A dead-end trap crop

A “dead-end trap crop”: is it the germ of a new Dr Seuss tongue twister or a surplus insult from a John Cleese and Graham Chapman sketch?  Nope, it’s the my latest strategy for dealing with the beautiful but deeply irritating cabbage white butterfly.

I like to think of our choice of a garden on a steep, shady south west facing slope not so much a tragic error in garden planning but a deliberate strategy for replicating temperate conditions in a subtropical climate.  It wasn’t an inability to use a compass that led us here.  Absolutely not. Instead it was my cunning plan to produce home-grown raspberries.

This fantasy has been somewhat tempered by our brassica disappointments of recent years.

Radishes are considered to be idiot-proof and we’ve usually managed to get them to grow, if not to actually eat them.  I like the long-rooted daikons since there is a brief interregnum between germination and gnarly inedibility.  The daikon sits happily in the ground waiting for me to make sushi. If don’t get my act together in time, there’s always the lovely white flowers to look forward to.

This year’s bash at radishes hasn’t worked out quite so well, thanks to my innovative  (a.k.a. totally ineffective) strategy for keeping the chooks at bay – a mandala of brightly coloured children’s bicycle wheels.  Evidence, if you needed it, that (a) the Goddess doesn’t necessarily protect every vegetable sheltering in a life-enhancing spiral (b) chickens are definitely not supertasters.  In fact, apparently chickens only have about 300 taste buds, and they’re on the roof of their mouths, which may explain the chooks’ enthusiasm for eating polystyrene foam (“crack for chickens” as someone once put it on a backyard chicken forum).

I’m also a serial failure at growing brussel sprouts.  Perhaps they’re paying me back for all the bad-mouthing I gave them as a child.  I console myself with the thought that it’s a bit warm in Sydney for this member of the brassica family anyway. You need to start early – I’ve heard you need to have your seeds in by November if you want tidy looking mini-cabbages and not some kind of ad hoc freeform leafy thing.

I banged in some seedlings in autumn – I’m reserving judgement but at this stage I’m not optimistic.   The “bad hair day” of the plant pictured above may be a consequence of a close encounter with the repurposed wire drawer I was using to keep the bandicoots at bay.  Since the cure appears to be worse than the disease, and the bandicoot seems to share my childhood dislike of sprouts, I’m living on the edge and letting the brussels go commando. The wire drawer, along with a bisected fan-cover, is off to provide security and support to my newly planted swiss chard and salsify.  I’m hoping the look is more “frugal locavore’s organic garden” and less “disturbed hoarder’s junkyard” but I reckon it could go either way.

And now we turn to the Battle of the Bok Choi.

Over the years my passion for purple and anaemic lust for iron-rich veggies resulted in an epic struggle to produce a decent crop of my favourite asian green, Red Bok Choi.  Cabbage whites seem to share my enthusiasm.   Bok choi butterflies would seem a more apt (and alliterative) choice of name.

My first effort – a feeble attempt to conceal my pretties underneath the generous leaves of a (ultimately fruitless) zucchini –  underestimated the persistence and acute senses of your average crucifer-loving butterfly.  Interplanting with coriander was a break through.  In Sydney, you can harvest your coriander leaves for aroundabout ten minutes before your plant goes to seed.  Growing cilantro as a kitchen herb here is an essentially doomed enterprise.  That said, stinky old coriander leaves do seem to throw the insect pests right off their game.  There’s apparently a couple of genes that are implicated in some peoples’ deep distaste for cilantro – maybe that’s a part of the genome we share with bugs.

But this year’s lone self seeded bok choi is looking more perfect than last season’s coriander-defended efforts.  Is it the chilly weather? The location inside the repurposed chicken tractor/brush turkey and possum exclusion zone? or is it… (drumroll) the magic of the dead-end trap crop?

After my embittering exeriences with kale and marigolds, I’m a tiny bit skeptical about companion planting.  But given the cruel fate dished out to our broccoli by an evil alliance of brassica loving bugs and furry critters last year, I’d give anything a try to get a bit more broc to the table.

I’ve been growing land cress a while.  It was one of the few food crops I managed grow – in a polystyrene foam box parked by the outdoor dunny – in the concrete back court of my terrace house in the rainy British north-west, back in the day.  Here in Berowra, it flourished in a damp and shady patch next to the chook yard, giving us for two La Nina years an unending supply of the “house soup” – vicchysoise hotted up with landcress, jerusalem artichokes and zucchinis.  Flatulence-inducing but fabulous.  All in all, a great plant.

So when I heard that upland cress has the reputation as a Black Widow for a crucifer-loving insects I figured I’d give it another whirl.

Sacrificial or trap crops are tasty things used to distract bugs from your favoured plants.  Dead-end trap crops, on the other hand, lure insects away from the plants you want to protect and then kill them.  Land cress, it seems, contains the spicy-flavoured glucosinolates, prompting some moths to lay their eggs on its leaves where its caterpillars hatch, feast and die.  Gruesome but apparently effective.

The seeds I ordered from the ever-reliable Green Harvest were the familiar looking upland cress (Barbarea vernis).  Unfortunately, the variety of land cress (sometimes called winter cress or yellow rocket) that’s been been tested as a dead-end trap crop is  Barbarea vulgaris, a related, taller plant with similar yellow flowers but a less rounded leaf.

Barbarea vulgaris is resistant to another pestthe diamond back moth – which produces a smaller caterpillar that’s also a lover of brassicas (to identify whether you’ve got got a diamond-back larvae, give the grub a bit of a nudge – it will give a bit of a wiggle backwards.  But hopefully not leap up and punch you in the eye.)  It’s a bit less clear about whether winter cress is quite so deadly to cabbage whites.  And then there’s the vexed question of whether the landcress in my garden – barbarea vernis – does the same job.

But it’s all going swimmingly so far.  My land cress is unchewed, and my the kids have already turned their noses up at a couple of meals of home-grown broccoli.  I’m sure they’ll be pleased to find there’s loads more to come, not to mention heaping platefuls of mustard greens, land cress, kale and (with luck) brussel sprouts.

And so the time honoured tradition of intergenerational brassica torture continues…

Nude trees and naughty birds

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 to a pincer movement of termites and southerlies.  But no, the demolition job was courtesy of a pied currawong, ripping the tree apart like it was a lego construction.  Well, a lego construction with integral insects.  Since in the (distant) future Lego will apparently be “sustainable”, one day this might even be a thing.

Perhaps it’s for the best that Lego’s green-washing target date is a decent decade and a half away.  Depending on how significant bark is to the structural rigidity of defunct pine trees we might need to use those infestation-proof plastic bricks – we’ve got enough of them under furniture and half buried in the garden – to rebuild our crushed house.

That’s if the currawongs are here to stay – and they might be.  Back in the day, before the ’40s, currawongs came down from the mountains to visit Sydney over the winter, but now they hang out in the big smoke all year round.  They like it down here, snacking on cute little birds and munching up the tasty berries of our attractive invasive plants.   If I want to save the roof, that monster privet the size of a redwood may have to go.

And a sighting today of another naughty black bird has cast doubt on the long-settled verdict in the Case of the Phantom Egg-Eater.

There was a stramash this morning between a crowd of brush turkeys and an crow, the latter carrying something that from a distance might appear to resembled a chicken’s egg.  I have no pictures of the actual incident but only an image extracted from the raven’s dream, in which hens’ eggs are light as a feather and easily borne in the beak for leisurely later consumption in convenient locations.

Later investigations showed that a freshly laid chook egg had indeed be devoured, but, in addition, one of the fake plastic eggs, carefully placed in the nest with to confuse and baffle hungry brush turkeys, had also vanished.

I’m not sure what this tells you about corvid intelligence but to me it suggests that ravens are optimists.  Apparently young European ravens are extremely curious.  In experiments where juvenile birds were offered “novel inedible items”, it seems, “birds never missed any potentially edible item … even with “highly cryptic objects”.”  I think it would be fair to call last year’s Easter hunt left-overs “highly cryptic objects”.  Maybe this was a young ‘un because apparently adult ravens are “neophobic”.  I’m assuming this doesn’t mean harbouring a hatred for Keanu Reeves in the Matrix sequels (though this is not an unreasonable viewpoint), but rather preferring actual foodstuffs to eccentric plastic replicas.

Where does the arrival of this new mob of razor sharp egg-robbers leave our prospects of our home-grown protein?  I can almost certainly outwit a brush turkey, but the socially adept, tool-using raven with the problem solving skills of a seven year old might give me a run for my money.  Perhaps I should plant some more broad beans.

And there’s more backyard black-feathered bandits where they came from.  The red-eyed, jet-feathered male koels are gone for the season, but the bowerbirds are back – mostly the “greens” – olive, stripey young bloods and females – but every now and then there’s a flash of violet-black as a grown male, glossy and gorgeous, disappears, full bellied, into the shrubbery, after a exhausting afternoon of shredding my kiwifruit vines.

But, despite my doziness, there was no way I could mistake today’s most magical visitor for a common or garden magpie.  Nude trees held no allure for her.  She watched me, still and cautious, from a leafy branch low in the hibiscus, patiently waiting for maybe five long minutes while I snapped away incredulously.

I reckon she came after the noisy miners that have descended on us over the winter, yipping and snapping at the wattle birds.  Last I saw the sparrowhawk, she was gliding off through the jungle at the bottom of the neighbour’s garden, indignant miners in hot pursuit.  I’m hoping she got the best of them.  What a fitting end for those hateful lerp eaters – fastidiously “killed, plucked and eaten”, all the while clutched in a sparrowhawk’s long and elegant middle toe.

I hope she’ll be back.  I’ll be keeping watch.

Ghost chickens

We have poultry visitors from beyond the grave.

RB had a wild look in his eye after a visit to the henhouse last week.  “I just saw Luna!!”  That’s Luna the barred Plymouth Rock, who sadly, quietly, died about three weeks ago.  And then, the next day, I saw her too, or at least her fluffy wraith-like behind, evanescent in the half-light by the woodshed.

You may doubt the evidence of our eyes*.  I invite you to compare this spectral butt with the large as life hindquarters of Luna the barred rock in better days.  The resemblance is uncanny.

And now Shyla the Australorp, thankfully still hale and hearty, has been possessed by the feisty spirit of the late, great Andy Ninja.

Never having shown any signs of Houdini-like qualities while Andy was in this world, she now greets us every morning from the back step.  The garden gate, sturdy as an upcycled Ikea bedhead could ever be, and previously an impenetrable barrier, now presents no obstacle to her fulfilling her urge to join us in the dining room for breakfast.

Clearly Shyla has been inhabited over by a chicken possessed of both wisdom and wanderlust.  Andy Ninja walks amongst us again.

* or indeed you may suspect that this fluffy behind belongs to the authors of our adventures in passive scrumping, the Barnevelder-cum-Australorp-cum-(possibly)-barred-Rocks from next door.  You may be right.

Andy Ninja’s great escape

Andy Ninja was always a chicken with a mission.  She arrived at our place, in the company of her rather macho sister Harley, already in possession of a name that perfectly captured her special qualities, thanks to the penetrating insights of my chicken-wrangling nieces.

Within a year she’d made her first break for freedom.  A quarter acre block just couldn’t contain her ambitions.

Most mornings we’d wake up to find her scratching up the trad in the front garden, her daily constitutional in no way hindered by clipped flight feathers or the locked garden gate.  Then one morning she toodled up the drive and didn’t come back.

There was no tell tale trail of torn feathers, but after a couple of days I tried to gently break it to the kids that Andy probably wasn’t coming back.  All the fox-baiting national park rangers in the world weren’t going to save a chook on the loose overnight on the mean streets of Berowra.

My eldest was in denial.  She hand-crafted a “missing” poster, complete with full-colour portrait and I nailed it over our mailbox.  Some kind of closure at least, I figured.

A week later, I get a phone call from some folks down the street.  Andy Ninja, it seems, was that proverbial chicken who crossed the road.  She had introduced herself to a new family, laid them some eggs and made herself at home in their kitchen.  They were in love with her.  There were childrens’ tears as the unrepentant adventurer was returned.

Don’t get me wrong.  Andy liked to roam, but she knew her own stomping ground. A couple of years back we spent a few months overseas.  While we were gone, some young Swedes rented our place.  They weren’t keen to be small-holders, so our generous and well organised neighbours, chicken aficionados from way back, offered to take in our birds for the duration.

We gave the chooks a week or so to settle into their new high security quarters – a proper coop, enclosed on all sides with wire, with a sturdy dog-proof outdoor run.  After our haphazard fencing and half-baked sleeping arrangements, surely the chooks would be safe and sound in the custody of some proper chicken keepers.

By Day Two, Andy Ninja had made her way home.  I returned from work to find her mooching around in our yard.  We had stern words and passed her over the fence.

On Day Three, she was back again.  Our chicken-wise neighbour assured us confidently that with close wing clipping, there would be no repeat offenses.

We woke up on the morning of our flight out to see this view from the window.

I shouldn’t have been surprised, then, when we arrived in London, to receive a slightly aggravated email from our Swedish tenants asking what to do about the chicken that, despite previous arrangements, had turned up on the premises.

Or to receive another one, a week later, saying that actually, it turns out that they quite liked having the chicken around and what should they buy it for treats.

While we were gone, Andy Ninja was quite the chicken around town, it seems.  Our poultry-hosting neighbours would get phone calls at all hours reporting sightings of a neat brown chicken strolling down the main street.  Was it one of theirs?  Our friends up the drive also got regular visits.  Andy would pop into their shed to learn a bit more about welding, or perambulate through their herb garden to monitor the watering.

She survived abandonment by jetsetters.  She survived a week on her own on the street.  She survived, we suspect, a midnight attack by an ambitious tawny frogmouth, perched, as she was, all alone on the top of the chook dome.  At one point, Andy transitioned to become a she-rooster who crowed in the morning and made eyes at her flock mates.  And then started laying eggs again.  After months under surveillance as a suspect in The Case of the Cannibal Chicken, she emerged, eventually, entirely vindicated.

I have to admit, Andy wasn’t wildly keen when the hefty newcomers arrived and stole her place at the top of the pecking order, but she rolled with the punches.  She was bit miffed when her perch, the chook tractor, was repurposed into a brush-turkey-proof brassica zone, but she sighed and settled down next to the pushy new girls on the edge of the potted figs. She outlived her bikie sister and a large percentage of the world’s twenty billion chickens, with their abbreviated and unfree lives.

But she didn’t survive this week.

Something – maybe Marek’s disease, maybe “wet” fowl pox, maybe both – has rolled through our little flock, despite our middle class pretention of expensive, vaccinated hens.  Luna quietly expired a week or so ago, and despite an attempt to segregate the sick bird, Andy went a few days after.  On her last day, looking horribly under the weather, she simply disappeared, her mysterious ninja powers undiminished by age and illness.

She’s made her final break for it and it looks like she’s got away for good this time.  We will surely miss her.

Ecosystems of evil

Okay, I know there’s no such thing as evil ecosystems.  You create plenty, and things come.  Plenty of chicken food and regular eggs, you get nine teenaged brush turkeys, slouching around your backyard, eating anything that’s not nailed down.  Lots of grapes vines and your resident possums bite their way through the mesh exclusion bags and let in the fruit flies.  A yard littered with the sulphurous fermented droppings of a cocos palm (not to mention the ordure of those brush turkeys), you get loads and loads of flies.

I’ve had a red hot go at taking an aesthetic approach to the flies, with their sparkling metallic blue and golden armour and crazy eyes.  I’ve tried to think about them as simply part of the cycle of life, but I am starting to stare pointedly at my watch, waiting for the arrival of the cavalry, a wheeling flock of insectivorous SBBs (small brown birds) that will weave through the undergrowth and snatch the pests from the air without breaking formation.  I want one of those neat and tidy ecosystems, the ones where the annoying insects become a food source for endangered and good-looking avian visitors.

But no – desite my native shrubs and the absence of a horde of noisy miners, our place is rich in  bombastic generalists and SBBs are thin on the ground.  Your kookaburra – good for tidying up your left over sausages. Your cockies will make short work of the peach crop.  But both of them bloody useless at disposing of flies.  The garden skinks have been a disappointment as well.  Allegedly they are avid carnivores, and flies are a favourite treat, and we’ve got more Lampropholis guichenoti in the backyard than we have five cent pieces rattling around in the bottom of the washing machine.  But they, too, have failed to come to the party.  Once again, Gaia appears to be napping on the job.

While the Cocos palm absolutely and definitively a weed (I like the nuggets of invective in the Grow Me Instead Brochure – “a blot on the landscape” “can give the appearance of a garden planted with telegraph poles”) my hatred for this vermin-attracting plant was masked for a while by a sense of gratitude.  After all, it did save the house and possibly the family from being crushed under a giant gum tree.

I was at work one day when RB called.  “I don’t want to worry you but a tree’s just fallen on the house”.

The SES was summoned: a marvellous mob of guys and gals with chainsaws who belayed themselves to the wonky car port and swarmed over the roof of the house, making short if noisy work of the tree.  The big gum had lost its grip on the ground and fallen sideways towards our verandah.  Fortunately a forked branch wedged itself across the Queen palm, holding the eucalyptus suspended just a smidgen above the roof. The sum of the damage: one branch lightly brushed a gutter and gave it a bit of a bend.

So, thanks for that, Queen palm (and, needless to say, the SES. You are legends.).  We’re grateful for the structural integrity of our roofline.

But if you think it’s going to stop us chopping you down, you couldn’t be more wrong. The possums might view your fruit as ideal picnic food but you’re a hazard for the flying foxes.  It’s a worry when you rely for 30% of your diet on something that gives you acid reflux, damages your teeth, chokes you and leads you to stumble around on the garden being mauled by suburban dogs.  Even Maccas isn’t that bad.  That’s an evil ecosystem if ever there was one.

And that’s leaving aside the trip hazard for someone as poorly coordinated and lazy with the garden broom as I am.  So unless I hear about a recipe for cocos palm wine before I afford a tree surgeon, Cocos palm, you’re cactus!

The Problem That Has No Name

Betty Friedan’s analysis of the psychological consequences of compulsory happy housewifery for  1950s middle-class American women may not cut much ice in the twenty-first century, when two incomes drum up barely enough cash to rent a cardboard box under a Sydney bridge.  But in recent weeks I’ve started to wonder if Her Indoors in the Henhouse may still, even in this day and age, struggle with The Problem That Has No Name.

Treasure has just spent several weeks in the nest box, trying to hatch baby Light Sussex chicks from golfballs.  At about 11 am every day the frustration seemed to overwhelm her and she would leap from the coop, galloping madly around the yard, finally throwing herself into the nearest patch of scarified earth for a frenzied roll about.  And then, after an orgiastic dirt bath, back to the nest for another thankless 23 hours of golfball-warming. After a month or so of this, she seems to have given it all up as a bad joke: she’s spending her nights with the other girls now, out on the edge of the fig tree barrel, in the rain.  But she’s emerged from her confinement looking disturbingly downtrodden and scabrous.

Just to ramp up the poultry-keeping anxiety, we’ve also had an egg strike.  Snowball occasionally pops out a pocket-sized effort which we have a slim chance of collecting, if we leap up the minute it’s been laid and leg it down the yard, hurling any object at hand at the awaiting brush turkeys.  But otherwise, nada.

We have had these health concerns before.  In the past our concerns about the wasting disease fatally undermining the chooks’ productivity has usually ended with a discovery like this:

After extensive searching of the spider-rich environs around the yard, a mother-lode of eggs has yet to be found, though  I have come to the conclusion that “exclusion netting” may be something of a misnomer.

Could an infestation of red mites explain Treasure’s sorry state and the recent lack of omelettes?  Oddly, Friedan’s account of housewives’ distress in The Feminine Mystique never references insects.

The henhouse has been duly scrubbed and even sprinkled with wormwood, allegedly a natural insecticide.  If it doesn’t kill off the annoying bugs, perhaps we can set up a still in the woodshed, chuck in the left-over wormwood and help the chooks drown their sorrows with absinthe.  What with the late Victorian bohemian vibe, I think chickens wasted on absinthe would have higher self-esteem than your hen zoned out on “mother’s little helpers“.

Not entirely persuaded that the beverage of choice of the nineteenth century Parisian art world would also do a good job with the modern mite, I also cracked out some evil commercial pesticide and gave the very indignant Treasure a good dusting.

In the spirit of equal opportunity ignorance, I’d been doing my best to avoid reading the manual or asking for direction.  Eventually I cracked and consulted other, wiser chicken enthusiasts.  Almost immediately I found out from Tim-the-Chicken that your broody light Sussex often sashays straight into the egg-free zone of the annual moult.

It’s The Problem That Has No Name no more. It has a name, and its name is moulting.

I’m not sure what insights I’ve offered into twentieth century women’s history here.   Can we read the rising popularity of the bikini in the the 60s and 70s as some kind of symbolic human female “moulting”? Will we see birth rates and valium consumption rise again with the increasing popularity of the retro one piece swim suit and the burquini?  Who can say.  I’m simply hoping, like a scary social conservative, that Treasure will come to her senses, cover up those naked bits, stop running around the town and get back into the henhouse.

Happy International Year of Soils!

I’m not kidding.  The UN has declared 2015 the International Year of Soils.  And not before time.  Everyone should be preoccupied with dirt.  I know I am.  What is going in down there, under the ground? Are my veggies growing in podzol or mycelium? Hang on, that’s soil profiles in Minecraft, not in Berowra.

The CSIRO’s recently released Soil and Landscape Grid with its 3 dimensional digital soil attribute maps could resolve most Australian gardeners’ soil questions. In case you were wondering how these maps were developed, let me put you out of your misery:

“The spatial modeling was performed using decision trees with piecewise linear models and kriging of residuals. Fifty environmental covariates that represent climate, biota, terrain, and soil and parent material were used in the modeling. Uncertainty was derived using a bootstrap (Monte Carlo-type) approach to derive for each pixel a probability density function (pdf), from which we derived 90% confidence limits”

More kriging of residuals, I say!

Gags aside, this free online resource shows why Australia needs publicly funded science and why sacking researchers in the CSIRO to bankroll Gina Rinehart’s tax breaks is a major error (if you need more persuading, CSIRO scientists also invented WiFi, Aerogard, the permanent pleat, and the word petrichor, which describes the lovely smell of damp earth after rain).

After reading about the rocks in our neck of the woods, however, I’m not sure we are best placed to fully exploit the sophisticated visualising technologies of the Soil and Landscape Grid.  The geology around here is pretty danged boring. Other than the odd lens of shale, mostly on the ridge-tops (that is, under roads and houses) it’s Hawkesbury sandstone all the way down, 40 million years and 270 metres of it.  Or at least, all the way down to Berowra Creek where there’s an outcrop of more fertile Narrabeen Group of shales, sandstone and clays here and there.

Of course, we’re not alone in our preposterously deep beds of sandstone.  They’re on display in the Blue Mountains too, though with a few more layers clay and basalt intrusions to break up the tedium.

The humungous quantities of sandstone across a swathe of the Sydney Basin makes my sentimentality about the disappearing rock faces along the new railway cuttings of the Northern Line even more absurd.  After reading about the good exposures of Ashfield Shale between Hornsbury and Beecroft,  I’ve become a tiny bit obsessed with capturing the freshly exposed slices of Sydney Basin geology as they are revealed by the diggers and before they’re covered with nasty grey concrete.  Wordsworth was mortified by the ugliness of railway cuttings slashing their way through the nineteenth century British countryside.  Here am I mourning for disappearing railway cuttings, a slice of geological time revealed and then lost again.

Perhaps I should stop grieving the lost glories of the Pennant Hills trackwork and spend more time worrying about what my garden might be doing to the “quartz rich, nutrient poor” soils of Berowra.

My snake beans are kinda sallow – I reckon they need a side serve of well-rotted chicken manure.  But even as I contemplate emptying the compost tumbler, I can’t help but fret about where my vegetable garden sits, perched above the national park with its “rich and distinctive assemblage of species that thrive on poor soils” , “60-80 different plant species growing together on an area half the size of an average house block” (Benson, Howell, McDougall, 1996, 24-5).  Benson and Howell in their fascinating Taken for Granted: the bushland of Sydney and its suburbs (Kangaroo Press/Royal Botanic Gardens, 1990) mourn:

 “much of Hornsby’s rugged sandstone terrain remained undisturbed until after World War III when the increasing availability of the car and improved building technology made steeper, more remote sites available for housing.  As a result, bushland on ridge-tops and upper slopes has been totally destroyed, the bush remaining only where it is virtually impossible to built, and along steep gullies which have become drainage lines.  Virtually very catchment system includes some suburban development, stormwater run-off from which contains silt and nutrients.  These promote weed invasion of sandstone gullies… in newer areas such at Mt Colah and Berowra [the] invasion is beginning, and the consequences appear inevitable” (108)

And that’s us, in our mid-century twentieth century house, teetering on a steep slope in a fold of the hillside you might otherwise call a creek bed.  My painstakingly-made hot compost, my organic sugarcane mulch, the poo from my beloved chickens, all building nitrogen, carbon, phosphorus rich earth – garden alchemy.  I’m creating an anthroposol – a human made soil – and I’m not entirely sure that’s a good thing.

As a homage to the UN’s declaration, I’ve stared in a  incomprehending way at a schematic cross-section of Hawkesbury soils, I’ve thought long and hard about our B horizon (by staring even longer at this quite marvellous online introduction to soil classification – thanks again, CSIRO) and I’ve double-checked Minecraft’s definition of “podzolic” with the kids but I’m not sure how far it’s got me.

Maybe this is the chthonic thinking – thinking about the soil and the communities, plant and animal that grow from it – that my friend Kate urges us all to do in her fab blog about the Armidale Community Garden, but it’s not so much grounded me as taken me directly to Hades via the Field of Punishment.  This is a special special place of suffering for people who long to understand rocks and dirt but can never remember whether the Devonian comes before or after the Carboniferous, no matter how many times they read David Johnson’s splendid Geology of Australia.  And that’s without wrestling with the geopolitics of topsoil loss or the impact of international agribusiness on pesticide residues or the links between soil, country and indigenous chlthonic law

The only solution to this torment, I feel, is another variant of subterranean thinking: that sense of mindfulness I get sitting in a darkened vehicle with a swag of empty shopping bags, gazing tranquilly at the carefully preserved, sandstone rock exposures in the underground car park of Berowra Coles.

Happy International Year of Soils everyone!

Latchkey chicks

The local youth have been loitering around our place, nicking in without so much as a by-your-leave, cadging food and then disappearing as soon as the adults arrive with a basket of washing or a lawnmower (or a camera).

Normally at this time of year the offenders are brush turkey chicks, absurdly tiny and fluffy to be so completely unattended by any kind of parental figure.  Chooks the same age and size would be under the watchful eye of some stern motherly type, but brush turkey babies are the original latchkey chicks.  From the time they burrow their way out of the incubating mound, they’re on their own.

Brush turkey like to make their mounds where it’s really shady – 85-90% cover.  Our neighbours’ backyard is perfect and every now and then the little chicks squeeze through the fence  – or fly over it, something they can do from the time they’re only a few hours old – into our place.  This one doesn’t quite have the heft to work Grandpa’s foot-pedal activated chicken feeder, but it’s giving it a red hot go.

But this year the brush turkeys are not the only feckless youth about. One morning last week, I spotted two scrawny youngsters scuttling away behind the woodshed.  Two?  I’ve never seen a brush turkey babe with a buddy before.

It seems the neighbours’ pair of fledgeling Barnevelders occasionally like to slip away from their adoptive mum to rampage through our yard.  I was baffled by the sudden demolition of the “clucker tucker” patch –  a mix of tasty greens and seeds like bok choy, buckwheat,  clover, linseed, lucerne, millet, silverbeet and sunflower that I’d been carefully cultivating as a cover crop and future fodder supply.   Green Harvest’s website makes the droll comment that these plants “have vigorous root systems that will quickly regrow leaves that are cut or eaten”.  I’d carefully fenced it off from our own poultry demolition squad and the damage didn’t have that “visit from by a front end loader” look so characteristic of the work of brush turkeys so I was at something of a loss until I saw two sets of skinny dino-legs through a pullet-sized scrape under the fence.

I’m not sure what the allure of our backyard is.  I guess there are no handy bus shelters for the young team to hang out in around here, so our woodshed is the next best thing.  Recently I’ve seen one of the neighbour’s teenage chickens in the yard again, this time fraternising with an adolescent brush turkey. All fine and dandy, I’m sure (like any naive parent, I’m carefully not thinking about this kind of thing).

I’m taking tips on bringing up the kids from the chooks – the case for a free range childhood seems pretty sound to me.  So bring on the latchkey chicks!  I’m here to embrace the modern fowl – whether she be Alectura lathami or Gallus gallus domesticus – with her busy life as a working parent, and to celebrate her offspring’s initiative and spirit of independence. As long as the little fiends stay out of my silverbeet!

The Phantom Egg Eater: caught in the act!

At last, after yesterday’s sting operation, I can announce that we have finally exposed the identity of the Phantom Egg Eater.

Was it Luna, so long a marked hen after the damning outcome of her interrogation by the children? Or Andy Ninja, craving not just egg yolk, but a return to her lost youth? Or Treasure, driven to the edge by long days alone in the chicken coop, attempting to hatch offspring from a collection of golfballs?

Or was it Snakey, taking a break from the taste of toxin-laden rats?


After six months of suspicion and doubt, all of the above have been exonerated.

Yesterday, RB caught the culprit in the act.

It was Colonel Mustard, in the henhouse, with a candlestick.  Okay, there was no candlestick.  But the resemblance to Colonel Mustard is more than passing.

So it seems apt that, in the interest of maintaining a consistent omelette supply to the humans of the household, the Colonel will be getting a taste of his own medicine.  Whenever he’s in the Dining Room, or indeed, taking light refreshments in the Billiard Room, the Kitchen or the Abandoned Compost Bin, the canapes will inevitably be that 70s classic “stuffed eggshell with a giant mouthful of spicy condiments“.

It’s a relief to know that our girls are innocent of Egg Murder.  However, I’m not sure if I have the probation officer stripes to successfully rehabilitate the Colonel and potentially the entire brush turkey population of the Berowra Valley National Park, even if I had an infinite supply of Masterfoods’ Hot English Mustard. Plus, I’m not entirely convinced that the Colonel, and indeed Mrs Peacock, Miss Scarlett and other native poultry friends, haven’t got a secret passion for the stuff.

So perhaps it’s lucky that the silly season is coming up.  During the festive period I’m hoping my intensive work schedule will involve exhaustive ongoing surveillance of chicken conversation for boastful “I’ve laid an egg” cackles from a strategically chosen location (ie, an easy chair on the back deck).  To ensure the achievement of my critical key performance indicators (that is, collection of at least four intact eggs a day), it will obviously be essential to clear my diary of all other commitments to ensure that I am able to respond to The Egg Dance in a timely and flexible way. This zero tolerance approach to policing brush turkey misdemeanours is going to be a productivity challenge but I think we can rise to it.

Plants in protective custody

Reflecting trends in Australia more broadly, the population behind bars in my garden is steadily increasing. The metaphor starts to break down there because my indigenous plants aren’t systematically and grotesquely over-represented in prison.  And it’s not collective punishment, more like protective custody.

Washing line vege netHere are some of the make-shift prisons keeping chooks and brush-turkeys at bay. Eventually I suspect I might just cage the whole veggie garden, as much to deflect the midsummer sun as to prevent raids by flying dinosaurs.  Some of our neighbours are already there, as you can see from this fabulous repurposing of a Hills Hoist.

In the mean time, I’m finding new and creative if not visually attractive ways of leveraging my pathological hoarding… from the tried and true bit of broken trellis…

… to recycled heavy rubbish finds.

So far mysterious steel objects from the side of the road 1: brush turkeys 0 (though not for want of trying).

There’s an array of objects yearning for landfill propping up veggie nets:

Old umbrella frame protecting salad greens

Old umbrella frame protecting salad greens

and then there’s the open prison: things surviving against the odds outside the fence that encloses the veggie garden.

Of course that’s making the assumption that the fence is high security. Somehow, I don’t think so:

Okay, my road-side finds are not quite quirky enough to function as garden ornamentation (I need to yarn bomb my umbrella!).  And I don’t think these pics will appear on Buzzfeed under “2014’s Best Organic Garden P*rn”.

Perhaps I should proudly locate my backyard in the fine tradition of rural homesteads featuring interactive museums of rusting Massey Fergussons and defunct Valiants, and in-situ galleries of op art reinterpreted in the language of car tyres, tarpaulins and giant piles of silage.

I’d like to flatter myself that the selling point of my carceral structures is functionality, rather than kerb appeal.  However, drawing on painful experience, I know there’s a strong possibility that around about the time my plantlets look like producing something edible, there’ll be a conspiracy between a brush turkey and a windy day and I’ll see roots wafting in the breeze.