An ice storm, a flood and eight invisible fish: the fraught tale of a frog pond

hailstones in hand crop long

Water features have everywhere in Berowra this last year.  With half the suburb’s roofs smashed to bits by golfball sized hailstones just before Christmas, an ice-storm followed an hour or so later by torrential rain, lots of those water features were indoors and distinctly unwelcome.  In a suburb that has come to be known over the months of waiting for insurers to come to the party, as “Tarpaulin Heights” we got off relatively lightly, with our indoor water feature making only a cameo one-time appearance.

Inundation was the origin of our new outdoor water feature as well.  Thanks to topography and a inexplicably ruptured stormwater drain – I did fear at one time it was an inexplicably ruptured sewer, so I’m thankful for small mercies – when the rain comes down in Berowra, most of it seems to come through our backyard.

The weather pattern in Australia now, even here on the coastal fringe where the trees are still alive and there is grass, which is sometimes even green, seems to be long dry months punctuated by occasional periods of quasi-apocalyptic rainfall.  So catching some of the run off and making some use of it seemed like a good idea.  And then there’s my fantasies about frogs.

So in December last year, I dug a big hole, downhill from the stormwater drain and uphill from my veggie garden.  Deep holes are not easy to dig on Hawkesbury sandstone.  I was aiming for a depth of no more than 30cm, since I really didn’t want to have to fence my pond, but even 30 cm was a push. I rationalised the shallowness of the hole with reference to the gently sloping edges that would allow the amphibians of my dreams to rest comfortably on the edge of the pond.  Not a very convincing excuse to avoid further shovel work.

releasing fish

I lined the hole with a few centimetres of sand from the local garden centre.  Carpet underlay is sometimes recommended for a layer underneath pond liner but I went an old trampoline mat, since that’s the kind of thing I have lying around in my shed.  Retrospectively I’m not sure that was a great idea.  On top of that I put down rubber pond liner – quite a lot more expensive than vinyl, but not plastic and, in a household full of underused bikes, I figured, quite patchable.  In theory.  Underneath that footlingly small pond is six square metres of heavy duty rubber.

lily leaves late Jan

Nymphoides montana. I think.

Sensible guides to pond making recommend that you set up your fountains and filters properly, then add native plants, give it a week or so and then add fish.   However, a couple of days after setting up the pond with a solar powered aerator, native grasses (Carex fascularis and Schoenoplectus Mucronatus) and pond plants (Marsilea mutica, and if memory serves, Nymphoides montana) I spotted a huge number of wrigglers frisking gaily around their new habitat, and decided we would need to go fish shopping.

Our neighbours had demonstrated their true commitment to biodiversity by not just accepting but actively welcoming the idea of frog mating calls 24-7 outside their bedroom windows.  However, we thought adding a vast number of mosquitoes to the local ecosystem might not necessarily go do down equally well.  We decided to buy two pairs of pacific blue eyes to populate our pond, while we waited for other insect eaters – frogs and dragonfly larvae and the like – to arrive.

Pacific blue eyes are small fish – less than 8 cm in length and usually much smaller – that are keen mozzie eaters but not big enough to devour frog spawn.  They’re locals all up and down the East Coast, inhabiting both fresh waters and estuaries, so not too fussy about water quality.  Our local aquarium shop had a stock of them, though the staff were pretty clueless about which fish were native and which were not, offering us white cloud minnows (originating in China) as a possible alternative.  We took our two pairs of tiny, quasi transparent fish home and Ms 12 and good friend and frog lover from next door carefully introduced them to the pond, taking time to equalise the temperature of the water to minimise shock.

Fish introduction 2 before flood crop

All that happened around midday on December 20, the day of the hail storm and subsequent torrential downpour.  Within hours of settling our blue eyes carefully into our little pond, our backyard looked like this:

Ms 12 was desperately trying to block the exit from the pond, but I think realistically the Pacific blue eyes were halfway to Berowra Creek by this point.  There was much weeping and gnashing off teeth, counterbalanced, on my part at least, by a certain smugness that I hadn’t bought white cloud minnows or gambezi fish or something else that you wouldn’t want to end up in your local waterway.

Of course, what with the water being murky and the fish being small, shy and in essence invisible, we weren’t quite sure if we still had pacific blue eyes or not. Rather than waiting for the mosquito murmuration that would tell us that we didn’t, and with an eye to diminishing the level of weeping, we went back to the aquarium shop for yet another couple of pairs.

That was a nearly a year ago now, and there have been no further sightings of the fish.  The solar powered bubbler carked it in another downpour, along with the rainbow nardoo which I accidentally ripped out while clearing out excess algae during winter months.   But the wriggler count has stayed low and the pond has done pretty well as a habitat.  Not to mention the fabulous opportunity it’s given me to buy new plants (full list at the bottom of the blog)

On the down-side, I’ve been surprised how often I have to top the pond up with water.  Either it has a surprisingly high level of evaporation for a pond in shade much of the day or the logs and rocks I dragged around the yard to make a naturalistic edging have punctured the rubber lining in some mysterious but annoying way.  Perhaps there’s a reason people don’t recommend using old trampoline mats underneath your pond.

One way or another, I have become a pond slave.  I’m constantly ruminating on where I’m going to get my next hit of  non-chlorinated water. The many many hail-holes in our gutters all have a bucket underneath them and I usually have a bucket of tap water off-gassing somewhere around the yard. I have heard rumours there may be better ways of collecting rainwater than this.  Working on it.

Blue banded bee in flight cropped

Blue banded bee on Artenema fimbriatum (koala bells)

It was lovely to see the blue banded bees the visiting koala bells and dragonflies hovering over the water, but we’ve had to be patient with the frogs. The approach you take to getting a frog is a bit like the approach 1950s women had to take to getting a boyfriend – make yourself appealing and wait.  Chytrid fungus is devastating frog populations across the world and if you go and collect frogspawn or tadpoles you can help it spread.  So we waited.

Skinks by the pond closeup

A few months back I heard the distinctive pock of a striped marsh frog in amongst the waterside foliage. I was beside myself with excitement, but after I let the chooks out to freerange for the afternoon, the marshie disappeared.  Troubling. It seemed like having both chickens and frogs might be an impossible dream.

Apricot by the pond 2 crop

Apricot nibbling at the microlaena stipodes lawn.  And possibly frogs.

But by the end of winter, another striped marsh frog was in situ, vamping the local females with the alluring noise of a loudly dripping tap.  Perhaps this male was too large to be wolfed down by the chooks on their visits to the pond for a drink and an insect snack.

And, glory be, last week we spotted a couple of handfuls of tadpoles, huddling at the bottom of the pond near some algae.  I am now officially a frog mumma, as my daughter said.  But I’m not feeling too much eco-smugness.  According to the Australian Museum, the striped marsh frog is an unfussy beast – it likes a pond but even a polluted ditch will do.  Apparently they’ve been found breeding in dog’s drinking bowls.

So no pressure.  The bar has been set low for us as aspiring frog parents. Let’s see how low we can limbo.

Pond in Nov 19

Native plants in and around our pond.

Artenema fimbriatum (koala bells) – blue or pink flowers in summer.

Bacopa monnieri (Brahmi, memory herb) – small white flowers.  Grows in and near water – edible plant.

Carex fascularis (tassel sedge).  Grows in moist to wet soils in part shade, up to a metre high.

Centella asiatica (Gotu kola, pennywort).  Edible plant.  Grows in part shade in moist soils.

Cissus Antarctica (kangaroo vine)    Planted in the drier area around the pond.

Doodia aspera (prickly rasp fern).  Grows in moist areas, nice pink new growth.

Finicia nodosa

Hibbertia scandens (guinea flower)   Flowers in shade,

Isolepsis cernua (Live wire) – low growing grass with interesting bright seed heads.

Juncus flavidus (billabong rush)

Libertia paniculata – in moist areas near pond in shade, alongside ferns. White flowers in early spring.

Lythrum salicaria (purple loosestrife)- growing in drier areas near pond.  Dark purple flowers in autumn.  Dies down in winter.

Marsilea mutica (rainbow nardoo) – pond plant.  Beautiful patterned leaves.

Microlaena stipoides (weeping grass) – grass surrounding pond.  Grows well in shade in damp or dry conditions.

Mazus pumlio (swamp mazus) – grows in moist soil.  White flowers in autumn.

Nymphoides montana – pond plant with beautiful yellow flowers.

Peperomia (native) – native succulent that grows well in shade.

Poa labillardiere (tussock grass) – grown in drier areas around the pond

Schoenoplectus Mucronatus – rush growing in the pond.  Interesting spiky seed pods.

Tetragonia tetragonoides (warrigal greens) – edible plant. Grows very well in damp or dry soil in part shade. Delicious to humans and also chickens.

Tripladeua cunninghamii (bush lily) – grows well in part shade, pink flowers in spring. I  killed it.

Dragonfly dark later

Murder, imprisonment and native grasses

This blog starts and ends calmly and peaceful as we consider lush grass growing.  In the middle there’s some horrifying interspecies violence – I’ll tell you before it happens so you can look away if you need to.

When we first into our place nearly a decade ago, there was plenty of grass in the backyard.  Note, I don’t say lawn.  Which is fine by me, since an array of weeds offer much better nutritional resources for chickens than a monocultural sward.

So a sequence of domestic fowl have enjoyed the delicious mix of trad, ehrharta, buffalo grass, couch, and a plethora of other greens as a supplement to their laying mash and scratch mix.   The trad went first.  Chickens absolutely love this horrid weed and have scratched out every shred, producing the fabulously golden yolk that are a definitive feature of your happy free-range egg. For a while the other grasses held on, but, over a few dry winters, as our flock grew to six chooks and an apparently infinite number of semi-resident brush turkeys, the greenery eventually lost the fight.

Sequence of brush turkeys crop

Peak brush turkey

Perhaps not surprisingly, I don’t have a lot of pictures of the muddy home farm during this “trench warfare” period.  And I have absolutely no pictures of the traumatic events that followed.  It’s taken me nearly a year to get up the gumption to write about it.

Baby brush turkey astonished

Very cute baby brush turkey hanging out with our chicks a couple of years back

Until November last year, the many brush turkeys hanging around the backyard were an annoyance but nothing more: scratching up seedlings, stealing eggs and making free with the chickens’ dinner.  The baby brush turkeys liked to huddle up to our newly hatched little chicks.  The older turkeys also seemed to like hanging out with the flock but were easily spooked by them.  It only took boss chook Treasure giving a funny look to have the brush turkeys scatter or even flap away. But that all changed last spring.

A large male brush turkey started hanging around, pursuing and doing his best to mount the chickens.  One day we noticed that several of the girls’ combs were bloodied, and concluded it was the work of this nasty animal. The neighbours had spotted the sex predator too. There were rumours of pet birds being attacked all up and down the street.

Concerned, we decided to keep the girls in Colditz, the steel-framed predator-proof cage for a day or two, rather than letting them roam the yard as usual.  The next day I was working from home, and by the afternoon, seeing no signs of the turkey and feeling sorry for the poor chooks pacing up and down in their constrained night quarters, like Steve McQueen in the Great Escape, I decided to let them out for a few hours.  I went back to my computer.

If you are easily upset, now is the time to look away.

Brush turkey wattle closeup.jpg

Male brush turkey extreme closeup

Late that afternoon I heard a pitiful squawking and rushing down to the yard.  All of the chooks were bleeding copiously from their scalps and two of our poor girls were mortally wounded, with huge slashes through their backs and terrible gouges to their heads.  Then we heard pitiful sounds from the last of our neighbour’s free-range chooks.  We jumped across the fence to rescue it, but too late – its eye had been pecked out. All three birds died soon after.

Needless to say I was inconsolable.

The only way I could atone my guilt was to make the surviving chickens a safe place to stay.  So that Saturday, in a frenzy, I pulled together an implausible collection of wire, wood from futon bases, half an aviary, parts of a picket fence, innumerable pieces of bamboo and that old standby, trampoline netting, to make a 8 square metre covered run adjacent to Colditz. The run featured Palm Beach as an elevated hangout zone and egg laying area, perches at a range of heights and diameters and its own personal orange tree.

The chooks were safe, and over the next few weeks slowly recovered from their head wounds.  But they weren’t happy.

So over the festive season, I had another crack, making an extension the same size again, which admittedly did involved purchasing a couple of steel droppers and a box of screws.  Otherwise, I was extraordinarily pleased I was able to make the “outdoor room” entirely from rubbish I scrounged from the side of the road.

Chook run extension

The outdoor room, featuring cot railing and an indoor clothes hanger feeding hatch

Now the chooks were secure in their generous run, an unworthy thought came to me.  The scorched earth of the backyard, without a single blade of grass and denuded of  every remaining seed, was now perfectly prepared for something I’d long aspired to have – a backyard full of native grass. The kids had started expressing a longing for a little bit of soft lawn to walk on, and I was keen to take on the challenge.  Buffalo, kikuyu and ehrharta outcompete native grasses, but thanks to the chooks, I doubted there was a single weed seed left on the premises.

It was time.

I decided to mostly use microlaena stipoides, weeping grass, a fine bladed grass that tolerates shade and enriched soils and, once established, copes with minimal watering.  I ordered a couple of hundred grams of a hybrid microlaena called Griffin weeping grass, a low growing variety bred by the Department of Botany at the University of New England.

My first sowing was in early summer – the best time for this variety – warm enough for a speedy germination and not so hot it’s impossible to keep the seed bed moist.  I raked in the seeds – they shouldn’t be buried more than 1 and a half centimetres deep – and covered them with the veggie nets that I usually use to protect seedlings from bowerbirds, chickens and possums that aren’t trying too hard.

The Great Berowra Storm of Christmas 2018 treated us relatively kindly ( two broken skylights is a pretty good outcome from golf ball sized hail) but did significantly undermine my efforts to even distribute those rather expensive grass  seeds.  But I guess the torrent saved me watering for a few days, as well as reminding me why we needed grasses and their root systems to stop our topsoil flowing away on those occasions when our yard becomes a tributary to Berowra Creek.  On hot days when we didn’t experience a climatic apocalypse, I did get out the hose for the first month or two – microlaena needs to be kept moist until its root system is sorted.

In the light of its inpropitious beginnings, the microlaena has done pretty well, coping with the chooks snacking on it a couple of days a week.  That brutish brush turkey has never returned (I suspect foul play given his cruel behaviour to most of the hens in the street) but we like to let them roam when we can keep an eye on them.  And the native grass has remained beautifully green through yet another very dry winter.  In the picture above, alongside the weeping grass, you can see my low-skill terracing with fallen wood and another native grass, poa labillardiere. The aim is to redirect any storm water into our new pond (more on that another day)

So after two days of drenching rain,  I decided this afternoon to sow another packet of griffin weeping grass, filling the gaps scoured by last December’s floods.  Yet more trampoline netting has been hauled out of the shed to protect the newly spread seed from the chooks on their weekend perambulations.

Even if I’m slightly nervous of what they might do to my baby grasses, I’m grateful to our girls.  Without their commitment to scratching and salad, we would never have got this far, and certainly not without reaching for roundup or something equally scary.   I hope I can return the favour by keeping them safe (if not always happy) and feeding them plenty of greens.

Microlaena and stepping stones

More stories of life, death and gardening from our backyard

Night of the living mulch: cover crops for the zombie apocalypse

Andy Ninja’s great escape

Chicken TV: the make-over show

DIY by subtraction: the kiwifruit arbor

The phantom egg eater: caught in the act

Scientifically hot: in which I fall in love with the Berkeley method of composting

Revenge is a dish best served cold.  Particularly when you are seeking revenge against a tree. Given the pace of their lifestyle, you have to drag it out for those guys to really feel it.

So how better to punish a seed-strewing, bat-choking, weedy cocos palm than – not simply chopping it down – but committing it to a doom of eternal proximity to rotting horse shit?

Surrounded by palm.jpg

How to torment a cocos palm: shower it with shite

What a red-letter year it has been for composting.  The year when I discovered the Berkeley method.  It sounds like natural form of contraception and it is hot, but it’s better than that because it works.  Time after time after time.

I have thought I had achieved the giddy heights of hot composting before, long ago when Treasure the white Sussex was queen of the chicken run, freaking me out by regularly supping from my vat of compost tea.

Treasure and compost tea

The much missed Treasure and her dangerous drinking habits

In those days I was convinced that the way to fast, weed free compost was my trusty tumbler,  still the first destination for our kitchen scraps and chookhouse bedding.  The tumbler certainly steams when you crack it open to add the week’s potato peel and apple cores, and not just on these winter mornings.

But I guess, like so many other lovely things, you don’t necessarily know whether you’ve really hot-composted, until you actually experience it  Then you realise that on all those previous occasions when you thought what you were doing was pretty hot, you were wrong, and in reality it was all distinctly tepid.

So what is the Berkeley method of hot composting and how do you get some of that good stuff?

The Berkeley method involves making a big heap of compost – at least a metre tall and a metre wide – all at once, using layers of high nitrogen (“green”) and high carbon (“brown”) ingredients.

I’ve used a a range of different “browns” – liquidambar and bamboo leaves, pine needles, sugar cane hay from the the chook cage (with its own little payload of nitrogenous ordure) and even cardboard boxes ripped up into small pieces.  This is a soothing activity to do in front of television and the only part of compost-making I can get my children have anything to do with).

Berkley heap 3

Berkley method heap 2 featuring lots of bamboo leaves

I usually try to sneak in some partially-rotted “warm” compost from my tumbler as a “green” layer low down in the heap just to keep our household waste systems from being overrun with biomass.  As a small household, we don’t really produce enough veggie scraps all at once to create the bulk materials needed for the Berkeley method.  Other people use thin layers of lawn clipping but we have chooks so we don’t have any need for lawn mowing.  That’s an understatement really – for much of the last three years our backyard has looked like the Somme.

My mainstay for “greens” is, ironically, distinctly brown – vast quantities of equine ordure, acquired at $1 a bag from the horsey country on the other side of the Berowra Waters Ferry.  I’m pretty sure my ten or fifteen bucks, left in an honesty box by the front gate, ends up in the pocket of a shovel-fit teenager, which gives me a warm glow.  You could get the same amount for free in another farm down the road if you had a trailer and good upper body strength.

It’s a fun weekend outing – I particularly enjoy coming back across on the ferry with the windows down, suffusing the palatial surroundings of the marina and its smattering of Hollywood celebrities with the fruity ambience of a stable.

Ferry

The always picturesque Berowra Waters Ferry

But if your idea of a good time doesn’t involve intimate encounters with 150 kilos of horse manure, there are other options.  Not carnivore poo though.  Just in case you happen to live near a zoo and were thinking of a midnight raid for high nitrogen materials, Robert D. Raabe, Professor of Plant Pathology, Berkeley, in his detailed account of hot composting, reminds us that tiger and lion shit are not worth the effort.

In my first few heaps I also added some wood ash after each layer – it‘s high in potassium, can correct acidic soils and since our wood-burner produces loads of it I’m always trying to think of uses for it.  There’s also a kind of wedding like gaiety to hurling handfuls of white powder over the mountain of poo which I really enjoy.

I think I got a bit carried away on my last batch of compost, though, as I discovered when my youngest did a science experiment: broad beans growing in three different soil types.  My newly made compost was literally off the scale on the Ph test. My vegetables are probably suffering but I suppose at least I now have a convenient lime-rich place for disposing of fresh corpses.

Each layer of your heap should be watered as you build it, til the whole thing is about as damp as a squeezed out sponge.  If it’s especially wet or hot weather you can cover it to stop it from drying out or getting soaked.  As you can see in the piccies above, I roofed my first Berkeley heap with palm fronds, partly to keep my heap from getting too dry and partly just to continue to torment the spirit of the evil tree they were hacked from. None of my subsequent heaps have had a cover, though, and they seemed to turn out just fine.

To be honest, while there are lots of really complicated rules for hot composting – for instance, this article gives a mind bogglingly detailed run down on the carbon-nitrogen ratios of a range of composting materials.  But in my experience, a rough and ready mix of about equal quantities of “greens” and “browns” just seems to work.

Then after you’ve built your heap, you just leave it for about five days.  All the while you are at work – sitting in meetings, shuffling paper or cruelly inflicting post-structuralist theory on innocent undergraduates – that aerobic bacteria is doing its thing.  It’s a curiously comforting thought.

Chickens on heap from side crop

Chooks cleaning up the last few weed seeds

Then you turn your heap.  The aim of Berkeley method hot composting is to create a friendly environment for the right kind of bacteria and fungi – the ones that like plenty of air.  They work quickly, produce plant nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorus, and magnesium and even smell pretty good (trust me on this).  Over the first few days after you build your compost pile, a sequence of different bacteria go to work – first the psychrophilic, then the mesophilic, and finally, once the heap gets to about 37 degrees celcius, the thermophilic.  Once the pile gets up to between 55 and 70 degrees, the heat kills off weed seeds and most insects (and some bacteria too).  But the thermophilic bacteria quickly use up all the degradable materials unless the heap is turned.

But how do you know if your heap is hot enough?  Here’s the advice of one permaculture site: “as an simple guideline. if you can put your arm into the compost up to the elbow, then it is not at 50 degrees Celsius, and is not hot enough”.  If the idea of a forearm coated in hot shit doesn’t appeal to you, you can also use a cake thermometer.  But perhaps not on the same day as the school bake sale.

I don’t bother with thermometers.  After the allotted number of days, I just dig into the guts of the pile. If steam comes pouring out, creating a sort of horse-poo sauna for the shovel wielder, things are cooking.  Best not to turn your heap in your PJs or your ballgown,though.

I’m not so sure about white stuff you can see in the picture on the right. According to the University of Illinois‘ composting boffins, this is actinomycetes – “a higher-form bacteria similar to fungi and molds” which feeds on the woody bits in the pile and helps make well cooked compost smell earthy. Robert Raabe, Dr “Afraid of lion poo”, thinks it’s a good sign in hot compost.  But it usually turns up in an nonaerobic pile so this pic indicates that while my current heap is hot it probably have been turned a bit earlier.

As the old joke says “What’s the difference between a good gardener and a bad gardener? Two weeks”.  Still, with a turn over and a bit of oxygen, I reckon my compost will get back on track. A perfect heap might require that horse do-do up to the elbow but a pretty good heap seems to be manageable without that level of commitment.

My technique for turning the pile is quite primitive – kind of like knocking down a stinky sand castle.  I dig into the steaming centre of the pile, shovel the hottest part of the heap to one side (up against the remains of the tortured ex-cocos palm). Eventually the undercooked layer above caves in in a satisfying way.  I do that a few times, so the outside part of heap is in the middle, ready to heat up again.

Somtimes when I’m tending my compost heap, I feel like I’m channelling the spirit of a brush turkey dad, as he scratches his big pile of mulch around, keeping the temperature just right for his clutch of eggs.

Brush turkey mound

Brush turkey bloke tending his nest

Having turned your heap, you let the heat build up for a couple of days and then you turn it over it all again.  And then again every two days or even once a day if you ever get over-excited. That goes on for about two weeks.  The write up of the Berkley method in the University of California’s Vegetable Research and Information Center (my kind of place) stresses that “outdoor exercise is an added benefit” of hot composting.

For a kayaker, all that shovelling is not bad thing at all, leaving aside the fabulous pile of compost you get at the end of the three weeks of relentless digging.  It’s hot composting and hopefully you get hotter in the process of making it.  Truly, there is no downside.

Some other posts about gardening experiments

My attempts to grow luffa…. no it doesn’t come from the sea!

Night of the living mulch: cover crops for the zombie apocalypse

The ginger family stole my brain!

DIY by subtractions: the kiwifruit arbor

From battery to backyard: the story of our rescue chickens, Dusty, Crumpet and Ruff

Turning our garden into whipbird habitat by making a mess

References

Antonella Anastasi, Giovanna Cristina Varese & Valeria Filipello Marchisio
(2005) Isolation and identification of fungal communities in compost and vermicompost, Mycologia, 97:1, 33-44

Yan Guo, Jinliang Zhang, Changyan Dengand Nengwu Zhu (2012) Spatial Heterogeneity of Bacteria: Evidence from Hot Composts by Culture-independent Analysis Asian-Australian Journal of Animal Science Vol. 25, No. 7 : 1045 – 1054

Sweet dreams, baby avocado

It’s hard to love a plant with a death wish.  I’m on my third generation of spindly unwell looking avocado trees now and it’s starting to get old.

It’s hard to believe that a plant that springs spontaneously from seeds carelessly cast into the compost could be so very hard to keep alive.  Pretty much all the other trees I’ve sourced from the prompt and knowledgeable online nursery Daley’s Fruits have taken off without a hitch, but after several years of abject failures I’m starting to feel like the Avocado Angel of Death.

Or maybe it’s not me, maybe it’s my naughty chickens.  My avocados need protection, by which I don’t mean armed body-guards, though I’m not saying I haven’t considered that.

I planted a low-chill nashi pear a few years ago in a perilous location, right next to the giant trampoline that is the social hub for all the neighbourhood kids.  It’s going gangbusters, despite the ever present danger of being crushed by pre-teen gymnasts and the surrounding scorched earth environment created by the chooks.  The enclosure I made for it out of the slats of a bed base found by the side of the road, for all its “chook-house tolerances”, is still going strong.

And the gate constructed from a surplus-to-requirements Ikea bed continues to serve its purpose of keeping all but the most determined and agile chickens out of my bush tucker garden.

Who knew bedroom furniture could be the key to a flourishing food forest?

With these sleep-related successes in mind, I decided to turn to a wooden cot, long stashed under the house, into surrounds for my two poorly looking avocado trees. You often see cots like this by the side of the road during the council cleanup, so this is a project for everyone, even those without anklebiters.

With the addition of a handful of mismatched screws and a small number of shelf brackets I bought on an over-excited visit to the hardware shop many moons ago, I was able to put two surrounds together from one cot in my dining room in the space of a few hours.  Warning: do check the dimension of your door frames before trying this at home.

The first surround featured the rather stylish cot head and foot, spliced together with the cot base (cut in half).  The four panels for the other were made by bisecting the two sides of the cot.  With a modicum of creativity, I was able to use the holes already drilled in the frame and a few self-tapping screws.  The only time I needed a drill was to add the slightly unglamorous pieces of hardwood across the top, which I included to ramp up the degree of difficulty for ambitious or athletic chickens (Winter the escape artist leghorn, I’m looking at you!) to fly inside.  Those with fatter or more docile chickens might not want to bother with this addition.

The nice thing about repurposing existing furniture if your carpentry skills are as impaired as mine, is that you can rely on the expertise and functional set-square of the person who put together the joints in first place.  So the finished surrounds look fairly regular, despite my inadequacies with a tape measure.

And so far, despite a giant tree being hacked down more or less over the top of them, the surrounds seem to have done the job.  The chickens have done their level best to squeeze between the slats but haven’t quite figured out how.  The avocado roots are no longer being ripped from the ground on a daily basis in the search for invisible but delicious invertebrates, and the trees are (perhaps overly optimistically) producing new leaves.

On my past track record, it seems highly likely that these avocadoes are still doomed, but at least I’ve done my best to put their troubles to bed.  Sleep well, little trees!

Cracking the whip in a messy garden

Typical whipbird picture crop tighter

This is a fairly typical photo of an eastern whipbird.  Thanks to its cracking call, you know with absolute certainty that the bugger’s there somewhere, darting from bug to evasive bug.  But up until recently all of my pics of them were abstract impressionist in style – an suspicion of a smear in the undergrowth.

Which is a pity, because even aside from their excellent call, these are fine looking birds.  I am a fool for anything with a crest, no matter how run of the mill.

But my days of cursing invisible whipbirds are officially over.  Because we now have a  resident pair in our the garden.

My efforts at growing food in surburbia, or at least food for human consumption, have been largely in vain.  Every now and then we get a few bananas or kiwifruit, tamarillos or jerusalem artichokes before the local possums, bowerbirds, cockies, bats and rats figure out they make good eating.

If I have singularly failed to feed us, I have been fairly successful in turning the garden into a tangled mess riddled with trip hazards.  In other words, top drawer whipbird habitat.

And now they’re here, there’s a decent chance they’ll stay.  Whipbird pairs are territorial, usually nesting each year within a few metres of last year’s spot.  And it seems after their chicks are raised, they stick around.

I’ve certainly seen our pair doing their best to defend their territory by seeing off the impudent rivals they spotted in the mirror in the bottom of the garden. Judging from the time they spend singing into it, that mirror has had far more impact on the whipbirds than the horde of male brush turkeys it was intended to discombobulate.

Whipbird midbath calling clear crop long

Eastern whipbird having a lovely sing in the bath

Something I didn’t realise until recently is that the distinctive call of the whipbird is an “antiphonal duet”, just like the call of the koels (or “those bloody koels!” as they are known locally).  The male of the pair produces the whipcrack, followed seamlessly by a “chew chew!” from its female partner.  This kind of singing is usually done by established pairs.

Tactful ornithologists describe whipbirds as “socially monogamous” (a bit like National Party MPs?).  Whipbird researcher Amy Rogers comments that, in general, duetting birds like these have “very low divorce rates” compared to non-duetting birds (Rogers 2004 433).

Juvenile koel calling long

A juvenile bloody koel

Having spent years crouched in the undergrowth surreptitiously observing the sex lives of South Australian whipbirds, Rogers has has concluded that duetting is “acoustic mate guarding” – a way for females to keep close tabs on their other half. In the nests she tracked, twice as many female birds were born as males.  Consequently spots with attractively tangled undergrowth were awash with unattached lady whipbirds seeking a mate and territory.

Whipbirds blokes seem to be a good catch, fetching plenty of food for nestlings, even if they don’t help incubate eggs.  After the youngsters leave the nest, each parent exclusively feeds just one of the fledglings. You can only imagine young whipbirds end up spending a fortune in therapy.

So once a female has hooked up with a male and they’ve nabbed some decent territory, she keep tabs on him by finishing his sentences, as it were.

Female whipbird in vine

I reckon our place, with its undisciplined shrubbery, snake-friendly piles of sticks and vines that loop their way through the trees at perfect garotting height would be damn desirable breeding grounds. I’ve certainly seen the whipbirds gleefully leaping around our carport picking off the window spiders (3/5 for toxicity in the “deadly critters of Australia” book I gave my Scottish spouse to help him settle in when he first arrived).

It may be cockroach infested deathtrap but the whipbirds and the lizards seem to like it here.  I’m not complaining either.

Skink with giant cockroach crop

You’ve got to admire the ambition

References

Frith, C.B. (1992) “Eastern whipbird psophodes Olivaceus listens to fruits for insect prey” Sunbird 22 (2)

Guppy, Michael, Guppy, Sarah, Marchant, Richard, Priddel, David, Carlile, Nicholas and Fullagar, Peter (2017) “Nest predation of woodland birds in south-east Australia: importance of unexpected predators” Emu- Austral Ornithology Vol 117 Issue 1

Mennill, Daniel and Rogers, Amy (2006) “Whip It Good! Geographic Consistency in Male Songs and Variability in Female Songs of the Duetting Eastern Whipbird Psophodes olivaceus” Journal of Avian Biology, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Jan., 2006), pp. 93-100

Rogers, Amy C. and Mulder, Raoul A. (2004) “Breeding ecology and social behaviour of an antiphonal duetter, the eastern whipbird” Australian Journal of Zoology Vol 52 Issue 4 417-435

Rogers, Amy, Langmore, Naomi and Muldera, Raoul (2007)  “Function of pair duets in the eastern whipbird: cooperative defense or sexual conflict?” Behavioural Ecology Volume 18, Issue 1, Pages 182–188

Toon, Alicia, Joseph, Leo and Burbridge, Alan H (2013) “Genetic analysis of the Australian whipbirds and wedgebills illuminates the evolution of their plumage and vocal diversity” Emu – Austral Ornithology Vol 113 Issue 4

More birds to be found in our backyard

A family of collared sparrowhawks – bickering as siblings do

Chilli loving satin bowerbirds, and migratory friends

Mimicking magpies

Female eastern koels, battling over a bloke

Ageing romantic sulphur crested cockatoos

A gorgeous grey goshawk

Bold bug eating birds

Whipbird 5 splashing crop

Join the war effort: grow your own luffa!

Given my history of coldly executing generations of zucchinis in babyhood, it was a high risk endeavour to attempt to grow luffa.  But the charmingly named “dish-rag gourd” is described on-line as a “large aggressive climber“, and apparently is an invasive weed in Uganda.  So I thought I would give it a go.  In fact, maybe I should only attempt to grow plants that sound like they should be banged up for burglary and GBH.

Luffa is a dual utility crop, a bit like our big boofy chickens Shima and Apricot.  We don’t like to mention it when they’re around, but as well as being pretty good at layers, Barred Rocks (like Shima) and Light Sussexes (ie Apricot) make pretty good eating.  Allegedly.  We won’t do it, girls, we really won’t!

I’m not sure how toothsome baby luffa really are but there’s not many vegetables that can be used as a backscratcher, a pillow, a sound-proof liner for steel helmets, a device for cleaning car wind-shields or a filtration system for ship’s boilers, so perhaps we are asking too much for it to be haute cuisine.

Pearl Harbour was obviously a tragic event, but one little known casualty of the bombing of the US Navy was the sudden disappearance of luffas from bathrooms throughout America.  Japan had been the main commercial producer since the 1890s, and so when America entered the war, the luffa supply was suddenly cut off.  In the words of economic botanist W.M.Porterfield: “the same catastrophe that stopped their importation enormously increased the need for them” (1955, 212-3)  and the US War Production Board forbad their delivery, sale or use for anything except filtration systems for ship’s boilers.

I am quite grateful that I’ve not been required to turn over my luffa crop to the authorities for some kind of military emergency.  While I consider it to have been a success, that is relative to my usual abject failure on the gourd growing front.  I managed to grow four mature fruits from three plants.

Dried luffa closeup

Luffa are tropical plants and need a long growing season.  Given that my whole garden is plunged into shade around about the equinox, it was nip and tuck whether the fruits would get big enough to make a decent sized back scratcher. As with zucchini, you have to be patient.  The first rather lovely yellow flowers, appearing in mid-summer, were male and only very late in the season, just as I was about to give up on it as yet another curcurbit failure, did female flowers and tiny perky fruits emerge.

On the positive side, the little luffa plants proved very easy to move around the garden so they could follow the sun – from  little pots on the windowsill in spring, to hefty tubs on the sunniest spot on our patio.  Since they’re actually a pretty vigorous plants for growing in a pot, I ended up moving one plant yet again, to the base of my “black widow” trellis.  This spot had previously been the kiss of death for any vine I attempted to grow there.

Innumerable generations of passion fruit and even a choko plant have turned up their toes on that higgledy-piggledy bamboo lattice (what can I say: I’m a slow learner).  By some kind of miracle, the luffa survived despite the fact I violated innumerable transplanting by-laws by moving a metre long vine covered in leaves in the middle of summer.  It survived the chooks (more evidence that luffa are probably not worth eating), and produced a haul of three fruits.  Okay, Porterfield reckons 20 fruits per vine is “to be expected”, but I find it’s best to cultivate low expectations.

There are lots of videos on YouTube sharing advice on getting the fibrous “skeleton” out of the luffa gourd.  Which would have been more helpful if they weren’t a sequence of mutually contradictory tips.  The smart money seems to be on leaving your luffas to dry as long as possible.  Some of mine dried out a bit while hanging on the vine, but I left the rest on a sunny windowsill for a couple of months.  In theory that skin should go hard, brown and leathery and then you can just peel it off, shake out the seeds and voila, there’s your luffa.

The alternative suggestion for those who were too impatient to wait for dry skin or, whose luffa (like mine) seemed likely to rot away in the meantime, involved cracking and carefully peeling off the skin and then squeezing and massaging out the remaining flesh and seeds in a bowl of water.  Whacking the flaccid luffa a few times on the sink to help shift the flesh was also recommended by one YouTuber.  The whole thing had a faintly sordid feel, like some sort of low rent vegetable s&m club, but did seem to work reasonably well in the end.  After a few days of drying out on the windowsill, I now have a suite of firm, fibrous and faintly grubby looking luffa that my children will no doubt refuse to have anything to do with.

So what’s new?  The vision of excited children running into the verdant backyard to pluck ripe organic snowpeas and strawberries has never really gelled with the scorched earth look of our chicken-denuded yard and proliferation of high-security possum-proof vegetable beds made of wire sock drawers found by the side of the road.  So I’ll let yet another self-sufficiency fantasy go.  The kids will remain (un-ex?)foliated but I’m still a seed saver – I’ll give “the dishrag gourd” another go.

 

References
Porterfield, W.M. (1955) “Loofah: The Sponge Gourd” Economic Botany, Vol. 9, No. 3 (Jul. – Sep., 1955), pp. 211-223

 

Nude trees and naughty birds

Who lives in our backyard?  How would I know? I haven’t been paying attention.

I see a flash of black and white down by the chook run and what do I think?  “Magpie”.  Humans, huh?

Yesterday, ominous thumps and crashes below the lightning-riven radiata pine had me racing to see if it had finally succumbed to a pincer movement of termites and southerlies.  But no, the demolition job was courtesy of a pied currawong, ripping the tree apart like it was a lego construction.  Well, a lego construction with integral insects.  Since in the (distant) future Lego will apparently be “sustainable”, one day this might even be a thing.

Perhaps it’s for the best that Lego’s green-washing target date is a decent decade and a half away.  Depending on how significant bark is to the structural rigidity of defunct pine trees we might need to use those infestation-proof plastic bricks – we’ve got enough of them under furniture and half buried in the garden – to rebuild our crushed house.

That’s if the currawongs are here to stay – and they might be.  Back in the day, before the ’40s, currawongs came down from the mountains to visit Sydney over the winter, but now they hang out in the big smoke all year round.  They like it down here, snacking on cute little birds and munching up the tasty berries of our attractive invasive plants.   If I want to save the roof, that monster privet the size of a redwood may have to go.

And a sighting today of another naughty black bird has cast doubt on the long-settled verdict in the Case of the Phantom Egg-Eater.

There was a stramash this morning between a crowd of brush turkeys and an crow, the latter carrying something that from a distance might appear to resembled a chicken’s egg.  I have no pictures of the actual incident but only an image extracted from the raven’s dream, in which hens’ eggs are light as a feather and easily borne in the beak for leisurely later consumption in convenient locations.

Later investigations showed that a freshly laid chook egg had indeed be devoured, but, in addition, one of the fake plastic eggs, carefully placed in the nest with to confuse and baffle hungry brush turkeys, had also vanished.

I’m not sure what this tells you about corvid intelligence but to me it suggests that ravens are optimists.  Apparently young European ravens are extremely curious.  In experiments where juvenile birds were offered “novel inedible items”, it seems, “birds never missed any potentially edible item … even with “highly cryptic objects”.”  I think it would be fair to call last year’s Easter hunt left-overs “highly cryptic objects”.  Maybe this was a young ‘un because apparently adult ravens are “neophobic”.  I’m assuming this doesn’t mean harbouring a hatred for Keanu Reeves in the Matrix sequels (though this is not an unreasonable viewpoint), but rather preferring actual foodstuffs to eccentric plastic replicas.

Where does the arrival of this new mob of razor sharp egg-robbers leave our prospects of our home-grown protein?  I can almost certainly outwit a brush turkey, but the socially adept, tool-using raven with the problem solving skills of a seven year old might give me a run for my money.  Perhaps I should plant some more broad beans.

And there’s more backyard black-feathered bandits where they came from.  The red-eyed, jet-feathered male koels are gone for the season, but the bowerbirds are back – mostly the “greens” – olive, stripey young bloods and females – but every now and then there’s a flash of violet-black as a grown male, glossy and gorgeous, disappears, full bellied, into the shrubbery, after a exhausting afternoon of shredding my kiwifruit vines.

But, despite my doziness, there was no way I could mistake today’s most magical visitor for a common or garden magpie.  Nude trees held no allure for her.  She watched me, still and cautious, from a leafy branch low in the hibiscus, patiently waiting for maybe five long minutes while I snapped away incredulously.

I reckon she came after the noisy miners that have descended on us over the winter, yipping and snapping at the wattle birds.  Last I saw the sparrowhawk, she was gliding off through the jungle at the bottom of the neighbour’s garden, indignant miners in hot pursuit.  I’m hoping she got the best of them.  What a fitting end for those hateful lerp eaters – fastidiously “killed, plucked and eaten”, all the while clutched in a sparrowhawk’s long and elegant middle toe.

I hope she’ll be back.  I’ll be keeping watch.

Death toll on the windowsill

This punnet of celery is 900 years 9 months old.  It’s a heritage variety, lovingly protected from the wicked hybridising ways of multinationals, raised without recourse to superphosphate or pesticides, its seeds collected and harboured by sequence of people of good will, finally given a new home on a windowsill that has scarcely ever seen any form of domestic cleaning product.   And look how it has repaid me and all the hippies before me that sought to give it life.

At some point during the epic period of time it has taken this recalcitrant celery to grow to its current puny dimensions, I  succumbed to a pack of genetically modified and chemically drenched celery seedlings from Bunnings.  The evil celery has been planted out, watered, mulched, fertilised, endured winter, had a spring growth, been mulched again, and seen the inside of at least three soups.  But it’s all too hard for our home-sown hero.

I wish I could claim that this diminutive plant was a radical experiment in developing kitchen-garden bonsai, or the result of a daring hybridisation of celery and genetic material from Methuselah, 4,845-year-old Great Basin bristle-cone pine, which holds the current record for the oldest tree in the world.  Indeed, I’m sure any hypothetical future celery sticks that might be harvested from this uninspiring specimen would have the same flavour and texture as a lump of a four thousand year old pine bark.

Sadly, however, this is no horticultural break-through.  It’s normal service. This is how we raise seeds in our Berowra backyard.  The fact that the celery seedling is still clinging to life at all is, in truth, a triumph.

Here’s a typical sequence of events.

1. I observe a change in the seasons: a warm breeze, the hint of autumn rain.  It’s late winter/ late summer – just the right time to put in some seedlings.  I resolve to grow some.

2. Weeks pass.  Sometimes months.  Eventually in a late-night frenzy of consumer excitement, I order about a hundred packets of seeds from the prompt, informative and ever-reliable Green Harvest: eighteen types of beans, twelve types of rocket, cherry tomatoes shaped like a banana, a rubik’s cube and the Sphinx, vegetables I don’t like/have never heard of/have never successfully grown/wouldn’t know what to do with even if I succeeded in growing them.

3. Seeds arrive in my postbox in a flash.  I file them carefully in an enormous box that previously stored floppy disks, fastidiously organised by season of planting and vegetable family, and filled with a panoply of seed packets, mostly well past their “use by” date. Weeks pass. Sometimes years.

4. One Sunday afternoon, in deep denial about the terminal decline of the weekend, I plant out at least four punnets of each of the hundred varieties.  Space on the kitchen windowsill is now at a premium.

5. Within a week or two, nearly all of the seeds emerge and turn into thriving little plantlets, thrusting up into the light, energised by the stored resources of their subterranean seed.  They grow a second thrilling set of leaves and sometimes a third.

… and then suddenly everything stops. It’s as if we’ve had a sneaky overnight visit from a vegetable hating comic-book super villain with a freezing deathray.

6. Tormented by the failure of my seedlings to grow even a millimetre, I am prompted to do one of the following:

(a) Anxiously over-water them. They rot.  I throw them into the compost heap.

(b) Vengefully serve them up a little tough love (ie, neglect to water them).  They maintain the same utter stasis but look a little bit crispier.  Eventually, I throw them into the compost heap.

(c) Bemusedly supply them with more light and gentle healing rain by putting them outside in the Valley Of The Shadow of Death (aka the zone at the edge of the carport).  From here they will inevitably tumble to their doom, knocked down by a promenading brush turkey, a pair of wrestling brush-tailed possums, a child with a skipping rope and/or RB on a bee line for the first cup of tea at the end of the working day.  I swear a lot, scrape up the seed raising mix and throw it into the compost heap.

(d) Despairingly give up on producing decent sized seedlings and abandon the flimsy weaklings to their fate in the bottom of the garden.  The following day will be the hottest of the year and by six in the evening the underprepared seedlings have been vaporised, leaving, at best, one or two limp greyish leaves draped over the mulch as a cruel reminder of the three months I’ve just wasted.

But it doesn’t have to be like this.  Surely.

I have some ideas for diminishing the windowsill death toll.  This is a non-exhaustive list and I welcome further suggestions.

1. Defrosting my static seedlings with Essence of Death (TM) compost tea.  Treasure the Light Sussex drinks it with gusto and she has grown to an enormous size so surely it must give the seedlings a little vim and vigour.

2. Treating the babies to the occasional little holiday in the veggie garden, to suck up the rays and meet new friends.

3. Experiment with newspaper pots so plant and container can go, holus bolus, into the ground.  The only outstanding issue with this plan, given the volume of newsprint bought by our household, is whether plant pots made of iPads and laptops are biodegradeable.

4. Plant everything out under veggie nets or horticultural fleece.  With lucky, the seedlings, however feeble and under-developed, will transpire a bit less in those tricky first days.  At worst, this will both delay the moment when I realise that it’s all been in vain and provide a fitting burial shroud.

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.