stevia plants, woo hoo! I have been looking for both Stevia and soapwort for ages, with no success so far, so I was pretty stoked to find the Stevia. Their leaves are used as sugar substitute and are supposedly 30 times sweeter than cane sugar. There has been some controversy about whether or not it may be harmful to your health, but as far as I can see, consuming a small amount of the leaf (as opposed to large amounts of the purified chemical extracts of the leaf), isn't going to do me any harm, and hey, it's calorie-free ;-)

Stevia seedlings.

I also have plans to start a medicinal herb garden in my backyard, so I also bought some Echinacea to start my collection off, and right next to it, I found seedlings of the Tuscan Black Kale I have read much about lately (all good!) so I grabbed one of them too.

I was pretty happy with my purchases when I got home with them, but then had to pop out again (in a different direction) on an errand, and since I went sans kids, I felt I needed to drop into another small nursery on the way ;-) Being winter, the fruit tree section was predominantly citrus trees, with any leftover plants shoved in the back. I fought my way through for a quick look, and right at the back a familiar-looking flat leaf caught my eye... And there, lo and behold, was a lonely, dripping-with-dead-leaves, banana tree seedling!!

Woo hoo! The first banana plant I've seen anywhere for sale locally! I grabbed it of course - the staff rapidly descended on it with secateurs at the counter and chopped the dead leaves off - and took it home to be a friend for my first banana sucker. When your kids are all banana fiends, you can't have too many 'nanas, right? :-D It will be planted in the garden space where DH chopped out the Giant Strelizia recently.

As you can see in the pic, it has started to rain today, yay! Everything was so dry that I had started to drag the hose around on Saturday but hadn't gotten to much since I've been sick with a pesky gastro bug since Friday. Luckily, rain has started falling, so hopefully it will continue long enough to give everything a good soaking.

I think the only sound nicer than rain falling softly on a tin roof, is the sound of rain water plunking into one of your tanks :-)

The downpipe rainwater diverter in action on one of my water buttes.