February Update

It has been a busy couple of months. Mainly since November. For the most part of it the garden has had to make do with the watering it got and the feeble moments of attention administered to it between excursions to the shed and back.

Much of the time spent in the garden lately has either been to pile up mounds and mounds of grass clippings from the monstrous pile left at the side of the house from a lawn-mowing friend or picking the ever-ripening cherry tomatoes and cooking tomatoes. The g-pigs have had free reign since early Jan and the chickens much the same - free to come and go from their coop into the straw-yard without us opening and closing the door to the coop of an evening. This has worked well up until a few nights ago when it became apparent just on dark that two had got into the garden and one was missing. She was out scratching around the grass piles the next morning.


It was during the frequent visits to the tomato bushes that I realised that one of the little green frogs had really made one of the bushes home. Initially it was seen sitting on the spinach plant but as the weather got warmer and the spinach wilted it moved into the sturdier tomato plant above it. Then a few weeks later it had a friend.


There was the odd night that we heard calls but these didn't last long and I'm not sure if it was this species of frog. Very, very happy to have them in the garden though.

The chooks are doing fine though we do have a clucky one that refuses to budge from her eggless nest. I will see to moving her to a smaller cage in the next few days. Otherwise the chooks are doing fine and with the addition of wheel barrow loads of grass clippings into the straw-yard the place is much nicer and there isn't any of the chook smell that we were starting to get even after just a few weeks in the pen. The grass clippings make the place much neater and nicer and the tamarillo is no doubt very happy to have a good thick mulch under it.

So, after a suitable crop of tomatoes with the odd beetroot, zucchini, cucumbers and sunflowers popping up surprise harvests - I am now awaiting the tamarillo and pepino crops. We have just started to harvest the passionfruit that have been hanging on the vine patiently. Some are dropping off themselves now. The pepino is holding fruit well. After the hot weather of early January I ripped out the greywater set-up, dug up the garden placing two large basins either side of the tamarillo, lined them with newspaper and cardboard and filled the lot with grass clippings. I now just tip a bucket or two or water in that general area every few days with the idea that some water pools in the ditch and seeps out very slowly into the garden further down the slope. This appears to be working well with even zucchini and cucumber seedlings that were battling in the heat now flourishing. They have also had an added hand with the overcast weather we have had since late January due to the cyclone activity around the country. This has brought some light showers but largely overcast skies and more easterlies. The easterlies really knocked back the choko but the added light showers and reduced harsh sunlight have allowed it to come back with strong new growth that is now rapidly creeping its way around the decking. The top garden of tomatoes has been harvested and is now sitting awaiting a raised garden set-up.

Little Observations

Here are some pictures from the garden over the last month or so.
Above, cherry tomatoes forming.

Zucchini beginning to fill out at the edge of the main vege bed.

Alpine strawberries which were grown from seed from Diggers Club seeds.They have given us about a small handful of flavoursome fruit each morning.

The Nelly Kelly finally took off in Spring but has slowed since it started forming fruit.
Looking forward to these.

A lillium petal from locally grown bulbs.
We had quite a nice display in vases for our Christmas Eve family gathering.

Jazz looking somewhat bemused as my wife handles her.

Not just a couple of frogs from tadpoles but this brilliant green frog that was a surprise to find!

Fennel flowers. I find these amazing, just like the carrot flowers are amazing.

... and the bull garlice (leek) flowers.

These baby bugs were gathering on a choko leaf. The adult bug wasn't far away and was an incredible shape with bright orange ends to the antennae.

Ants guarding pupae on a lillium prior to flowering. This was just before rain I think which may be why they were seeking higher ground. Beats me why they chose a flimsy lillium stem though.

January Rain

What an amazing day. We went from 37.5 degrees Celsius around midday to a heavy rain shower from large, grey ominous clouds. Very much like a tropical climates.

This was great for the garden with around 15mm recorded around town. Some of the larger trees and shrubs were weighed down with the rain on their branches. The rain water tank must have been low (as its pressure was suggesting) as I could hear water running into it quite loudly.

I have a list of tasks to do in the garden tomorrow so this rain has freshened things up and will make things a little easier I think. I want to change some plants around and do some planting.

So nice to have a decent down pour or two!

They did say on the news that it's the wettest January day on record for four years, but given that we are only five days into the month I don't know that it really means much!

Garden Update

This last fortnight or so around Christmas we have been experiencing what the local fishermen call The Black Easterly.

The weather has been warm, quite comfortable actually with lots of cloud cover and rather overcast with a strong wind from the east, hence the term Black Easterly. This is apparently caused around this time of the year by higher temperatures in Perth and to the north. Perth had 39/40 degrees celcius (102.2 F) Christmas Day. This creates a pressure system that scoops down the coast in an anti-clockwise direction past Cape Leeuwin and circles around to the coast and overland delivering strong easterly winds and off-shore breezes to Albany and the Great Southern region.

Today however the sky is blue for us and the wind is gentler, but still drying and consistent.

The tadpoles I brought back from my brothers place have all changed to frogs and are the most delightful little friends around the pond. They are Motorbike Frogs - due to the sound of their call and I spied two this morning on the edge of the pond. One was dark against a piece of the plastic liner and the other had just come out of the water and was a vivid lime green colour with a yellow stripe down it the length of its back and a stylishly black line through its eye from the tip of its mouth to half-way down its side. The contrast between the two was amazing and I wasn't aware that they changed colour so extremely.

The choko vine near the clothes line is now making its way along parts of the deck as is the grapw vine that we planted last autumn. The passionfruit has slowed down its growth and is setting fruit which will probably be ready in a few weeks once the heat comes a little more extreme.

Leading up to Christmas one of the mallees lost one half of its brances and I had to cut it out and I mulched the small limbs to put on the garden and made some into roosts for the chook coop.

The other fairly major things that were going on were the arrival of the chooks -written about below- and a huge quantity of grass clippings delivered by a friend with a lawn-mowing round. This is lawn from rather large community areas where the lawn is not really fertilised or sprayed very much so I was happy to take it as the garden is needing that extra bulk.

Also, I placed bids in a silent auction by the local city council for steel and wood shelving and some work benches. I won quite a number of the bids and had an interesting afternoon shifting it with just a single trailor and the aid of my dad, brother and a very switched on young, fork-lift operator called Ben. Most of this I have placed into the shed to organise it much better and give me more working space and the ability to find things more quickly and easily. The rest is going to be used under the house decking to create other pieces of garden infrastructure that will assist with my new ventures of seed saving, aquaponics and worm farming.

The sunflowers are flowering and I did lose one the other night to the ominous Black Easterly, but it hadn't started to bud open just yet which was good. The first one to flower has now started to form seeds and must be an incredible weight for such a narrow, tall stemmed plant.

The Cabbage Moths are out in force but with the use of a little dipel spray now and then I have managed to keep the caterpillars under control. The peas on the deck and in the garden are flowering also and some are just starting to set pods, just as the zuchini is starting to set its fruit also.

We will no doubt have an adequate supply of tomatoes this year. Perhaps not the abundance I was aiming for in order to preserve some with recipes from my Christmas present "Nourishing Traditions", but enough for fresh consumption which is still a plus - and to keep the guinea pigs happy!

I have just had the most amazing lunch served up in front of me of tapas and salads and some of the snapper we cooked in a salt crust. So I must go. But I will be back to add more notes because it is a busy time of the year.

The Chooks!

The chooks arrived in town on a little truck crammed with all the other chooks on the tenth of December. I think they were so glad to be away from the noise and clammer of the farm and all the other chickens that they settled into their new home readily and even began laying the following day.

I had set up the yard that so if I were a chook, I'd have liked it when I saw it too. A nice, safe little coop with high roosts. A straw-yard to dig around in with a huge pile of compost chock full of wriggly worms. Some pellets and wheat and some rainwater from the tank.

We average about two eggs a day between three chooks which is just enough to replenish what we use on a regular basis with a couple of days reserve in advance.

They have since made short work of the huge compost pile and after cleaning up a bit today in the straw-yard I was amazed to observe how dramatically they have changed their environment. Just about every green, leafy herb or plant has been . . . . decimated. They have legs on them like emus. After raking the ground over the only plants standing are the gum, the tamarillo ( the mighty, mighty tamarillo) and a clump of exuberant, fancy landscaping grass in a pot which is half dead and has probably been ear-marked as a possible future nest site.

This is good.

The nasturtiums and the potato plants have vanished and the scraps from the kitchen and some from my brothers catering business get churned around and pecked at and made into compost quite easily and quickly.

There is one chook that gets out quite regularly despite our efforts to barricade the gate with pot plants. They are easy enough to catch though and have a peculiar habit of kind of hunkering down and flattening themselves against the ground while doing a little stomping dance. They do this and stay put and are easy enough to just pick up and pop back over the fence. There is very little running about involved - unlike the guinea pigs!

I am very happy with the way the chickens have been going and the fact that they are really quite quiet. Just a noisy episode now and then which I think is usually when a cat is in the yard and sets them off.

They are Isa Brown chooks which I settled upon for their quiet nature, egg laying regularity and compost producing ability. They are therefore a hybrid breed and perhaps one day when I have a larger space I will go in for having a more traditional breed of chook after researching several varieties.

Until then, they have really completed that final missing link in the garden that I have been planning for nearly a year.