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mccnmatt

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December 13, 2014

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Damage caused by chickens, Fruit, Garden trees, Gardening, Plants and what I know about them

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Pomegranates: a Christmas star turn

Pomegranate star and blue sky

Green pomegranate vase

Pomegranate bud

Pomegranate sepals

Fallen pomegranate calyces

My little pomegranate, a variety called “Wonderful“, is living up to its name. The flowing scarlet flamenco skirts of the flowers don’t last very long, but in a kind of floral Eurovision stunt, once the maxidress is off, there they are in their nifty stellar mini.

Pomegranate flowers

Of course, just because they’re looking gorgeous now, doesn’t mean any of these beautiful budlets will go on to become proper grown-up fruit. The tree struggled on for a few years in a pot, and only gave us our first taste of success when it finally went into the ground last year. And festive as it is, I’m not sure what to read into the flurry of fallen starry frocks underneath the tree.

Apparently pomegranates don’t like humidity much, especially in the spring time. The rigorous raking its roots were getting from feathered visitors up until recently probably didn’t do much for it either. I sorted out that problem by piling rocks and tiles on them – the pomegranate roots, that is, not the brush turkeys, although the thought of burying a turkey or two under an avalanche of bricks is pretty appealing.

I’m hopeful we’ll see a better crop this year. A tree with a 5,000 year old history of cultivation has got to be tough as old boots, I reckon. Unsubstantiated rumour has it that the pomegranate may even have been the “apple” that Eve was tempted with by the diamond python of the Garden of Eden. Surely a participant in that epic contest between good and evil (or at least, between nudity and a well supplied fruit bowl) will be able to handle a tussle with a chook or two. With luck, in the spirit of this year’s glamorous bearded Eurovision winner Conchita Wurst, our feisty femme will “rise like a phoenix” above her stack of stones and discarded finery.

Pomegranate sepals

First pomegranate harvest

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December 12, 2014

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Animal pests, Backyard birds, Backyard chickens, Brush turkeys, egg laying

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The Phantom Egg Eater: caught in the act!

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

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

Luna mugshot 2

Treasure mugshot

Andy mugshot

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

Snakey in the trellis 2012

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

Yesterday, RB caught the culprit in the act.

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

Hen-house raiding brush turkey

Colonel Mustard

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

Delicious 70s style canape: eggshell stuffed with hot English mustard

Sometime later: a rejected 70s style mustard-flavoured canape

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

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

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December 8, 2014

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Death, Fruit, Garden trees, Recycling, Vernacular architecture, Waste

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The waste management business

Heavy rubbish day. Or as it’s known locally, the council cleanup. No words strike more fear into the hearts of your loved ones, if you are a gardener with an ample shed and an insatiable love of junk.

I was left momentarily unsupervised today, and all the good work of a weekend of chucking stuff out began to go into reverse. I know it’s a sign of my hoarding pathology, but I really struggle to imagine why someone would ditch a barely scratched inch-thick slab of gorgeous red gum about half as long as my kitchen.

Here’s the only plausible explanation I could come up with: it had been used in the commission of a mob murder. “I know, I know, Vinnie had to go… he knew too much… but since he “went on holiday” I just don’t feel the same about that big chopping board…”

Today’s found objects

Another road-side acquisition of the last 48 hours (the coffin-sized item pictured below) also suggests restless nights and guilty secrets. I swear the pruning saw was in-situ before I even considered taking this photograph. Such measures may be necessary when “spring cleaning” for those of us who only have possession of an electric mulcher, suitable strictly for lighter duties.

Okay, not quite long enough, but there’s always the pruning saw.

All this “waste disposal” has perhaps been a bad influence, since today I had to do a piece of work. I got a place ready, somewhere nice. No need for concrete boots (or indeed blood and bone) just a very old pair of Blundstones and some hair clippings at the bottom of a hole. We had a problem: our new associate, low-chill Tropical Sunshu nashi pear, had to be put in the ground.

Shyla pretending not to notice the disposal of the boots in case she’s next

Who needs blood and bone when you have Blundstones and hair trimmings?

We put her in the ground, and we put her in a box. In that order, suggesting I’m no wise guy. Though I can say, hand on heart, that she’s gone to her narrow bed, to sleep the Big Sleep, since the box we put her in was constructed of not merely one, but two bed frames. Those beds may never have concealed any horses’ heads, but they were absolutely and definitely products of the waste management business, a business I should clearly for the sake of my family (and my shed) try to leave behind.

Tropical Sunshu going to her narrow bed.

Tropical Sunshu, the low chill nashi pear. Our newest associate. No longer a problem.

“Is it the old double-coffin trick?”

Andy Ninja looks for a horse’s head. Or perhaps a way to get in to our associate and clip her.

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December 5, 2014

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Animal communication, Death, Diamond python, Gardening, Herbs, poisons, Rats, Spices, Subtropical gardening, Vegetables, Weather

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Of snakes and snakebeans

This sight out the window as I stumbled into the kitchen for the first cup of tea of a Monday morning made the caffeine hit mostly redundant. Snakey the diamond python’s back in town.

Eye to eye with Snakey the diamond python

Diamond python with absolutely no need for pilates or yoga training

Last time we saw her was early spring a year ago. I looked up from the computer, wondering about the din the little wattlebirds were making, and there she was, stretching up for a sunny rooftop.

I’m worried about the timing of Snakey’s visit. After a good five years of prevaricating, we finally decided to use rat poison near the house. You can predict and even understand when the vermin demolish your nearly ripe corn-on-the-cob – it’s almost obligatory for your quasi-rural pest population. But when they won’t leave your broccolini alone it’s all gone too far.

Leaving the house on a late-night mid-winter drive, I saw a tawny frogmouth flash out of the dark. Another evening a surprised visitor landed on the balustrade of the back deck, only to realise three humans, stock still with beers half-raised to their lips, were unexpected keeping the rodents away. And we’ve seen Snakey wait, poised for hours, then suddenly strike a rat on a twilight mission for chookhouse grain. A glorious sight. But pythons might only eat one a fortnight – it’s that low energy lifestyle. Sadly there’s no sign of such dietary modesty in the case of the sweet potato munching rattus rattus.

Diamond python in the kiwi arbor, 2012

Diamond python waiting to strike

We tried humane traps too. But what do you do with the terrified beasts, usually the littler, stupider ones, after their night in a cage? Counsel them? Release them in the nearest industrial estate? Figure out some new, psychologically gruelling way of killing them, all the while deluding yourself that it might be somehow be painless?

So not so long ago we reluctantly, guiltily, laid down baits in inaccessible places and endured our penance, the smell of death.

Snakey the diamond python wrapped in vines

So over my cup of Earl Grey, I anxiously inspected Snakey’s features for signs of toxicity. She’d chosen her spot judiciously, beside our neighbour’s chicken shed and right above the rat run down to ours. She looked torpid: had she taken a poisoned rat, one dying slowly and easier to catch than the others? Wasn’t her jaw somehow slack and asymmetrical, her pose ungainly…? All I can say is, don’t try phrenology or poker with snakes. They are danged hard to read.

By the time I got home from work she was gone. I must confess, in the subsequent days, I have become slightly more cautious with my footing as I head down to peg the washing on the line.

Apocalypse descending over Berowra

Snakey seems to have brought the subtropical summer with its run-to-the-washing-line storms. I was that nervous commuter, glancing up at the looming alien mother-ship and hoping I’d get home before all hell broke loose. Then, same thing, same time, next day. And the next. A regular 4 o’clock Apocalyse.

River lily looking pleased about the ad hoc river

The panicky moment when you think you might have to make a break for it in the $8 canoe

Flood detritus/found art installation

It’s like the Nile River Delta out back. As you can see from the flood-art-installation above, every item a child or lazy BBQ tender has carelessly discarded in the backyard now has its own rich pile of alluvium.

The subtropical plants are glowing. The tumeric has reappeared in the understory as just suddenly as the snake has in the vines. It dies right down over the winter, and come early December, just when you think it’s a goner, the leaves start nudging through the soil. Given my dodgy record with propagation, I’m specially pleased to see the this year’s young ‘uns. Instead of wimping out and buying plants from the ever reliable Daleys, I buried some fresh rhizomes from my weekly organic veggie box and crossed my fingers.

First signs of the tumeric

Tumeric leaves unrolling

Tumeric leaves in the storm

New tumeric plants, grown from rhizomes

Last year’s tumeric flower

Inspired the marvellous Sri Lankan cooking of my clever sister in law and her mum, I’m trying to grow the ingredients for my favourite mid-week meal of 2014, snake bean curry. I probably don’t have the stamina to harvest and process my own tumeric powder, but thanks to the big rain, the “Red Dragon” yard long beans are leaping out of the ground, and my baby curry leaf plant – in a pot near the house where I can nip off its weedy berries and quash any suckers – seems to be doing well so far, despite attentions from a nearby lebanese cucumber. Now, if only I could keep my coriander from bolting for more than 15 minutes I’d be ready to hit the kitchen. With luck, I’ll still be under the steady supervising eye of Snakey.

Baby curry leaf plant under armed guard

Snake beans – rain at last!

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mccnmatt

Posted on

November 28, 2014

Posted under

Backyard chickens, Brush turkeys, Damage caused by chickens, Exclusion pest control, Gardening, Plants and what I know about them, Recycling, Waste

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Plants in protective custody

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

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

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

Yellow zucchini seedlings

“Sugar baby” watermelon seedling

… to recycled heavy rubbish finds.

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

Red okra seedling – safe for the moment

Seedling burgundy okra

Burgundy okra

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

Old umbrella frame protecting salad greens

Once it was a rattan salad bowl. Now it is giving lebanese zucchini head room under a veggie net

Kicking a goal for asparagus, sorrel and watercress with the spine of an old kids’ soccer goal

Methuselah broccoli protected by an old clothes hanger (shallots in the background). This broccoli is six months old (not a joke). Everytime it gets to about 10 cm something eats it. Health-conscious critters around here – I’m not going to bother planting goji berries!

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

Chilli bush protected by pea sticks

Rock samphire – sticks and stones may break your bones but they also discourage visits from possums and chickens

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

“Frenchette”from my lavender hedge, in front of the garden gate

Inside the veggie garden fence there’s a broad bean fence. And inside the broad bean fence is… Andy Ninja. She can break in as well as out.

I thought Shyla was sleep but the minute I moved the veggie net to show off the toning colours of the yellow zucchini leaves and the broken kids camping chair, she was in like a rat up a drainpipe.

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

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

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

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November 22, 2014

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anthropocene, Australian natives, Climate change, Ornamental gardens

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Maps in bloom

Angophora costata in bloom seen from Berowra train station

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.

Gorgeous Sydney red gum in a Berowra street

Sunset from the back deck

Angophora costata in Hornsby Heights

Has Morrisey been performing in Berowra? Angophora blossom hurled away in disgust

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.

Angophora costata in Berowra Valley National Parkbloom in Berowra

Angophora costata at sunset in Berowra Valley National Park

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.

Jacaranda and Sydney red gum dot-to-dot

The rhizomatic city of jacarandas

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 hotter. An 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”

Gorgeous street trees on my way to work

A magic carpet

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.

Jacaranda flowers close up

Prepare to stop and marvel at the suburban glories of jacaranda

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.

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Posted on

November 18, 2014

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Gardening, Greens, Permaculture, Plants and what I know about them, Plants that attract wildlife, Seed saving and seed raising

Gone to seed

Past-it parsley showing off its new spiky leaves

Celery blossom

Parsley going to seed

Parsley fireworks

Beautiful even past their prime, the Umbelliferae.

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Posted on

November 12, 2014

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Fruit, Gardening, Natives for shade, Plants and what I know about them, Plants that attract wildlife

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The inconspicuous, the insignificant and the underwhelming

Sure, to the swanky author of a well-received volume on gardening it’s a throwaway line: “has insignificant flowers”, “flowers are inconspicuous”. But how about some consideration for feelings, eh? What’s wrong with “reserved”, “low profile”, “unpretentious”?

My 7 year old drew me aside the other day and whispered conspiratorially “At school I drew a picture of a plant’s bits!!!” In the light of this insight, which I really hope she didn’t share with her teacher, perhaps we could even go with “modest flowers”?

Shy persimmon flowers

Persimmon flower retreating from the light

To be honest, I find persimmon flowers faintly perturbing when upended and exposed to the rude light of day. Much better to let them shelter under their curtain of leaves.

Sheltering below the leaves

What they look like when you invade their privacy

I do, however, need to be rather forward with my demure custard apple flowers soon. They may not look like much but there’s the smell of perfume in the air. Time to wave my magical pollinating paintbrush and help create some atemoyan fecundity. Or, given my pruning anxieties and the consequent fact that most of the new flowers are more than two and a half metres off the ground, perhaps it’s time to fall off a poorly located stepstool, crashing through branches, crushing multiple flowers and possibly poking myself in the eye with pollen-dusted painting gear on my way down.

Too insignificant to pollinate yet

What happens if I don’t get to a flower with my magic paintbrush

One to gather pollen from

Custard apple flowers when it’s too dark after work to get out my magic paintbrush

Thankfully there’s no need to hand pollinate the midgen berries to get tasty little purple-and-white fruits. Otherwise I’d have to get one of those three-haired brushes they use to paint a portraits on a grain of rice.

Australomyrtus dulcis flowers – teeny

Midgen berry flower

And then there’s the flowers that are not so much shy as downright recalcitrant. On the left, a NSW Christmas bush down the road. On the right, the unimpressive shade-dwelling specimen in our yard.

And another offender: Kunzea ambigua doing its thing elsewhere on the left and in our garden, not even making the effort to take a decent photograph. Very poor form.

Kunzea ambigua looking rather nice elsewhere

Kunzea ambigua – can’t really be bothered

Thank goodness for institutional plantings. Just because councils like to plant it on the median strip doesn’t mean I’m not happy to see the blue flax lily producing its, shall we say, somewhat coy flowers in the shade under the maple tree. If your camera is close enough, even the teeniest flowers are significant. Could that be a metaphor for this blog? Or is it just a sales pitch for a macro lens?

Dianella caerulea

Dianella caerulea really really closeup

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Posted on

November 1, 2014

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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.

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mccnmatt

Posted on

October 28, 2014

Posted under

Anthropomorphism, Fruit, Plants and what I know about them, Pollination, Possums, Vines

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An unhappy threesome

The threesome in the bottom of the garden is just not working out well, or not for my lonesome lady kiwiberry anyway.

Most kiwi fruit are dioecious – to produce fruit you need both male and female plants. Commercial producers have maybe one staminate pollinator to eight fruit-bearing pistillate plants. In our garden, there isn’t enough space for such large scale polygamy. All in all, the plant sex around here is playing into the hands of the social conservatives.

The couply-couply Sweetie kiwifruits in the “solar pergola” have done their baby-making (with a little bit of help from me). Inspired by their example, the Mt Tomah Red kiwiberry is now in bloom. But it’s just not happening for Hairy Hayward, her pollinator (or his lovely vigorous and hairy wife). It takes chillier weather to get their blood up, I reckon.

Sweetie baby kiwis

Hairy Mr Hayward. Really not up to much in the reproduction stakes.

I’m not quite sure what should happen next. Mr Sweetie has done his dash fertilisation-wise this year. I have no shame – I am willing to act like a bee and transport the good stuff around the garden but I’ve gotta have something to work with. Perhaps internet dating is the way to go: “Would like to meet: generous pollen-laden male kiwifruit. A love of warm weather essential. Variety and nectar-production unimportant. Must be willing to reproduce immediately. No time-wasters please”

Mt Tomah Red kiwiberry buds

Mt Tomah Red kiwiberry blossom

Mt Tomah Red blossom

She may not have a fully functioning pollinator, but Mt Tomah Red does have a new BFF. A teenaged possum has snuck into the marsupial sunroom – between an old pane of glass above the barely used airconditioner and the boarded up window behind it. I don’t think he realises it’s like the Big Brother house in there: he might feel like he’s having a secluded nap amongst the kiwi vines but in reality anyone hanging out the washing can look in and catch him snoring. And if he’s hoping that Madam Tomah Red is going to provide him with a sequence of midnight snacks, he’s mistaken there as well.