Life and Wildlife on the Banks of the Murrumbidgee
I'd given up watching the local radar loop for rain. It's been a long time since we had water falling out of the sky. This year's lambs will be very confused when it happens. The land around us is dimmed by the smoke haze from the fires on the coast and to the south. Jessie... Continue Reading →
After sunset, most birds are prepared to get some sleep. The volatile sulphur-crested cockatoos cease their screeching, the galahs "zip-zip" their way to bed, and even the restless flycatchers actually take a rest. But the Masked Lapwings (vanellus miles) are always on guard, giving out alarm calls day and night. That’s because they live and... Continue Reading →
Thistles and brooms, ryegrass and goosegrass and vetch. The more I learn about the weeds that infest our paddocks, the more I find myself spotting them when we travel. Fancy names, multiple names, "Great Mullein", "Salvation Jane", "Horehound" and "Pellitory of the Wall". Some are clearly at home, well controlled by the climate, or insects... Continue Reading →
A scratch at the door. The dog knows to come around to the laundry. Another scratch at the door. Finally I get up to take a look. It's the termite inspector. I know there are many types of termites all around us, just waiting to have a little chew on the timber parts of the... Continue Reading →
Having a river in your backyard is a lovely idea, not always so pleasant in reality, as fences and dead animals go swirling past in a flood, or when you find out that a city upstream is putting something in the water that shouldn't be there. Waterwatch has been a great way to find out... Continue Reading →
Amazingly, we're done with our main project for 2018! After the bitter weather on our big planting a few weeks ago, I was worried we'd never get our whole Glossy Black Cockatoo project finished. Thankfully, Darren Menachemson and a wonderful crew from ThinkPlace plus a Greening Australia "Adopt a Plot" team came to our rescue.... Continue Reading →
After months of flu last year, I was very excited when Ben Hanrahan from Greening Australia offered help with planting our new Glossy Black Cockatoo area on the steep gully behind the house. It's been a dry year so far, with only scattered amounts of rain making the soil just moist enough for planting. Mostly... Continue Reading →
It's an embarrassment that when I see litter in our paddocks. That's because it's usually my own: one of my tree guards that has blown off and landed in the creek, or among the ti-tree, or strung up against a barbed-wire fence. But collecting them again is the easy part. The problem is what to... Continue Reading →
One of the things I love about gardening is the unexpected arrivals. After being away for three weeks we had a predictable explosion of spring weeds - sticky weed, nettles and grasses especially. Many of them arrived with the sheep manure dug up from under the woolshed a few months ago. Also expected were the... Continue Reading →
Suddenly, while I was still coughing and wheezing from the flu, spring arrived on the hills around us. It seemed as if every type of wattle and fruit tree began to flower simultaneously, even while the mornings remained so cold and frosty I couldn't step outside without going into a coughing fit. Best of all,... Continue Reading →
They look so innocent. But my, they have big teeth. And lots of them. I'm currently not feeling very friendly towards kangaroos. Since we finished this year's main tree planting early I had a chance to go and check on our WOPR planting, a ten hectare plot near the river We started with direct seeding... Continue Reading →
When trees attack they often do so without warning. A few months ago, a massive old eucalypt (I thought possibly a Blakely's red gum, but my identification skills are poor - or maybe a very large Red Box (eucalyptus polyanthemos ) in the crop paddock near the house suddenly turned into a crushing giant squid-shaped... Continue Reading →
Despite the dry ground and heavy frosts, 2017's winter planting season has gone really well. I'm down to a couple of weekends planting extra plots to use up 100 leftover plants. Increasing the number of regular helpers has made a great difference, as has Matthew's reliability and skill as my outstanding Chief Planting Assistant. Plus... Continue Reading →
I love work. I can watch it all day. For several days this year I've had an extra farm assistant in the form of backpacker Emil, who's been doing things that I've managed to avoid for months, but know are necessary. He meticulously painted the trailer, which got left in the paddock last year becoming... Continue Reading →
I've been looking out for Rakali for a while now, ever since my wonderful assistant Matt found a yabby claw out on the creek bank while we were doing water testing at Lizard Crossing. I was told that water-rats (or rakali) like to take their food out onto the bank to eat. Unfortunately, the first... Continue Reading →
Sometimes everything just seems to go right. This last weekend was one of those. We finally had a planting location where we could use the ripper. This is my big project for this year - a big windbreak on Adnamira which will connect a gully with the existing ridgetop windbreak. Last year we had a... Continue Reading →
We have some beautiful beetles here, and some that annoy me by eating trees that I would like to have survive, but I'd never paid much attention to the little black beetles that crawl around on the ground. Then in March we had a visit from Kip Will from UC Berkeley who was interested in carabid... Continue Reading →
When I was a child I loved to play around the "magical" twisted trunk of a huge weeping willow (salix babylonica) in a gully behind the house on Adnamira. It was a little off-putting, however, when I traipsed down the paddock one day with my adventure Barbie dolls, to find a whole nest of baby... Continue Reading →
Ever since I went to the Friends of Grasslands workshop in 2014 I've been itching to try my hand at revegetating native grasses, rather than only trees and shrubs. Of course, that's not all that easy to do. Sue McIntyre has some good suggestions, but we are mostly forced to deal with weeds where we can,... Continue Reading →
The problem with Australian summers is you don't know which you're going to have: a nice day on the river, dinner with friends, or an invasion of flames. We've had a hot summer, with the compensation of time on the river in my new canoe. Learning to use it involved lots of shouting, and... Continue Reading →
One Bend In The River 