Christmas Day

Crayfis

Christmas Day at Palm House started early with Leigh and Wendy getting the house ready for a slap up meal for Wendy’s folks.  Once the place was ready for habitation (lot’s of dust from working on the wall had drifted down the corridor) we started the meal preparation.

Leigh and Wendy proceeded to shell and devein a crayfish, some bugs and a bucket of prawns which were served with a lovely Bowen Mango Mayonnaise.  We also devoured a couple of dozen oysters with a shallot and raspberry vinegar dressing.  Yummm.  Our seafood was kindly ordered through our local She Sells Seafood.

Of course we munched on our Fernleigh Farm Organic Wessex Saddleback ham with gusto (obviously I am writing this pre xmas drinks!).

Replete with food we lazed in the lounge until it was time to open some pressies.  Wendy played Santa (after all she had the hat) and gave the presents out.  Rex required a little assistance but not much, after all snacks were mostly involved.  We have to admit however that a little paw assistance was required with one well taped present from his Grandhumans.   Can’t wait to see a little BC opening her presents next year.

On behalf of everyone at Palm House B&B, we hope you have a safe and merry Christmas.

Gardening and home improvements

The House and Gardens

After a visit to the Melbourne Garden Expo we returned home with many plants who needed a new home and today seemed like a perfect day to plant them. The gardens are looking fantastic at the moment with color and scent everywhere you explore. In fact the gardens are looking so great at the moment that we’ve been included in a new book focusing on gardens of the goldfields. We’ve had a photographer come out to get some early Spring shots and should have more info on the book in a couple of weeks. Aside from planting our purchases, most of our time has been spent maintaining the gardens or working on our renovations.

Leigh is curently stripping cement render off some walls in the old servants quarters using a scrubbing brush and (diluted) hydrochloric acid. He expects to be finished in the next 3-4 hundred years. We’ll have some photos of this work up in the next couple of days. The image above shows us enjoying the gardens just before Spring – the hedge in the foreground is now so think you can’t see through it! This image is one of the shots from our GMTM testimonial board.

Renovations

Painting Palm House

In our last post we mentioned we were escaping renovations at Palm House. The photo above shows some of the major work going on the exterior. What you can’t see is the scaffolding extending around the entire house. We snuck up the scaffolding the other day to have a look and got fantastc views over the Long Gully Mine next door as well as Palm House’s garden.

There are also renovations being undertaken on the interior, more details of these in a later post…