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Such a pleasure to go to sleep at night hearing the rain falling heavily on the roof above.

I woke up this morning and found our pond very full - the rain fall has helped, but so has the drainpipe we have running from our overflowing guttering around the roof as well.  The water is now right up to the line of rocks and much more rain will mean I’ll have to turn the tap we have on the pipe so the water doesn’t start overflowing the pond or going back up the pipe feeding the pond.

Maybe we really should consider putting in a rain tank.

Our roses seem to be coming out in phases at the moment. I walk down the street and see gardens (on the same side of the road) that have bushes constantly in bloom but ours don’t seem to do that.

One of my favourite and most prolific rose bushes in our garden is the Graham Thomas rose. Not co-incidentally that is also my husband’s name. Our daughters bought it for us 2 or 3 Christmases ago and I put it in the garden near the front gate where it gets the most sunshine. It grows crazily throwing up branches high into the air and I’m often pruning it.

It’s like one of those old-fashioned roses with a magnificent scent. I’m always torn between leaving them in the garden or picking them and having in them in the house to enjoy.

I’ve not been that active here for a few months. The latter half of last year got incredibly busy. I’d written and published a book and had no idea how much of my time and focus the book would take. Been exciting and interesting but meant some of my blogs lost my attention for a period of time. So I’m back!

The Australia Day weekend (long weekend for those outside of Australia) has given me opportunity to catch up with my blogging, to potter in the garden, take some new photos and just relax.  The first 3 weeks of the year are usually quiet but that hasn’t been the case this year - good for work, not good for catching up on things!

You will see from a previous post ‘Filling Our Pond With Water Restrictions’ that we’d put in a pipe to feed our pond during rainfalls. This has been an excellent thing to set up. The drought is still with us and we’ve had long periods of dryspells but when the rain comes, it comes suddenly and fast and in a short time our pond is full again! I’m sure our poor fish, if they were capable of thinking, would be wondering what on earth is going on out here in the dry world. Anyway, thought you’d like to see how effective this has been for our pond!

We’re having cold weather now - frost, snow in the mountains, and rain, thank God!

The corner of our roof at the front of the house outside the office tends to overflow and I was despairing about the loss of the water in the recent drought we’ve had. So we got a plumber in to run a down pipe to the ground and another pipe under the paving into the garden, leading to the pond, and now when the roof overflows it waters our pond. The pipe has a tap on it attached to a second pipe so we can redirect the flow to the garden if the pond gets full - much better idea.

The poor pond was half empty but now looks almost full again. I felt sorry for the fish but there wasn’t a lot we could do - I would periodically catch fresh water in buckets to put into the pond but it would have taken a lot of buckets (and backache) to successfully fill it again.