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mccnmatt

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April 23, 2014

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Animal senses, Backyard chickens, Death

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A sentimental chicken recalls the good old days

From a sentimental chicken remembers the good old days

Long ago, Andy Ninja the ISA Brown laid an egg a day, regular as clockwork. The laundry, attached to the back of the house, was her chosen spot. The eggs started appearing on the tiled floor, so we put out a straw-filled cardboard box, to stop breakages if nothing else. For Snowball the Silkie bantam to lay, everything had to be just right: clear blue skies, light yet refreshing breezes, no interruptions to routine or uproar of any kind. She is a right diva. Looking around at the picnic-perfect weather and hearing some self-satisfied cackling you might well figure that she had done the business, but you then have to find the damn things before they started to rot. If you successfully track down her hidey hole she immediately looks for a more private and profoundly inaccessible location.

But you could set your watch by Andy and her much missed sister Harley as they hopped up the back steps on their daily mission. I used to joke that the only way of making egg collection more convenient would be to put an egg carton next to the washing machine and get them to lay directly into it.

Sadly, those days are well behind us. Harley succumbed to some nasty bite or bug and, after a few months of laying soft-shelled eggs, Andy stopped producing eggs over a year ago. No amount of shellgrit or other calcium-enhancing pampering seemed to toughen those babies up. I guess it was the beginning of “the change”.

Despite her recent “transition” from egg-laying stalwart to quasi-cockerel who crows at dawn, Andy still seems to have a soft spot for the laundry.

She loiters on the steps while waiting for her breakfast to be delivered, but when she’s fed, she’s there again, trying to sneak past me while I’m filling the front-loader. She’ll settle in a corner near the sink, fluff out her feathers and hunker down in position that says “I’ve got some serious egg laying to do”. Given half a chance, she’ll roost in there at night as well. Here’s her, shut out, roosting on the next best thing: the back doorstep.

The laundry probably is a cut above the other dry and sheltered places to bunk down for the night, at least until Palm Beach, the new coop, is open to the general public. But I wonder if she goes there because she hankers after the good old days when she was Andy the regular layer, top chook in the pecking order, Andy the laundry ninja.

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mccnmatt

Posted on

April 22, 2014

Posted under

Australian natives, Gardening, Greens, national parks, Natives for shade, Plants and what I know about them

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Two easy steps to make your warrigal greens thrive

We had a break from the back garden this weekend, camping at Twin Beaches in Marramarra National Park on the beautiful drowned river valley that is the Hawkesbury estuary. The east-facing wooded slope up the back of the camp site was object lesson in how to use the shade-loving local plants I’ve been bringing back into my garden over the last couple of years. Particularly gorgeous was the swathe of prickly rasp fern, tendrils fresh and pink after recent rain, appearing through the grass and the dianella caerulea along the path to the dangerously repellant pit toilet.

I haven’t yet managed to propagate a cissus vine – I am working on some cissus antarctica cuttings pinched from a nicely planted up children’s playground. Since it is a national park and I am slightly neurotic, I would have felt guilty if I had snipped off some propagation material from the vine that wound its way through the trees – a slender young cissus hypoglauca, I believe. Apparently you can cut the stems of the mature vine into sections and drink the sap that drips out like water.

But most impressive was the dense carpet of exceedingly healthy looking warrigal greens growing only a metre or two back from the high tide line. I did end up picking some to stave off the scurvy likely to be induced by too much camping food. However it was a bit of a challenge to find a satisfactory spot for my ad hoc harvest, since the most vibrant and sturdy patches of tetragonia seemed to be in just those places – a couple of steps from the fire hole, around the base of a convenient tree – that a bloke might choose to relieve himself after putting away a couple of long necks. This may be a coincidence of course. But nettles and lime trees seem to favour human urine as a tonic so who knows, maybe New Zealand spinach is the same? I know it’s sterile and Romans used it to wash their togas and all, but I’m not completely sure I’m going to try this particular high-nitrogen fertiliser on the salad greens at home.

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mccnmatt

Posted on

April 15, 2014

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Animal pests, Backyard chickens, Brush turkeys, Diamond python, Exclusion pest control, Gardening, Insect pests, Native animals, Plants and what I know about them, Rats, Recycling, Vegetables

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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mccnmatt

Posted on

April 2, 2014

Posted under

Australian natives, Backyard chickens, Gardening, Natives for shade, Ornamental gardens, Plants and what I know about them

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Absurd gardening prejudices pt.1

It seems I harbour a deep-seated suspicion of people who use epiphytes as a garden feature, something I discovered at the exact moment I transformed into one of them. According to my brain, the sin of gratuitous staghorn display is gravely compounded by the location of said epiphyte on any kind of artificial structure, including but not limited to fences, trellises, wooden mounting boards and hanging baskets. As far as the Chelsea judges in my head are concerned, such epiphytic offenses are right up there with non-ironic use of garden gnomes, concrete kangaroos, or indeed any form of arboreal statuary.

So, obviously, this – garden design by guano – is unimpeachable:

But when bird-dropping inspired artlessness comes crashing down, what’s to be done?

Well…. this might pass at a push:

But this is just plain tacky, or so my inner hippie informed me just as I whacked in the last fencing pin:

The garden, begun with an earnest utilitarian intent, has strayed from the straight and narrow of food production. First it was the bird baths, those gateway ornaments, a thin veneer of ecological functionality only partly disguising their real purpose, as a visual full stop in the fernery (“fernery”??!). Then it was the native grasses: “to promote biodiversity”. Huh. We will turn silently away from the mosaic stepping stones. Even the companion animals are becoming disturbingly decorative:

Clearly the shark was jumped long ago. And to add insult to injury, this post has no political rationale either. No musings on death; no hot tips on organic gardening; not even a passing reference to climate change. Utterly bereft of any skerrick of social utility. Bugger it: I’m off to a garden centre for that replica of the Manneken Pis.

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mccnmatt

Posted on

March 29, 2014

Posted under

Brush turkeys, Climate change, Exclusion pest control, Gardening, Plants and what I know about them, Seasons

Cherry blossom in autumn

What’s the difference between a good gardener and a bad gardener?

Two weeks.

That’s me, at least two weeks late with everything. Most of the autumn planting happened today, in delicious sunshine after three days of deep, seeping rain. Peter Cundall says my newly sown carrots (should they germinate, always rather unlikely – I got one solitary seedling out of the batch sown a month or so ago) will be pale and thin. Gothic carrots. Hopefully the spindly survivors will be the purple ones: seems more appropriate somehow.

I’m not very optimistic about my garlic either. In previous years I reaped, almost to the clove, an identical amount of garlic to the quantity I planted six months before (I have a similar success rate with potatoes). However, I live in hope that all that will change in 2014: “The Year of Lime”. I have been very slapdash with soil preparation in the past, hoping that cow manure and lucerne-and-straw mulch, with the odd splash of comfrey tea will do for pretty much everything. This year I’ve taken the same approach to dolomite on my leeks and garlic, that the Scottish other half takes to salt on his dinner: more is more. Hopefully it will make a difference. I’ve also put in not just the usual Italian White but also a day-length neutral type, Glen. Perhaps its not me that is harshing my garlic, but my latitude. Now I have a controlled experiment to settle it.

Having discovered the implausible passion of brush turkeys for the allium family, I’ve gone for a belt and braces approach to protecting seeds and seedlings. This year I’ve draped my usual little hoops of wire fencing with vege nets, partly to keep out the beasties and partly to shade the newbies in what’s been an unusually warm March. My home grown brassica and fennel seedlings are working with that same goth aesthetic and I fear that one sunny day might be the end of them. The nets have done sterling service with the beans, which are up and cropping well.

So since we’re in the dying days of March, it may be that my celery and rainbow chard, broccoli, kale and fennel are destined to spend the next six months in suspended animation waiting for the sun to hoist itself above the trees and get things going again on our chilly south-west facing slope. But then, I noticed only a few days back that the little pot-grown cherry tree that has, for the last five years stubbornly refused to flower or fruit, has spluttered into bloom at this most inpropitious time, and that the strawberries beneath the custard apple have sprung little white petals and even greenish fruits. I’m not sure what all this portends: the unnatural beginnings of climate change or just the confused reaction of temperate plants to subtropical seasons. Either way I’m hoping for a harvest.

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mccnmatt

Posted on

March 27, 2014

Posted under

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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mccnmatt

Posted on

March 25, 2014

Posted under

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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mccnmatt

Posted on

March 17, 2014

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Animal pests, Backyard chickens, Brush turkeys, Death, Microbiome, Native animals

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What lurks in brush turkey bellies?

This is my other flock, the brush turkeys. I think there are about six of them using our place as a recreation area and take-away just now. Teenagers and youngsters, I think, none of the absurdly young yet unattended chicks at the moment – the hatching season must be over.

Our fences are not so much boundary markers, more convenient perching sites and high level walkways, attractive and arboreal, a little like New York’s famous High Line. When we bought our vermin proof chicken feeder (made by Grandpa, it seems) we were warned not to train the chooks how to use it in front of cockatoos. Though individually cockies are not heavy enough to step onto the foot pedal and trigger the lifting of the feeder lid, apparently they are quite capable of learning to saunter on mob-handed and get a feed that way. It took the chooks a few weeks to get used to the clanging as the pedal went down and the feeder opened. The learning curve for the brush turkeys was pretty steep it seems. They are casual snackers at this stage.

So I’ve spent a lot of the last few weeks thinking about the contents of brush turkey guts and the parasitic load of brush turkey ordure. We lost another chick (Turbo… sniff) and I’m blaming the turkeys rather than myself. Viral and bacterial vectors, flapping and crapping all round the yard. We couldn’t leave little Shyla to join the big chickens all on our own, so we went back to the hatchery and got some older and hopefully more robust pullets. But now the veil of naivete has been drawn back and I’m expecting more deaths, despite Sulfa3, cider vinegar, natural yoghurt snacks and regular anxious visits to the bottom of the yard where the young ‘uns are segregated in their chook dome from bigger fowl. I’m not sure I can bear to lose any more, at least not yet.

So I’m going for a chemical blitz, on new chicks and the old. Still thinking through which antibiotics I should have in the cupboard for the inevitable emergency. And when I’m dosing up the chickens, I’ll also be dosing up the brush turkeys, our involuntary companion animals.

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mccnmatt

Posted on

March 1, 2014

Posted under

Backyard chickens, Brassicas, Brush turkeys, Gardening, Native animals, Predators, raising chickens, Recycling, Vernacular architecture

A grand day out

Time to get the fully feathered chicks – all of 6 weeks old – out of the brooder in the kids’ bedroom. To my amazement the new coop, which weighs the same as a gas giant, does actually fit under the chook dome. After Donna’s departure, I’m a bit worried about plunging the peepers straight into the fowl-and-brush-turkey-ordure-rich environment of the run, so we’ll give them a few weeks in the chicken tractor, getting a garden bed ready for brassicas. They had a first scratch around this afternoon, ready for the big move tomorrow.

Andy is looking very miffed by these developments. I caught her lurking in the new coop – I think she envisages it as her own personal quarters. She was transfixed by the sudden appearance of the new girls, so I was able to grab her and turf her out before any argy-bargy. However, Snowball and Andy have been using the top of the dome as a perch, so they were wandering around the run at something of a loss at sundown tonight. They have a whole series of dry places to sleep – under the granny flat, in the wood-shed – but since they seemed to favour a spot underneath the neighbour’s horrible coral tree, we leaned a ladder (a previous craft project) against the outside of the woodshed, exactly where the chicken dome used to be. I tried to give Andy the idea but she wasn’t having it. Hope they are somewhere out of the rain tonight….