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June 5, 2016

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Backyard birds, Fruit, Fruits for shade, Gardening, national parks, Permaculture, Rats, Satin bowerbirds, Seasons, Weather

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A flash of gold and a stash of blue

yellow boat and low cloud horizontal larger

Season of mists and mellow tinnies: the Hawkesbury in fall

Autumn lasted for aroundabout a fortnight this year. The endless summer of an apocalyptic El Nino wrapped up in mid-May, giving the deciduous trees an extremely tight schedule to dispense with their leaves before this weekend’s torrential rain.

“Apollo” muscadino grape vine leaves

The neighbour’s rather confused liquidambar

Liquidambar autumnal leaves

Persimmon leaves turning

Yellowing grape leaf

We’ve had autumnal glory in the kitchen as well. When Keats talked about the “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”, I’m not sure he was thinking about bananas. In theory our crop of tiny fragrant fruits should have been perfect for lunchboxes, but I made the mistake of describing the first-ripened one as “Geoffrey”. After this, not only Geoffrey but all his brothers were deemed “too cute” to be eaten.

Gary Cooper is quite impressed with our collection of home grown bananas

Geoffrey’s cousin

Literally a hand of bananas

As well as the gold in the fruitbowl, there’s been plenty of gold in the trees. The yellow-tailed black cockatoos are back in force, mewling and crunching in the radiata pines.

Yellow tail and autumn leaves horizontal

Fly by from a yellow tailed black cockatoo

And for the first time this year, I’ve noticed the migrating yellow-faced honeyeaters. Thousands of them pass through the Blue Mountains most autumns, it seems, but this year they’ve been funnelled between the mountains and the coast, through the Hunter Valley. I first spotted them darting through the riverside casuarinas at Karuah National Park, on our trip north, but since we’ve been back, I’ve seen flocks of them with their travelling companions, the noisy friarbirds, pouring up the Hawkesbury. I’ve even seen them on the way to work, taking a moment out on their journey to watch the commuters boarding the morning train at Berowra Station.

Noisy friarbirds on the move up the river

Yellow tail captured exactly this time last year

Yellow-faced honeyeater at Berowra Station

But not all the autumnal excitement has been touched with gold. Last weekend, halfway through detaining my broad beans (fencing, netting and a mulch of lavender and liquidambar – doubtless all in vain) I spotted a little collation of royal blue underneath the pomegranate tree. Nerf gun ammunition, the lid of a milk container, a peg. Signs that we need to tidy up the yard, and a hint that randy bowerbirds might just do it for us.

Female bowerbird on the look out for an attractive collection of nerf gun pellets

The beginnings of a bower?

More autumnal reflections from our backyard:

Let them eat light!

Autumn in terminal decline?

Backyard gold

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mccnmatt

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May 14, 2015

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Garden trees, Gardening, Plants and what I know about them, Possums, Seasons

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Let them eat light!

Green and orange for closeup real crop horizontal

It’s persimmon season, but, natch, nothing doing on my little Nightingale tree, despite a grand show of weird naked-looking flowers in the spring. Two fruits nearly made it to the finish line, but the possums got there first.

Gorgeous as the golden fruits are reputed to be as they hang on the leafless trees, 2016, I have decided, will be the year of picking green. The persimmons may well be mouth-puckeringly unripe but as human overlord of this place, I insist that it is I who will enjoy their high-tannin nastiness, and not some upstart marsupial.

In fact, my tree is an old fashioned astringent persimmon: the fruits need to be “bletted” to go super soft and sweet. This can happen far from fruitflies and other critters, deep in the pantry, in the comforting darkness of a paper bag, with only an ethylene-emitting banana for company. I have days when crawling in next to the banana to be bletted myself sounds like a good gig.

In theory, me and my persimmons can hole out for a few weeks in an undisturbed corner and it should work out delectably for both of us.

Persimmon flowers last spring

Leaf shadows

Nightingale persimmon tree

But, really, I don’t care! Harvests mean nothing to me! A barren tree is a beautiful tree.

For now, it’s all about the komorebi, a Japanese word I encountered for the first time a few days ago in the marvellous nature blog, Mildly Extreme.

Because who needs food when you can have sunlight filtering through though autumn leaves?*

Love those leaves…

*but thank god for the Freemont mandarins

*Love those leaves… but thank god for the Freemont mandarins…

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mccnmatt

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February 5, 2015

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Animal pests, Backyard birds, Brush turkeys, Damage caused by chickens, Exclusion pest control, Fruit, Gardening, Plants and what I know about them, Pollination, Soil, Vegetables

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Jailbreak!

“I gotta get outta here!”

Cucumbers will go to desperate lengths to flee an attack-flock of brush turkeys, eh?

“Freedom!” – zucchinis under veggie nets

So is it better to die fighting than live in chains? I’m not sure where my zucchini would stand on this one.

I’ve managed to keep the plants alive under an ancient perforated veggie net, held up by a rusty drum stand and contorted steel reinforcing wire. Shyla the Australorp sneaks through to lay the odd egg but so far the brush turkeys haven’t spotted an entry-point. Which is lucky, because if they made it in, there’s no way they would ever find their way out again. I’d arrive in the garden one morning to find a turkey skeleton splayed out underneath the enormous hole these leaves are bursting through.

The bees don’t seem to have found the great big holes in the netting either. Or perhaps the local pollinators suffer from claustrophobia. I’ve seen loads of male flowers but the little golden zucchinis just seem to wither on the vine. I’m trying to figure out if it’s (a) the plant aborting seedless, non-fertilised fruit (b) blossom end rot, thanks to insufficient calcium (c) rampant powdery mildew, caused by constrained circumstances (d) despair induced by a life Inside or (e) all of the above.

Going, going, gone … doomed baby zucchini

It hasn’t been a good year for jam making, either. Here’s the breba crop which was looking so lovely mid-winter. Not really worth setting aside a day in the kitchen for preserving this one. On the right, “dried figs”, but not as we know them. A few hot days saved me the cost of a dehydrator, but I’m not sure gastronomy is the winner here.

The 2014 breba crop

This is not what I normally think of when someone mentions “dried figs”

And a sad discovery this morning – the lone survivor of my bumper crop of coyly fleshy persimmon flowers ripened, unattended, and was demolished overnight, probably by a young possum taking a leisurely midnight stroll from his summer house above the air conditioner in the granny flat. Only a few days back I was thinking if might be time to wrap the precious persimmon in one of the net exclusion bags sitting neatly folded on the bench in the toolshed.

Persimmon flower retreating from the light

The sad end of an unprotected persimmon

Zero tolerance, it seems, is the only solution. Imprisoning the chickens is mean, imprisoning the possums and the brush turkeys illegal. Whereas imprisoning vegetables, pollination issues aside, seems to work quite well.

Incarcerated lettuce

A new generation of okra seedlings group up under a draining rack

And an older burgundy okra plant, growing through the bars of another tiny prison.

Small scale vegetable prisons seem to do the business for seedlings and your slender or ground hugging plants, but now I have the frame of an aged trampoline at my disposal, I’m thinking big. And I’ve started looking at the superannuated chook tractor with a new eye.

Yes, it has traditionally been Andy Ninja’s lofty sleeping quarters, but with a bit of dusting off, what a fine brush turkey exclusion zone it would make. Perhaps, Andy, it’s time you reconsidered the virtues of Palm Beach, the vernacular modernist architectural masterpiece I painstakingly made you and your feathered friends a year ago, now sadly abandoned by every damn chicken in the flock. Even the brush turkeys don’t try to sleep there.

Now there’s an idea: if the new improved carceral complex with its walk-in prisons doesn’t protect my veggies from assaults by poultry, maybe I should start planting them in the chook house.

Superannuated chicken tractor cum vegetable prison?

Andy Ninja roosting on the chook dome

Andy eyeing up the ex-trampoline, soon to be brush turkey exclusion zone.

Remember Palm Beach, Andy?

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mccnmatt

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November 12, 2014

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

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The inconspicuous, the insignificant and the underwhelming

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

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

Shy persimmon flowers

Persimmon flower retreating from the light

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

Sheltering below the leaves

What they look like when you invade their privacy

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

Too insignificant to pollinate yet

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

One to gather pollen from

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

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

Australomyrtus dulcis flowers – teeny

Midgen berry flower

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

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

Kunzea ambigua looking rather nice elsewhere

Kunzea ambigua – can’t really be bothered

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