gardening

The ladybirds and the swallows stole my morning. Twice.

by frogpondsrock on December 10, 2010

in blogging,Distractions galore!,fauna and flora,gardening

Alternate titles could be. “This is why I don’t get any housework done” or “The Spouse is grumpy with me again.”

Time has a habit of quietly slipping through my fingers, when you couple this with the fact that I am very easily distracted it can quickly add up. A lost morning here, a wasted afternoon there but luckily time is relative and a wasted morning in the The Spouses eyes is time well spent in mine.

I went outside to start a load of washing, (yes my washing machine is still outside) and as I walked down the steps to the water tank to turn the tap on, the ducks peeped at me, reminding me that I hadn’t fed them. So I changed course and fed the ducks and wandered around in the veggie garden for a bit looking for hidden nests. The ducks have a pen off to the side of the veggie garden and I pulled down part of the fence so that they had access to all of the garden.

On the way out of the garden I noticed that the new growth on my cherry trees was a bit curly and deformed. The damage wasn’t that widespread so I nipped back inside, (walking straight past the empty washing machine) to grab the secataurs and a bucket so that I could snip off all the diseased parts of the tree to stop it spreading.

Once I started to snip off the leaves I could see that the curling was caused by clusters of little black sap suckers that looked like a cross between a flea and an aphid. The weather has been quite humid here lately with lots of rain so I am on the lookout for mould in the garden as well. Aphids produce a honeydew, which the ants love to eat and the sight of ants crawling all over a plant is often the first sign that aphids are about (see I am getting distracted again) The sticky honeydew is also the perfect environment for black sooty mould to appear and cause the leaves to shrivel and die as well.

The cherry trees had already been well chomped on by the stray cows that wreaked bovine havoc the other day and now aphids were chomping on the new growth. It isn’t looking good for cherries here this year at all.

As I was busily snipping away at the tips of the tree I noticed that the ladybirds were all over the tree as well, hiding in the folds of the leaves eating aphids and having ladybird sex.

So there I was mid-snip faced with a dilemma, did I stop removing the leaves full of aphids and let the ladybirds do their job or did I keep on snipping?

I kept on snipping.

Normally I would burn the diseased leaves of a plant but that was impossible as these leaves were also covered with ladybirds, ants and small spiders. So I emptied the leaves out onto a tray and grabbed my camera instead. I also started to worry that the ladybirds would lay their eggs on these soon to be dead leaves, thinking that their babies would hatch out to a feast of aphids, so I moved all the ladybirds that were having sex onto the honeysuckle, as that still had pockets of aphids chomping away on it.

When I came inside to edit the photos I could hear The spouse banging away rebuilding parts of the balcony, the guilt got the better of me and I thought I better go and offer to help before I got sprung sitting in front of the computer. Again. The Spouse didn’t need me getting in the way my help so I wandered off up the driveway to my unfinished studio.

I have been watching the swallows zooming in and out of my studio for days now I hadn’t seen any signs of a nest or any swallow poo, so I assumed that they were just hunting the trapped insects that were flying around the ceiling. I went and sat quietly in the back of the shed watching them as I daydreamed about shelves and worktables instead of bare concrete floors.

As I was quietly sitting there one of the swallows flew in underneath a piece of loose sisalation in the ceiling. I was quite surprised by this as swallows make mud nests on the side of buildings under the eaves, so I traipsed back down to the house to grab my camera and before “The Spouse could say I thought you were doing laundry” I had lost another hour.

The swallows are definitely making a nest in the ceiling of my studio and that makes me inordinately happy.

But.

There will be a couple of small problems, like not being able to close the front roller door of my studio for a couple of months so that the swallows can fly in and out but I am sure I can work around that. The Spouse isn’t impressed but he will humour me and will bide his time to say I told you so when my work space is full of swallow shit.

Unfortunately when I began to edit the ladybird photos, as I am still learning how to use the macro lens, most of them were crap. The depth of field was wrong, or the photos weren’t as crisp as I liked and shots that looked ok in camera were blurry on the screen. So skilfully avoiding The Spouse I went back outside with my camera and took some more photos. A lot more.

I was much happier with these and before I knew it most of the day had vanished and I still hadn’t done any laundry.

Fast forward four days and I am still messing about with the same batch of ladybirds and cherry leaves. I left the leaves in a container on the table outside so that any ladybirds could fly away before I burned the leaves. As per usual I forgot about them and only went back to check on them yesterday. The leaves were shrivelling up and the aphids are dying but the ladybirds are still madly crawling all over the leaves chomping away and mating.

This reinforces my belief that I should just leave things alone. If I had not snipped the leaves, the ladybirds would have done the job for me and cleaned up most of the aphids. As it is by being a hasty human and interfering with the natural order of things here I have mucked up a mini eco-system.I have moved most of the ladybirds down to the cherry tree which still has some aphids left on it. I found a leaf with ladybird eggs on it so I have wedged that into a nook in the middle of the honeysuckle and I am keeping an eye on it. The Spouse cracked the shits and ended up doing the laundry himself, making me eligible for worst housekeeper of the year award again and finally five days later I am pressing publish.

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Grey Aphids.

by frogpondsrock on November 23, 2010

in Distractions galore!,environmental stuff,fauna and flora,gardening,photography

I have a large honeysuckle that grows over the balcony rail, it is only a few feet away from my computer space and in the spring and summertime the perfume is divine. I often try to photograph the honey eaters as they drink the nectar from the flowers or the silver eyes and wrens as they pick insects from the leaves.

This year the plant is absolutely covered with grey aphids there are zillions of the fat little fuckers happily sucking the life out of the flower buds.

As soon as “The Spouse” sees aphids he gets an itchy trigger finger and wants to start madly spraying soapy water everywhere to kill the little sap suckers.

I am not that hasty. I like to adopt a wait and see approach to pest management. We have a very good ecological balance here and I have found that it only takes a week or so before all the predatory insects find the veritable feast on the honeysuckle.

Also while the Aphids are sucking the life out of the honeysuckle flowers I know where they are, the honeysuckle is a tough plant and it will recover. I would much rather have a large population of Aphids on one plant that can cope instead of all over the garden on my more fragile plants.

So yesterday when I should have been working on various projects and answering your emails, I was photographing the busy ecosystem that is contained within one plant in my garden.

The birds come in the early morning to breakfast on the aphids.

There are ladybirds everywhere, gorging themselves on fat juicy aphids. (photo credit: Veronica took this first shot)

I counted at least four different types of parasitic wasp busily hunting aphids.They were far too flitty and zoomy for me to photograph well.

There were lots of different flies feeding on the honeydew the aphids produce as well as two different types of small ant.

As I am writing this I can see a number of finches eating aphids as well, I know that if I move they will fly away and I don’t want to disturb their breakfast. You will just have to imagine them flitting from branch to branch busily pecking aphids off the flower buds.

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Simple frog ponds for your back yard.

by frogpondsrock on November 17, 2010

in fauna and flora,frogs,gardening

This post was inspired by a young man with a burgeoning interest in frogs. I thought I would publish some photos here of the simple frog ponds I have at home.

When my children were small I was the go to “frog lady” of my local area. I would supply a batch of tadpoles to the local primary school so that the children could watch the tadpoles turn into frogs in a living science project.

I live in the Southern Midlands of Tasmania, in an area of dry sclerophyll forest. There are places near me that have evocative names, reminiscent of wetter times. Tiny hamlets called Lower Marshes, Broadmarsh and Green Ponds, but with 200 years of European settlement and a piecemeal approach to land management, the marshes and the green ponds have all been drained and replaced by gorse covered hills and dusty paddocks.

This next photo is of a part of my garden. I was in the process of turning the blue clam shell into a new frog pond, when life intervened. I am so busy as well as very easily distracted, that before I had finished properly positioning the clam shell the rain had filled it up with water and the frogs had filled it with spawn.

This next photo was taken this winter, the large wooden box was a fish tank until it sprung a leak. The spouse fixed the leaks with some silicon and it worked really well as a frog pond for a couple of years. When it finally gave up the ghost and sprung multiple leaks, I put an old eski inside it as well as the plastic orange container thingy. The frogs still use it.

This is a photo of it this morning. It is surrounded by a lovely tangle of raspberry canes, a self sown apricot tree and assorted weeds.

If you look very carefully at this next photo you can see the container of water. This is one of those large black 40 litre buckets with the rope handles that you can buy at any hardware store for about $10. I put it down in the garden and forgot about it. It filled itself up with rainwater, the raspberry canes and grass hid it from sight and the frogs moved in. It is absolutely chockers with tadpoles.

Now for some photos of my more elaborate frog ponds. This next one is an old bath that the spouse rocked into place for me. The dead sticks in the bath were just put there for the lizards to use as a ladder when they fall into the water. An echidna has also fallen in to this bath, just under the water is a large branch and a large ceramic pot which helped the echidna to climb out of the bath. Bull rushes are just poking through the surface as well.

This next photo shows my first frog pond, which is in the middle of a rather grassy garden. I try and leave the grass long so that the frogs have somewhere to hide when they first emerge from the water but it is a bit of a balancing act because it also gives the snakes somewhere to hide as well.

This is another shot of the clam shell frog pond. I have just removed some old shrubs that had shaded the pond and replanted with some grevillias and leucodendrons. The grass is winning at the moment and I should be doing something about it as opposed to just photographing the tangle.

Can you see that reddish coloured weed on the surface of the pond. That is duck weed and it is a great big pain. It reproduces by dividing itself and will quickly cover the surface of a pond or farm dam. I have a love hate relationship with the rotten stuff. I love how it gives the tadpoles protection from hunting birds as well as a surface for newly emerged froglets to hop onto while they take their first breaths of air. I hate how aggressive it is and how it will very quickly smother the pond to the exclusion of all else. I saw some of it in the water plant section of a large hardware chain the other day and I would strongly advise against buying it.

Here is a close up of it. I don’t know its proper name I just call it duck weed. If you are going to buy water plants for your pond I would sit them in a bucket of water inside before I put them into the pond just in case some of this stuff has hidden inside the pot.

What I am trying to say is that a backyard frog pond doesn’t have to cost the earth or be an elaborate set up with pumps and filter systems it can be as simple as an old eski in a wooden box. All the clam shell ponds have rocks and gravel covering their base as well as rocks placed on one side of the pond up to the rim, so that if any frogs that cant climb hop into the water they can hop back out. The rocks also provide the lizards with a handy spot to wait for emerging frogs to hop up for lunch.

All the frogs photographed here are Brown Tree Frogs (Litoria ewingii).These are climbing frogs with large climbing discs on their fingers and webbed toes so the plastic sides of the clam shell ponds don’t bother them at all. Tasmania also has burrowing frogs who have claws for digging on their fingers and toes and they would become trapped in a plastic pond, as they wouldn’t be able to climb out.

There are some more frog photos as well as some links to more frog information here

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At least I have stopped worrying about the end of the Mayan calendar in 2012.

by frogpondsrock on June 25, 2010

in Distractions galore!,fauna and flora,food,gardening

Not that I was worried really, I was more sort of concerned in an abstract kind of way.

I have had a feeling of impending doom for well over twenty years now. It has never been strong enough to actively make me think about it analytically, it has always just been there whispering to me to be prepared, you never know what’s just around the corner.

Maybe I was a boy scout in a former life, who knows?

So I would like to thank Jessica from La Fin DuMond Farm for telling me that her friend is South American and they honestly dont know what all the fuss is about regarding the end of the Mayan calenadar in 2012 as they have no idea what we are on about at all.

So I can scratch that little doomsday scenario off my list.

Back to my feeling of impending doom though and being prepared. In the midst of the hysteria about the Y2K bug I did hedge my bets a little bit and just in case the doomsayers were correct, I prepared for the end of civilization as we knew it by stocking up on salt for preserving meat, candles for nighttime and matches because they were on special, I figured that I would just play it by ear and that was the end of my preparations.

Six years prior to the Y2K doomsday scenario/hysteria we killed a huge pig, the last of my Wilburs and the day that we killed him the fridge and the freezer died. So The spouse and I and 5 year old Veronica were faced with over 200 pounds of pork and no way to keep it all.

At that time we were living in the bus and a shed, “The Spouse” had recently told social security to go and get well and trulied and so our regular income was zero. I was seven months pregnant and replacing the fridge was akin to flying to the moon.

So I preserved the pork by salting it. I kept it in a brine and we ate an awful lot of pickled pork. Once we had eventually eaten all the pork, it took me a further eighteen months before I could even think about eating any pork products at all. But we did not waste one single piece of Wilbur. Not one bit.

So that is why salt was the top of my list for my Y2k preparations.

Fast forward 16 years, the house is nearly finished and money isn’t as tight as it was back then, I am complacent, overweight and lazy. Now that I am not driven by necessity the main vegetable garden has been neglected in favour of the easier kitchen garden.

The kitchen garden is easier because it is harder for the wallabies to destroy it, I see it every day so I remember to water it when the plants are all droopy and it is of a height that makes weeding easy.

But that boy scout from a previous life is still whispering in my ear be prepared, So I have been slowly restoring the veggie garden.

Even though it doesn’t look like it.

This strip of ground is about ten metres long and two foot wide and has just recently been fenced off at either end as it was the easy access for the wallabies to hop down into the garden. So now the only way I can get into this bit of ground to weed it, is to lean through the fence and reach as far as I can towards the wall. It is a pain and it hurts my back. So I have decided to mass plant in here in the hope that all the herbs and greenery will overtake the stickyweed and the couch grass. Even though it just looks like a green mess there is rosemary, calendula, thyme, oregano, silverbeet, kale and comfrey in here, as well as broad beans and snow peas.

This next photo of the veggie garden shows the red currant canes on the right hand side next to the fence, the remains of the lovage canes, a josta berry and more small broad bean seedlings poking through the earth, mixed in with the chickweed, stickyweed, fumitory and couch grass and a zillion honesty plants as well. There is a self sown apricot tree next to the water tank and a tangle of raspberry canes that need cutting back.

Remember it is the middle of winter here so that is why everything is dead looking.

There is a self sown apple tree in the middle of the garden and this year it grew four apples Yay! Amy and I had planted broccoli and cauliflowers along with a zillion broad beans but I forgot to shut the garden gate and the wallabies came in and ate them. I am hopeless like that I wander off leaving a trail of half done jobs behind me all the time. I remember looking at the gate when I was busy with something else and thinking I must shut that gate or the wallabies will wreck the garden, and then the next morning I saw the gate was still open and I still forgot to shut it. *sigh* I think it was probably open for about three days and the wallabies were happy with their snack.

This will do me for now as I can hear that one of the chooks has laid an egg and I need to go down into the bracken and see if I can find a secret nest.

Wish me luck.

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And the winner is…

by frogpondsrock on March 2, 2010

in Amy,blogging,Family,fauna and flora,gardening,The pigs

Not Drowning, Mothering.

I went to Veronica’s yesterday and watched Amy bounce on the trampoline as Vonnie pressed refresh on the bloggie’s twitter page.

I am thrilled to bits to be writing out a congratulatory blog post to the NDM, as her blog is well written and very funny. She writes about her life with humour and honesty and I find myself nodding along in recognition. You really should do yourselves a favour and go on over and check out her blog, I have no doubt you will add it to your favourites.

I had a small visitor for a couple of hours yesterday afternoon and together we went outside and played in the mud.

Then we went down and fed the pigs and had a bit of a chat about how delicious they are going to be.

We went and raided the fruit trees and Amy found that she didn’t like the furry skin on the peaches but was more than happy to munch away on the plums.

This year has been a really good year for most of my fruit trees, due to a wetter than average winter and spring. We normally struggle for water up here and I am really pleased with how much fruit my trees have produced. Amazing what a bit of water does for a plant.

The whole time that Amy and I were pottering around outside, Harry the dog was at our side. Harry loves the apple trees as he is sure that those green balls are just for him.

And finally here is a photo of my latest garden project. The spouse cut an old water tank in half for me. This autumn and winter I will be busily filling it up with sheep poo, mushroom compost and whatever else I can get my hands on. I am going to turn all the vegie garden into a series of raised beds over the next two years, as sitting on a milk crate and weeding is just so much more civilized that kneeling down on my dodgy knees.

Once Amy had gone home I went to turn my laptop on and found that my grand daughter had decorated it for me. That was my day yesterday, how was yours?