An ice storm, a flood and eight invisible fish: the fraught tale of a frog pond

hailstones in hand crop long

Water features have everywhere in Berowra this last year.  With half the suburb’s roofs smashed to bits by golfball sized hailstones just before Christmas, an ice-storm followed an hour or so later by torrential rain, lots of those water features were indoors and distinctly unwelcome.  In a suburb that has come to be known over the months of waiting for insurers to come to the party, as “Tarpaulin Heights” we got off relatively lightly, with our indoor water feature making only a cameo one-time appearance.

Inundation was the origin of our new outdoor water feature as well.  Thanks to topography and a inexplicably ruptured stormwater drain – I did fear at one time it was an inexplicably ruptured sewer, so I’m thankful for small mercies – when the rain comes down in Berowra, most of it seems to come through our backyard.

The weather pattern in Australia now, even here on the coastal fringe where the trees are still alive and there is grass, which is sometimes even green, seems to be long dry months punctuated by occasional periods of quasi-apocalyptic rainfall.  So catching some of the run off and making some use of it seemed like a good idea.  And then there’s my fantasies about frogs.

So in December last year, I dug a big hole, downhill from the stormwater drain and uphill from my veggie garden.  Deep holes are not easy to dig on Hawkesbury sandstone.  I was aiming for a depth of no more than 30cm, since I really didn’t want to have to fence my pond, but even 30 cm was a push. I rationalised the shallowness of the hole with reference to the gently sloping edges that would allow the amphibians of my dreams to rest comfortably on the edge of the pond.  Not a very convincing excuse to avoid further shovel work.

releasing fish

I lined the hole with a few centimetres of sand from the local garden centre.  Carpet underlay is sometimes recommended for a layer underneath pond liner but I went an old trampoline mat, since that’s the kind of thing I have lying around in my shed.  Retrospectively I’m not sure that was a great idea.  On top of that I put down rubber pond liner – quite a lot more expensive than vinyl, but not plastic and, in a household full of underused bikes, I figured, quite patchable.  In theory.  Underneath that footlingly small pond is six square metres of heavy duty rubber.

lily leaves late Jan

Nymphoides montana. I think.

Sensible guides to pond making recommend that you set up your fountains and filters properly, then add native plants, give it a week or so and then add fish.   However, a couple of days after setting up the pond with a solar powered aerator, native grasses (Carex fascularis and Schoenoplectus Mucronatus) and pond plants (Marsilea mutica, and if memory serves, Nymphoides montana) I spotted a huge number of wrigglers frisking gaily around their new habitat, and decided we would need to go fish shopping.

Our neighbours had demonstrated their true commitment to biodiversity by not just accepting but actively welcoming the idea of frog mating calls 24-7 outside their bedroom windows.  However, we thought adding a vast number of mosquitoes to the local ecosystem might not necessarily go do down equally well.  We decided to buy two pairs of pacific blue eyes to populate our pond, while we waited for other insect eaters – frogs and dragonfly larvae and the like – to arrive.

Pacific blue eyes are small fish – less than 8 cm in length and usually much smaller – that are keen mozzie eaters but not big enough to devour frog spawn.  They’re locals all up and down the East Coast, inhabiting both fresh waters and estuaries, so not too fussy about water quality.  Our local aquarium shop had a stock of them, though the staff were pretty clueless about which fish were native and which were not, offering us white cloud minnows (originating in China) as a possible alternative.  We took our two pairs of tiny, quasi transparent fish home and Ms 12 and good friend and frog lover from next door carefully introduced them to the pond, taking time to equalise the temperature of the water to minimise shock.

Fish introduction 2 before flood crop

All that happened around midday on December 20, the day of the hail storm and subsequent torrential downpour.  Within hours of settling our blue eyes carefully into our little pond, our backyard looked like this:

Ms 12 was desperately trying to block the exit from the pond, but I think realistically the Pacific blue eyes were halfway to Berowra Creek by this point.  There was much weeping and gnashing off teeth, counterbalanced, on my part at least, by a certain smugness that I hadn’t bought white cloud minnows or gambezi fish or something else that you wouldn’t want to end up in your local waterway.

Of course, what with the water being murky and the fish being small, shy and in essence invisible, we weren’t quite sure if we still had pacific blue eyes or not. Rather than waiting for the mosquito murmuration that would tell us that we didn’t, and with an eye to diminishing the level of weeping, we went back to the aquarium shop for yet another couple of pairs.

That was a nearly a year ago now, and there have been no further sightings of the fish.  The solar powered bubbler carked it in another downpour, along with the rainbow nardoo which I accidentally ripped out while clearing out excess algae during winter months.   But the wriggler count has stayed low and the pond has done pretty well as a habitat.  Not to mention the fabulous opportunity it’s given me to buy new plants (full list at the bottom of the blog)

On the down-side, I’ve been surprised how often I have to top the pond up with water.  Either it has a surprisingly high level of evaporation for a pond in shade much of the day or the logs and rocks I dragged around the yard to make a naturalistic edging have punctured the rubber lining in some mysterious but annoying way.  Perhaps there’s a reason people don’t recommend using old trampoline mats underneath your pond.

One way or another, I have become a pond slave.  I’m constantly ruminating on where I’m going to get my next hit of  non-chlorinated water. The many many hail-holes in our gutters all have a bucket underneath them and I usually have a bucket of tap water off-gassing somewhere around the yard. I have heard rumours there may be better ways of collecting rainwater than this.  Working on it.

Blue banded bee in flight cropped

Blue banded bee on Artenema fimbriatum (koala bells)

It was lovely to see the blue banded bees the visiting koala bells and dragonflies hovering over the water, but we’ve had to be patient with the frogs. The approach you take to getting a frog is a bit like the approach 1950s women had to take to getting a boyfriend – make yourself appealing and wait.  Chytrid fungus is devastating frog populations across the world and if you go and collect frogspawn or tadpoles you can help it spread.  So we waited.

Skinks by the pond closeup

A few months back I heard the distinctive pock of a striped marsh frog in amongst the waterside foliage. I was beside myself with excitement, but after I let the chooks out to freerange for the afternoon, the marshie disappeared.  Troubling. It seemed like having both chickens and frogs might be an impossible dream.

Apricot by the pond 2 crop

Apricot nibbling at the microlaena stipodes lawn.  And possibly frogs.

But by the end of winter, another striped marsh frog was in situ, vamping the local females with the alluring noise of a loudly dripping tap.  Perhaps this male was too large to be wolfed down by the chooks on their visits to the pond for a drink and an insect snack.

And, glory be, last week we spotted a couple of handfuls of tadpoles, huddling at the bottom of the pond near some algae.  I am now officially a frog mumma, as my daughter said.  But I’m not feeling too much eco-smugness.  According to the Australian Museum, the striped marsh frog is an unfussy beast – it likes a pond but even a polluted ditch will do.  Apparently they’ve been found breeding in dog’s drinking bowls.

So no pressure.  The bar has been set low for us as aspiring frog parents. Let’s see how low we can limbo.

Pond in Nov 19

Native plants in and around our pond.

Artenema fimbriatum (koala bells) – blue or pink flowers in summer.

Bacopa monnieri (Brahmi, memory herb) – small white flowers.  Grows in and near water – edible plant.

Carex fascularis (tassel sedge).  Grows in moist to wet soils in part shade, up to a metre high.

Centella asiatica (Gotu kola, pennywort).  Edible plant.  Grows in part shade in moist soils.

Cissus Antarctica (kangaroo vine)    Planted in the drier area around the pond.

Doodia aspera (prickly rasp fern).  Grows in moist areas, nice pink new growth.

Finicia nodosa

Hibbertia scandens (guinea flower)   Flowers in shade,

Isolepsis cernua (Live wire) – low growing grass with interesting bright seed heads.

Juncus flavidus (billabong rush)

Libertia paniculata – in moist areas near pond in shade, alongside ferns. White flowers in early spring.

Lythrum salicaria (purple loosestrife)- growing in drier areas near pond.  Dark purple flowers in autumn.  Dies down in winter.

Marsilea mutica (rainbow nardoo) – pond plant.  Beautiful patterned leaves.

Microlaena stipoides (weeping grass) – grass surrounding pond.  Grows well in shade in damp or dry conditions.

Mazus pumlio (swamp mazus) – grows in moist soil.  White flowers in autumn.

Nymphoides montana – pond plant with beautiful yellow flowers.

Peperomia (native) – native succulent that grows well in shade.

Poa labillardiere (tussock grass) – grown in drier areas around the pond

Schoenoplectus Mucronatus – rush growing in the pond.  Interesting spiky seed pods.

Tetragonia tetragonoides (warrigal greens) – edible plant. Grows very well in damp or dry soil in part shade. Delicious to humans and also chickens.

Tripladeua cunninghamii (bush lily) – grows well in part shade, pink flowers in spring. I  killed it.

Dragonfly dark later

Maps in bloom

Perhaps I’ve simply been oblivious before, but this year it seems the bush around Berowra is awash with flowers –  white posies crowning the Sydney red gums (Angophora costata) that now appear to be on every street corner, ridgetop and slope.

There’s something strange about this foam of blossom appearing across our familiar view, as if, while we weren’t looking, a stagehand unrolled a new backdrop to our lives.  I’ve become a tiny bit obsessed by capturing this new scene on camera. Here’s a small sample of my multiples.  Andy Warhol eat your heart out.

Closer to town, the jacarandas are also out.  I love the way this royal bloom redrafts the map of the suburbs, rerouting your eye from the usual lines of roads and railways and wires, to a new dot-to-dot of superbly laden trees.  The city shifts on its axis.  Or better, the city’s axis, the radial city itself, retreats behind a mist of purple flowers.
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Of course, this new cartography of living things is still a map of privilege, of the breathing space between people.  They don’t call affluent parts of town “the leafy suburbs” for nothing.

Creating and keeping green space gets more urgent as cities get hotterAn article in the Harvard Gazette reports research on the way inequality, heat and green space correlate.  “Heat” says Joyce Klein Rosenthal, who teaches in Harvard’s School of Design, “is an environmental stressor, unevenly distributed in places where there are less trees, less green space, and associated with poorer housing quality”.   “At every scale” she noted “income levels are associated with surface temperatures. Poorer neighborhoods are hotter; wealthier neighborhoods are cooler”

Street trees have magic carpets beneath them, not just lilac flowers, but shade.  And on a stifling day the breath of wind across a city park – old-school evaporative airconditioning – is almost as good as the breeze off the water.  Just now, the City of Sydney is trying to green streets and villages, beating the urban heat island effect by shading concrete, weaving plants into walls and sowing seeds on roofs.

But, that hasn’t stopped the chainsaws round here.  New regulations in NSW, created in the name of fire risk-management, let householders rip, at least on trees ten metres or less from their place (oddly, it seems that trees in the middle of spectacular views present the greatest fire hazard).  What an irony: climate change, worsened by tree-felling, makes the Australian weather hotter and extends the bushfire season.  We fear the urban forests, just as we need them the most.

After years of cultivating a back yard the size of a large picnic blanket (that’s to say, a picnic blanket made of concrete) every day I bless the growing things I see from my window.  I may feel differently one day when the view from my back deck is Sydney red gums topped with flame rather than flowers.  Let’s hope I don’t find out anytime soon.

A long drive

One of the garden projects I’ve been plotting for a while is clearing and revegetating the green strip beside our vertiginous, fifty metre long driveway. “Your front yard is reportable” was the dry remark of a local ranger passing through our botanical garden of pestilence.  After a long day of pulling out weeds in the sun, RB strategically averts his eyes from the tangle of asparagus fern, honeysuckle, spider plant, fishbone, agapanthus, ochna, freesias and trad on the final moments of his trek home.

My most unsuccessful plan to beat the access road into submission was undercover hedge replacement.  Slowly but surely, I figured, blueberry bushes surreptitiously planted amongst the morass of agapanthus would take over, without me every having to have a cross word with the neighbours.  Just like the state under the dictatorship of the proletariat, under the benign influence of my edible fruits the floral weeds would simply wither away.  Right.  I reckon agapanthus could give the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China a good run for its money.

My driveway strawberry patch was a less immediate fail.  When we first moved in I planted up the space between the concrete wheelruts with a couple of dozen Diggers’ strawberries.  At one stage, I had about three metres under weed matting, the strawbs basking in a good bit of morning sunlight and not so close to the footpath to actively invite passers by to help themselves.  We got quite a decent crop during recent La Nina years, possibly because the backyard critters couldn’t be bothered roaming so far from the easy pickings of the chicken run and the compost bin.  The lure of ripe strawberries at the top of the drive had the kids bursting out of the front door on school mornings.

Unfortunately the demands of ministering to this patch in the drier times have demonstrated my deep seated laziness.  Even the glute work-out offered by the stiff hike up the hill out front couldn’t get me sufficiently motivated  to stop the strawberries disappearing beneath the buffalo grass.  Ironically, since mowing said grass is best undertaken with pitons, crampons and a length of abseiling rope.  The occasional stroll, watering can in hand, would have been much less effort.

So I’ve been considering the low-maintenance alternatives.  I got as far as ordering and trying out a couple of prospects just before our recent camping jaunt to South Australia – because it’s always good to leave tiny plantlets without attention or water in their first couple of weeks in the ground, right?

Bearing in mind the can’t-be-bothered-with-the-watering-can factor I figured desert plants might be best.  So, pig face around the post-box and maybe creeping boobiala on the graves of the strawberry plants.  I popped some in to see how they got on.

But it turns out there was no need to watch and wait to find out what myoporum parvifolium would look like.  As the sun rose on the first morning of the trip and I headed into the bush, shovel in hand, for alfresco ablutions, what should I find underfoot but boobiala creeping towards the horizon.

And by the side of the road, a carpet of pig face*.

*Okay, It was probably a different variety of pigface – maybe carpobrotus rossii or aequilaterus or even the round-leaved pigface Disphyma crassifolium subsp. clavellatum (thanks Sherilee!) .  And the myoporum parvifolium wasn’t the fineleafed kind most common in nurseries.  Stop being so damn fussy and let me enjoy the coincidence!

A fossil in the garden

Gardens are time-capsules.  I don’t just mean the odd, poignant occasion when you dig up a bone carefully buried, long ago, by a dog you never met. I mean the fashions in plants that date gardens just as surely as winklepickers, blue eyeshadow or shoulderpads date photographs.  As you walk round the suburbs you’ll see  jacarandas arching over Californian bungalows, rows of red cordylines hemming eaveless McMansions, 70s brick veneer hidden behind shaggy bottlebrushes and rambling grevilleas.  Social history has roots in the backyard.

Our place was built in the late 1950s, and I reckon a few of the bigger trees date from about that time.  The largest hibiscus I’ve ever seen, entwined with an ancient honeysuckle as weighty as a strangler fig, reaching up above the roof of our neighbour’s two-story house to catch the light, speaks to me of post-war dreams of expansive America, a Hawaiian fantasy.  The liquidambar and the Japanese maple – a yearning for colour in the fall.

Until today, I put the tallest tree in the yard in the same category – I figured it was a swamp cypress, native of the Everglades, happy knee-deep in water (and, with enough water, they do grow knees!).  Like a larch, it’s a deciduous conifer, needles turning copper in the autumn, then returning, fresh and feathery green in the spring.

But I was wrong.  It’s not an imposing American, though it is a cousin of the great sequoias.  It’s Metasequoia glyptostroboides, a dawn redwood: living fossil from the “dawn of time”.  It’s the Wollemi Pine of the 1940s.   An expedition to a remote village in Szechuan province in 1946 discovered a giant living Metasequoia, a species known from fossil evidence to have existed for 100 million years, thought to have been extinct for at least two million more.

Metasequoia (“sort of Sequoia”, “Sequoia-ish”) was something of a sensation in the late 1940s. In 1948 Sydney’s Royal Botanical Gardens, along with arboreta all over the world, received seeds and commercial nurseries in Australia began growing them for sale the same year. With seeds both easy to collect and propagate, the dawn redwood, George Seddon says, was a big money spinner and the trees are are now common in parks and gardens all over the world, from the subtropics to Alaska.  It’s proudly grown as a street tree in China, though it is critically endangered in its only location in the wild, Metasequoia Valley, not far from the staggeringly huge Three Gorges Dam, a hydro scheme so big filling it slowed the rotation of the earth.

Now of course, I want more lazarus taxa – more trees returned from the dead.  Gingko with its maiden-hair leaves, a clear yellow in the fall.  Okay, it has fruits that smell of vomit and its edible nut is toxic.  Who cares! It’s a dinosaur tree, over a hundred million years old!  As is the Wollemi Pine – three clumps of genetically identical trees discovered in a deep, remote canyon in 1994 – weird looking, self-coppicing, lusted over by others in possession of dawn redwood, it seems.  Although John Benson of the Royal Botanical Gardens in Sydney advises against hoarding this fossil: “people who put them in their backyard will soon have no backyard” (Seddon, 2005, 100).

My neighbours say every winter they look out their window and think, hearts sinking, that the redwood tree we share has gone and died.  Perhaps I should reassure them that it will live for more than a hundred years; that it is Lazarus, come back from the dead; that it has been around for a hundred million years.

Ornamental manoeuvres in the dark

I’m hip to the food forest concept but there’s only so much food you can grow in the shade.  Naranjilla, tamarillo, monstera, babaco, finger lime, warrigal greens – ticked all those boxes.  But at a certain point, you’ve just got to give up the dream of a waving field of wheat outside your kitchen window, and actually plant something that’s going to grow there.  Even if it means going over to the other side, down the slippery slope towards… the ornamental garden.  The garden you can’t eat but which ameliorates the existential despair of staring down at yet another sinkful of dishes.  Gardening in the terrain between utility and futility.

Just now quite a few of those spirit pleasing plants are in bloom.  Libertia Paniculata has made me very happy: a lovely native that flowers in the shade, and is even named after a female botanist and mycologist, Anne-Marie Libert (or Marie-Anne, depending who you ask).  Okay, you can’t eat it, and you couldn’t describe it as flowering copiously in its sheltered spot under the pittosporum (also blooming now).  But the delicate white flowers when they come – some in May and again in August this year – linger, picked out in the odd beam of light that makes its way between the ferns.

Plecanthus argentatus has been a stalwart too, sprawling a bit unless snipped back now and then, but you can’t have too much silvery-grey foliage in my view and it’s a rarity in shade-loving plants, so sprawl away, I say. It copes  well with dry weather and even produces small sprays of tiny white flowers in autumn.  I’ve had less success with indigofera australis which I hoped to plant alongside it – one cheap but sickly plant finally croaked recently after sitting there rather miserably for a year or so, and I failed to get any of the seedlings I sparked up from seed bought online to survive in the garden.  But I’ve noticed new growth on a second plant, put in last year, so I’m hopeful I’ll see some of its purple flowers eventually.

Vines are a good bet for shade, since they are usually happy to climb towards the light. I’ve got two varieties of pandorea jasminoides swarming up a trellised fence, entwined with Tecomanthe hillii.  The Fraser Island Creeper has done nothing flower-wise, which may well be a good thing, since I’m not wild about the hot-pink colour scheme (it was an impulse buy), although I do like the mauvy-purple of the new shoots.  There’s been a bit of action from the “Bower of Beauty”: though it’s decided to set up its bower of trumpet-shaped flowers on the neighbour’s side of the fence (in the sun, dammit!).

Pandorea pandorana, the wonga-wonga vine, flowers for a only couple of weeks a year – just about now – but with the occasional bit of cow poo it has done a good job of disguising the shonky engineering of our garage. Having seen “old man’s beard” going the full Ned Kelly in sandstone country up the way, I was a bit nervous about putting Clematis aristata over the car port, thinking the extra weight on the roof might crush our car like a bug.  But no – after a couple of years it’s barely hanging on.  I suspect that lime from nearby concrete might be the offender.

The correas seem to have done their dash more or less, so no pics.  Correa glabra, quite an upright small bush with fresh lime-green leaves and pale yellow flowers, and Correa bauerlenii, with greeny-white flowers in the shape of an implausibly towering chef’s hat, shiny dark leaves and reddish stems, have both grown well and flowered in a gloomy spot, though Correa alba struggled, never really growing much at all and finally giving up the ghost.  Another “Chef’s cap correa” did really well for a while out back but succumbed during a very wet February, so drainage seems to be a thing.

The correas apparently attract birds, but the plant growing in the shady front yard that has attracted the most attention, not just from our “house” birds, the red and little wattlebirds who dangle upside down to sip its nectar, but even the occasional beautiful visitor like the gorgeous rufus-chested Eastern Spinebill, is not a native but the abutilon, the chinese lantern.

I didn’t plant the chinese lanterns, but as time passes, I come more and more to like Val Plumwood’s idea of garden that is convivial – accepting the presence of foraging animal visitors and plants – local, native and imported – as long as they don’t go feral.  She was fond of daffodils – in part because the wombats and other critters that visited her garden didn’t eat them, and in part because they didn’t do a runner into the bush.  She was a smart lady: you have to respect anyone who survived a death roll with a crocodile.

Beyond the out-and-out baddies to be found in the noxious weeds list and the excellent Grow Me Instead booklets, it’s actually pretty hard to work out what to avoid if you don’t want to become notorious as the “Typhoid Mary” of the next generation of weeds.  I only know not to plant freesia, which I love, because of the fact they pop up everywhere at this time of year – in the wheel rut zone in the drive and the dog poo zone along the street.  The smell of murraya is gorgeous and it’s not listed on the plants to avoid pamphlets for around here but murraya paniculata “exotica” is a serious weed in South Eastern Queensland.  All sorts of scary things are for sale in garden centres and online, and there’s plenty to be worried about in my garden already (I’m going to have to hypnotise my neighbour if I want to uproot the avenue of seed-shedding agapanthus between our drives).  I try to grow local, but if all you can buy are hybridised natives, provenance unknown, perhaps you might be better off with some well behaved, hard working refugees from a South American rainforest or an English country garden.

Bee-ing positive

Tropic snow and bee

It’s dry as a chip in the garden: less than 20% the average amount of July rainfall in Sydney and bushfires have already starting in the north of NSW, months ahead of the official fire season.  Warm too – a record 24 days of 18 degrees C and above.  It’s been 2.7 degrees C above the historical average for July.  Climate change – it’s here, suckers.

But on the bright side, gorgeous blooms on the Tropic Snow peach, and plenty of bees.  Touch wood, the varroa mite hasn’t arrived in Australia (yet) and our honeybees seem to be doing better than the rest of the world. I’m thinking about getting a hive or two, either of native stingless bees (though you can’t collect their honey here in Sydney) or just your everyday honeybees.  So far I haven’t had any flowers from my kiwifruit vines (notoriously hard to pollinate), but you have to plan ahead.

In the mean time… welcome, visiting bees!  Please help yourselves to our beautiful if precipitate peach-blossom.

Delicious monsters

After giving a damning review to one weird home-grown fruit I thought I’d better balance out the report card on the food forest.  The babaco I selected and carefully cultivated myself.  But the Monstera deliciosa (or cheese plant as its sometimes called, because of the swiss cheese-like holes in its leaves) was flourishing here long before we arrived.  It did seem to get a new lease on life when the large gum tree that had shaded it fell on our house – the rejuvenating power of schadenfreude perhaps – and I’ve had to hack it back numerous times since.

While most people grow this plant as an ornamental, I had heard its fruits were edible.  Our rampant vine has had quite a number of fruits over the years, but it wasn’t until I stepped over one knocked down and half eaten by possums that, in a moment of uncharacteristic boldness, I decided I would have to give them a try.  I hacked off the end that had been nibbled by critters, for cootie management, and, peeling off the small green cap on each, tasted a few of the hexagonal berries, compressed together pineapple-style. What a revelation – absolutely delicious, with a hint of a pineapple-like tartness, and the creamy mouth feel of a banana, but perhaps closest in texture and taste to a custard apple (also appearing from the bottom of the garden at the moment – yum!).

At a first taste the berries were sweet but quite firm.  After sampling a handful my throat felt slightly raspy, as it sometimes does after eating under-ripe pineapple, and there was a faint burning sensation around my chin and lips.  Rather hastily, I did some light googling to find that, thanks to needle-like raphides of our old friend oxalates, the fruit salad plant, including its unripe fruits, can be quite toxic. Oops.  There’s a lesson for the kids at home.

So, annoyingly, while babaco with its flavour of newly-laid-carpet is quite innocuous, monstera deliciosa fruits get the following rundown from the Queensland Government poisons centre: they are “considered edible” but can cause “immediate burning pain, and swelling of the lips, mouth, tongue and throat… copious salivation and difficulty breathing, swallowing or speaking… rapidly developing urticaria or hives, a transient swollen, itchy rash… nausea, abdominal pain and intense gastric irritation”.  Kill joys.

Given that my light snack on allegedly toxic unripe berries had only mild side effects, I decided to try to ripen the rest of the “cob” in a paper bag with a banana, as one site suggested.  As promised, after a few days the little green caps on each berry fall off spontaneously, although the fruit didn’t turn yellow as it appears in some of the pictures online.  The fruit seems to ripen from one end to the other, so I pulled off some of the rather scabrous looking lidless berries, leaving others, still clinging to their hats, to ripen further.  As you can see, the half gnawed fruit looks distinctly unglamorous, but the squoodgy berries underneath tasted great.

I’m going to keep eating them, carefully and in small quantities.  On a cautionary note, my tasters, the possums, haven’t been seen since the appearance of that discarded cob.  So if this is my last post, it was the raphides that dunnit.

The liquidambar feast

So much excitement over such tiny seeds (or more accurately, in terms that will never be used in an up-market menu, even after the zombie apocalypse: “abortive seeds resembling sawdust“).  Check out the mucky faces of these lorikeets.  The yellow tailed black cockatoos love them too.  At first, there’s just the occasional thump of the prickly round fruits hitting the deck, as if there’s a poltergeist at work.  Then you hear a rustling overhead and a plaintive mewing, like a kitten stuck up the tree.

Black cockatoo

Don Burke doesn’t like liquidambar: they have thirsty roots that will choke your pipes and lift your pavers.   But the 20 metre tree at our place shades us and our epiphytes in summer, lights up the yard in autumn, and by May, let the scraps of winter sun that makes it over the hill slide in through our front windows.  The piles of fallen leaves get kicked up by the kids, scratched through by the chooks and dumped under the trees as easy if messy mulch.  With my pro-native plant prejudices I wouldn’t have planted it, and if the sewage pipe backs up I’ll come to hate it, but it’s easy to love a deciduous tree.

Night of the Living Mulch: cover crops for the zombie apocalypse

When the very existence of humanity is threatened, perhaps by catastrophic global warming, perhaps by an attack of brain-eating monsters, what is the first thing you think of? Yes, we’re on the same page: ensuring an adequate layer of mulch under your fruit trees.  Ideally something that not only retains moisture and maintains soil structure but offers a little something for the humans struggling with a post-industrial lifestyle nearby.  So, to address the needs of fellow survivalists in these difficult times, I offer a run down on chlorophyll-laden companions for such moments of adversity.

Strawberries.

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Chance of surviving: Good, given consistent moisture and morning sunlight.  After a couple of years in the ground, susceptible to a virus that makes the fruits look like hairy-faced Cousin It out of the Adams Family – greenish protrusions all over the fruit.  Still tastes okay, though: it doesn’t pay to be fussy after the zombie apocalypse.

Productivity: Theoretically, excellent. A delicate reminder of the luxuries of gentler times.  In reality, in my garden, nada: easy pickings for critters. Maybe netting would help.

Capacity to out-compete weeds: Could do better.  Needs extensive straw mulch or weed matting.  This is your pampered city no-nothing who is the first to bite it when weapons are drawn.

Pepino.

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Chance of surviving: Excellent.  Said to be short-lived but can reproduce by layering, so new plants take root wherever branches lay on the ground.  Tolerates partial shade well and copes well with periods of drought.

Productivity: Again, theoretically, impressive.  Produces peach-sized juicy, mildly sweet fruits tasting like a slightly insipid melon – good in a mixed fruit salad.  Flavour will be surely enhanced by the scarcities after the breakdown of civilisation.  Fruits early, within the first year or so.  Unfortunately, fruit tends to droop towards the ground where fruitarian zombies and/or rodents can easily nab them.

Aesthetic appeal: (the art galleries may be filled with mindless corpses, but the beautiful things in life are still important) High.  Gorgeous little white and purple striped flower with a contrasting yellow stigma.  The light apricot-coloured fruit is dappled with purple and the long leaves are an attractive greyish green.

Capacity to out-compete weeds. Not bad.  Plenty of leaves right down to the ground, even in shade.  Can’t entirely crowd out ehrharta or trad, though, and it’s a pain to weed around and through it.  Not for neat freaks.  But neat freaks probably won’t cope with the survivalist lifestyle too well, so not to worry.

Comfrey.

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Chance of surviving. Comfrey will be the last plant standing.  Deep tap roots enable it to access any water available.  Needs some sunlight but copes with very little in my garden.

Productivity. This is the permaculture mother lode: high nitrogen, high potassium, a dynamic accumulator of mineralsNo doubt there are herbal types who will profess it cures cancer.  You can’t eat it and your chooks probably shouldn’t eat too much of it either unless you want them to have liver failure, but it’s a fantastic compost activator and decomposes into a comfrey tea that’s an all purpose liquid fertiliser.

Aesthetic appeal: Enormous textured grey-green leaves and lovely delicate purple flowers.  Smells pleasantly of cucumbers when cut.

Capacity to out-compete weeds.  Comfrey is a weed.  Well, the non-sterile versions are: you are best getting your hands on the Bocking 14 sort which don’t produce seeds.  Spend some time in the underground bunker planning ahead before you plant this, since, a bit like Jerusalem artichokes, once it’s in it stays there.  Any tiny piece of root (or stem) in the ground will produce another plant.  You can tear off its leaves three or four times in a year and it will come right back. In fact, comfrey may well be the plant version of the undead.  The large leaves and capacity to grow when all around are wilting means it keeps most competitors down though trad seems to be able to find a way.  Dies down briefly in winter which gives the other nasties a go.  Since Sydney will no longer have a winter in the near future this may become less of a problem.

Sweet potato.

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Chance of surviving: Very good. In theory dies back in winter (but see above).  Regrows from tubers left in the ground in previous seasons.  Copes well with drier periods, though it does need quite a bit of sun.

Productivity.  In my garden hasn’t produced an astonishing number of tubers, but I haven’t taken it very seriously as a root crop.  That will obviously change when civilisation breaks down and there’s no longer a chip shop around the corner.  The new leaves and shoots are an excellent alternative to spinach or swiss chard, juicy and quite mild flavoured.  They are much nicer to eat raw than rainbow chard, for instance, and apparently are a favourite food in the Phillipines.  The leafy tips grow back quickly after being harvested.

Aesthetic appeal.  Gorgeous.  Some varieties have heart shaped leaves, others palmate.  The leaves are a deep glossy green with purplish new growth.  Related to the (weedy) morning glory vine, so you may get some very pretty flowers towards the end of summer.  Apparently there are ornamental varieties with near-black or lime green leaves, but the culinary varieties are nothing to sneeze at.  Note: there will be zero tolerance of ornamental plants after the zombie apocalypse.

Capacity to out-compete weeds.  Not bad at all.  The leaves are large and there are lots of them.  The vine is quite vigorous and, like pepino, sends out roots where it touches the ground.  With a little light supplementary weeding, my sweet potato seems to have kept things under control around the artichokes and the citrus pretty well.

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No advice here on weaponry or tips on an antidote for those snacked on by the undead, but we have covered the important issues.  Next week: hydroponics after the collapse of the West Antarctic Icesheet.