It seems Andy Ninja is not the only member of our flock to be inextorably drawn to the laundry. Unless you have a passion for turps, detergent or window spiders, there’s nothing appealing in there. But when I arrived home today, look what I found on the bench, gazing longingly through the murky window at […]
This blog starts and ends calmly and peaceful as we consider lush grass growing. In the middle there’s some horrifying interspecies violence – I’ll tell you before it happens so you can look away if you need to. When we first into our place nearly a decade ago, there was plenty of grass in the […]
There’s a festival of death going on in our neighbourhood at the moment. Several times a day, amongst the robotic clicks of the bower birds and the squawks of the wattlebirds, there’s an insistent high pitched chittering call, often accompanied by the din of freaked out noisy miners. I’m not 100% sure of its ethological […]
Who lives in our backyard? How would I know? I haven’t been paying attention. I see a flash of black and white down by the chook run and what do I think? “Magpie”. Humans, huh? Yesterday, ominous thumps and crashes below the lightning-riven radiata pine had me racing to see if it had finally succumbed […]
Where does our backyard end? The unwary burglar or, more plausibly, brush turkey fetishist leaping over the back fence and finding themselves falling off the small but perfectly formed cliff between our place and our downhill neighbours might think the answer obvious. But clearly, property boundaries don’t mean a lot to the brush turkeys or […]
Cucumbers will go to desperate lengths to flee an attack-flock of brush turkeys, eh? So is it better to die fighting than live in chains? I’m not sure where my zucchini would stand on this one. I’ve managed to keep the plants alive under an ancient perforated veggie net, held up by a rusty drum […]
I’m the sort of person who always has a plan F. While it doesn’t represent my three previous failed attempts or the well-raked but now choko-free planting site, the following gallery of photos showing my recent efforts to grow a choko vine on my back fence, gives a hint why. You might ask “Why the […]
I’ve been laying low on the blog a bit lately while we’ve been doing cut-rate eco-renovations on our house, a poorly insulated 50s fibro place clinging to a steep south-west facing slope, thermally enhanced by a dense cluster of giant evergreen trees perfectly aligned with true north. Short of an avalanche burying the house in […]