A fabulously scary scarecrow in the veggie garden at Berowra Public School.
This is what happens when you get schoolkids to grow spinach!
Rage amongst the swiss chard
Author Archives: mccnmatt
Dinosaurs in the backyard
I’ve been thinking a lot about chickens’ feet lately. Not as as a convenient snack, like the vacuum-packed ones left on a hotel pillow (alongside a packet of condoms) for my parents to enjoy on a recent trip to China. But as a little reminder that chickens are actually dinosaurs.
Abbey’s dinosaur feet
Shyla’s dinosaur foot (do you think she needs moisturiser?)
Treasure’s goth inspired ready-pierced dinosaur feet
The whole avian dinosaur thing has crept up on us over the years, hasn’t it? Children’s encyclopedia facts shifting under middle aged feet, kooky science factoids becoming simple commonsense. The plastic dinosaurs in the kids’ toy basket, made in the 70s, are discredited heritage items now, with not a feather in sight.
When I was a fledgling, Archeopteryx was the only bird-like dinosaur around. But now, it’s just one of many, and not even the earliest (a title currently held by Aurornis xui, which was covered with fine proto-feathers most likely used for insulation and probably couldn’t fly. Naturally, Aurornis is described as “chicken sized“)
I’ve been reading John Pickrell’s Flying Dinosaurs (University of New South Wales, 2014), and he notes that “there is now good evidence that many carnivorous theropod dinosaurs, even fearsome and well known species – such as Allosaurus and Tyrannosaurus – had feathers” (Pickrell, 2014, 84).
Wow! You could knock me over with one of those proto-feathers.
Monitor skin
Snowball’s flightless protofeathers
Dinosaurs did all kinds of bird-like things. Mei Long tucked her head under her elbow to roost for the night (Pickrell, 2014, 48). Fossils show Citipati osmolskae crouching over its eggs like a broody hen (Pickrell, 2014, 179). T.rex seems to have suffered from trichomonosis, a potentially lethal parasite that which rots away the jawbone.  Contemporary birds of prey catch it from eating pigeons; T.rex might have got it from gnawing at each others’ faces. (Pickrell, 2014, 60)
I discovered some crazy facts about birds reading this book. For instance, birds have smallest genome of the vertebrates – and bats’ genome is pretty small too. Smaller cells with large relative surface area means better gas exchange and greater efficiency, enabling the high metabolic rate required for flying. Apparently hummingbirds, with the fastest metabolism amongst birds, also have the smallest genome (Pickrell, 2014, 58).
Hard to believe that such tiny tiny changes could make a macro difference, but I guess if you’ve given up teeth and a jawbone to save weight, economising on your genome seems like a mere bagatelle. Inferring genome size from the space of lacunae in bones, researchers have proposed that between 230 and 250 million years ago saurischian dinosaurs – ancestors of the birds – also started to have smaller genomes, while the bones of your triceratops or hadrosaur soldiered on unchanged (Pickrell, 2014, 59).
I was amazed to read that birds don’t breathe like mammals: they have a one-way respiratory system with multiple air sacs that, when inflated, help make them light enough to fly. When birds breathe, the air flows into their their bones!  And some dinosaur skeletons reveal the same spongy, pneumatised bones (Pickrell, 2014, 49-50)
“Dinosaurs and birds unquestionably have very very similar ankles. In fact, nobody has an ankle like a dinosaur or a bird” (Phil Currie cited in Pickrell, 2014, 27)
It’s perhaps ironic that chickens’ scaly feet scream “dinosaur” to me, because one of the earliest feathered dinosaurs was Anchiornis huxleii which actually had feathers on its hind legs as well as its forelimbs. In fact, there were loads of early feathered dinosaurs that looked like this. Paleontologists are still trying to work out quite how it could have used these rear legs in flight without dislocating its hips – they were probably for used to enhance aerodynmics or to create drag (Pickrell, 2014, 114).
The startlingly speedy progression of our chicks from tiny bundles of fluff to whopping great layers, made sense of the notion of paedomorphosis, a process in which animals reach sexual maturity at an earlier stage of development
In the brooder
A fledgeling at 2 months old
Four month old Shyla learning new tricks
Shyla fully grown
In comparison to the slow maturing reptiles, birds, like mammals, grow quickly in early on. Interestingly, as they mature, birds’ heads don’t change much in shape; in comparison most dinosaurs’ skulls morphed dramatically, the comparatively large, spherical noggins of babies elongating into the snouts and jaws of adults (Pickrell, 2014, 54). US researchers Bhart-Anjan Bullar, Mark Norell and Timothy Rowe noticed Archeopteryx’s adult skull is rounded just like the babies of other dinosaur species, and concluded that the ancestors of birds maintained juvenile characteristics later in life. This process of paedomorphosis (or neoteny) often goes along with smaller body size. It seems to allow the emergence of a new and unexpected set of features in an organism. Harvard’s Bhart Anjan-Buller observes “These unique characters may allow the exploitation of radically different ecological niches from other similarly sized organisms” (Pickrell, 2014, 56).
And birds have surely filled those ecological niches. There are aroundabout 10,000 living species of birds, far more types of avian dinosaurs than all the non-avian kind that ever lived.  “Dinosaurs are now more successful than they’ve ever been, but they all look the same” says Paul Barrett of the Natural History Museum, “With the exception of a few aberrations, they are all bipedal flyers” (Pickrell, 2014, 28).
And let’s not beat around the bush, a really really big percentage of those living dinosaurs are chickens. There’s a global chicken population explosion: there are now about three times as many chickens as there are humans – in the 1960s we were about eekies. And that’s not even considering the ratio of domesticated to wild animals. According to the RSPB, there are maybe 30 times as many domestic chickens as there are the most numerous kind of wild bird, the African dwelling red-billed quelea.
In fact, best not to dwell on this to prevent yourself being plunged into depression about the forthcoming Age of Loneliness, when we humans will mostly likely have few non-human companions. Better get used to the company of rats, cockroaches, and jellyfish. Maybe we’ll have a few bats – to my surprise, there are more species of bats than any other type of mammal except rodents (Pickrell, 2014, 107). And, of course, chickens. Lucky I love my avian dinosaurs.
Andy Ninja the ISA Brown’s knock knees
Treasure the Light Sussex’s dino-feet
(You wouldn’t believe the confused and irritated looks the chickens have given me as I’ve been taking these pictures of their feet. Sorry guys.)
The inconspicuous, the insignificant and the underwhelming
Sure, to the swanky author of a well-received volume on gardening it’s a throwaway line: “has insignificant flowers”, “flowers are inconspicuous”. But how about some consideration for feelings, eh? What’s wrong with “reserved”, “low profile”, “unpretentious”?
My 7 year old drew me aside the other day and whispered conspiratorially “At school I drew a picture of a plant’s bits!!!” In the light of this insight, which I really hope she didn’t share with her teacher, perhaps we could even go with “modest flowers”?
Shy persimmon flowers
Persimmon flower retreating from the light
To be honest, I find persimmon flowers faintly perturbing when upended and exposed to the rude light of day. Much better to let them shelter under their curtain of leaves.
Sheltering below the leaves
What they look like when you invade their privacy
I do, however, need to be rather forward with my demure custard apple flowers soon. They may not look like much but there’s the smell of perfume in the air. Time to wave my magical pollinating paintbrush and help create some atemoyan fecundity. Or, given my pruning anxieties and the consequent fact that most of the new flowers are more than two and a half metres off the ground, perhaps it’s time to fall off a poorly located stepstool, crashing through branches, crushing multiple flowers and possibly poking myself in the eye with pollen-dusted painting gear on my way down.
Too insignificant to pollinate yet
What happens if I don’t get to a flower with my magic paintbrush
One to gather pollen from
Custard apple flowers when it’s too dark after work to get out my magic paintbrush
Thankfully there’s no need to hand pollinate the midgen berries to get tasty little purple-and-white fruits. Otherwise I’d have to get one of those three-haired brushes they use to paint a portraits on a grain of rice.
Australomyrtus dulcis flowers – teeny
Midgen berry flower
And then there’s the flowers that are not so much shy as downright recalcitrant. On the left, a NSW Christmas bush down the road. On the right, the unimpressive shade-dwelling specimen in our yard.
And another offender: Kunzea ambigua doing its thing elsewhere on the left and in our garden, not even making the effort to take a decent photograph. Very poor form.
Kunzea ambigua looking rather nice elsewhere
Kunzea ambigua – can’t really be bothered
Thank goodness for institutional plantings. Just because councils like to plant it on the median strip doesn’t mean I’m not happy to see the blue flax lily producing its, shall we say, somewhat coy flowers in the shade under the maple tree. If your camera is close enough, even the teeniest flowers are significant. Could that be a metaphor for this blog? Or is it just a sales pitch for a macro lens?
Dianella caerulea
Dianella caerulea really really closeup
The Broody and the Bustin’: daytime drama on Chicken TV
I witnessed the Tiff of the Uber Femmes in the henhouse this weekend.
Snowball the silky bantam and Treasure the light Sussex have both gone broody. Their steadfast commitment to their chicks-to-be is in no way diminished by the fact that they are sitting on two golf balls and a couple of plastic Easter eggs in attractive shades of green and pink. The fakes aren’t there just to mess with their minds: they were slipped into the coop to thwart the Phantom Egg Eater (golf balls being both hard to break and to the best of my knowledge flavour free).
The other new girls are still sleeping alfresco, but with a dramatic drop in the egg-count we suspect they’ve also been forced by Them Indoors to find some new and obscure location to lay their eggs. Now: documentary evidence of desperate chickens turned out of their coop by feathered home-wreckers. Shy Abbey makes a frantic dash for the nestbox but is thwarted, not once, but twice, by Snowball, the Fluffy Ball of Fury.
“Don’t even THINK of laying that egg here!!”
“Over my dead fluffy body”
There’s a picture burnt into my brain: poor Abbey “crowning”, an egg half out of her cloaca, trying to beat off the rageful Snowball for long enough to drop her bundle. No photo – perhaps a good thing. Having shoved Snowball out the door, I thought Abbey deserved a moment or two of privacy to finish her business. But as soon as the deed was done, Abbey was out of there and the indignant bantam was back in the coop, carefully gathering and nurturing her beloved plastic brood.
I don’t think I could psych myself up to lay under these circumstances either. So this week’s job: stalking the homeless chickens until we figure out where they’ve hidden their egg stash.
Day of the Dead Bugs
Victim bugs
It’s a pity the internet isn’t scratch and sniff. The citrus flowers were splendiferous this year – the place was suffused with perfume for weeks. And now there are lots of baby fruit on the trees – not only on the lemon, mandarin, oranges and grapefruit down in the veggie garden but even on the limes and the kumquat suffering in pots by the back door.
But there’s a nasty smell taking over the garden these days. The stinkbugs are back.
Tahitian baby limes before the invasion
Tahitian baby limes with stink bug
I’ve spotted bronze orange bugs in the garden before but never quite got around to doing anything about it. I’ve gone for a bit of a Darwinist approach with insect pests in the past. Organic Tough Love, we might call it. “Deal with it! I’m busy!” has worked okay with the Eureka lemon and the Freemont mandarin (and the ruby grapefruit seems to be doing alright too). But the poor baby blood orange has only grown about 5 cm since I planted it, thanks to sooty mould and aphids (… okay, thanks to neglect). The one mature fruit tree that was here when we arrived has been smothered by potato vine, scratched by chooks, starved of water and fertiliser, permanently shaded and, of course, parasitised by the odd citrus bug. No wonder we’ve only seen 3 rather unpleasant oranges in the last 5 years.
So, bugs, it’s time.
The Bronze Orange Bug: a worthy adversary
Bondish insect villains
There’s something of a 60s Bond film about these pics – I think it’s the Chromakey background. But maybe it’s also the general Bondishness of stink bugs. You can imagine a cable car zipping up to their citadel at the top of the lemon tree. And 007 would need any number of secret weapons from Q’s underground lab to deal with that nefarious blinding spray.  There’s Sean Connery converting a dapper hat into an oxygen mask before fighting off the green and orange horde.
No fancy equipment for Uncle Harry and I when we set out on our mission this morning, just protective glasses, ill fitting rubber gloves and a trug of boiling hot water. No-one lost an eye, though by the time the bucket was filled with colourful corpses we both smelled atrocious and Harry had a mysterious brown stain on his beetle-pinching fingers.
Uncle Harry, bug killer extraordinaire
Toning nymph bugs
The first victim
An infested branch destined for the drink.
Despite being a vegetarian for a quarter of a century, I’m not sure I’d make much of a Buddhist. Meat-loving Harry felt guilty about the citrus beetle death toll whereas I wielded the seccateurs gloating “Die, bugs, die!!”. While I was up a stool lopping the most heavily infested branches off the lemon tree (it needed a haircut anyway), I spotted a Halloween-themed scene which made me feel less unnaturally ghoulish. I particularly like the bit of fly viscera splattered on the right hand side of the frame: Spidey was obviously scuttling from the scene of the crime. We killed a lot of bugs today but at least we didn’t paralyse them, regurgitate stomach acid onto them and then suck their corpses dry.
Spider assassin
Although strictly speaking, if you could face a meal of stinkbug entrails, this probably would probably be a more sustainable alternative to death by washing up liquid. On that funereal note, enjoy All Soul’s Day, folks. Let’s hope we don’t see any stinkbugs returning from the grave.
An unhappy threesome
The threesome in the bottom of the garden is just not working out well, or not for my lonesome lady kiwiberry anyway.
Most kiwi fruit are dioecious – to produce fruit you need both male and female plants. Â Commercial producers have maybe one staminate pollinator to eight fruit-bearing pistillate plants. In our garden, there isn’t enough space for such large scale polygamy. Â All in all, the plant sex around here is playing into the hands of the social conservatives.
The couply-couply Sweetie kiwifruits in the “solar pergola” have done their baby-making (with a little bit of help from me).  Inspired by their example, the Mt Tomah Red kiwiberry is now in bloom. But it’s just not happening for Hairy Hayward, her pollinator (or his lovely vigorous and hairy wife). It takes chillier weather to get their blood up, I reckon.
Sweetie baby kiwis
Hairy Mr Hayward. Really not up to much in the reproduction stakes.
I’m not quite sure what should happen next. Mr Sweetie has done his dash fertilisation-wise this year. I have no shame – I am willing to act like a bee and transport the good stuff around the garden but I’ve gotta have something to work with. Perhaps internet dating is the way to go: “Would like to meet: generous pollen-laden male kiwifruit. A love of warm weather essential. Variety and nectar-production unimportant. Must be willing to reproduce immediately. No time-wasters please”
Mt Tomah Red kiwiberry buds
Mt Tomah Red kiwiberry blossom
Mt Tomah Red blossom
She may not have a fully functioning pollinator, but Mt Tomah Red does have a new BFF. A teenaged possum has snuck into the marsupial sunroom – between an old pane of glass above the barely used airconditioner and the boarded up window behind it. I don’t think he realises it’s like the Big Brother house in there: he might feel like he’s having a secluded nap amongst the kiwi vines but in reality anyone hanging out the washing can look in and catch him snoring. And if he’s hoping that Madam Tomah Red is going to provide him with a sequence of midnight snacks, he’s mistaken there as well.
The papparazzi invade the marsupial Big Brother House
Eat sheet and die
Today’s garden project: half-baked sheet mulching. It sounds like a filo pastry recipe but it’s actually permaculture as practiced by the exceedingly impatient.
Proper sheet mulching is a variant of no-dig gardening that can turn your couch grass infested lawn into a fairly weed-free veggie garden, at the same time recycling all those packing boxes you used when you moved in. Done properly it involves ingredients as rich, fastidiously prepared and generously layered as a fabulous lasagne.
However with an epic quantity of washing still to get off the line and some holy card weather on the horizon, speed, rather than accuracy, was my watchword today.
Ingredients
– Garden soil. Very very recently limed and ready to off-gas ammonia when hit by the inevitable cow manure. Because you can’t beat a vegetable patch that smells of a recently cleaned bathroom. Soil includes plenty of trad (left over treats for the chickens) just waiting to reroot in the moist and nutrient rich environment of the new zucchini mounds.
– Partly cooked compost, still replete with visible kitchen scraps. Nothing says “urban food forest” like a seed growing mixture that looks like a bin. In defense of my shonky methods, zucchini will apparently grow happily on a compost heap. Lucky, that.
– A bale of sugar cane hay, three bags of cow manure and a handful of golden zucchini seeds
– Two large cardboard boxes, recently used to deliver plants. There’s poetic symmetry here, since these very same boxes may now very possibly be used to kill them.
Procedure
– Amend soil with cow manure and compost. Best advice is to check soil chemistry first, but life is too short. Possibly zucchini plants lives may also be quite short.
– Shape into a mound. Turn your back for a moment. Reshape into a mound. Repeat. Once again, we see the way chickens (and, it seems, brush turkeys) flourish on a diet of ordure.
– Water thoroughly. Flatten and soak the cardboard boxes/give the chooks a drink.
– Lay the boxes over your mounds and cover with remaining rotten food scraps. Mulch with a thick layer of straw, or alternatively, whatever meagre quantity of straw you have left after interring the potato plants.
– Plant three zucchini seeds in each mound. Say a tiny prayer for each of them.
– Attempt to protect your seedlings from resident poultry by either mechanical or psychological means. You may want to try one of the one of the following: (a) a long arch of of chickenwire secured with rocks and tiles (b) a broken child-sized camping chair draped with a vegetable net (c) a scary painting of the Cyclops’ eye.
Only time will tell whether the exclusion approaches traditionally used by permaculturalists will be more or less successful than the innovative deployment of one-eyed monsters from Greek myth. Since I’ve now used up every scrap of chicken wire, trellis and veggie net on the premises, I may be heading in the direction of threatening ancient gods for economical bird protection in future.
Implausible vegetables
Running bamboo
I don’t know if it’s spring or the big rains we had a while ago, but bamboo shoots from the neighbours’ giant hedge are popping up everywhere. I say it’s the neighbours’ bamboo hedge but since it’s running bamboo, it’s ours as well. It makes a frequent guest appearance amongst the native shrubs, pokes through cracks in the concrete driveway, squeezes its way around the foundations of the house. Regularly hacking it back is the only thing stopping our yard slowly transforming into panda paradise (in fact, every time I get out the saw the kids accuse me of species-threatening habitat destruction).
But rampant bamboo is actually fine. In fact, it’s great, since I consider myself to be an artist whose natural medium is bamboo stakes and zip ties. So far my oeuvre includes four gates, a 10 metre long enclosure for the vegetable garden, five trellises in a range of styles, a pergola, some windchimes and more bean tripods than you can shake a stick at. Obviously, if you did shake a stick in my vicinity I’d probably grab it from you, attach zip ties to it and turn it into a trellis.
The wall of bamboo is a magical swaying whispering verdant thing. Every year it manufactures the living fenceposts that keep our property’s ancient teetering side wall more or less upright. And now it feeds us! Okay, it feeds us with grass. In fact, grass laden potentially fatal amounts of cyanide. But it’s still food, even if you’re not a panda.
Bamboo shoots, I think, should be included in a new class of produce I’m calling “implausible vegetables”. I’m not 100% sure how we define this category of foodstuffs. One possible definition: “a vegetable that, in the process of preparation for human consumption, shrinks to a tiny fraction of its pre-preparation size. The amount of the implausible vegetable that can actually be eaten is dramatically smaller than the quantity of peelings, husks, stems or leaves destined for the compost bin”. Another possibility: “a vegetable which even rats refuse to eat”.
But is it simply implausible vegetables, or should it be implausible and dangerous vegetables?
The pics above were taken for our 7 year old’s class presentation: an explanation of a simple procedure in the kitchen. In her notes, she did stress that you needed to boyl the sliced shoots for at least 20 minits or you will be poysned. Even so, if a wave of year twos with histotic hypoxia turn up at the local hospital, we will be keeping a low profile.
After three meals on the trot containing home-grown bamboo shoots, there has been some hypochondriacal consultation of Dr Google. Hard to distinguish the early symptoms of toxicity, though, since weakness, confusion and headaches are, in my experience, a fairly normal consequence of a day at work.
Globe artichokes, of which I am a passionate admirer, are also clearly implausible, to wit:
All those fallen petals…
But lethal? Well, for a start, it’s clearly a mistake to allow anyone as unhygenic as I am near any kind of sterile procedure. The throwaway line in my recipe that inclusion of raw garlic in the jar could induce botulism did not significantly reduce Home Canning Anxiety, either. And to me, pickled veg and stuff in jars just scream deranged-scientist-in-subterranean-lab-full-of-body-parts-in-formaldehyde. My own disturbing inaugural effort at artichoke hearts in oil was no exception.
It looks like a body in formaldehyde, but does it contain botulism?
But the more I think about it, the more all plant-based foods seem deeply implausible and highly likely to be dangerous. You grow grass, pick the seeds, grind them into dust with rocks, add a single-celled micro-organism found on the human body, warm the mixture til it produces carbon dioxide, pummel it until the carbon dioxide diffuses, warm it again, pummel it again, heat it in a fire until you kill the eukaryotic microorganism, cool it and eat it. What a lot of effort. No wonder we all used to eat gruel. And I’m not even factoring in the possibility that along the way the grain might have collected another fungus that causes hallucinations, convulsions, burning of the limbs and gangrene.  Â
But it’s not just modern, non-paleo foods. You eat the tiny tiny flower buds? You eat the tiny tiny inverted flower buds? You eat the stems of a plant traditionally giftwrapped before eating? You eat the extremely sour stems of a plant whose leaves are full of a toxic chemical used as a metal cleaner? You eat the fruits of a carnivorous plant closely related to deadly nightshade? You grow and then systematically bury a plant closely related to deadly nightshade so you can eat its roots without them going green and prompting delerium, hypothermia and paralysis?
And I’m not even considering the implausibility of cheese – stealing the breast milk of a lactating mammal, mixing it with the stomach lining of a ruminant until it curdles, straining it, pressing it, putting it in a cave until it gets mould on it and then eating it. Hard to imagine the weird circumstances that led to this culinary breakthrough – although I guess cow-keeping cave dwellers with an acute food shortage and limited access to the internet were less thin on the ground in the past.
My conclusion: hungry people will eat anything, even if it takes weeks to prepare it and if, at the end of all that effort, it may well kill them. We’re just lucky we have so many things that will potentially kill us on our doorstep.
The year of the dragon?
I know, I know, it’s the year of the horse. But could 2014 be the year that our dragonfruit plant finally does the business?  Half a decade we’ve had it in a pot in the sunniest part of the garden, and while it did produce this gorgeous flower for my 40th birthday, that’s been it. Not a single piece of fruit.
Happy birthday!
I figured Sydney was just not hot enough, but gardening pro Juke reckons if I treat them right, I should be in business. I’ve been guilty of botanical stereotyping: pitaya looks like a cactus but apparently it should be treated like a moisture loving tropical epiphyte.
So, with a tremendous amount of cursing and significant perforations in the gardening gloves, it’s out of the constraining plastic pot and into the ground by the sunny back fence. I’m not psychologically ready to build a heavy duty trellis (and given that various tipsy bits of paling on the yard’s perimeter are held in place by running bamboo and optimism, if I was quick on the draw with the cement I would have to have other priorities). So I’m hoping the dragonfruit can cope at least for the moment with jerry rigged temporary supports and the odd bit of string.
In position behind the mandarin tree
There’s not many problems in life that can’t be fixed by chicken manure, spoiled hay and weekly deep watering. The chooks’ bedding seems to be working well for the stupendously fast growing Eureka lemon and the small but fecund Freemont mandarin, so fingers crossed their new neighbour will respond to the same treatment. I’m also trying to grow Kipfler potatoes at the feet of the citrus using the same basic recipe. It will either be a triumph or a multi-species nitrogen-burn-off.
Juke’s dragonfruit expert thinks that a cutback before the flowering season’s not a bad thing. With the kids’ school fair only three weeks away and the plant stall trestle tables to fill, I’m cloning like the wind. The chunks I had to hack off (literally, with a saw – it was surgeon-barber barbarity) have been unceremoniously dumped in pots, with the price-tag as yet to be determined.
Dragonfruit vines seems to be a bit like tetris pieces. They don’t seem to have obvious “up” or “down” bits. In their natural habitat they apparently grow aerial roots from pretty much anywhere so with luck my primitively executed cuttings will take. I’m hoping the prospect of home-grown dragonfruit will shift units, however implausibly shaped those units might be.
Black wattle and a pile of rotting logs
We missed the October snowstorm in the Blue Mountains by a week, dammit. But as we walked the historic (if annoyingly snow flake free) National Pass last weekend I suddenly realised why my callicoma serrata has been struggling in its spot right next to a humungous, thirsty pine tree.
Wentworth Falls, home of many contented callicoma plants
Black wattle dangling its feet in the pool above Wentworth Falls
and another splashed by the spray from the falls
On the moist Undercliff path
Despite the lack of a 200 metre waterfall in our garden, our black wattle is finally enjoying life enough to flower. A rainy August probably helped, but I reckon our extreme torpor also played a role. A few weeks back, our helpful neighbours stacked the severed remains of a casuarina tree on our side of the fence, right round the base of the callicoma. It took us a while to move the logs into the woodshed and I suspect the callicoma enjoyed the hyper-mulch experience.
This unexpected flowering made me think again about hugelkultur – growing stuff in raised beds on top of a moisture-absorbing stack of rotting logs. The idea has some appeal and it’s not just the fact that the word reminds me of delicious German pastries. I’ve sometimes toyed with ad hoc terracing of the part of the garden into which storm water is unceremoniously decanted after big rain. Since the yard is full of piles of wood, “hugelswales” (surely the name of a lime green chest of drawers in the IKEA children’s department) may be the way forward.
I admit, there’s a faintly faddish feel about the hugeltalk. I’ve got a pretty good idea that eventually it will go the way of my superannuated chicken dome, parked up like a rusted out combi van at the bottom of the paddock, only used by weary, equally superannuated chickens. But what the hell, may as well give this hippie thing a bit of a spin before we put her up on the blocks.