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June 24, 2014

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Animal senses, Bandicoots, Brassicas, Companion planting, Edible flowers, Exclusion pest control, Insect pests, Plants and what I know about them, Possums, Rats, Vegetables

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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:

Kale companion planted with marigold

Kale doing it for itself

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).

“Well, I came for the marigolds, but I hear kale is a superfood!”

Companions in better days

Broadies under granny’s lavender-scented hanky

Shyla’s kale dreams

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.

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mccnmatt

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June 23, 2014

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Animal communication, Animal pests, Animal senses, Backyard chickens, Bandicoots, Brush turkeys, chicken diet, Native animals, Plants that attract wildlife, Possums, Rats

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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May 25, 2014

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Animal pests, Backyard chickens, chicken diet, Gardening, Greens, Plants and what I know about them, Possums, Rats, Vegetables

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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:

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.

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mccnmatt

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May 15, 2014

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Animal senses, Backyard chickens, natural history, Possums, Recycling

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Twilight of the Chickens

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).

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.

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March 27, 2014

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Animal pests, Animal senses, Australian natives, Fruit, fruit for shade, Fruits for shade, Gardening, Native animals, natural history, Plants and what I know about them, Possums

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Do possums see in technicolour?

Tamarillos: what a great fruit for inept, part-time gardeners! Stupendously quick to grow – to a couple of metres in not much over twelve months. Producing a crop in less than two years and in a shady spot too, tucked in amongst monstera deliciosa, naranjillas and a dwarf Cavendish banana in the lee of the neighbour’s tall pine tree, with filtered light in summer and just a touch of winter sun. The egg sized fruits are quite pleasant to eat: flesh with the texture of a honeydew melon and with an overtone of passionfruit. I like the big bright green tropical leaves and the fact that fruit flies seem to leave them alone. But best of all, Matimba (as our youngest named the baby tree when it went in) didn’t seem to be pestered by possums. Since the fruits dangle from slender pendulous branches I wondered at first if the critters couldn’t make it to where the action was. Then I thought perhaps they hadn’t spotted them yet, remembering how my figs and beans went untouched for a year or two.

And then recently I spotted a green but nibbled fruit under the tree. Obviously the contents weren’t to the liking of the thief – not quite ripe enough, perhaps. It might well have been an optimistic bird that did the dirty work. But given that tamarillo fruits quite distinctly change in colour as they ripen – gold in the case of Matimba and red in the case of her as yet non-fruiting little sister Molly – this evidence of mid-snack mind-change made me wonder: “Do possums have colour vision?

I realised only recently that primate colour vision is actually pretty unusual amongst mammals, whose ancestors swapped technicolour for better night vision while hiding amongst the shadows, waiting for dinosaurs to leave the party. Humans, primates and monkeys have a kind of gerry-rigged third cone that gives us an in on the neat seed dispersal system fruit-bearing plants sorted out with birds and their dinosaurian tetrachromatic eyes. Like parrots, we can spot a ripe fruit against a canopy of green leaves (although we don’t get to see the UV spectrum, which is disappointing). Okay, there are other explanations for primate colour vision – like spotting tasty red-hued fresh leaves – but I’m sticking with this one for now. Interestingly, colour-blind humans, primates and monkeys (particularly males) are still unusually common. It seems that colour-blind individuals are great at seeing through camouflage, so a sprinkling of dichromatic members of the group serving as predator-spotters does a mob of monkeys or apes no harm at all.

Pulling out of the fascinating vortex of animal colour vision research and returning to my original question, what about possums? With the ubiquity of brushtailed possums in suburban houses and gardens in Australia, surely someone would have a definitive answer on this one.

It turns out that marsupial colour vision has been a hotbed of academic research over the last fifteen years. Until the early noughties it was assumed that marsupials, like most placental mammals, were dichromats, with pretty limited colour vision. But then researchers identified that some marsupials, like the fat-tailed dunnart, the honey posssum and the quokka, were trichromats (as indeed were the ancestors of platypus and echidnas, the monotremes). Some marsupials, like the poor old tammar wallaby, do seem to have the same rather average colour vision as the placentals.

Brush-tailed possum vision is so cutting edge that Lisa Vlahos’ PhD on it, completed in 2013, hasn’t even been published in science journals yet. But, based on the annual reports at the Vision Centre at ANU (sadly I haven’t been able to access her endearingly named PhD thesis “Possum Magic”) it look like brushtails can see part of the UV spectrum, but can’t distinguish between white and green light: more like dogs than chickens, they’re red-green colour blind.

Which might explain my chewed and rejected green tamarillo fruit. Or not. But it was fun finding out anyway!

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March 25, 2014

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Animal pests, Brush turkeys, Death, Native animals, Plants and what I know about them, Possums, Uncategorized

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An inexpert Anglo’s guide to identifying bush foods in the garden

Step 1. Come up with a list of possibilities through the interweb or other trusted source.

Step 2. Purchase, potentially with some difficulty, from a suitable vendor of native plants.

Step 3. Bring finds home and situate them carefully in the garden, giving appropriate thought to aspect and drainage.

Step 4. Wait. If, after some time, you find a patch of thoroughly excavated soil or even a few macerated fragments of greenery where your precious purchase was previously located, congratulations! With the help of your hungry non-human assistants, you have identified an edible native plant!

Okay, it doesn’t always work that way, but I’m feeling slightly embittered since a second generation of bulbine lily has bitten the dust courtesy of the advanced culinary sensibilities of our trusty flock of brush turkeys. Thanks, guys!

The apple berry vine was, I think, cleaned up by the possums. The chocolate lily has suspiciously vanished from its new spot sheltered in the fringes of the prolific and obviously insipid tasting blue flax lily. Dormant in summer, perhaps it will pop up again next year, but after reading descriptions of its “delectable” aroma and tubers that are edible both raw and roasted, I am not optimistic. I have a strong suspicion, based solely on the fact that the regularly nibbled growing tips of the specimen outside my kitchen, that the Fraser Island creeper may also have some undocumented uses as a pot herb. Don’t try this at home, though… unless you are a brush turkey, in which case, help yourself.

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February 25, 2014

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Animal pests, Backyard chickens, Brassicas, Brush turkeys, Companion planting, Exclusion pest control, Gardening, Greens, Insect pests, Iron deficiency, Native animals, Natives for shade, Possums, Rats, Vegetables

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It’s not easy eating greens

Maybe it’s a careless-vegetarian-with-low-level-iron-deficiency thing, but I’m often hankering after greens. Thankfully, the green leafies seem to be one of the few foodgroups to which brushtailed possums, rats, bandicoots, brush turkeys and chickens – the non-human beneficiaries of my most of my horticultural efforts – all seem relatively indifferent. When things were very barren in the yard recently, my sorrel plant, a marvellous perennial that, with the deep taproots of a potential weed, soldiers on with minimal attention, was munched by something with a sophisticated palate for citrus flavours and a high tolerance of oxalic acid. Occasionally some beastie has a light snack on my other trusty standby, the rainbow chard, but on the whole my favourite greens seem immune to animal predation.

Having failed to grow them from seed, the Warrigal greens I bought from Daleys have been a cracker. They’ve threaded their way through a garden bed that, with only a couple of hours sun a day, has pushed the envelope for even shade tolerant plants like Davidson’s plum, macadamia and callicoma serratifolia. Andy Ninja regularly scratches her way through that neck of the woods, grubbing for remnants of trad, but she hasn’t managed to loosen the Warrigal greens from their moorings, and we’ve had it in everything from lasagne to dal to quiche without any visible dent appearing in the supply. Rumour has it that they self-seed prodigiously, so there’s promise of more next year.

During a couple of La Nina years we had watercress soup on the menu for about 18 months on the trot thanks to a semi-shaded spot near the chook run: boggy in torrential downpours but otherwise ordinary garden soil. A soft spot for umbrelliferous flowers and the aphid eating critters they attract, and a lazy habit of chucking decrepit parsley plants under my fruit trees as mulch has meant that Italian parsley pretty much dominates the seed bed in the herb garden and food forest around the back door. Whenever the moisture level and the temperature is right, a new generation surges forward underneath the potted makrit lime and the Cavendish banana and even between the paving stones.

I had rocket doing the same in the veggie patch a couple of years ago, until I put the kibosh on it by over-zealously collecting the contents of the papery pods. I must have been indulging in some herbal fantasy of seed saving, and so I have feral rocket no more. At least for the moment. Because of the tedious necessity to earn a living, I’m never on top of the weeding, and as the years pass I’ve started to recognise the seedlings of my favourite plants wherever they appear so I can “edit” the garden rather than, in that hateful bit of business-ese, attempting to “grow it”.

However, a particular favourite has proven to a more difficult proposition. I love bok choi and all its cousins, but especially the look and taste of red bok choi, an F1 hybrid that’s really a luscious purple, a perfect match for the “house” beans, Purple King; the salad enriching Giant Mustard and the beautiful but apparently impossible to grow purple brussel sprouts.

I have spent far too much time, money and mental energy over the last three years trying to produce an anemia-busting harvest of bok choi. In year 1, following the gospel of Jackie French, I tried to shelter my precious cruciferous greens in a guild of fellow travellers, with limited success. In year two, I went for a guerilla strategy – my choi germinated under the cover of the great hairy leaves of my zucchini. I was optimistic but the cabbage whites were not so easy to fool. But I have made a break-through, thanks to a “chuck all the seeds in the bottom of the packets together and hope for the best” approach. Coriander! So impossible to grow in Sydney, always starting so well and then going to seed before you’ve even got a garnish out of it. But apparently, you can keep the barn door closed (to moths? where is this metaphor going?) even if your coriander has bolted. The bok choi that grew in amongst my incorrigible coriander was completely untouched. So under the shelter of brush turkey-thwarting hoops of wire and the modest veil of a rather tattered veggie net, in goes bok choi and sacrificial coriander along with the aragula and the mizuna, the watercress and the daikon. If I can crack this one, the purple brussel sprouts are next!