Tall, dark and handsome

My latest cunning plan occurred to me many years ago, and it only came to fruition last Wednesday. Patience rewards those who wait. As soon as I saw the famous Chinese terracotta warriors, I wanted one – as garden art in my garden (although the unkind might think of him as a gnome - heaven forbid!). I don't care what people think. Now I have one, and he's tall, dark and handsome and I've found him a nice spot, too.

At the Art Gallery of New South Wales, here in Sydney, they're staging an exhibition of some of the famous Terracotta Warriors from China. Fabulous exhibition, well worth getting to if you are in Sydney. My nephew Neil visited China last year, went to the Terracotta Warrior site in China but also went to the Sydney exhibition a few weeks ago, and said he learned more about them here in Sydney than he did in China. But of course seeing them ALL in China was a truly wonderful experience. Like Neil, I learned so much in this excellent and beautiful display. And then, in the Art Gallery shop that inevitably follows on from every major art exhibition, there he was. About 30cm tall, very striking, and a bit expensive ($90). But I had to get him, I had wanted a terracotta warrior in my garden for many years. (Of course real Terracotta Warriors are real size, 190cm tall, so a mere 30cm tall copy-warrior fits my small garden so much better!)

He's not the first famous personage which I have borrowed for service in my garden. This Bart Simpson shampoo bottle is one-foot-tall perfect gnome size, and provided his little plastic body stays in the cool shade, he should be here for years.

Until the terracotta warrior arrived on the scene, security duties here in Amateur Land have been very ably covered by this hand-painted postman gnome, who I turned into a combat gnome with a splash of camouflage colours. Now, with the ancient warrior to lend a hand, I am sure he will be glad to have an increased force.

There was an important lesson I learned several years ago about the placement of objects in my garden, and that is 'respect'. I wanted a Buddha figure to sit at the base of my curry tree, and while I'm not a Buddhist or practitioner of any religion, if I ever turned religious I would probably become a Buddhist. And so I got in contact with a local Buddhist ashram, explained my somewhat quirky desire to have a Buddha figure close to my curry tree (reclining on a mother-of-pearl shell), and I learned a few things in that conversation. It's respectful to not have Buddha in a lowly position, such as down on the ground. That's OK. He's sitting in the garden's largest pot, in a nicely elevated spot. And then the Ashram person asked me: "Does Buddha have a nice outlook?" and I replied "Well, I guess he actually has the best view in the garden, and sees the setting sun every day." And so I relaxed, I had treated Buddha with respect.

I bore this lesson in mind when finding a suitable post for my Terracotta Warrior. He's close to Buddha's curry tree, also facing the setting sun. He has a traditional Chinese money tree behind him, and my most beautiful and fragrant herb bush, my sage plant, around him at the front. Hopefully he likes his spot. I think it's the second best one in the garden, and I don't think he'd begrudge Buddha the best seat in the house.

Excellent timing

Excellent timing indeed. I was about to start my second, words-only 'photo-less' posting this week, when Shivangi chimed in with a supportive comment on my previous 'pic-free' post (where I was grouching about spammers), lamenting the lack of pix on that one. (Maybe I should have taken a pic of a can of Spam for that one?)

Anyway, I dashed outside slowly (I'll explain all in a moment) and banged off a quick bunch of snaps to decorate this posting, which was going to be about excellent timing of a completely different sort.

What sort? Well, if your dodgy back is going to throw a wobbly and go into a spasm, it might as well be on a rainy day when you can't do much gardening. And so what I've been doing, apart from being very careful with my dodgy sore back, is sitting down at my blog and trying to improve it. And that's why I dashed outside very slowly to take some photos.

All the improvements to the blog navigation will, I hope, make it easier to browse the 'back-catalogue' of earlier postings. But before I get onto the dreariness of that topic, some pix for everyone, but especially you, Shivangi!

Top quality rain we're getting right now. A good soggy soaking, but no damage done. This well-watered French tarragon is singing in the rain.

As promised a couple of posts ago, the native orchids are out, putting on the prettiest little show in Tinyville.

This alien space monster is, in fact, an oak-leaf lettuce which I am allowing to go to seed, just so I can see what the flowers are like. I know that they'll be some kind of daisies, but it will be another week or so before I find out what size and colour daisies they will be (small and yellow is the best bet). I like letting the occasional vegie live out its full life-cycle, flowering and setting seed, rather than being cruelly cut down in its youth by greedy farmers (such as me).

Tragic, isn't it? A storm-damaged pub. But tomorrow promises to be sunny once more, and so I'll tidy up the birdbath, clean out the detritus and the pub will be open for business once more. Popular spot, this one, with the fly-in crowd.

Aren't babies adorable when they're wet? This is the third, baby-sized scadoxus plant, sending up foliage-only this year. Maybe next year it will have reached fruitful adolesence and will make its first attempt at blooming.

And while it seems like cheating to repeat the same flower that I blogged about previously, at least this is an updated shot from about half an hour ago. And besides, the Scadoxus really is the star of the garden right now and deserves a second moment in the limelight.

Get up close and it truly looks like this photo has been taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of some exploding supernova in outer space. Boooooom! Lovely thing, isn't it?

Anyway, with Shivangi's slide show out of the way, onto the re-organisation of the blog, which has taken about three hours to do, so I am going to bore you with it for a moment, just to justify all the time spent!

On the right side of the page I have set up the 'labels' tool that Blogger offers, so that previous postings are grouped according to common topics, such as 'flowers', 'vegies', 'natives', 'cooking', 'herbs' etc.

There are some postings which defy easy classification, hence the 'left field' group in which you'll find motorcycles, dust storms, art shows and all sorts of odd stuff of highly variable quality.

What took me so long to discover this tool I do not know. I'm not one of cyberspace's sharpest denizens, I guess! And what took me three hours was laboriously working through all 250 postings I have done so far, trying to give each of them consistent (ie, 'sensible') labels that would then be picked up by the Blogger tool.

With my bad back restricting me to my office chair, it was the perfect little project to take up most of this soggy Saturday afternoon. Hopefully it will prove useful, and might encourage some of you to browse what the music industry likes to call the 'back catalogue'.

A cure for spammers

Of course we all hate spam and spammers. So far my quiet little backwater of a blog has been free of spammers, but in the last couple of days I've been spammed repeatedly by someone who I can describe only as electronic pond-scum.

Dozens and dozens of my posts have been smeared with the stupid ads of a spammer from far far away, and so I've been forced to turn on the option in my Comments section which means any comments to my blog need my approval prior to making it up onto the site. Sorry about this, but for the meantime I'll be doing this until I think it might be safe to return to normal. So there might be a wait occasionally before you see your comments appear. That's a bummer because I love comments!

The only thing that I can offer by way of constructive suggestion is that anyone caught spamming should be jailed for one year and fed nothing but Spam. That should cure them.

However, I hate to conclude this little text-only posting with jails and revenge in my heart. So please accept 50,000 thanks from me to all the good people who visit my blog. My little visitor-counter thingy at the bottom of the page finally ticked over past that little milestone this week, and so please accept 50,000 thanks all you wonderful people who have visited my blog with the best of intentions (even if you sometimes leave confused!). As far as I can tell, the good people outnumber the spammers by 50,000 to one.

One thing leads to another

I hadn't planned on doing a blog posting today, but one thing led to another and here I am, blogging about something that wasn't even on my mind as recently as three hours ago. Where to begin? Easy - pictured below is a Syngonium. This is what I didn't know three hours ago. Up until that point it had the rather lengthy common name of "Pam's old pot plant which got too big and so we planted it out in the shady back part of the garden where it has thrived but sorry we don't know its name." Syngonium sums it all up much more succinctly, I think you'll all agree.

Traa daa, our Syngonium, accompanied by three blind mice disguised as mushrooms.

This is what cleared up the plant name thing. Its original label, discovered in a big pile of plant labels in my shed, while I was looking for a completely different label. See what I mean about one thing leading to another?

By the way, if you look carefully at the label above you'd notice that the plant on the label is variegated, but the leaf in the opening photo on this posting isn't. Our Syngonium is doing what all (or at least, many) variegated plants seem to end up doing – they proceed to also grow some unvariegated, fully green leaves. From what I understand variegation is a not a dominant gene in plants. So, if you don't cut off the 'normal' fully green leaves, slowly but surely the variegated leaves will be outnumbered, and after several years it will be a plain, unvariegated plant.

And so, in another sense altogether, one thing (a variegated plant) leads to another (a non-variegated plant).

In fact, this innocent little dig around my dusty plant label pile in my shed also gave me another idea for a blog topic that I'll try to make sense of soon, so one thing has led to another, which then led to another. I love a good meaningless set of tangents – it feels like I'm dreaming!

Everything must go!

Well, that was fun. Pam's mum has sold her house (after 48 years there), is moving out next Friday to a snazzy new townhouse, and the property has to be bare, inside and out, by then. So the only solution was a classic 'Everything must go' garage sale, including lots and lots and lots of potted plants, as Pam's mum, Val, is quite a green thumb, who I have blogged about before, here. Here's a few snaps from the big day.

We advertised in the local paper and online, put up signs nearby on telegraph poles, but nothing beats Nanna's hand-made sign which we nailed to the lovely old paperbark tree (a Melaleuca) outside her house. The bark itself is about two inches thick in places, and so the nails never touched real wood, but the sign has held onto the dense bark nevertheless.

I was in charge of the plant sale, and so I organised the pots into lines of $1 pots, $2 pots and $5 pots. So everything there was a very good bargain. Anything we can't sell goes into a skip – a terrible fate – so our aim was less to make money and more to see the pots off to new homes.

Just $5 - that's craaaaaazzzzy!

Dracaenas for just $1 – that's craaaaaazzzzy!

Told you Nanna has green thumbs.

Succulents a specialty.

These went fast.

Happy customer Liza even brought her own trolley.

At $10 for the pair, these pots (not the weeds in them) didn't even last till the official opening time of 9am.

And how can you have a proper garage sale without a garage? Val's collection of bric-a-brac is extensive, to put it mildly, and the action was brisk early on, as everything was priced to sell. The gnomes were gone before 9.30. No-one wanted the Wedgwood plate, though, and the Royal Worcester egg coddler, at $10, is still there. Books gone, magazine stacks dwindled rapidly at 10c a pop. And retail mathematics was the order of the day, so if people bought six items at $2 a pop, it's 6 x 2 = 10. Works for me.

Val has lots of great friends and they all showed up to help out during the day. Some brought cakes, another a barbecued chicken and bread rolls which, with some avocado and a tomato or two, turned into a very nice lunch. It was tea and coffee all morning but by late lunch the champagne came out with a loud Pop! and the garage sale slowly turned into a verandah party by late afternoon. The good news is that we sold a big proportion of what we started with, and lots of potted plants are going to loving homes somewhere in the local area. I can sleep easy tonight!

Shameless self-promotion

Don't you love those blog comments which go something along the line of "you have a nice blog, and make sure to visit my blog" and then they post a link to their blog? I can just see these people spending countless hours copy-and-pasting the same generic self-promotion into countless other blogs. I hope it works for them. It probably works, much in the same way that I hear Viagra spam emails earn their peddlers large sums of money. (Wonder if that's just a myth? Surely not...) Anyway, I digress before I even started. What follows is just shameless self-promotion of me and my blog, but in the process maybe I might be able to provide you with quite a few new gardening websites that you may not have heard of, courtesy of links to just three other websites.

This is our little patch (a panorama taken late last summer) as I always like to include some kind of photo in every posting. And I guess it is vaguely relevant to shameless self-promotion.

First up, have you ever visited Your Garden Show? Neither had I, but Stacie from Your Garden Show emailed me last week to ask if I wanted to include my garden on her site. While the website offers lots of things, it allows you to upload as many photos of your own garden as you like, just to show others. There are lots of gardens to check out there. Here's a link to our garden, Jamie and Pam's garden, but if you're like me and you love stickybeaking at others' gardens, Your Garden Show is worth a visit.

Second on the list is the result of another email which lobbed in a while ago from Ashley, whose blog title of "construction management degree" didn't exactly remind me of gardening. Yet within his blog Ashley has compiled a list of what he considers are the top 100 gardening blogs in the universe and, aw shucks, I'm in there. Even if you don't agree with Ashley's picks, or that I deserve to be in the top million, there are some interesting new sites to visit there.

Finally, this will be no news whatsoever to any keen gardening bloggers, but if you're a newbie to garden blogging, do drop in on Blotanical. It's a great place to make yourself known, find a zillion other gardening blogs, and get started in garden blogging generally. It's run by a hard-working Australian named Stuart, and it provides a very popular service to gardeners and garden bloggers that's well worth a bit of promotion here.

So there you go, shameless self-promotion dressed up as talking about others. I think I should have had a career in politics. Too late! Oh well, might as well keep on gardening and blogging then.

Floating an idea

I had one of those Homer Simpson "D'oh" moments recently, when I saw a plant in another garden growing as it should grow, unlike my version of the same plant. It was in a pond that I saw some Nardoo (Marsilea drummondii), our native floating fern, doing what it should do. Float. On the water. It's a simple game. Float on water = floating fern. Trouble was, my floating fern didn't float. It kind of hovered over the water. D'oh!

Problem solved, here is my nardoo, floating on the goldfish pond like it should.

And here is nardoo doing it all wrong a month or so ago. The problem was simple. I had not put the pot deep enough underwater. That's all. The pot was sitting on a brick, with the top of the pot about 2-3 inches below water level. Wrong! I took out the brick, sank the pot to the bottom, so it was 6 or more inches below the water level, cut off all the foliage, and started again.

While it was a bit of an anxious wait to see whether my drastic action worked, it took only four weeks for the first new leaves to float into position, just like they should have all along. But now all is well with the world, the fish seem to like their new floaty cover, and I've learned something.

And so the moral of the story is to be a gardening stickybeak – you might just learn something useful. Now, I'm sure many blog-readers from around the world won't be familiar with the word 'stickybeak' but it's a fine old Australian term that's fairly close to the English 'Nosy Parker'.

In its worst sense a stickybeak is someone who pries into others' lives, but in the grand sense of the word it just describes what we all can't resist doing: having a look at something, whether or not it's often over a fence, through a fence, or from a vantage point.

Stickybeak often = get a life.

Stickybeak occasionally = national pastime.

And that's what I was doing, walking around the local area stickybeaking at others' front gardens, and in one I saw the nardoo floating serenely, just as it should. That ended my stroll in fact. Headed for home, 'fixed' the nardoo problem then and there. Good, productive, stickybeaking stroll, that one.

A parallel universe

I've always taken the view that there's so much happening in my little garden that it's a complete world on its own, if you bother to look. It's a parallel universe so big that I'll never really get to know all of it in my lifetime. And now my darling Pammy has given me the incentive – and the equipment – to explore this 'other world', the micro world of nature.

It's our 21st wedding anniversary today, and Pam has bought me my first microscope. I've always wanted one, often talked about getting one, but never quite got around to buying one. And this one is perfect. It's a "Kid's First Microscope", and that's spot on, because I'm just a big kid at heart.

I love the packaging. As soon as we unpacked it we immediately set about examining seeds of parsley, lettuce and silver beet in various magnifications. Amazing detail, such complex structures I never imagined were there. And then we looked at each other romantically and said "pond scum!" Borrowing a blob of water from our outdoor potted water garden, we were amazed to see the micro wildlife swimming around on the glass slide. Yikes!

Suitable for ages 9 and up. Yep, I qualify, with several decades to spare!

Pammy is a truly gifted when it comes to buying presents. She's a legend in her family for her gift-buying imagination plus her attention to detail. The gift papers are always something special, the cards equally so. This beautiful carrot paper wrapped up my microscope box.

And this lovely lemon paper wrapped up a couple of little extra gifts for this boy who loves gardening, and his girl.

While I don't imagine that I'll be able to take any photos of the amazing things I am already seeing in my tiny parallel universe, I know that the insights which will come to me via Pammy's microscope will somehow end up in this blog.

Even without a microscope I've always taken the view that there's a million fascinating little things happening out there in the 9m x 7.5m of our little garden, but with the new close-up viewer I had better upgrade that estimate to a zillion.

Noisy distractions

Yes, I could easily blame the weather, which has been as leaky as a wicker roof lately, but that would be unfair on my old mate Huey, the Aussie Weather God. No, I only have myself to blame for a quiet patch both in the garden and in the blogosphere. Oddly enough, I've actually been quite noisy during this recent quiet patch. Mechanically noisy, that is. Yep, the Death Wish has taken hold and this old gardener has bought himself a motor-sickle (with Pam's blessing, surprisingly enough – what a gal!). I once did earn my living riding and writing about bikes, before I became a genteel gardener, so a regression into some kind of wistful remake of my wild youth has always been on the cards.

And it's quite a nice way to do it, in fact. A lovely Italian Moto Guzzi 750.

It looks new but it's not, but it is only one year old. The previous owner likes polishing bikes in the same way I like growing plants.

Well, I think it's pretty. The paint is pearlescent white, the chrome suitably gleamy. The sound is a deep baritone burble. And it's not garish and insect-like, like so many modern bikes. It has a simple elegance that works for me.

Talk about distractions. Last Sunday, the heavens stopped leaking for a few hours. I could have gone out into the garden and thinned the seedlings, pulled weeds, picked up fallen fruit. But no, as the weather forecast for the next few hours was fine, I put on the helmet, headed south and rode off into the distance, making a deep burbling sound as I did so. I was back for lunch, mind you, but what a lovely distraction after so many years away from motorcycles.

Now my gardening is going to take on a completely new dimension. I am going to have to redesign my garden so it's easier, less time-consuming to care for. I need time on sunny weekends to spend time out on the highways. Yet I still want a lovely, productive garden.

Now, this might not make too much sense, but spending so much time in a garden, as I have done in recent years, almost makes gardening too easy. If I couldn't grow nice plants given the hours I spend out there, I really should give up. No, the new challenge is to grow nice plants with half the available time. It's a bit like a "gardener's challenge" which this whole new arrangement offers up.

I guess this probably does mean a lot less garden blogging, but I don't plan to give it away completely any time soon. I'm quite intrigued by the idea of what lies ahead. And so if any of you are regular readers and you notice that there aren't anywhere near as many posts as there used to be from wordy, long-winded old Garden Amateur, now you know why. I'm probably out on the road somewhere, listening to an Italian Moto Guzzi sing its beautiful highway Opera.

Slimming down

I love those ‘before & after’ photos in the diet ads, especially those hopelessly unrealistic ones where it’s two completely different people doing the before-ing and after-ing. I won’t lie to you: this isn’t me, but this is how I feel, already.

So far I have lost 4 kilos. There’s still one more kilo to go before I hit my first target of a 5 kilo loss, and another 5 kilos more beyond that till I’m truly back in normal, healthy, 50-something male shape (and the weight I was pretty consistently from age 30 to 50).

And guess what, during my daily walkies I’ve been thinking a little on how diets succeed and fail, and I thought I’d share my few grams of understanding here today. So, here are my three golden rules of how to stay on your diet and reach your personal target.

1. Don’t listen to the advice of friends

This is a biggie. All diet advice from friends will be of the sort which preaches just a bit more fanaticism than you’re currently practising: ie, why giving up that yummy spoonful of sugar in your coffee/tea really adds up; why a particular cardboard-like crispbread is better than the nice-tasting one you’re eating right now; and why whatever exercise you’re doing is not quite gruelling enough to have any effect. When you listen to them, you hasten the day you give up your diet. They are devils trying to make you fail.

2. Don’t listen to the advice of health experts

This is an equivalent size biggie to number one. Health experts are usually thin and often young, and mistakenly believe it’s all their careful eating and exercising which makes them thin, when the simple fact is that being young, or thinness genes, or both, is mostly what keeps them thin. They also read too much. They will find your exercise regime worthy of a smirk, and nothing more. They will recommend even more bland, vile eating options than your friends can think up. They are devils trying to make you fail. All their advice is destined to hasten the end of your dieting efforts through the crushing boredom of bland food and exercise-related injury. Whatever you do, don’t pay them. It only encourages them.

3. Don’t eat or drink anything you hate

This might even be bigger than 1 and 2, which makes it VERY BIG. Never sigh that sigh of “oh well I guess I’d better eat/drink this bland tosh” during a diet. Take that thought as a warning sign that the end of your diet is nigh! Bland ‘diet’ food is just another devil trying to make you fail. Healthy food with good flavour is out there in abundance, and that’s your assignment: find a real variety of it, then eat and enjoy to your heart’s content.

And so that’s what I’ve learned so far. Listen to no-one. Do your own thing. Go for quality and variety, not quantity. And never ever eat or drink something you don’t like. Works for me.

Stage fright

Thank goodness that's over. Stage fright. In front of a live audience. Talking. Worse still, being asked questions. And yet somehow we survived. The good thing was that I wasn't alone. I had my good mate Tracy, our magazine's cookery whizz, along to share in the whole stage fright experience with me. A pair of newbies, and we managed all right. Although I talked too much (not the first time that's happened, won't be the last, either). Sorry, Tracy!

This is what I mean. There's a home-show style of event happening in Sydney now called 30 Days of Home & Entertaining, and our magazine set up the 'garden' component out in the former car park. Included in the garden is a little stage for talks and demos, etc. This is its first weekend of opening, and yesterday Tracy and I were one of the opening acts on Day One. The 12.30 show, then the same show again at 2.30. Tracy made and cooked yummy Thai-style chicken skewers, while I talked about growing coriander and limes. During the show, caterers came out with trays of skewers cooked to Tracy's recipe for the audience to munch on. There's nothing like a free feed to keep audiences happy! If you want the recipe (and the coriander growing tips), they're here.

In a moment I'll show you the 'before' shot of the area we set up, but this is it before the gates opened. Haybale seats with cushion covers, huge potted fig trees laden with fruit, hundreds of French lavenders in bloom, olive trees, surprisingly realistic fake grass, even a chook shed with Silkie chooks in the corner. It looked really pretty, a credit to the design and construction team, especially Nic, the guy in charge of construction, and Don, who came up with the design concept.

Here's that chook shed with its gaggle of chooks. During our talk one of them even laid an egg and started clucking loudly about her achievement. How farmyard can you get! It doesn't say much for my talk, but I think the chook laying its egg was the highlight of that hour.

Here and there were espaliered citrus trees. In this corner, a Eureka lemon, in another a wrinkly, thorny Thai makrut lime. There were huge galvanised iron tanks filled with soil and planted out with vegies, and other pots filled with water were planted with taro and water chestnuts. Everywhere you looked there was something interesting growing.

This is the 'before' shot. A week before the show, it was the warehouse parking lot, with an ugly electrical transformer down one end. The ground is lumpy, sort of slopes right to left. Seeing this grim looking starting point, the final result is even more admirable.

This is Bruce the Chook Expert, who followed us, and there's nothing Bruce doesn't know about chooks. Behind him in the purple shirt is Christine, the person who makes things happen. She's a producer, organiser, fixer of problems, can do woman extraordinaire. Needless to say she made sure Tracy and I stayed on schedule and turned a nervous first-timer's bout of Stage Fright into pretty good fun in the end.

The audiences weren't that big, less than 50 people each time, and they were lovely. All of them were into their herb, fruit and vegie growing and had good questions that lasted all the way to the end of our allotted time, God bless 'em.

On the right you can see those big galvanised steel vegie tanks I mentioned earlier. They looked really good overflowing with salad greens and herbs.

And hopefully I won't have to ever do any more live performances on stage again! It all actually went quite well, and Christine said we did OK, so that's all that matters in the end.

Final footnote: for the first time ever on my blog, all photos are brought to you by mobile phone. Most are mine, but naturally enough the photos of Tracy and me onstage come from Christine's iPhone. They're getting better, these mobile phone cameras!

Mushie weather

You won't have much trouble getting most Sydney folk to agree that autumn is the nicest time of year here. The worst of summer is over, but the ground is still warm. Mornings and evenings are cool, so you sleep well, but the days are mostly very nice, in the 20s, lovely gardening, walking and being-outside weather. But autumn can get quite rainy at times, and in the last week that's what it has been. Rainy, or at least showery. And that means the mushrooms are popping up here, there and everywhere.

Down the back of the garden, where this green-leaved former pot plant of Pam's is slowly unfurling its plan to take over the world, this delicate little trio of mushrooms popped up under the protective cover of the new regime.

Pam discovered them (she has eagle eyes) and said they looked like three delicate little parachutes gliding down to land – and she's right.

Across the other side of the path several other kinds of mushies were popping up. In fact, no two fungi seemed to be alike – they're amazingly diverse. This blobby, bald-headed mushie came up around the sides of one of my favourite gnomes.

This is Tran, he likes to watch. He is a slow-mover, the perfect companion for a mushroom to snuggle up to.

I think it's the fact that I always keep the mulch topped up that makes the garden so mushie-friendly after a week of regular showers. The nice bit is that I don't have to do a thing. They just come up all by themselves, last a day at the most usually, and then they're gone, until the next showery week. A bit like fairies in the garden, only mushy. Now you see them, now you don't.