silver beet

Well now Joonie you have alerted me to something. Silverbeet is sometimes called swiss chard. Now do you know it? You eat the stalks and leafy part not the root. My Mum grew up only eating the stalks as her mother did not like "spinach" as many people used to call the leafy part. Now she eats it all. It is a relative of the things Mum calls beetroot, and you just call beets or red beet. Yes, those come in orange and other stripey colours accordng to pictures in Mum's heritage seed catalogue.. Mum sometimes grows beetroot and then I might get the odd leaf of that, too - Mum eats those would you believe, too. As well as the roots. Back to silver beet. The stalk part is white, perhaps with a silvery tinge. And I suppose that is where the name comes from. you can get coloured sorts, known even here as rainbow chard. I have seen yellow and pinkish red stemss up to almost beetroot coloured stems. the chard things do not have edible roots - at least, Mum does not eat them and she seems to eat a lot of odd things.

Your nice ball with nuts sounds fun - for you. I do not really like to DO anything. I sit and watch TV and Mum in the garden and Dog Angela and.. sing and whistle and climb about my cage. I have a swing and it terrifies me. I will not go near it! I sit on the door of my little cage - I like to sleep there - but soetimes it rocks a bit and I get scared evenof that. If I lose my balance I am in big trouble.. can't flap feathers to sort things out though the wings still flap. They just don't seem to DO anything! I have a sort of kebab thing,and some balls appeared and I ws scared to move till they vanished again. I have cuddly things too, but I did not come out of my little house for several weeks, well, not willingly, till it went away again. I hated it touching me! Soft and cuddly and warm they said - no way! I like to sit and snooze, contemplating my life and how it has changed since I was dangling upside down in that garage carport place with cold winds whistling about.

Maybe SoS can update the blog for me - she can, but she does not communicate with me often from England so she may not know what I want to say.. Last time she rang I called out "Hello Cocky"and she called back over the phone "Hello Bibbie!" It was good to hear from her. I will have to practice screeching loudly so she can get my messages on the other side of the world. And then she can update my blog..

Well, the fire has started putting out more heat now Mum has put more wood on it. She went out to friends for dinner and I was not invited. The only consolation, the only thing that makes me not feel ignored, unwanted and so on is - Dog Angela was not invited either. At least she came straight in and stoked up the fire for me.

It is cold and windy outside so the fire is a nice thing to have going.


Back to sleep for me

goodnight

Bibbie