Summer. Week one. I’m over it already!

Well, here we are, one week into summer in the southern hemisphere and we have already had every type of weather extreme. On Monday it was a boiling 36c and we were all in shorts and eating icypoles. Now it is day six and we are all back to woolly jackets and freezing our butts off. The driving rain didn’t stop all day yesterday and we spent last night shivering in the cold.

No, I didn’t light the fire, it’s December for gods sake! We should have been barbequeing! Maybe I should get some more wood in though, there was even a snow report on the news yesterday morning…

Broccoli flowers and a tiny Hover Fly. On the right there is an even tinier…. hmmm… I don’t know what that other flier is!

That 36 degrees is far too hot for me. I’m not a hot weather lover at all and looking at the insects in the garden I’m probably not the only one.

I want to do a bit of gardening, stripping out a bed and putting in some new stuff, but I am too lazy have been leaving that particular bit of garden to go crazy for the insects.

I love a nice neat garden but at the same time I love it when things start running to seed and are covered in flowers. The bees and other pollinators love it even more and flock in for their share.

On Monday, when clearly the world was about to combust, I dragged myself outside to check if the chooks had enough fresh water.

I stepped off the back verandah into a shady patch of ground (the edges of which I hadn’t been overly attentive to with the mower, frogs live there) to find every weed blade of grass abuzz with Hover flies.

Usually these guys find a place to hover where they can hold position for as long as possible. Clearly the ability to do that is hugely attractive to the females of their species.

It just so happens that on this particular hot day the places they all wanted to hover were all in the shade. Rather than maintaining a polite distance from each other as they normally do, there were so many (hundreds!) they were all pretending that it was ok to be standing around on the same blade of grass waiting for a turn in the limited airspace.

I felt sorry for the poor fried things and, after finding the well-watered chooks happy now their muddy yard had turned back into a dust bath, I hunted down a shallow dish and filled it with water and old fish tank rocks (so they could walk about and drink, but not die a splashy death) so the hover flies could have a drink too.

I placed it near them and wondered if they would all share, or if I had just accidentally given one of the Hover Flies the best slice of hoverable real estate ever, and that the females would be flocking in for this bloke with the nice new swimming pool…..

After a few minutes I noticed that a some of them had managed drift in the right direction and snatch a drink. I guessed that over time any of them who wanted to would find a way to hover in the right spot, so I retired back to the interior and my own cold drink!

Thirsty hoverflies.

Maybe plants can read too!

When I started buying seeds and seedlings for the veg garden earlier in the year I decided that I wanted different varieties than the normal things you usually get at the shop. To that end I have collected things like both red and purple carrots, green grape tomatoes, red spring onion and golden beetroot among others.

Ages ago I also planted some purple sprouting broccoli. It has done one thing really well, sprouted.

The plants are thigh-high with beautiful big green leaves. Unfortunately, their sprouty green-ness had gone on for so long I wondered if anyone had told them that they were supposed to do anything else!

The other day I rearranged the tag on their row and they must have finally read it. I was very excited to see that over the next few days they all managed to summon up some of the ‘purple’ and ‘broccoli’ part of their name. Yippee!

If only some of the other colourful things were ready for picking, now that would be an interesting looking dinner plate. 😀

More interesting than the green variety!

Flowers and grovelling apologies.

It appears some apologies are in order. BIG apologies.

Like a queen ant, I am all behind.
————————————————Goulburn Evening Post 3 Aug 1945.
http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article103229668

It seems as though it was only a week ago when I last posted, but I checked my emails today and it has clearly been longer than that.

I’m not quite sure when I lost track of time (or last checked my emails) but such unforgivable neglect wasn’t intentional, I promise!

I have been taking photos for you as always (my camera was bulging at the seams) and thinking of things to write all the time, I have just had difficulty getting it from head to screen!

Although I can only blame myself for being so hopeless I was assisted by that ever present evil, bad internet. 😦

It has been sort of ok during the day (when I am busy of course), but in the evening it has become abysmally slow right when I have time to actually use it. Grrrrr…

Funny thing about that though. Over the weekend I was hard at work with a saw (blistered palm, ouch!) clearing away a stand of scrubby trees at the very furthest and highest part of the back garden.

When I stood back to admire my handiwork (ok, I was really hoping that The Man would notice, take pity on me, and take over) when I realized that through the trees I could actually see a new(ish) mobile phone tower on a lower hill a kilometer or so away.

Hmmm…. That means we are in between two towers, one on top of a hill to the west and another lower hill to the east. Nevertheless, I still can’t get decent reception! Aaargh!!

I promise I will be better at keeping track of the time from now on and here is a photo of the most powerful plant in my garden, the Donkey Ear Orchid, as an apology.

Why so powerful you ask? Well, there are a few of these guys scattered over our hill and the Man has a particular affection for this flower above all the other equally beautiful orchids out there. This is possibly because it is the largest and tallest and, although he is horribly afflicted with domestic blindness, even he can see them when he is clomping around out there.

His affection for them means they have saved the entire population of the hill from being blitzed with the mower! Yay!! ….. for now, anyway…. Here’s hoping that they outlast all the others so they all get a chance to scatter a few seeds about for next season. 🙂

Mower repellent….

Holiday helper.

The kids are on school holidays for two weeks and, as usual, we are hanging about; watching cartoons, messing about in the garden and being super competitive about sports. Well, Wii sport anyway.

We have had a few lovely days weatherwise, but today was ferociously windy and sporadically rainy, ruining our plans for a bike ride. Stuck inside instead, we spent the morning laughing ourselves silly while jumping about the lounge room doing our best not to break things, or each other, while playing Wii Sports to the death. 😀

After our arms were worn out from all the flailing about the boys went off to make lunch and I dragged my latest purchase for the garden out of the back of my car.

Yesterday I bought a 120 litre wheelie bin with a tap at the bottom for catching rainwater and emptying my washing machine into so I could re-use the water on the garden. I have a long grey-water hose that I usually attach to the washing machine to direct the water onto the bits I want watered, but the garden I need the water for has expanded well beyond the reach of it. Last summer I spent time racing back and forth with buckets and watering cans while the machine emptied but I have decided that I should be better organised this time!

Once I got the bag of bits out of the bottom of the bin to put the lid and wheels on and the tap in I realised I had a problem. Bin deep, arms short. How was I going to get the tap screwed up tightly on the inside while holding the bit straight on the outside?

Actually, thanks to the school holidays I had the perfect thing to help me get it done. Son Number 2.

Number 2 is small and dexterous and when I asked if I could put him in the bin to do it up for me he jumped at the chance. After all, how often do we get to see the inside of a shiny clean bin? Usually they are coated in the icky stuff that has escaped from bin liners and horrible enough for the lid kept tightly shut at all times!

I lowered him in, and Number 2 had the tap screwed on in no time. He saved me the embarrassment of the neighbours seeing me leaning too far while doing it and falling into the bin headfirst… Thanks kiddo! 😀

Don’t worry, I helped him back out.

More sundews.

Yes, I’m posting about them again…. I can’t help it! 😀

This post is on request of Meeks. She lives a similar place to us so there is the possibility of having sundews growing in her garden too. Well, maybe not in her garden, thanks to the munching of the alpacas, but perhaps there might be a few bravely growing just out of nibbling reach on the other side of the fence.

Just like fat grass.

As you can see, with the help of my ring for scale again, they are small enough to pretend to be grasses and remain unnoticed. The tallest are about 20cm high but can be much smaller.

They are quite fragile things. I tried to put my ring in a better spot and each plant I gently placed it on immediately keeled over under the weight and glued itself to the ground with its sticky tentacles.

Never fear, I carefully unstuck all of them and stood them back up.

One plant tipped itself onto a large ant who was passing by who was no doubt quite startled to suddenly find itself under assault from above. It probably went home screaming something about Triffids to its friends…

Finally I found his little group who were the best option for comparison as they were all already stuck together and holding each other up!

No grass here….

I took this photo yesterday afternoon in the small window of time that the small light pink/white flowers that top each of the sundews was open. (click on it to see it more clearly)

Each of the white dots in this low-level landscape is one plant, generally only one flower per plant seems to open at a time.

The flowers stay tightly shut when the sun is at its brightest and will only open when it has passed over.

I am surprised that any of the flowers are ever pollinated. After all, every other part of the plant wants to eat the bug doing the pollinating! Clearly the flowers are irresistible to some brave bugs out there.

I hope this helps you find some of your own fly eaters in your garden wanders Meeks. 😀

Pretty, and sticky.

Yippee! Lemony success!

Look! Look!!!! *jumps about happily*

Hurrah!!

Woo Hoo!

Yes. I am getting ridiculously excited about the tiniest bit of new growth on a plant, but bear with me.

When we moved in here about 15 years ago much of the back garden was a barren wasteland, although the previous owner clearly had delusions of grandeur and had planted a few things on the hill.

When I say planted I really mean ‘hacked out a wedge of clay and inserted a plant’. Over time most of them died leaving only the dent in the hill to show they had ever been there. (Yes, the impressions are still here after all this time. Our hill changes at glacial speed….)

One of the few that still soldiers on was a lemon tree, although calling what it is doing ‘soldiering on’ might be a tad optimistic.

When we arrived here it was about hip height and not the healthiest specimen. Now, all these years later, it is about chest height and not in any better condition. A few weeks ago I resolved to actually care for the poor thing in the hopes of reviving it. After all, what is a food garden without a lemon tree?!

The first thing I did was drag a short, fat fallen branch from the pile of waiting-to-be-cut-up wood to use as a barrier against any more dirt being washed away from around it, and then pinch some soil from another part of the garden to sprinkle it around it.

Over the next few days I made a short wire fence around it to keep Jack away from the chook poo I spread around the base. It has now been pruned and mulched with pea straw to within an inch of its life in the hopes it will retain some kind of damp when the weather warms up.

The kids have also been instructed to relieve themselves on it whenever they feel like it. Number 1 is a little hesitant, the chance a neighbour might look out of the window at the wrong time is too much for him, but Number 2 cares less about what people might think and has taken up the challenge with relish.

Clearly all this attention has had some effect and hopefully this tiny bit of new growth is the start of an abundance of lemons. Well, I’m not holding my breath but I can dream! 😀