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mccnmatt

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May 25, 2015

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fruit trees, Gardening, Plants and what I know about them

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Streets paved with oranges

Standard oranges as street trees

Growing up on the Murray River in South Australia, I know a bit about oranges.

Each morning, the schoolbus drove past row upon row of grapevines and fruit trees, taking us (reluctantly) to class with kids from Berri, the next town along, with its juice packing plant, cannery and stinky wine makers. We played “baby jesus” under the mandarins and grapefruits on my auntie and uncle’s citrus block. And of course, I’ve surveyed the great, flat sweep of the mallee from the viewing platform of that mighty SA landmark, The Big Orange.

But growing up, I never witnessed fruit trees quite like the ones on the Amalfi coast.

The Italians could teach lawn-loving Anglo Australians something about growing food. In fact – thinking about the fertile backyards of the first generation migrants that lived in my grandfather’s neighbourhood in Adelaide, backyards crammed full of loquats, olives, tomatoes and apricots – they already have.

My vibrant and delicious little Freemont mandarin. What is it doing in a garden when it should be promenading in the street?

Even from the train, we could see that every scraggy patch of dirt between the tower blocks on the southern fringes of Naples had its well tended veggies and caged fruit trees. Fennel, broccoli and artichokes found a place between holiday villas and upmarket boutiques on the vertiginous slopes of gobsmackingly gorgeous Positano.

And the mid-winter streets of Sorrento were lined with laden oranges, glowing under the streetlights as the well-heeled townsfolk celebrated the Epiphany – La Befana – in their passegiata finery.

What a grand notion! Fruitful city streets; boulevards and avenues of lemons or pears or mangos! Why doesn’t every city and town look like this? Okay, it might take gun-toting fruit police patrols to keep the street trees looking good for the tourists. Will I lose any shred of PC respectability if I say… it might just be worth it?*

The volcanic sands of mid-winter Positano

Vertiginous veggie patches of Positano

Captive citrus trees in Positano

*Obviously, I don’t mean this. Nor, just to clarify, do I support Switzerland’s strategy of recruiting, via conscription, geranium police, a cadre whose mission is to guarantee a consistently high standard of floral displays on balconies throughout the summer months. In case you were wondering.

Yes to geraniums, no to the vicious geranium police.

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mccnmatt

Posted on

May 14, 2015

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Garden trees, Gardening, Plants and what I know about them, Possums, Seasons

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Let them eat light!

Green and orange for closeup real crop horizontal

It’s persimmon season, but, natch, nothing doing on my little Nightingale tree, despite a grand show of weird naked-looking flowers in the spring. Two fruits nearly made it to the finish line, but the possums got there first.

Gorgeous as the golden fruits are reputed to be as they hang on the leafless trees, 2016, I have decided, will be the year of picking green. The persimmons may well be mouth-puckeringly unripe but as human overlord of this place, I insist that it is I who will enjoy their high-tannin nastiness, and not some upstart marsupial.

In fact, my tree is an old fashioned astringent persimmon: the fruits need to be “bletted” to go super soft and sweet. This can happen far from fruitflies and other critters, deep in the pantry, in the comforting darkness of a paper bag, with only an ethylene-emitting banana for company. I have days when crawling in next to the banana to be bletted myself sounds like a good gig.

In theory, me and my persimmons can hole out for a few weeks in an undisturbed corner and it should work out delectably for both of us.

Persimmon flowers last spring

Leaf shadows

Nightingale persimmon tree

But, really, I don’t care! Harvests mean nothing to me! A barren tree is a beautiful tree.

For now, it’s all about the komorebi, a Japanese word I encountered for the first time a few days ago in the marvellous nature blog, Mildly Extreme.

Because who needs food when you can have sunlight filtering through though autumn leaves?*

Love those leaves…

*but thank god for the Freemont mandarins

*Love those leaves… but thank god for the Freemont mandarins…

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May 2, 2015

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Backyard birds, Climate change, Garden trees, Gardening, Plants that attract wildlife

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Timber!

Black cockatoo on the top of the tree cropped further

We’ve had a mob of at least fifteen yellow tailed black cockatoos hanging around in the last few days, mewing like strangled cats and being chased around by magpies and (I think) even noisy minors. We get the yellow tails quite often around these parts, especially in the winter-time, thanks to the large and sickly but apparently tasty radiata pines that loom over our place.

A male yellow tailed black cockatoo enjoying a pine cone in the neighbours’ yard

Yellow tailed cockatoo tucking in

Silhouette of a yellow tailed black cockatoo

The rule in Hornsby Shire is you can cut down a tree that’s within three metres of the foundations of your house. If only there was some special by-law where the council chops down the tree for you for free if you can’t slip a paperback book between a towering pine and your bathroom. One of these days I’ll be communing with nature and the nearest treebole will swell just that tiny bit further and burst straight through into the shower cubicle. That fresh piney smell with not a cent spent on disinfectant.

Two of the less prepossessing pines in our yard

This tree is cold and wants to be inside

It’s been very very very windy in Sydney lately, and quite a few people have been unfortunate enough to experience that piney odour, quickly followed by plenty of refreshing indoor rain. We’ve been pretty lucky, but we’ve spent a lot of time staring anxiously out the window at various ominously swaying monumental specimens. When I lived in Brisbane I used to be a bit judgey about the lawn to tree ratio in most peoples’ yards. But if cyclones start creeping their way down the coast I may have to reconsider.

Female yellow tailed cockatoos and a male peeping out of

Yellow tailed black cockatoo enjoying a dead tree at our place

Black cockatoo angel

Yellow tailed black cockatoos are doing pretty well on the east coast, including urban areas, no doubt thanks to their penchant for pines. But apparently they often struggle to find nesting sites, preferring hollows in trees a century or more old. They seem to like our senescent radiatas, and spend time perched high on the various dead branches voguing. I hope, when we finally save enough shekels to pull down the extensive array of dangerous trees in our yard, we still see them.

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mccnmatt

Posted on

May 1, 2015

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Animal pests, Bandicoots, Brush turkeys, Exclusion pest control, Gardening, Rats, Recycling, Vernacular architecture

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Bandicoot in the Sacred Garden

The sacred garden – but does it feature a coy bandicoot?

Is it just me, or does this sound like the title of an atrocious 1970s Australian erotic film? Admittedly I’ve never heard a bloke describe their wedding tackle as any kind of marsupial. Is this a failure of the national imagination? Possibly.

Anyway, the “sacred garden” is not as lewd as it sounds – it’s the name our eight year old has given the veggie patch that shelters beneath the frame of our ancient trampoline.

I’m not quite sure why she views it as a holy site. It could be the shape. In the organic gardening world, it seems, circles, mandalas and spirals have some mystical life-giving power that doesn’t flow through your old fashioned rectangular plot. I’m skeptical, but at this stage in our death-match with the brush turkeys I’ll take any advantage I can get. From chook dome to remodelled tramp to recycled children’s bicycle wheels, there are no corners here.

Chicken dome and sacred garden

The late great Andy Ninja checking out the sacred garden

Upcycled bicycle wheels protecting radishes

Broccoli and sorrel under a fan in the sacred garden

And the Mandala of Aviary Wire does seem to have worked its magic on my brassicas, despite extreme flimsiness. Having been abandoned by the side of the road after a rich and full life getting between bouncing children and broken ankles, the trampoline net is more a spiritual than a physical barrier to aerial raiders, held in place by optimism and zip ties. But to date, my newly planted garlic – positioned, of course, in a protective ring around the broccoli – has remained in the ground and my crop of red mustard and baby bok choi, while small, is perfectly formed.

It’s not looking so good on the broad bean front, despite a lavender and rose geranium mulch that makes the chook dome smell like a seniors’ underpants’ drawer. I’d like to think a benevolent long-nosed bandicoot is squeezing in under the wire to snaffle the curl grubs amongst the asparagus crowns. But I suspect that in reality I’m hosting rodents with keen insights into the politics of eco-nationalism. “When you go in and take the beans, Rupert, make sure you leave a cone-shaped hole. That way the marsupial-loving hippie will never dare leave rat poison out again.” If only I owned an infra-red video camera with a motion sensor I might find out for sure – or at least collect some footage of hirsute visitors for that retro Ocker erotica.

Bandcoot digging with boot for scale

Curl grub making a break for it.

Bandicoot or devious rat?

Rose geranium ready to be sacrificed to the rodent repelling cause

Aromatherapy mulch

The miraculous tears of the broccoli in the sacred garden

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Posted on

April 3, 2015

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Flying foxes, Fruit, Fruits for shade, Gardening, Permaculture, Plants and what I know about them, Plants that attract wildlife, Weeds

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Bats about tamarillos

Tamarillo flower in spring

This time last year, a raid on my tamarillo crop had me pondering on possums. What spidie sense tells the resident marsupials to gobble up your perfectly-ripe figs and grapes the very night before you plan to harvest them? Are they tri-chromatic mutants like we humans, with gerry-rigged colour vision just good enough to grab a ripe mango before the visually well-endowed parrot gets it first? Or do they sniff out your glorious organic harvest in defiance of their typical mammalian red-green colour blindness?

But this year I’ve been mostly thinking about bats.

I’ve had a bumper crop this year off my quick growing and beautiful tamarillo tree, though not quite the 20 kilos that others brag about. So I’ve not been too miffed to find some of the ripe fruit scattered on the ground, flesh neatly scooped out, or to spot a few gnawed items left dangling on the tree. All the other members in my household are either under ten or Scottish, and consequently I have no human competition for weird fruits of any kind. It would seem churlish not to share with the local critters.

Tamarillo leaves

Green tamarillos

Remnants of the tamarillo crop

So who are my fellow tamarillo lovers? I suspect the grey-faced flying foxes (Pteropus poliocephalus), the most common “macrobats” in this part of New South Wales. While I haven’t eyeballed a single flying fox at our place, I’ve heard them playing cricket with the toxic fruits of the cocos palms for weeks. Soon after lights out, there’s a sequence of companionable shrieks, rustles and thumps, and the palms start raining seeds onto the roof.

One of the many reasons cocos palms are a dangerous pleasure for flying foxes is that the fallen fruit lures them down where they can be chewed up and spat out by the local dogs. Every morning for the last month or so I’ve found a little piece of installation art on a stump near the cocos palm – a few half-eaten fruit arranged with an eye to the design possibilities of the log’s in-house fungus. I thought this was a convenient possum picnic spot, but I’m wondering if it’s a safe haven for bats who are obviously unaware that our house is guarded not by dogs but by night-blind attack chickens.

Bat or possum picnic spot?

Cocos palm in our yard – “a telegraph tree”

Cocos fruit rain

Our tamarillo tree (“Matimba”, as our eight year old has named her) is just beneath the hateful-but-expensive-to-remove cocos palm, in a jumble of shade-tolerating subtropical plants – galangal, ginger, bananas, naranjilla. My kind of (sub)urban density.

Flying foxes are opportunists. They don’t just eat eucalyptus nectar, lillypilly fruits and mangrove leaves but take what they can find, and are willing to fly a long way to find it. The closest bat “camps” to our place are in Gordon, Warriewood or Avalon – twenty kilometres or away or more. Having come all that distance for a feed, only a bat-masochist who relishes the guts-ache produced by cocos fruits would turn up its nose at the delightful passionfruit-meets-apricot flavoured snack down below.

Did a bat eat this tamarillo?

Tamarillo sheltering near monstera deliciosa flower

Tamarillos under monstera leaf

Unlike possums with their dud colour vision, megabats seem to be spoiled for choice when it comes to tracking down a ripe tamarillo. When our mammalian common ancestor was hiding in a burrow and sneaking around in the dark to avoid veloceraptors, being able to see all the colours of the rainbow was less critical than decent night-sight. Despite a largely nocturnal existence, fruitbats however have evolved the ability to see not just short wavelength but also medium and long wavelength light – and, like birds, can even see in ultraviolet, perhaps to spot flowers and fruits at dusk, at dawn and in bright moonlight.

So perhaps it’s no surprise that my surviving tamarillos were hiding underneath the banana and the monstera leaves, invisible to fruit bats cruising past above. But flying foxes also have a pretty good sense of smell, so after the mysterious overnight disappearance of my first kiwifruit (and my mulberries, and my persimmons, and my grapes…) I don’t think I’ll chance it.

They may share colour vision with us primates and may even share some of our sexual peccadillos, but unless megabats evolve opposable thumbs and can open my back door, they’re not getting any more of my harvest this year.

Ripening inside – beter safe than sorry!

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mccnmatt

Posted on

March 15, 2015

Posted under

Brush turkeys, Exclusion pest control, Gardening, Microbiome, Plants and what I know about them, Pollination, Seasons, Vegetables, Weeds

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The first winds of autumn

Beautiful jerusalem artichoke flowers

It’s been a dispiriting harvest. No zucchinis. Not one microvegetable. I managed to get the plants to grow, thanks to divine intervention – well, an arresting children’s painting of Cyclops on my cardboard sheet mulch. Not to mention, those secular forms of protection: chicken wire, veggie netting and steel reinforcing wire – in fact everything short of kevlar, plexiglass and concrete. So my zucchini plants survived, but perhaps traumatised by their oppressive high-security environment, they steadfastly refused to reproduce.

I remember my allotment-owning pal Mary’s desperate missions to dispose of her harvest of marrows: abandoning big bags of courgettes on her friends’ front steps at the crack of dawn and legging it before her mates, undoubtedly already in possession of a fridge bursting with zucchini, could refuse. Websites and blogs abound with strategies for hiding surplus zucchini from disgruntled family members in breads, slices, chutneys, muffins. Whereas I can only fantasise about concealing pulverised marrows in my children’s ice cream.

Everyone else’s garden seems to have rampant marrows as eager to breed as randy rabbits, whereas I have somehow I have managed to create zucchini plants with the delicate sensibilities of the giant panda.

Sick looking zucchini fruits

After the trauma of the zucchini experience (not to mention the underperforming watermelons, the disappearing peaches and the epic potato fail) I am considering giving up on planting altogether. Instead I think maybe I’ll just edit the plants that arrive under their own steam. Feral gardening.

For instance, I’ve recent realised the the garden is awash with purslane, an edible weed with a whole lot of omega 3 fatty acids. Flavour wise, it doesn’t rock my world but since the brush turkeys and possums seem feel the same, I may have to work up an interest. I’m still still waiting for the sweet potato vines to hit their stride so I can make free (or more precisely, make stir fry) with their new growth and my warrigal greens have once again been murmalised by something with a sharp eye for bush tucker, so even with the fair success of “lettuce under a draining rack” strategy, the salad bowl is currently a bit bare.

Purslane keeping company with oregano and snakebeans

Lettuce in captivity

Along similar lines, I’ve finally reconciled myself to the self-sown jerusalem artichokes.

Don’t get me wrong, I love jerusalems with a mad, colon-exploding passion, and I’ve tried to grow them in many locations around the yard. They are almost unkillable. Eight foot high plants don’t normally take to container gardening, but back in my expat days I got a decent crop out of a modest sized pot under grey British skies.

Given their invasive qualities – leave just one small tuber in the ground and next year’s crop is sorted – my first plan was to grow them in places where little else would thrive. I set up a kind of slow motion, plant-based reality TV show: The Great Australian Weed Off. Running bamboo, gigantic grass grass that grows through concrete, versus Jerusalem artichoke, towering beauty that sneers at weaklings who need full sun, regular watering or fertile soil. Which would survive on a permanently shaded rubble filled slope subject to occasional flash flooding? I had faith in my sun chokes, but given the number of critters that range this place cruising for food, the bamboo’s quotient of deadly cyanide seemed to be its ace in the hole. My artichokes disappeared without a trace.

Running bamboo

So when some artichokes popped up on the northern edge of the veggie garden, springing from a few peelings I threw to the chickens when the chook tractor was in that neck of the woods, I was not so much delighted as resigned. My dream permaculture garden would probably not include gargatuan invasive plants blocking the autumnal sunlight. But after a decade of watching fastidiously planned planting schemes going to hell, my gardener’s hubris is slowly waning. Who am I, an organism entirely lacking in chlorophyll, to decide what grows where?

Jerusalem artichoke flowers

Sunchoke flower

Jerusalem artichoke leaves – six feet and counting

So the jerusalem artichokes have been left to tower over their neighbours, and it seems like it’s been a good year. The plants have put on great show, looking exactly like the cousins of the sunflower that they are. I’m too impatient to wait for them to die back before I start harvesting, so last weekend, I burrowed around to get the first couple of tubers of the season for a gourmet touch in my potato dauphin.

Jerusalem artichokes straight from the ground

Scrubbed jerusalem artichoke tubers

Thinly sliced jerusalem artichoke, sliced onion and garlic over a layer of sliced, parboiled spuds. Add another layer of potatoes, top with cheese and buckets of cream and bake!

Since they’re so danged delicious, why harvest so few? It’s not that I’m worried that pinching more tubers will kill off the floral display or thin out the harvest. It takes a lot more brutality than that to cramp the style of a jerusalem artichoke. It’s the flatulent dinner guests that trouble me. There’s no getting around it: jerusalem artichokes will make you fart. And as a longstanding vegetarian I should know. Baked beans have nothing on it.

Jerusalems (like the completely unrelated globe artichokes) contain a sugar polymer called inulin, which is totally undigestible, making it high in fibre, a handy sweetener for diabetics and a probiotic which feeds the bacteria in your greater intestine. Sounds great, doesn’t it? In the thrall of this glowing nutritional report card, Mother Jones recommends using jerusalems, with its high fibre, high iron, high calorie payload as a substitute for potatoes. A huge bowl of mashed jerusalems – my idea of heaven! But best not consumed before, say, a graduation ceremony, a silent Buddhist retreat or a solo piccolo performance in the Sydney Opera House, since when those friendly bacteria consume inulin they produce enough gas for a live re-enactment of the Hindenberg Disaster.

I love this vegetable so much I’m not willing to give it up. My other half has worked this out, and now inspects any autumn stew with deep suspicion. I’ve heard rumours about ways of deflating artichokes – slow cooking, long keeping and pickling. I’m not convinced by any of these. In my experience, slowly and gently does it: a diced tuber in a vichyssoise, a handful roasted in the oven, one or two thinly sliced in a stir fry.

And make sure the next day is spent outside, in the fresh air of the garden. Or in the company of artichoke loving friends.

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mccnmatt

Posted on

March 3, 2015

Posted under

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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mccnmatt

Posted on

February 19, 2015

Posted under

Backyard birds, Geology, national parks, Native animals, Weeds

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What’s at the bottom of the garden?

Where does our backyard end? The unwary burglar or, more plausibly, brush turkey fetishist leaping over the back fence and finding themselves falling off the small but perfectly formed cliff between our place and our downhill neighbours might think the answer obvious. But clearly, property boundaries don’t mean a lot to the brush turkeys or the bowerbirds. As far as they’re concerned, our backyard is just a part of Berowra Valley National Park with better snacks.

And since our yard is, in essence, a part-time storm drain, you could say that this is where our backyard ends:

Waterfall into Berowra creek after rain

Dusty Hole marina, Berowra Creek

Sometimes the view from the deck seems like a theatre backdrop, an artful two dimensional screen behind our suburban dramas. Every evening, the cockies, wheeling and screeching, burst through the scenic backcloth. Last weekend, a bit more quietly (bar the kayak-onto-roofrack related cursing) I did the same, plunging into the dawn mist towards the very bottom of the garden, the watery end point of our backyard.

Sam’s Creek in the mist

In the 1990s, Berowra Creek was not a good place to be a fish. Sewage outflows from waterside communities at Dusty Hole and Berowra Waters and the landlubber suburbs to the south meant algal blooms, brick red water and floating fish. As the cheery Hornsby Shire Biodiversity Plan ten years back noted “Some parts of the tributary creeks in the Berowra Creek catchment feature weed invasion, garden plants and waste, streambed siltation, rubbish and gross pollutants from stormwater drains, bank erosion, undercutting, tree death and poor water quality” (2006, 28). It’s enough to make a gardener think long and hard about what might wash down the hill in the next heavy rain.

Thankfully there’s a whole lot less nitrogen going into the creek these days largely thanks to better poo processing. I don’t have a lot of interest in fish. I don’t eat them, they make rubbish cuddly pets and they lay very tiny eggs far too infrequently. But even to my disinterested eye, the backwaters and mangrove flats of the estuary look like fish paradise. Okay, fish paradise probably doesn’t feature stingrays, cormorants or osprey, but you get my point.

Fishermen (I use that term advisedly) out well before the birds

Welcome swallow still in fluffy slippers and bathrobe

Male and female Chestnut Teal completing their morning ablutions

Fishermen get up earlier than kingfishers, it seems. People who say they’re “up with the birds” or even, in that eloquent Australianism “up before sparrow fart”, are clearly lying through their teeth. The welcome swallows were barely out of the fluffy slippers and the ducks were still brushing their hair and cleaning their teeth, but the fishermen of the Hawkesbury were already out on the water, lurking in quiet bays or drifting mid-channel like tinny Mary Celestes.

The feathered fisherfolk only seemed to appear after the mist began to rise. I’m not sure whether I can attribute that to poor avian night vision or my water spattered multifocals. You’ve got to assume the rufous night heron can see in the dark, but I only saw it scoop up a take-away in a kind of disgruntled way, after some annoying canoeist with an inadequate zoom lens made a nap in the mangroves untenable, and that was long after sunrise.

Mist rising over Berowra Valley National Park

Very patient and faintly curious juvenile white faced heron

Into Joe Craft Bay

Mist rising

White faced heron fishing

Rufous night heron trying to get some shut eye

Miffed night heron, off for a take-away on the way homee

For all the wildlife in these parts, that sharp edged snap of an azure kingfisher sparkling in flight is as much beyond me as a decent crop of salad potatoes, it seems. But I’m not going to complain. Over the last few weeks I’ve seen plenty of boats with girls’ names, but I haven’t seen too many Rubys, Calistas or Beverleys actually messing about in boats. There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden and there are certainly plenty of fish, but there don’t seem to be quite as many fishwives. Seems like it’s a rare privilege to be Her Outdoors.

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Posted on

February 13, 2015

Posted under

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

February 12, 2015

Posted under

Plants and what I know about them, Spices, Subtropical gardening, Weeds

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The Ginger family stole my brain!

On the face of it, it seems implausible, I know. But if mimosa plants have long term memories, corn calls out for help, beans search for a supportive pole and tomatoes are flesh eaters, it is possible that my free will has been stolen by the extended ginger family.

When we moved into our place, it was a ginger-rich environment. The front yard had a two metre perimeter wall of shell ginger, the perfect height to conceal the neighbours and our decaying garden fence without blocking the light (or should I say, any more of the light). Its flowers are a homage to Georgia O’Keefe: I feel faintly prurient just looking at these close-ups.

Eat your heart out Georgia O’Keefe

Meanwhile, lingering in the backyard was a much more nefarious member of the family – kahili ginger (aka ginger lily) – producing tall red and yellow blooms and strapping leaves even deep shade and impoverished Hawkesbury soil.

According to the Queensland government, this one lives for 70 years and is “known to invade rainforests, montane forests, agricultural areas, coastland, disturbed areas, natural forests, planted forests, range/grasslands, riparian corridors, scrub/shrublands, urban areas and wetlands.” I’m struggling to think of a habitat not listed there. It may possibly fail to flourish if planted directly on a glacier, but given its origins in Nepal that might be risky too.

You know a weed’s a baddie when official websites entreat you, in red block capitals, to call them immediately if you even suspect you’ve seen it (local rates Australia wide). This one’s in the global “hottest 100” thanks to bird dispersal of seeds and a capacity to survive in deep shade. There’s none left to photograph in my backyard, needless to say – it wasn’t too hard to excavate, given time and a sharp spade, although the NSW Primary Industries reckons it can develop a layer of rhizomes a metre deep.

But I still feel like a criminal: so far I haven’t dobbed in my local primary school to the NSW Invasive Plants and Animals hotline, or the suburban house on my walk to work which displays this Category 3 weed proudly out by its front drive.

Kahili ginger or ginger lily- dig it up and get rid of it!

Strangely, after all the time I spent removing weedy gingers from the yard, I now find more and more members of the Zingiberacae family appearing, as if by delivered by some unknown hand, around the back door.

First it was tumeric and galangal, “for their edible roots“. Yet curiously, three years down the track, I’ve yet to dig up a single rhizome. They’re just too pretty. Is that me, or my Ginger Overlords talking?

Tumeric leaves and flower

Tumeric flower

Tumeric leaf

Tumeric flower from the side

Galangal

Suddenly, leaving no conscious memory of the deployment of a credit card, Atherton ginger, the good-looking redback kind, started appearing all over the place. It’s okay, I tell myself, it’s edible and a native too – with tart but tasty fruits and ginger-flavoured leaves to wrap your tucker in for an extra zing. Not that I’ve laid a hand on a single, lovely leaf, for snack-wrapping or any other purpose. Funny that.

Atherton ginger “Red back”

Blue fly on native ginger

And now, not a week goes by when I don’t find another relative of the ginger family loitering in the undergrowth. Alpinia caerula, the local variety. Cardamom ginger… smelling more suppurating than spicy. Zingiber officianale, good old-fashioned definitive ginger ginger, lurking under the bananas and the monstera deliciosa, a dessert just waiting to happen.

To the best of my knowledge (at least in my waking hours) I haven’t yet planted anything you can get arrested for supplying to a garden centre. But it’s possible one of these days I’ll be found stumbling around under the tamarillo tree in my nightie, raving about the marvellous yellow flowers of Hedychium flavescens and cursing the shallow minds of Australia’s biosecurity fascists with their inability to appreciate the full glory of the gingers.

And when that happens, you know the number to call: NSW Invasive Plants & Animals Enquiry Line 1800 680 244. Or email weeds@dpi.nsw.gov.au