APRIL 2011 – PRACTICALLY PERFECT AUTUMN WEATHER.

Mid autumn – and a wonderful time for sitting in the garden.

At last, a brief respite from all the lush growth that’s been happening during the wet summer and beginning of autumn. There’s been no need for constant work in the garden so we’ve been able to sit in the sun, and relax with friends and family - in between mowing the grass, that is. Geoff, has still had to get on that ride-on mower every week because, unlike most summers, there’s been no time when it’s even looked like browning off. It just keeps on glowing wonderfully green and growing wonderfully high!



Evening shadows after a perfect autumn day.

Pony Poo - $1 a bag! A distinct advantage of living in the country is the availability of good, cheap fertiliser. I find a couple of bags of horse or pony manure are quite enough to help nourish my garden over the winter. Having bought two big bags for $1 each, the contents is now sitting in a couple of plastic bins, soaking in water, all ready to decant onto the asparagus bed and any other vegetable beds as they become vacant.

The asparagus ferns need to brown off and die down before I’ll cut them, then I’ll cover the whole bed with pony poo, compost and then a layer of pea or sugar cane straw. It’s a voracious feeder and it produces such a heap of luscious spears every September to December, that I don’t mind the little bit of work it takes at the end of autumn.

A new Seed-bed set-up.
Last year I managed to germinate lots of different Australian native seeds in a very makeshift and ad hoc way. This year I’m getting organised with trays of seed pots and giving each tray its own little hot house. I’ve set them up an old BBQ trolley from which Geoff has removed all the heavy bits like burners, etc. Now, with a minimum of effort, I can place the whole table of seeds in any sheltered, sunny or shady spot I want to.

The centre tray was $7 and came with its own cover. I bought the others for $4 for four
at a 'Cheap Shop' and made a cover with wire frame and plastic. It's all working very well so far.

Very convenient and I’ve already been astonished at the results of planting seeds from the X. bracteatum in my home-made hothouse. They germinated in 6 days and haven’t stopped growing.

This is the home-made hot-house cover.

And this is what happened in ten days!

Perhaps they’re a bit early. If so, it’s a pretty safe bet that I can get another lot up and on their way if I need to.
I’ve also put in seeds from the Running Postman and am striking bits from X. viscosum (Sticky everlastings) and Chrysocephelum apiculatum.(Common everlastings). There are also four pieces of cardboard impregnated with seeds of the Swan River Daisy (Brachyscome ibiridifolia) which I put in at the same time. They came attached to some wine from Banrock Estate Winery; it’ll be interesting to see if they do actually grow. No sign of any germination yet.

Self-sown plants.
In various parts of my garden which are covered in mulch and left virtually alone, it’s very encouraging to find various plants popping up that have self-sown. In the biggest Bush Garden area there are a couple of Tea Trees, a Kunzea, and a couple of different wattles. Down in the Bog Garden at the end of the block, there is a very healthy Melaleuca (from the three bushes nearby) and I’ve just discovered three tiny Tea Trees of a kind I don’t yet recognise. There’s also a Blackwood Wattle and a Dogtooth Wattle growing very happily, both of which appeared a couple of years ago.

This is a very healthy Kunzea self-sown from a bush nearby.

The end of the Sunflower Circle
By the middle of April, the sunflowers had grown to their full height, had flowered beautifully for the bees and butterflies, and were beginning to drop their petals. Two small grandsons – Jack 6 ½ and Marley nearly 6 – came up to visit and enjoy the country for a couple of days. They marvelled at the circle, played inside it, admired the height of the plants, and had a good time shaking the tiny dying flowers all over themselves and each other. Then (with our blessing) they spent a very happy couple of hours demolishing the lot! They dragged the plants towards themselves and, as the stem cracked, went crashing to the ground covered in sunflower leaves and laughing hysterically. Luckily the ground was soft so they didn’t damage themselves too much. Then they broke the stems up (if they were thin enough) and dragged them to the green-waste bin. The thick ones they dragged to a pile ready for the tip. It certainly kept them entertained and saved their grandparents a lot of hard work.

Jack and Marley inside the circle.

By the second day they were getting so much enjoyment out of the garden, they decided to cart mulch down in the wheelbarrow and spread it over the centre of the circle – ready for next year.

You'd harldy know it had been there! But I'll keep the spot free of grass
for next year's Sunflower Circle.

Next jobs?
I’ve taken most of my last year’s pots and put the plants out into the garden: a couple of Kangaroo Apples, a Viminaria that I thought was dying but recovered enough to plant out, and a couple of Goodenias that also looked a bit sick and seem to be surviving, so now I’m ready to start again. There’s a cluster of self-sown Pussy Tails that I intend to try to thin out a bit and I hope I’ll be able to get them growing in another couple of spots around the garden. I’ve collected seeds from anything that I think will grow and am going to put my new seed pots to good use – that will happen in the next month or so. I’ll be transplanting some of the X. bracteatum from the seed pots before too long and, of course, there’s the ongoing problem of the too-healthy Dichondra. Any spare time and energy I have will probably be spent removing some of that – firstly away from smothering my good plants and eventually, trying to eliminate it from various areas.


I really didn't think the Dichondra would be such a vigorous grower.
It will have to be VERY firmly treated to stop it killing everything!

 Picasa album: There are lots of pictures of this month’s activities here, so feel free to browse all my pictures and make a comment on any. I'd be happy to hear from you.
Next month I'll be able to report on how (or if) my new seed beds are working.

AUTUMN – SEASON OF MISTS AND MELLOW FRUITFULNESS

Autumn
How could I not start with Keats when he describes this autumn of 2011 so well?

Mists we have certainly had in the mornings, with hundreds of spider webs outlined and sparkling with droplets of water; and mellow fruitfulness in abundance. In typical country style, friends and neighbours have been bringing peaches and pears, zucchini and various other marrows, and we have been able to send them back with tomatoes and silver beet. Not much more from our meagre food garden but enough to feel part of the sharing.

A curtain of droplet-outlined webs are all over the garden.

Apart from the occasional rainy night, the March days have been sunny, warm, and still, making it very difficult to leave the garden and come inside to work on the computer.

Constant pruning neededAbsolutely everything has been growing apace and therefore has needed pruning. Native shrubs, like the Hibbertias and one particular Hakea, that I have carefully nursed over the past few years, suddenly decided to grow so fast that they nearly strangled each other and smothered a poor little Correa nestled between them. I needn’t have worried for the Correa – as I pruned and pruned to uncover it, it had grown just as fiercely and was thriving underneath.

The Hibbertia (H. aspera) on the left, Burrundong Beauty (H. luarina cross) on the right
 almost killed the Correa in the middle.

Timboon Rail Trail

Easy walking and pleasant company - makes for a great day.

 A walk with a group of friends for about 8-10 kilometres on a local Rail Trail was a wonderful way to spend a cool autumn day. Cars were used to provide transport to the start and three were parked at the end to drive us to lunch at Timboon and then back to the start again. It’s a labour of love by a number of hardy volunteers who have worked hard to establish the track and keep it clear of weeds and overgrowth. Most of the old trestle bridges are falling down and unusable which means that the track has to take walkers down into the gully and up again – a definite bonus. Down in the gully, as small bridges cross the streams, there are ferns, fallen logs, mossy banks and all the delights of Victoria’s temperate rain forest. Quite a lot of invasive weeds too, unfortunately, such as the ubiquitous blackberry, Ivy, a St John’s Wort variety and quite a lot of exotic grasses.

We walked through about six to eight beautiful gullies.

I discovered a wonderful site for identifying weeds. You can go to this site: http://www.weeds.gov.au/identification/index.html, click on Weed identification tool and just by a short description of your unknown weed, you are offered a list that you can check in detail. That’s how I found the variation of St. John’s Wort. Very useful.

Paul Jennings and a re-forestation project.
On Sunday 20th March Paul Jennings and his neighbour opened their properties to the public to enjoy and Geoff and I drove the 45 minutes to be a part of it. It’s of great interest to us in particular because he started his project eight years ago, which is when we moved to Camperdown and began our own small contribution to native revegetation. Admittedly, Paul has 50 acres and we have one – just a bit of a difference! So it was just lovely to park the car out the front of a small forest and follow the arrow to a winding dirt path that took us through all the native trees that we’ve been planting and nurturing in our own place. There were various Eucalypts, Acacias and Casuarinas as well as numbers of ground covers and grasses.
Paul and his neighbour have had heaps of assistance from the Hopkins Point Landcare Group and a couple of other private and semi-government bodies – both with money and advice, whereas we have struggled to spend very little and learn as we go. This has meant quite a few failures and set-backs – particularly with the changing weather conditions we’ve had in the past eight years but, fortunately, Paul had many experts there and available for us to talk to about what we’re trying to do, and we received lots of help and advice about direct seeding, sources for native plants and places to go for further advice and assistance. It was lovely to be amongst a group of people all with the same aims and enthusiasms.
Unfortunately, I forgot my camera so I’ve had to use a picture from Paul’s brochure and I hope and trust I’ll be forgiven if I’ve broken copyright. I don’t think he’ll mind though, since we’re both working for the same thing.

You can see the small forest in the background of this picture.
Credit is formally given to the Landowner's Re-vegetation Project Open Day brochure
from which I obtained this picture.

Willing workers welcome!
We’re very lucky to have two large grandsons of 23 and 20 who are happy to visit Camperdown and contribute some strong muscles to the cause. On 26th Stefan and Alex arrived and began work on getting rid of some very large branches of the Dog Tooth Wattle (A. cultriformis) that had grown out and over the Pincushion Hakea (H. laurina) in the Bush Garden. I hadn’t realised how much it was smothering it and the other Sweet Scented Hakea (H. drupacea) next to it until it was all gone.

Don't tell me the young ones don't work hard!
I didn't know Alex (on the left ) was a plumber!

Not only was it smothering it but it seems, it was also hiding it from our beautiful Black Cockatoos. Only on the following day we saw a group of five fly over and, within half an hour, we heard loud cracking sounds as the birds dined happily on the Hakea nuts. That’s when I discovered that the tree was now too low for us to see it (and the birds) over the intervening Wattles and Grevilleas. I can’t bring myself to give the front shrubs a severe pruning, so I’ve now bought yet another Hakea laurina and planted it where we’ll be able to see it from our lounge room window. Only a year or two to wait for the nuts – I hope!

Native wild life
Nothing as exciting as koalas or wallabies I’m afraid, only bugs, grasshoppers, crickets, spiders, butterflies and skinks, but still native and still wild life. And such a wide range of them all, many more than we’ve seen in our garden in all the eight years we’ve been here. We’ve had some really interesting caterpillars, so I’ve reverted to my days as a mother of young children and have made a couple of caterpillar boxes and collected two sorts, with the hope that they’ll make cocoons and we’ll be able to see the moths or butterflies hatch out. Two of the smaller grandsons (5 and 6 years old) are going to visit us through the school holidays so with a bit of luck, there’ll be something interesting happening for them.

I'll be interested to find out what these turn into.



A shoe box, a piece of plastic and a jar of water
all make a great 'caterpillar box'.

A lot of photos from March with explanatory captions can be seen on my Picasa Album here.