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.