First fruit

Babaco

I’ve had a few babacos now: small, cool climate papayas that are said to fruit prodigiously, and in the shade too.  My first expired very quickly, probably from root rot, to which they are apparently quite prone.  I kept the second in a pot for a while, for drainage reasons, and it clung on despite my peripatetic watering habits.  The third plant I put in the “food forest” part of the garden, and it seemed to grow pretty well, on a sandy slope with filtered summer sun and not a lot of light at all in winter, so I popped the one from the pot into the ground nearby, in a slightly brighter spot.  The second plant has had two torpedo-shaped green fruits hanging on for quite a while, during which time it has slowly but steadily shed all its leaves, possibly encouraged by the possums.  I began to think it might croak before the fruits ever ripened, given the seasonal gloom.  Eventually one of its paps started to turn a patchy lemon yellow. After some bad guessing with custard apples last year, I wouldn’t have been game to pick it but the fruit dropped off the tree of its own accord and pleasingly, ripened up quite well inside, sitting next to a banana in the fruit bowl.

Apparently the ancient Greeks had a tradition of offering the first fruit of the new season to Demeter, goddess of the harvest.  I suspect Demeter might have turned her nose up at my first babaco.  It’s been called the “champagne fruit“, and others suggest it tastes of strawberries and pineapple… it certainly has a citrus tang along with that strange slightly off taste of papaya and something else… the odour of freshly laid carpet? the plasticky inside of a new car…? Not something I would be super eager to eat anyway.  That said, it’s a good looking plant which seems to grow reasonably well in a tricky spot and apparently propagates easily too.  I’m fairly sure the taste of slightly curdled carpet offcuts will be the least of my problems after the zombie apocalypse so I think after Number Two’s second torpedo has been launched I might have a go at growing some cuttings.  I have to drum up plants for the school fete this year (yes, we will be running a cake stall while the government spends $12 billion on jets) and it is always possible that there are fruit-growers out there in Berowra that like the taste of new cars.

All-conquering kale and its frenemies

Good friends describe me as “herbal”.  I’ve been a lentil eater for 27 years and my shelves groan with organic gardening and vegetarian recipe books.  And I’m not averse to dabbling in a spot of ancient-learned-women’s-plant-knowedge-as-yet-unverified-by-modern-experimental-science.  But I have to say that companion planting has taken a body blow in our household in recent weeks.  Here’s why:

 Two kale plants, from the same punnet, planted less than a metre apart.  On your left, the kale that enjoyed the companionship of a cheerful red and orange flowered marigold, “Naughty Marietta”.  On your right, the kale out in the cold with no date  (though giant mustard, baby leeks and daikon radish are hanging around in a kind of unstructured way).

It turns out that the vague story I heard about marigolds, with their pungent foliage, as a nifty companion plant is true enough if you have a problem with nematodes, but dead wrong on the aphid front.  It seems that all-female parthenogenic parasites love the cheery flowers of marigolds even more than I do. But not enough to turn down the opportunity for a feast on a superfood.

In fact, I read recently that if you rub some vaseline on a yellow sticky label and stick it in amongst your veggies, the aphids will be lured in and get stuck on the lube so you can dispose of them thoughtfully.  But I’d advise you not to get too carried away with this approach, for a number of reasons: (a) if left long enough your post-it might attract aphids from further afield  (b) striding out back with a bundle of stationery in one hand and a tube of vaseline in the other will raise eyebrows amongst your neighbours and (c) the veracity of this story is no more guaranteed than the one about the marigolds and the aphids.

I’m not dissing the power of the herb entirely though.  It seems the smell of granny’s hanky does distract possums and bandicoots (and perhaps singing mice and super rats) from sniffing out newly sprouted peas and beans.  My broadies and sugar snaps are looking good under a vegenet liberally sprinkled with lavender flowers and leaves. I hold out hopes that this continue to work, significantly reassured by the fact that absolutely no one, as far as I know, recommends these as companion plants.

Things that go clang in the night

Tiptoeing down to the bottom of the garden through the midwinter gloom (or, to be precise the astronomical twilight) for some last-minute salad greens, I hear a sudden clang in the chook yard.

It’s grandpa. Well, Grandpa’s patented galvanised iron chicken feeder, slamming shut.  Something’s been chowing down on the chooks’ supper, and it isn’t Andy Ninja.

Andy at the feeder cropped 2

According to the manufacturers, Grandpa’s are vermin proof, requiring the heft of a chook to access the munchies inside.  And we carefully checked the skies before training our girls, since apparently cockies, despite being lightweights, comparatively speaking, have be known to figure out to jump mob-handed on the foot-pedal to get to the goodies.  And it’s not a brush turkey, for all their proprietorial air.  It’s after their bedtime.

In my fantasy life, my garden, as well as being effortlessly fecund with nature’s edible bounty, is an ideal habitat for rare and exciting native creatures.  The clang, in this universe, would be a shy and endangered Long-Nosed bandicoot, taking a detour from its usual diet of grubs and tubers to snatch a mouthful of scratch mix, as if to assure me, through this moment of dietary eccentricity, that I am walking lightly on this earth.

long-nosed-northern-bandicoot.ashx

In fact, I’m pretty sure we do have bandicoots in the back yard, but I’ve only once had a fleeting glimpse a white bum disappearing into a disorderly pile of prunings (or “habitat” as I like to think of it).  If they are attempting to communicate with me through the medium of conical nose-holes disturbingly close to my seedlings, I’m not quite sure what the message might be.

In my nightmares, on the other hand, the visitor at dusk is a Liverpudlian Super Rat, that somehow sneaked into the shipping crate when we left the UK seven years ago and has been loitering in the bottom of the garden ever since, disembowelling cats and swallowing brush turkey eggs whole. Okay, the Super Rat may be not all bad.

A giant rat caught in Liverpool.

There’s a more endearing rodent possibility: perhaps it’s a hard working and cooperative clan of mice, like the very cute singing ones in Bagpuss.

Mice in bagpuss 2

I could hide behind the generous leaves of the custard apple and try to catch the interloper in the act.  But since there’s a sharp westerly blowing and further research is bound to disappoint, one way or another, I think I’ll allow the Clanger to remain a mystery.

clangers

Reflections of a ground predator

Drawing of Andy bigger

What noise does a chicken make?

Some people might go for the classic “cockadoodle dooo!” of an rooster at the crack of dawn.

But many people probably come up with something like this: “Buck buck buck buck” (here’s a video example).  That’s what chickens sound like to most of us.

In fact, this is a specific type of chicken alarm call.  It means “Ground predator! Watch out!“.   In this video, there’s a cat on the prowl.  However, this call sounds so familiar to us humans, even those of us who are not chicken obsessives, because we are ground predators.  So what we think of as “normal chicken sounds” say less about what chickens normally do, and more about the fact that we’re there, and they’re keeping an eye on us.

Chickens make at more than twenty four different calls (check out some of them on this very interesting video), which are not only referential (“aerial predator” “food” and so on) but are uttered differently depending on who’s listening and what’s going on.  In fact, they can be quite machiavellian, deliberately “lying” (for instance, some males make a food call to attract females when there’s no food to be had – though since chickens can recognise and remember up to 100 individuals, this is not a good long term strategy!)  They are pretty cunning too.  In a recent article in Scientific American K-Lynn Smith and Sarah Zielinski explain how researchers resolved a problem: why do roosters frequently call out a warning about a passing hawk even when this might attract the hawk’s attention and put the rooster himself at risk.  They found that roosters are very strategic.  For instance, they observe that “a male calls more often if he is safe under a bush and his rival is out in the open, at risk of being picked off by a swooping predator. If the rooster is lucky, he will protect his girl, and another guy will suffer the consequences”.

To sum up, chickens are smarter than humans usually think (if not always nice), and humans… well, humans are ground predators.

Sweetness and light

On our shady south-west facing hillside (who went house hunting without a compass, then?) there’s just one spot that gets plenty of light year round: not a bad place for some solar panels on the top of a pole. But right in that spot there’s a native tree, sweet pittosporum or pittosporum undulatum.  And there’s a healthy specimen of the same species dead to the north of our kitchen windows, right where the winter sun might otherwise beam through.

Hornsby Council is pretty proud of its status as a leafy north shore suburb – “The Bushland Shire” – and dissuades its rate-payers in the strongest of terms from cutting down trees.  But not this one.  Until 2011, despite its status as a native, gardeners had a licence to kill sweet pittosporum, along with a select few imported nasties – cotoneaster, camphor laurel, privet and coral trees. But now it’s a different story.  You can chop down quite a lot in Hornsby these days – pretty much any non-native tree.  You can even gaily hack down Australian natives that don’t hail from this part of the Hawkesbury.  But put that saw down!  Pittosporum is now right there on that not very lengthy list of protected local trees, shrubs, grasses and vines.  It’s a dramatic turnaround, from big-league environmental weed to local hero, all in the space of a single year.

So what’s going on here?  Tim Low’s immensely readable book, “The New Nature: Winners and Losers in Wild Australia” (Viking, 2002), a fat but fascinating volume filled with stories about birds and trees, insects and frogs and their complex inter-relationships with human beings, has a lot to say about weeds and natives, and in fact quite a bit to say about sweet pittosporum.  The essential argument of the book is that any quest to preserve untouched wilderness or to maintain nature free from human interference is not just doomed, but essentially ill-conceived.

Human influence has been making plant and animal winners and losers in Australia for many thousands of years, and Low documents not only the way some pragmatic species capitalise on urban environments (think peregrine falcons nesting in high rise buildings) but the way many others rely on continuing human intervention (like firestick farming or stock grazing) to survive.  Sydney’s green and golden bell-frog survives at the Brickpits in Homebush, a location described as “one of the most industrially polluted in the Southern Hemisphere” (24) because these frogs are tolerant of high levels of heavy metals, while the frog-killing chytrid fungus is not. Low points out the limitations of the distinction between “native” and “exotic” as a way of gauging the impact of animals and plants on biodiversity, and argues that decisions about what to conserve and how to do it, are in short, very very complicated.  Koalas can be forest killers and cows can step into the gap left by extinct megafauna in maintaining diverse grassland.  As a greenie and a gardener, I found the anecdotes and ideas in “The New Nature” provoking and intriguing, making me take a good hard look at my weed anxieties and my fantasies of a bird-friendly, local provenance garden.

Hornsby Council’s change of heart about sweet pittosporum illustrates Tim Low’s arguments beautifully.  Don Burke, the Australian Native Plants Society of Australia, Grow Me Instead (The Nursery and Garden Industry Association) and the Queensland Government all agree that it’s an invasive weed. “The New Nature” with its ambivalence about such terms calls pittosporum “our worst native weed” (250), “replacing diverse systems with monoculture” (201).  While a canopy of eucalypts allows a rich understory, pittosporum shades out nearly everything else (although that nasty garden escape, privet, apparently copes well).  Birds enjoy the pittosporum’s orange fruits and disperse its sticky seeds.  Not needing fire or light to germinate, and tolerant of richer soils than many other natives, pittosporum is a native to this neck of the woods, flourishing on the shale ridgetops on Hawkesbury sandstone – most of which are now built on.  Run off from houses and gardens has enriched the sandstone soils on the slopes and pittosporum has moved on in.  According to Low, “If you take eucalypt forest, add fertiliser and water and take out fire, you have a recipe for rainforest.  The pittosporum invasion is really a takeover by rainforest” (248).

Pittosporum undulatum has its defenders.  Jocelyn Howell from the Royal Botanical Gardens suggests that pittosporum can shade out and outcompete other more troubling weeds (although Tim Low would argue that even invasive weeds like lantana can play their own role as a habitat).  Others argue for it in terms of the food supplies it offers and the fact that it *is* a local really. Obviously, Hornsby Council has plumped for this point of view.  Most of the advisories suggest that it’s a weed only outside its home range, using provenance to distinguish true locals from native invaders.

But according to Low’s arguments, its home range isn’t the home it once was.  His book gives poignant examples of Sydneysiders talking about the impact of pittosporum (“pittos”) in terms of solastalgia, the sense of homesickness you have when you haven’t left home, but your home has changed forever.  Orchids and grasses gone, along with the smell of eucalyptus (248).  There are no easy answers here: it’s “a hard one”, “one of the most sensitive issues around” (249).  Are the eucalypt forests of the Hawkesbury slowly morphing into (monocultural) rainforest?  Will the catastrophic fires I expect and dread drive it back?

From a more selfish point of view, it seems like my kitchen windows will remain gloomy and my solar panels a dream, even as my fantasy as a kid growing up in the arid lands of the South Australian mallee, of coming home to a rainforest seems to be coming true…

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.

Critters with kidneystones

It was all going so well.  The warrigal greens were flourishing, even without being regularly urinated on.  Deep-rooted sorrel was a stalwart when pretty much nothing else was happening in the garden at all. Both were in high rotation in the kitchen.  I’ve always been a bit cautious about using them raw, since, along with other garden staples like rainbow chard and rhubarb, both of them have a fair bit of oxalic acid, which if you overindulge and/or are unlucky can cause kidney stones (although the idea that the latest “miracle foods” might have the potential to be dangerous causes outrage in some) .  Given that rainbow chard, which is also quite high in oxalates, always has escaped animal attention, it seemed too much of a coincidence that the beasties seemed to leave these plants alone: those smarty pants critters were sensibly avoiding intestinal distress .

But look at my poor greens now:

Chewed sorrel Chewed warrigal greens

Something is clearly tucking in.

There are a number of possible suspects.  Judging from the robotic squeaks and buzzes in the undergrowth, there are satin bowerbirds still around.  Rumour has it they are fond of fresh shoots – I blame them for the tatty foliage of my now past-it Purple King beans.  It could be the chickens of course, but though the four new girls spend a lot of time in the area where the warrigal greens are (or were… *sniff*) only tricksy skinny Shyla regularly scoots through the gap in the bamboo gate into the veggie patch where I’ve planted the sorrel and, more recently, rhubarb (the leaves of which *are* toxic to humans, and have also been chewed in the last few days).  So, in the absence of an extensive literature review on comparative rodent, marsupial and human tolerances of oxalic acid (I have tried!), I’m blaming rats or possums.  I guess definitive evidence would consist of creatures with particular glossy pelts.  Or creatures rolling around with excruciating abdominal pain. Or both.

Twilight of the Chickens

Snowball portrait

Jeez, chickens go to bed early.  I’m outside getting the washing, and ok, it’s heading towards dusk, but not only can I see the location of my smalls, visibility’s so good I can even spot and dodge the brush turkey doings as I go.  But the chooks are already tucked up in their palatial quarters, or in the case of Snowball (pictured above), having a nap in an elevated position while waiting to be eaten.

So, twilight is more complicated than you might think, and I’m not talking about the teen vampire series.  Apparently it comes in three types.  As the sun first sinks, there’s civil twilight.  Technically, that’s when the centre of the sun is 6 degrees below the horizon – in good weather you can still see the things around you (say, your knickers on the line, or an inconvenient pile of guano).  Then, after about 20 minutes, more (as you get closer to the poles) or less (closer to the equator), you have nautical twilight.  The sun is 12 degrees below the horizon now, and if you’re a sailor, you can take a bearing on the stars with the horizon still visible. If you forgot to pick sweet potato greens before sundown, you’re rummaging around in the cupboard for a torch.

After nautical twilight comes astronomical twilight, with the sun 18 degrees below the horizon.  To an untutored eye it might appear as if night has finally arrived, but impatient astronomers wanting to check out nebulae will be still pacing up and down waiting for full dark.  Of course, you won’t get the full sequence come the summer in Trondheim (civil twilight from sunset to sunrise), Glasgow (nautical twilight for most of the darker hours) or even London (astronomical twilight all night long, even without throwing in the orange glow of light pollution).

I find this orderly taxonomy of darkening moments curiously soothing, an effect only slightly diminished on reading that nerdy acronyms like EENT (end evening nautical twilight) aren’t just used by meteorologists and astronomers to document the passing days and track the movements of the stars, but also in military campaigns to synchronise watches.

But all this is from a human point of view.  For chickens, it’s different.

If possums have got pretty dud typical mammalian dichromate vision, chickens are rocking their cones.  Not just three sets of cones like us, but five, including one that enables them to see ultraviolet light and a double cone for detecting motion.  And “cellular sunglasses”: an oil-drop to filter particular wavelengths of light.

But wait!  There’s more!  Chickens also have, in essence, a third eye.  Okay, not as visible as parietal eyes of Tuataras and other less famous reptiles (and related organs in the eyes of other tetrapods – like the receptor that looks like a little blue pimple between this critter’s eyes).

Frog_parietal_eye

But still, a pineal gland perched up just under skull that receives enough light to regulate sleep and trigger annual reproductive cycles. Extremely cool.  Perhaps too cool for some. While researching this post, I noticed, right underneath a webpage spelling out the multidimensional excellence of chicken vision, an advertisement for eye surgery.”Replace tired and baggy eyes with a younger look!”.  Presumably the reader, ruminating dolefully on the superiority of the avian retina and the failings of human sight, is primed for this kind of thing.

But perhaps we humans shouldn’t be so grim about our drab colour vision, our tediously symmetrical pair of eyes.  At the very least the time our mammalian ancestors spent cowering in a burrow while the dinosaurs strode the earth gave us respectable night vision.  We can revel in our fine array of twilights while the shutters come down with a clang at the end of the day for our long time companions.

Okay, The Twilight of the Chickens may not have the apocalyptic ending of the Ragnarøkkr, the Twilight of the Gods.  The rivalry between Treasure and Shyla over who gets the highest perch in the upcycled coop doesn’t have the same Wagnerian grandeur as Odin’s battle to the death with the wolf Fenrir.  But pleasingly, even the Norse myths have a place for chooks: the end of days is heralded by the crowing of a crimson rooster, a golden rooster, and a rust red rooster.  I must tell Andy Ninja.

Cliff hanger on Chicken TV

Last night we moved the young’uns out of the veggie garden and into the chicken run.  At dusk, I found them wandering disconsolately around the spot where the coop had been the day before, scratching out symbols in the mulch in an attempt to reverse the invisibility spell that had obviously been performed on their living quarters.  Having sorted out that problem, I made a late breaking decision to grab Snowball from her highly exposed roost and throw her in with the others.

Public holiday sleep-in abandoned, I was up at dawn to watch the next gripping episode of “Chicken TV”.  Who would be new Top Chook: Andy Ninja or the feisty contender, Treasure the Light Sussex? How would Snowball react after her night sleeping with strangers?   Could there be peace between the two clans, or would blood be spilled?

Major turn-up in the pecking-order stakes: Treasure not only monstered little Snowball, but had Andy on the backfoot as well. The two veterans, driven together in a “spirit of the blitz”, paced up and down while the two most brazen of the new girls muscled in on brekkie. We took 2 weeks to train the older chooks to use the foot-pedal feeder: it took Shyla the Australorp about 10 minutes.

So much for getting the new birds for Andy’s mental health – she spent much of the afternoon in her usual haunts in the front garden, on her own or in the company of one of the brush turkeys.  Snowball hung with the young team for a while, but it looks like it was a one-night stand in the coop – she’s back on her “fox appetiser” roost this evening.  So I guess Chicken TV is the poultry Home and Away: mostly about the triumphs of good looking teenagers.

Bean thieves

I’ve been a little obsessed with brush turkeys lately, in case you haven’t noticed. As yet I haven’t set up a nanotechnology lab to investigate the remarkable hydrophobic properties of their eggs but perhaps that’s only a matter of time. In the interests of keeping them from scratching everything up, the garden is an “homage de Christo” at the moment, swathed in vege nets and scraps of daggy horticultural fleece. That’s in addition to chicken wire hoops over my garlic, rocks and tiles around the baby citrus, and a trellis trapdoor over germinating sweet peas. And my new strategy: distraction. The brush turkeys have been having a grand time digging through a recently applied layer of wood chip mulch on the garden paths. Since “tidy” is not my watchword this is all to the good, keep them from pondering on what mysteries might lurk under the sugar cane mulch elsewhere.

However, while I’ve been congratulating myself on my success, other produce snackers have been at work. A few weeks ago I put in a couple of patches of broad beans, and for good measure some lupins as green manure. I spent some time fretting that lupins could become a garden escape, spreading through the sclerophyll forest of the Hawkesbury sandstone like the blue carpeted uplands of New Zealand’s South Island.

Image

I really shouldn’t have bothered. A week or so later I peeped under the fleece to find a neat sequence of holes in the loam. I actually wondered if I’d forgotten to fill in the divots I’d made with my dibber, but no. Apparently lupins make a fine high-protein rodent snack. Sadly broad beans seem to be haute cuisine too – though they weren’t nibbled til they had sprouted. It seems the local rats are health food freaks. Mental note: don’t bother planting quinoa or a goji vine.

There’s a lot in the permaculture literature about the virtual cycles of animal-botanical interactions. Your chickens in their upcycled chook tractor convert scrap to crap, dig up your weeds and move on to clear pastures new. They are a serious danger to your slug population and their bedding makes a fabulous mulch.

Not so much lyrical celebration of the rats that come to eat those scraps and also make short work of your seedlings.

It is particularly irking when these inconvenient animals deploy a pincer movement, the sad story of last year’s voluptuous TropicSnow peaches being a case in point. Protected by mesh exclusion bags, they were safe from fruit fly, or so I thought. But the bags were short work for the local rat pack, and once they’d had the pick of the ripe fruit, the fruit fly came in to clean up the rest.

This is where the food web shows its grimmer side, at least from the human harvester’s perspective. We could put out poison for the rats. But what if bandicoots are also fond of RatSak? And when the rats pop their clogs unobserved, what if the tawny frogmouth or Snakey the diamond python decide groggy and voraciously thirsty rodents or still warm corpses are an easy snack? The poison’s up the food chain and the next thing you know a White Bellied Sea Eagle has carked it on top of your washing line.

Snakey has made inroads on what I should perhaps refer to as our “organic” rodent population.

Image

Unfortunately with that slow reptilian metabolism one rat a fortnight is the best you can hope for.   I like to think that Grandpa’s chook feeder with its foot pedal operation has made things a bit more difficult for the rodents, since I’ve not yet seen them jumping up and down en masse to access the delights inside.

Beans and sky

So, over the last month I’ve managed to raise my first green (and purple) bean crop for years. I’m not quite sure why the critters left them alone. There seems to be an element of the stochastic in all this. Things emerge and grow peaceably and then, bang, the satin bower birds have macerated your greenery. Are the beasties lulling us into a false sense of security? Waiting for the precise moment when everything tastes its best? Or are they just a bit flakey and take a while to figure out that beans are once again on offer down the bottom of the yard?  For all I might be a bit skeptical about the “we sow the seeds, nature grows the seeds, we eat the seeds” hippie vibe of permaculture, there is a lot to be said for stealing a march on the predators by simply baffling them with a jumble of plants: an odd collection of survivors and accidental successes.