What a lovely basket of roses and flowers to welcome me back to Rose Talk !

A very pretty photo, Bonita !
Hello to everyone that still wants to talk to someone who has stayed away too long. While I visited Jenny on my way to Tasmania a few times, she helped me with my family history, and since through emails and on the phone, so I have learnt a great deal about my ancestors and actually walked on land that my first fleet convict woman ancestor first farmed with her partner 200 years ago. So I got addicted and was going to Ancestry.com etc. and Trove instead of Rose Talk, and there I would stay for many long hours. So I hope I am welcomed back now.
I have recently started working through my roses, ( I think that is why I have been motivated to come back to talk roses because I am now working with them again and looking forward to their future next Spring ) digging out the dead ones, cutting out dead wood, weeding around them and finally I am determined to cut all the name tags away from where I tied them on each of them and writing their names in my book of roses. I started doing the name thing a few times since I planted them but didn't keep up with it. I never ended up having enough money left over to set a irrigation system for watering the roses so the roses survived just on the rain that we got, which wasn't a great deal in latter Spring and Summer. But there was enough and most of the roses toughed it out though and have grown very well, so that is good that it worked out that way. I have to get to bed now so I can get the girls off to school early. I look forward to spending time here each day now, I will leave the family history to the weekends instead when I have more time for the searching records etc.
I hope you are all well and had a great Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday.
From Karen.

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Karen, its nice to hear from you again....

Welcome back Karen.

Hi Karen, it is good to hear from you again, I do hope all is well with you and the girls.
Any chance of a newer photo of the property and the roses.

Great to hear from you Karen! After shifting all those roses (etc) down to Tassie I'm not surprised you "took a rest"!! That said - we'd love to see a pic or two.

Ahhh .. yes, I've spent a bit of time on Ancestry but managed to get out of it. A lot of our family tree is actually researched so I wasn't doing anything "new". I found mistakes on there so that made me tread more cautiously...

Holy Week and Easter was lovely, thank you. I trust yours was as well.

Hi , Rosemeadow , welcome back , even though you have been away from Rosetalk you have achieved something thats probably all in our minds , the family tree , great to hear that you were able to actually walk on ancestral land . Looking forward to seeing some pics , as i'm a wanna be Tasmanian , meaning i would love to move there , but all my family is firmly rooted here ,so it probably will never happen , good luck with the roses ...

The welcoming back is even better now, thankyou !!!!!
Neptune, what a beautiful rose card and sun, I really appreciate it !!!!!
Hi Carole and David, we are going really well. The girls all love the Christian school and the discipline there makes shall a huge difference to their schooling. Since coming here we have worked our way through a pressure pump that broke early on, then underground rainwater pipes that were full of leaves, so got some over head pumping done from the corner of the house to the tank till we got afford to have the pipes cleaned out, then had to buy half of tank of water ( first time I have ever bought water ) and the 3 weeks after we were out of water again. There was a underground hole in one of the pipes between the house and the tank and it wouldn't show itself right to near the end, the pump wouldn't turn off so I knew there was something wrong and we had to turn the pressure pump off when we weren't using the water. Also I did damage to my new mower when I hit a little tiny bit of steel post that was above the ground, also the ground was on a little bit of a hillock. So I got that fixed. So I got a bit behind in my normal bills, as well as paying for a private school, which is a very reasonable priced school because I didn't have to buy any school books for them except a few texts books for my older daughter and all their camps are included in the fees I pay each week which was a relief with the other expenses going on. The school also gave me a big reduction in the fees I pay because I am a single parent raising my children ( their Dad who I am divorced from is on a disabled pension ) and the Government gave us a little subsidy too. This private school is subsidise by the government too.
Except for the money worries which I hope to be nearly through shortly, my car registration is happening at the moment, we love it here. The weather is beautiful and I better get out to work with the roses right now, I will have to say some other things I wanted to tell you tonight.
Hi Autumn Damask, yeah maybe that was it, I just left the roses to defend themselves once I planted them into the very wet or water logged beautiful soil. I did some mowing but latter I didn't do much as I couldn't afford the petrol and it wasn't growing that much which was a bonus, even though it was green. Yes Jenny found a mistake which had been made and found out my right family history on that line. It taught me how to use Ancestry.com or just starting to learn how to research your family history properly, thanks to Jenny. I am having a break till I can afford the $25 a month again for Ancestry.com, I can still access my family tree though, which is good.
We attend a great Presbyterian Church in Launceston every weekend now. This year was the first time I had gone to church on these special days. Now I realise what I have missed on all my previous life.

Dear Mari, I missed your message as I posted my above message. You are welcome, as anyone one from Rosetalk is, to visit me if you are planning a trip to Tasmania.
I love history I have found out this last 12 months and at the moment I am reading 'Sydney Cove 1788, the original diaries edited by Dr John Cobley'. My female ancestor, Mary Philips is mentioned in this book. After a year or so she went to Norfolk Island for about twenty years and then every one was moved off the Island and sent to Tasmania. They again started off as original settlers, this time at the East Norfolk Plains ( now Longford, or near there ).
Mary's last decedent sold the land in the late 1950s. There are Hawthorn hedges through the paddocks and a very old tree at the entrance. It was a 80 acre grant. There isn't a house there anymore because the South Ersk River flooded the area too many times, but I saw where a little house had been and there is a small wooden shed still there. From their you can see across a distance to a still standing small two story brick house called Diamond cottage ( name that because it has the shape of a diamond worked into the bricks either side of the door) and a huge brick barn on the next property, which is where her daughter ( who was a half sister to my ancestor who never went to Tasmania with her mother but instead went to the Castlereigh area, near Penrith ) lived with her husband. There used to be a Inn there too. The cottage dates back to about 1830. That property is owned by a decedent now because he re bought it back. It was he who set it up so I could walk on the next door property. Also the property on the other side has in front of it a avenue of huge ancient trees, in the other direction is a small convict bridge, also another lovely old inn/school building on the old Pateena road.
I never knew any of this before I moved to Tasmania, I never even knew my ancestor was Mary Philips and she came on the first fleet as a convict. If I had known and if the property was on the market, I might have tried to buy it even though it doesn't have a house. Apparently the land may have been worth within what I had to spend, from what the neighbour reckoned. Luckily that never did happen because I love our comfortable brick house on my 13 and a half acres, it is so pretty the views around us, and it is perfectly placed for us, only 9kms from the gorgeous Tamar River, 3/4 of a hour from Launceston and the same time back the other way to the beach. We have beautiful shade trees around our house, so it was never hot in our house during Summer even though it was hot when you went out in the open. Also its not too far away to visit Longford every so often. My ancestor's grave stone is part of a courtyard made of many gravestones ( the very old graves were being vandalised ) that have been cemented into a wall around a small rose garden. The Church there is a huge church with a very huge stained glass window.
We haven't bought our sheep or a cow yet. The cow will have to wait, the sheep will be soon I hope so I can work my dogs. Our property will look better when the paddock are eaten down a little, I never plan to over stock the paddocks though as I love the thick green grass here.
About 100 roses died out of about 800 hundred roses I bought to Tasmania. I lost all the weepers except for one young one, so about eleven of them died. They were growing well I thought but the latter Spring and Summer didn't have a great deal of rain and I counldn't water them, also I had to go back to the mainland for a while. I lost a lot of my older own root roses, beautiful roses that I will get again one day grafted. Grafted roses are tougher if you have to move them once established, maybe if it had been a moister Spring and Summer. The own roots may have been better if they could have been moved in wet soil or paper, but I had quarantine and too many roses to give them this type of care. Actually it is a wonder I have any living roses at all. Roses are so tough. Its very sad to have lost some of my favourites roses but I still have around 700 other roses to make all the work last year worth while. I will have to do a official count of roses once I have weeded around them.
The soil is amazing here, it gets so wet in winter and yet it has cracks and cavities through it in places because the soil has shrank. A lot of the roses may have some of their roots exposed to the air because where I dug and planted and the soil has shrunk around the roses and there are big cracks around some of the roses. But the roses don't seem to mind and are growing very well. The ground is too hard to work when it is dry, it is really hard to break up, but really easy to work with when it has moisture in it. I think it is really fertile soil because the plants and grass hang on really well waiting for the rain, and also the days don't get as hot as on the mainland and for so long. The once blooming roses that bloomed for me for the first time in Tasmania were blooming over a long period or the different once bloomers were blooming at different times over a long time, no hot wind to dry them out and end them too soon. That's the type of place I wanted to be at. The tea roses seem to have grown well here so far. Actually all the foliage on the roses has been very healthy. I was so pleased with each rain we got, a few times I nearly started to worry that the roses would start to decline like the weepers had.
I wonder how the roses will like being so wet again in winter. All the roses have plenty of room to grow. I am so excited about this Spring coming, and the future ones even more and I certainly hope to have some beautiful photos to post here for you.