Broccoli. Bleh…..

I haven’t done any newspaper posts yet this week because the weather has been too garden friendly for me to stay inside and surf the net for interesting things!

Instead of lazing on the couch I have been hanging out with the chooks, messing around in the vegie garden and wishing for more vegie beds in time for winter.

I am not a person who needs sculpted flower beds to greet visitors as they arrive. To me if it is green and leafy it is good, and most people don’t really notice what you have planted anyway. If they notice you have veg they would usually like to take some home though!

I have two garden beds at the front of the house that I often keep vegies in and yesterday I decided that one of them would be a good broccoli bed.

Don’t get excited, I hate broccoli. Actually I don’t really like eating many types of veg at all! However, as a (semi) responsible parent I have to feed the kids veg and that means I have to eat it too… bleh. The Man though, he loves all vegies so I can pretty much plant anything and it will get an appreciative audience.

Broccoli seedling.

An advantage of planting vegies out the front is that I can put snail bait around them and not have to worry about the dog eating it which really helps. For some reason we have an abundance of snails in the garden immediately around the house and those ferocious snails love destroying my seedlings.

I suspect they lurk under the house in the cool and dark all day (houses in Australia don’t have basements), breeding frantically and out of sight of the birds. At night they slide out and chomp my plants.

I want to know what kind of agreement they have with the weeds though. Why do they leave them alone and eat the things I have planted!? Curse you snails!!!!

A very tiny invasion…..

It is spring in Australia and that means that the garden has been invaded by multitudes of tiny, newly hatched critters.

The weather was splendid over the weekend and that meant spending the day out in the garden. It also meant I probably spent as much time taking many breaks with my camera chasing the tiny beasts as I did actually doing something to help…

We have a load of new plants to put in the garden bed we had to clear out after a tree fell on it a few months ago, and while we were out there I found a few of these tiny mantis walking on one of the new plants.

They were very cute and so tiny (about 1 cm long) they were walking from leaf to leaf on the spider webs. They were quite hard to get a decent picture of, each time they saw me looking at them they would retreat to the other side of the leaf they were on and I would have to start all over again!

tiny mantis

Sundew flower.

A while ago I did a photo post about the wild carnivorous plants in our garden so I thought I would share a photo of the tiny flower that the Sundews produce near the end of their season.

Although each plant produces a spray of these flowers at the top of their stem they usually only show one or two at a time. They start off pink and fade rapidly to white.

I am also using this post to try to make you arachnophobes feel better about the other post I am doing today, sorry to all of you 😀

Sundew flower.

Dangerous backyard plants.

Ok, not dangerous to you or me, but if you are a small, curious insect you are in whole lot of trouble with these guys.

Sundews (Drosera) have many tiny tentacles growing from each leaf and each tentacle has a drop of stickiness at the end. Any passing insect will quickly find itself stuck in the goo and ripe for digestion, as you can see by the fly stuck in the centre of the lowest leaf.

It amazes me that such small plants can be so successful in attracting meals. This baby plant was only about 4cm tall, and while I was getting ready to take this photo, the mozzie hanging down on the left was caught by the foot as it flew in for a look. It is unusual to see this type of sundew in our garden (there are a few different types out there) without most of the leaves hanging on to some hapless victim.

Every year when the weather gets cold these tiny killers start showing their faces. I love carnivorous plants and have a small collection of them so having wild ones growing in my garden makes me very happy.

Tropical tale of the jungle. 1924.

Western Mail 24 Apr 1924 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article37634197

Here is another long article to keep you squinting for the weekend. This fantastic story of a man-eating plant could well have been lifted from a B-grade horror movie.

In 1924 botanists Joseph Villareux and George Gastron were collecting specimens in a swamp 40 miles from New Orleans when they discovered what they described as the ‘missing link between human and animal’.

Joseph and George had been lost in the swamp for over a week when, after landing on a small island, they came across an unusual plant on the water’s edge.

Joseph made the mistake of trying to pick one of its strange flowers, but was grabbed by the fronds of the plant and dragged towards the stem.

Seeing his friend in danger George rushed to help and was himself grabbed by the tentacle-like creepers. Fortunately, they were both armed with axes and spent the next few hours hacking their way to freedom. There would have been quite a bit of motivation to get away from the beast, the entire time they were hacking away at the tentacles unsuspecting critters were wandering by and being grabbed, squeezed and devoured.

If you are one of my regular readers you know I can’t ever read these stories without picking apart the details the story tellers didn’t think through before they opened their mouths. Don’t ever watch a movie with me 😉

Apparently this fight for life took some hours which makes me think that the speediness of the original attack was a little exaggerated. Not only that, when I go flower picking I am not normally armed with an axe. What kind of flowers did they expect to encounter?!

The furry critters on that small but surprisingly well-populated island who were unfortunate enough to be consumed while the fight was going on must have been a little different from any of the critters I know. If I was hacking away at a plant with an axe for a few hours, I can guarantee that nothing furtive and furry would be strolling up to see what I was doing.

I really wish there was a plant like this in the swamps of New Orleans but…. well, I don’t really need to finish this sentence, do I?

Man eating plant. 1892.

I was sitting in my thinking spot yesterday, otherwise known as the Steps of Death to regular readers, and watching the Venus Fly Trap. You might remember that I moved some of my carnivorous plants out to the front verandah to feast on the wasps. Well, Flytrap has been having a high old time and many stripy stingers have fallen victim to its enticing jaws.

Watching it got me thinking, surely there must be articles about man-eating plants.

The Horsham Times 6 May 1892 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article72853601

A search threw up this article about Devils Snare, a terrifying plant described by the naturalist Mr Dunstan as a kind of vegetable octopus. You might also know Devil’s Snare as a plant from the Harry Potter novels, I think both plants came from the same place….

What a great story. There was Mr Dunstan, out for a walk with his dog when he was attacked by a man-eating plant. He was walking in the jungles of Central America though, and in 1892 there would be no better setting in the world for a story like this. I wonder if the plant preferred human or dog?

This story is just wonderful. The details of the plant make it sound so menacing; bare interlacing stems of a dark nearly black hue, oozing with a thick viscid gum. Ick.

The twigs were like grabby tentacles, lined with little mouths or suckers that left skin red and blistered on contact. Ouch.

Even better, the last part of the article. Imagine a plant that has the presence of mind to grasp a piece of bloody meat and, once it sated its thirst, toss the drained flesh aside like yesterday’s sushi.

I just wish I had one of them on the steps of death. None of those annoying door-knockers would make it past ever again!