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September 14, 2018

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Backyard birds, Fruit, fruit trees, Gardening, Insect pests, Insects, Native birds, Plants that attract wildlife, Subtropical gardening, Uncategorized, Weeds

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Blue eyes and biteys

The glamorous eye of the brown cuckoo-dove

We’ve had a visit from some old friends this week: a gorgeous pair of brown cuckoo-doves. who each took a constitutional around our patio before reconvening for an exhaustive mutual preening session above the chicken run. They’re rainforest birds, but don’t mind wandering away from damp gullies in search of tucker – fruit, mostly, along with seeds and the occasional flower blossom. You’ll often find them in disturbed areas and roadsides, feeding off weeds like lantana and wild tobacco, so what with the great swathes being carved, legally and illegally, through East Coast bushland, they’re doing better than many other forest loving critters these days.

And they are expanding their range as well. Back in the day, Sydney was the southernmost point you’d reliably find a cuckoo-dove. No longer. Just a continuation, I guess, of the species’ earlier journeys from the north, where several close relatives still live. In fact, the amboyna cuckoo-dove of Indonesia and the Sultan’s cuckoo-dove of Sulawesi were considered part of the same species only a couple of years ago when I last wrote about these portly visitors.

Cuckoo dove looking back from water crop

Brown cuckoo-dove quenching its thirst in our bird bath

I’m not sure what attracted them to our place, now we’ve executed the humungous broad leafed privet that used to lure them here. The fruit-bearing natives we’ve planted to replace this nasty weed – lillypillies, blueberry ash, koda, bolwarra, native gardenia, small leafed tamarind, brush muttonwood – are all too teeny to offer snacks of any significance. I spotted the cuckoo-doves innocently drinking from the bird bath but I suspect they may also be implicated in the overnight disappearance of the fruit from our mulberry tree. Though since I chose to plant the mulberry right next to our washing line, maybe that’s a good thing.

Cuckoo dove long tail amend

For me, cuckoo doves are all about those beautiful blue eyes, though their exceedingly long tails are also a feature, helping them with fruit nibbling acrobatics, and at one time earning them the name pheasant-tailed pigeon. But as far as science is concerned, they’re mainly interesting for their body lice.

A female brown cuckoo-dove being groomed by its mate

Normally, it seems, parasites co-evolve with their hosts. A family of lice tend to be found only on one family of birds (and in fact, each species of lice normally exclusively hang out with one species of bird). But the Ischnocera – the family of louse that this pair are trying to remove from each other, in a rather romantic manner – can be found on all manner of birds – not just pigeons and doves, but also pheasants, quails, partridges and indeed megapodes. Though not apparently our local megapode, the brush turkeys, or “the bloody bloody brush turkeys” as they are usually referred to in our household.

But if cuckoo-doves brought their own personal payload of body lice with them when they moved south to Australia, they also do a fine job of cleaning up some other pesky insects – fruit flies. Along with ripe fruits, cuckoo-doves gobble up loads and loads of larvae. One researcher went so far as to say that vertebrates like brown cuckoo doves are the “natural enemies of fruit flies” (Drew, 1987, 287), words to bring joy into the heart of a sub-tropical gardener. But further reading crushes these dreams. Yes, cuckoo-doves, (along with rats) made a huge dent in the fruit fly population. But unfortunately, they did so in the course of eating most of the available fruit.

I guess, then, its lucky I’m hooked on the looks of our frugivorous visitors, and I’m not banking on them for pest control.

The blue eyes of the brown cuckoo-dove

Additional references

Drew, A. J. I. (1987) “Reduction in Fruit Fly (Tephritidae : Dacinae) Populations in their Endemic Rainforest Habitat by Frugivorous Vertebrates” Australian Journal of Zoology 35 283-8

Gibbs, David (2001) Pigeons and Doves: a guide to the pigeons and doves of the world, Bloomsbury Books

Gosper, Carl and Gosper, Dennis (2008) “Foods of Pigeons and Doves in Fragmented Landscapes of Subtropical Eastern Australia” Australian Field Ornithology, 25, 76–86

Johnson, Kevin, Weckstein, Jason, Meyer, Mathys (2011) “There and back again: switching between host orders by avian body lice (Ischnocera: Goniodidae)” Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2011, 102, 614–625

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mccnmatt

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January 22, 2016

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Fruit, Insect pests, Plants and what I know about them, Possums, Rats, Uncategorized, Vines

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Experiments with kiwifruit

Thanks to exhaustive if faintly intrusive matchmaking with a ladder and a paintbrush back in October, we have a bumper crop in the kiwi arbor.

Pollinating kiwifruit

Kiwifruit buds and flowers

The kiwifruit harvest

Four years ago the northern wall of the kitchen was occupied by a dank lean-to, usable only for turning your bike into the kind of rust-bucket that can be safely left overnight at train stations. But we don’t need these kinds of amenities. If you leave your bike unlocked outside the pub in Berowra, it might get taken by a drunk on his wobbly way home, but if it does, the bartender will recognise the miscreant on the CCTV footage and leave a friendly message on the guy’s answering machine to return it in the morning. Even the pelotons of MAMILS leave their featherlight carbon-fibre bikes untethered at the end-of-ride coffee shop.

Blue skies over Berowa

So, with no need for a bespoke bicycle corroding zone, we replaced the corrugated iron over the frame of the lean-to with couple of precociously fruitful Sweetie kiwifruit vines, a low chill variety from Daleys Fruits in Maleny. Last year we had a handful of fruit that the possums seemed enjoy. If they’re planning to eat the whole crop this year they’d better be hungry.

The laden kiwifruit arbor

Who’s been eating my kiwifruit?

Peeping possum looking innocent

I’m feigning disinterest in what happens to my kiwi harvest but let’s be real – the last few years have turned me from a lentil-eating hippie into an antipodean Mr McGregor, the pointlessly enraged gardener who would love to turn Peter Rabbit and his fluffy little brothers and sisters into a delicious warming casserole.

Don’t get me wrong, while I do covet the infinitely soft possum-fur jumpers that vengeful New Zealanders knit from our invasive marsupials, I’m not spending my nights under the kiwi trellis with a gun in my hand. That said, the rugby-league style gum shield I wear overnight to stop me grinding my teeth to dust (expensive, but since it doubles as a contraceptive, probably good value) does date from about the time I started trying to grow fruit in the backyard.

No, I’m taking a less brutal and more scientific approach to harvest-management. I have a control – the fruit I’m leaving untouched on the vine. And I have two intervention groups – there’s the kiwis I’ve picked early, hard as furry brown rocks, and left to ripen in the fruitbowl, and then there’s the bunches I’ve put into protective custody in mesh exclusion bags.

I maintain a cautious optimism that I will get to eat at at least some ripe fruit. This upbeat attitude has nothing to do with early success. While commercial kiwifruit are usually picked unripe and can be kept on ice for two months or more, so far my early harvest has withered slightly but maintained a mouth puckering acidity, as evidenced by our school holiday Ph testing activity.

I can’t seem to kick the habit of growing red cabbages, despite the fact that no one in the house, myself included, really wants to eat them. They’re just so pretty!

Red cabbage abstract

So apart from feeding the leaves to the cabbage white butterflies that my 9 year old keeps in her bedroom as “pets”, what else can you do with leafy brassicas too chewy for coleslaw? Well, you can boil them up and use the purple cooking water as a very cool litmus test.

There’s nothing kids like more than squeezing out half the toothpaste tube, making potions out of bicarb, tomato sauce and milk, or filling every single glass in the kitchen with disgusting viscous liquids. We even ended up with a boys v girls Ph contest – boys obviously preferring alkaline household products, while as we all know, historically girls inevitably favour acids. Including our long-cossetted kiwifruit, which turned our cabbage water a pleasing deep pink.

The results of the purple cabbage litmus tests

Early indications are the mesh exclusion bags aren’t doing much better than the fruit bowl in the protection and ripening caper. I can’t remember a pre-masticated fruit being present when I tied the bag around this bunch. We seem to have a Houdini of the rodent world somewhere on the premises. The outcome so far is not as dismal, at least, as 2014’s doomed attempt at protecting peaches. The mammal and insect pests deployed a pincer movement – rats gnawing a hole in the bags and fruitflies pouring through to finish the job.

Intervention group 1: ripening in the bowl

Intervention group 2: inside the exclusion bag

No, my optimism about getting to wrap my laughing gear around some home-grown kiwifruit sorbet is based on the barely nibbled fruit discarded the ground under the vines. Whatever is chowing down on my crop just isn’t very keen. Perhaps they have a sweet tooth.

How, I hear you ask, can you tell when to harvest your kiwifruit? Well, apparently if you cut one open and the seeds have turned black it’s ready for harvest: its starches will turn slowly to sugar in storage. But there is a more scientific way. Sugar solutions refract light, particularly polarised light, differently from your ordinary tap water. So your go-to-device for measuring sweetness (reported in Brix) is a refractometer. The savvy kiwi farmer picks her fruit at a bit over 6 degrees Brix, it seems. Let’s just hope the brush tailed possums can’t tell their pouches from their polarising light and the satin bowerbirds couldn’t track down a refractometer on ebay.

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October 13, 2015

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Backyard chickens, Damage caused by chickens, Exclusion pest control, Insect pests, Permaculture, predation, Recycling, Vernacular architecture, Waste

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How to exploit your termite work force

One of permaculture’s big ideas is makig plants and animals your agricultural labourers. It’s not so much hitching the family Great Dane to the plough as letting your furred and feathered workers, more or less of their own free will, roam through your food forest grazing on weeds and wolfing down snails. Say goodbye to tedious annual seed-raising, planting and hoeing: your self-reliant plants will look after themselves and keep an eye on each other, shading and nitrogenating and breaking wind (if you know what I mean).

Food forest chlorophyll collective

Treasure in the food forest

Sometimes it works. Our tamarillo, banana, monstera and tumeric plants have formed a chlorophyllerous collective. We have tip-pruning possums, chickens that mow the lawn and do the weeding, rat-catching diamond pythons and bandicoots on a search and destroy mission for curl grubs. This week I even had a local katydid offering to supervise the manufacture of my home-grown pesto.

Katydid critiquing the quality of the olive oil in the homemade pesto

Unfortunately some of the local flora and fauna seem to have skipped crucial pages of Bill Mollison’s permaculture classics. My custard apple tree, for instance, appears to need assistance to shed its leaves in a timely manner. Really, has it come to this? I spend my precious hours of leisure depilating fruit trees?

Meanwhile in the kiwifruit arbor, lacking both enthusiastic pollinators and RoboBees (yep, New Zealand has them), we’re having to take a prurient interest in the sex lives of our male and female kiwifruit vines. To be honest, my child labourers were about as useful as the diffident insects. I’m baffled. How could standing on the top of a ladder tickling plant reproductive organs with paintbrush fail to entertain?

Custard apple leaves waiting to be plucked

Male kiwifruit

Female kiwifruit

Past it custard apple leaf

Child labour 1

Baby sweetie kiwi

Termites at work in the kiwifruit planter

The sorry state of my home-made kiwifruit planters remind me of another insect labour fail. Termites. What can a permie do with them?

Thanks to our hippie ways, our place is a kind of termite nature reserve, where wood-eating insects can flourish, peacefully ingesting fruit trees and vernacular architecture, without fear of retaliation. It seems, when they tired of consuming ad-hoc structures made of discarded bed bases, they like to break it up by devouring whole stands of artichokes as a kind of palate cleanser.

Termite eat artichokes – who knew? Last year’s gorgeous silver leafed statement in the outdoor room is this year a soggy larvae-infested hole in the ground.

Before the termites struck

Architectural artichokes

Last year’s artichoke crop… sniff

But let’s not lose faith in our insect workforce! We need to reframe this problem. Bill Mollison once consoled someone tending a denuded garden: “You don’t have a slug problem, you have a duck deficit“. Thinking along these lines let’s put it this way: we don’t have a termite problem: we have a woodwork surplus.

When we first arrived here six years ago, we were puzzled by the gratuitous decking around the washing line and the apparently pointless wooden walkway that took you there. Our neighbours said they’d scratched their heads as they watched this expensive folly being nailed together.

The mystery was illuminated by the lingering damp patch by the garden gate. Somewhere between the fig tree and the passionfruit vine, roundabout where the sewage line runs down from the house, there was a persistent and troubling damp patch. RB wanted to investigate. Having experienced the delights of sewage tumbling through another backyard and with a terrifying vision of a poo fountain raining down on my veggie patch, I implored him to leave it to the professionals. But I made the error of leaving him unattended one day after work.

Thankfully I was spared the realisation of my nightmare of e-coli amongst the asparagus. It turns out our damp patch was an old storm water drain, busted through when the some new and exciting toilet was installed in the house. As one does, rather than repair the drain and desoggify the garden, our predecessors just built a walkway over the swampland. What with the convenient supply of moisture, this wooden path has been a fine buffet for the termites over the years.

“What the hell is this decking for anyway?”

Thanks to our cellulose loving friends, a short stroll to hang out the laundry had become as fraught with peril as a high-wire walk between two sky scrapers. Collecting a clean pair of undies from the line carried the ever-present risk of a broken ankle or at least the embarrassing prospect of a plank snapping under your weight, a reminder that you may have had too many marinated artichokes on your pasta lately. Yes, I could have fixed it properly with some decent hardwood or a load of treated timber. But that just wouldn’t have been in the spirit of the thing. Instead, it’s become steadily more raddled looking, thanks to running repairs with a random selection of timber found by the side of the road.

But even with my love of hammers and heavy rubbish, I finally had enough. The walkway had to go. Even in 35 degree heat, the demolition job was a highpoint of my weekend. There’s little more viscerally satisfying than ripping something to bits with your bare hands, even if it has been fatally weakened by termites first.

Much missed Shyla on the old walkway

Evolution of a raised bed

The once and future termite buffet

But what to do with the hardwood footings, cemented and bolted in place? Digging them up would be tricky work, haunted by the ever-present risk of a spade through the sewage pipe. And then it came to me in a blinding flash: with a bit of help from our termite tenants, moist soil heaped up onto wood frames would do the job for me.

So now the erstwhile walkway is a (very very slightly) raised bed, fenced in by scraggy aviary wire: yet another addition to the carceral complex that is our garden. As I water the cucumbers and the cherry tomatoes, I’ll be helping our Willing Workers on Organic ~~Farms~~ Backyards, the termites, demonstrate the second law of thermodynamics.

It’s been a long time since I sat through high school physics. Things might well have moved on in the inexplicable post-Newtonian world. But I can say with absolute confidence that, in our yard at least, there continues to be “a natural tendency of isolated systems to degenerate into a more disordered state”.

If they weren’t disordered in the first place, the termites, the possums and the brush turkeys would pretty soon make them that way. Good work if you can get it, lads!

Baby brush turkey investigates the construction site

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July 12, 2015

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Backyard chickens, Brassicas, Companion planting, Damage caused by chickens, Exclusion pest control, Gardening, Greens, Herbs, Insect pests, Insects, Iron deficiency, Plants and what I know about them, Seasons, Vegetables

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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.

Confused cabbage white butterfly on a shallot flower

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.

Mandala of bicycle wheels – didn’t keep the chooks off the radishes, let’s see how it does protecting the roots of the persimmon tree

Daikon radish flowers

Radishes taste tested by chickens

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).

Brussel sprouts having a bad hair day

The look for Chelsea 2015 – the recycled underpants drawer

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.

Red bok choi – what’s not to love?

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?

Giant red mustard

Red bok choi

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.

Miracle broccoli surrounded by land cress

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 pest – the 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…

Land cress – Barbarea vernea

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March 3, 2015

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Animal pests, Backyard chickens, Brush turkeys, Garden trees, Insect pests, Insects, Plants and what I know about them, Possums, Weeds

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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.

Aesthetically pleasing flies

Too many bloody 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!

Cocos palm in our yard – “a telegraph tree”

Bat or possum picnic spot?

Helpful local telegraph pole

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February 13, 2015

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Gardening, Insect pests, Insects

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Mystery minibeasts

Intense fly conversation on a plecanthus argentatus bud

Lavender loving bug

Butterfly visiting a shallot flower – is it a cabbage white?

Stick insect escapes the house, scarred by dust bunnies

Lots of these tiny green pseudospiders in the garden

Calling entymologists and taxonomists, amateur and professional. Who can name these minibeasts?

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Posted on

January 24, 2015

Posted under

Anthropomorphism, Backyard chickens, broody chickens, Companion planting, egg laying, Exclusion pest control, Insect pests

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.

Before nestbox confinement, out on the alfresco sleeping area

After nestbox confinement. Looking scraggy.

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.

What you use to protect zucchinis when the Greek gods fail you.

Perhaps “exclusion netting” is 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“.

Getting herbal on your a*#e, you mites

Wormwood planted near the chooks’ drinking area

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.

Discarded feathers

Feather stubs

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.

“What the hell are you trying to do to me?”

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mccnmatt

Posted on

December 17, 2014

Posted under

Gardening, Insect pests, Permaculture, Plants and what I know about them, Vegetables

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Epic potato fail

Over the years I have reconciled myself to the fact that I will harvest, more or less to the tuber, precisely the same number of spuds as the number of extortionately expensive seed potatoes I put in at the beginning of the season. Only the delicious memory of my friend Mary’s fabulous Greenbank allotment crop keeps me dreaming of fresh dug salad potatoes and hoping that my years of abject failure as a tater farmer are simply a consequence of a sequence of unfortunate accidents.

This year I thought I had made a breakthrough. Why not cluster my Kipfler and Pink Fir Apple spuds around the base of equally hungry plants – the banana trees, the citrus, the celery – and mulch them all within an inch of their lives? The piles of sugar cane straw and the level of expectation were both at an all time high.

On the left, I present you with the potato patch. On the right, this year’s harvest.

The potato patch

This year’s harvest

I’m blaming this guy: I believe it’s a flea beetle. Found – no surprises – loitering below the Eureka lemon, which as we have already established is the garden headquarters of Bond movie insect super-villains. Flea beetle has no doubt been plotting world domination with the now well-ensconced victors of Operation Bronze Orange Bug, perhaps while riding on a secret underground monorail that speeds him directly to the locations of my poor doomed potato plants.

Flea beetle on a doomed potato plant

I love the advice on this organic gardening site for combatting the flea beetle. Their main recommendation: blasting a metre wide strip of barren lifeless earth right around your veg. Now, where did I put that flame thrower?

There seem to be two schools of thought on organic pest management. On the one hand, you have the garden hygienists, the short-back-and-sides crew. Weeds? Hoe them! Plants? In neat rows! Spent crops? Rip them out and burn them! And then eat the ashes! Quail in the bright light of day, insect fiends! There is no escape!

And then there’s the permies and the hippies, with their food forests, their companion planting schemes, and their growing guilds. Spent crops? Let them flower and attract the hoverflies! Step away from that spade – think of the the busy worms and their delicate underground cities, rich with seams of organic matter from the recycled roots of yesterday’s vegetables. That patch of nettles in the corner? A fabulous buffet for butterfly larvae, binding together precious topsoil from erosion. The stack of rotten logs and twigs by the back fence? A habitat for sleepy lizards and an overwintering insect hotel. Gaia is at one with all her four and six legged companions.

This particular site seems to want to it a little bit both ways: … Why not grow some lovely cottage garden flowers as companions to your plants? The delightful blooms of Queen Anne’s Lace will attract beneficial insects… and then you must rip the evil bug-harbouring weeds out by their nematode encrusted roots leaving only pure naked earth, free from the taint of exoskeletal evil!!

I’m squarely in the hippie camp, from sheer laziness if nothing else. Swathes of bare soil are indicative of a tragically perished garlic crop or a chicken incursion, rather than some kind of pest reduction plan. So I will be keeping a careful eye on my eggplant seedlings, also susceptible to flea beetle attack, which have, semi-miraculously, successfully made the transition from windowsill seed tray to vegetable patch.

I suspect I know the secret of their resilience – these are “Little Finger” aubergines. I feel deployment of plant varieties named after nakedly ambitious characters in popular fantasy television, particularly arch manipulators dab handed with a dagger, is a form of psychological plant protection under-explored in permaculture. Think you can take “Little Finger”, flea beetle? You may want to think again.

“Little finger” eggplant seedling

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mccnmatt

Posted on

November 1, 2014

Posted under

Death, Fruit, Garden trees, Gardening, Insect pests

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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.

Posted by

mccnmatt

Posted on

October 12, 2014

Posted under

Backyard chickens, chicken coops, Eco renovations, Insect pests, roosting

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Tonight on Chicken TV: Roost Swap

The chooks have abandoned Palm Beach, my upcycled mid-century vernacular modernist masterpiece of a hen house. Its retro roof line and evocative beach-shack colour scheme wouldn’t look out of place on the cover of Vogue Living with Chickens but it seems these days, our girls feel out of place inside it. I feel the overwhelming sadness of an artist doomed to be underappreciated during their own lifetime.

Of course, the veterans never saw the appeal of the coop: Andy Ninja unswervingly committed to her lonely position on top of the chicken dome; Snowball, after enduring wearying attentions during Andy’s “cock of the roost” phase, shifted to an exposed position on the rim of a half-barrel.

Andy on the chook tractor

Snowball in position

At first I blamed Treasure the uppity Light Sussex, throwing her weight around. During our recent holiday, she took up a new role as “Her Indoors”. Friends and neighbours, promised eggs as a quid pro quo for keeping the flock fed and watered, went away empty handed. Treasure kept prying eyes away from her crowd-sourced egg stash with fluffed up feathers and force of personality.

Queen Treasure was enjoying plenty of wing room in the nesting box the first night Luna, Shyla and Abbey decided to perch next to a Snowball by the brown turkey fig. However, by the following evening, she’d followed the crowd, and Palm Beach, with its rakish verandah, striking use of organic forms for perching purposes and innovative aquarium-lid clerestory window, stood empty and unloved.

Treasure hogging the beach shack

The outdoor room

I’d like to console myself that this move is not so much a rejection of my design ideas as an embrace of one of the garden’s many “outdoor rooms”. But before concluding that the chooks’ change of roost simply expresses a seasonally appropriate relish of al-fresco napping, I thought I should eliminate alternative explanations. Like an infestation of red mites: the bed bugs of the chicken world.

I can now report that the henhouse is now cleaner than my kitchen, with the deployment of a bottle of bleach and a rarely sighted scrubbing brush. The organic credentials of my garden may have taken a dent but hopefully the chookhouse has had a detox. The mantra of “form follows function” does come in handy when you need to hose chickenshit out your modernist masterwork – though this is not a feature frequently noted in Australian Architecture magazine. In the process I believe I may have made a breakthrough in the quest for an eco-friendly alternative to concrete: a mixture of sugar cane straw, wood ash and a small quantity of egg yolk, carefully cured under a sequence of chicken bottoms, makes a substance that could not be moved by a jack-hammer.

I hope the chooks were keeping a close eye on my efforts to pest-proof their home, since the tomorrow’s weather forecast, predicted with 95% confidence, is for rain. If there’s anything more humiliating than spending your Sunday on your hands and knees scrubbing a nestbox, it’s standing in a puddle during a downpour trying to persuade a group of saturated chickens of the merits of functionalist architecture.