Friday 24 July 2020

Oranges and hope

Yesterday I planted an orange tree:


in fact, a blood orange tree. Basically, we both like 'proper' bitter orange marmalade, and while we could get imported traditional English marmalade in Canberra, here in rural Victoria, Frank Cooper's Oxford marmalade or Keiller's is utterly unknown as are the designer 'colonial' style brands you occasionally see in more metro stores.

Rose's (which is of course owned be Heinz and made in NZ) is about the best you can do ...

So we've planted a blood orange tree to compliment our lemon tree, and hope that in four or five years we might get enough in the way of fruit to make a jar or two, and I am on the lookout for a Seville orange tree.

In the meantime I've taken advantage of the last few days - alternately freezing fog that refuses to lift, or brilliantly sunny and freezing days to turn our back garden from a building site with plants to something that looks as if it might one day be a pleasant garden.

Given that you can't really go anywhere - Albury, our nearest large town, is inaccessible as it's in NSW, and the nearest alternative, Wangarratta, is smaller and doesn't have the range that Albury has, staying home has been the only thing to do.

We did manage dinner out for J's birthday, but that's about all we've done - except for buying plants and garden supplies - something which explains why I've a half built Omeka classic install on my test machine - I started on a dismal wet day, and got as far as installing MariaDB on a virtual debian machine, and there I've left it, still with the hope of building a dummy exhibition from the material I've collected so far while documenting Dow's pharmacy ...


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