Life and Wildlife on the Banks of the Murrumbidgee
Brazil's coastal rainforest could hardly be more distant from a sheep farm in New South Wales. Yet I found visiting it both inspirational and helpful for my own plans. The rainforest plant life is nothing like our dry eucalypts and grasses. While there are a few ancient relatives of Australian plants, most of the vegetation looks as... Continue Reading →
Tree planting doesn't always go as planned. In 2011, before we actually moved back to Australia, I spoke to Graham Fifield at Greening Australia about being part of their WOPR (Whole Paddock Rehabilitation) program. That program is designed to revegetate an area of 10 hectares or more, using bands of trees and shrubs directly seeded on the contours.... Continue Reading →
One way to stop topsoil from disappearing from under our feet is to use loose vegetation. Anything from grass and weeds to big logs will help catch it as it flows past. The Southern ACT Catchment Group ran a workshop recently with Cam Wilson from Earth Integral as the expert advisor on how to make... Continue Reading →
This year the grand finale of our tree linkage project was not even on our own land. To complete the 3.9 kilometres (2.4 miles) of small plots that will allow birds like diamond firetails (stagonopleura guttata) and speckled warblers (chthonicola sagittata) to move around the landscape, we planted a larger area at the edge of... Continue Reading →
I was quite cautious when the idea of a "Green Army" was proposed. It seemed like a political stunt. And the cost of the payslips was going to be subtracted from Landcare, a community organization I admire a great deal. Who was this Army going to attack? The trees? Us? Who was going to join... Continue Reading →
We don't often see Eastern Long Necked Turtles (Chelodina longicollis), as they spend most of their time in the water. The Murrumbidgee River is rarely clear enough to see to the bottom where they hang out. We do sometimes see them hiking overland after rain. When you pick them up they not only hide as... Continue Reading →
Last weekend we planted in two different directions at once. We finished the final small tree lots that are part of the chain of connections across the Murrumbidgee river for small birds. That makes nine tree lots for connectivity only, plus two extra areas, a shelter paddock that used to be a calf-feeding area,... Continue Reading →
At sunset on Anzac Day we planted an Aleppo Pine (pinus halepensis), a descendent of the Lone Pine at the centre of the 1915 battle at Gallipoli in Turkey. I don't usually plant non-native trees, but this one was special. The Rev. Peter Dillon, a former Army Chaplain, and Dad of our neighbour Leonie, gave a... Continue Reading →
Just before the weather began to turn cooler, a stranger came flapping through the garden. It was large enough that you could expect to hear the wings beating. I spent some fruitless hours looking at pictures of Delia butterflies, since the last impressive butterfly I saw was an Imperial Jezebel (Delias harpalyce) in a neighbour's... Continue Reading →
Once we've got our trees planted, we usually walk away for several months and hope for the best. But eventually we come back and check on them. On the Easter weekend we had a whole crew of helpers to strip remaining covers from the 450 trees and shrubs planted in May 2013 near the cattleyards.... Continue Reading →
The Easter Bunny this year brought friends and excellent company - and the planting of 182 trees and shrubs . Generally, our method of planting trees and shrubs requires lots of water. We pour on 10 to 20 litres per tree to give them a head start in our dry landscape. We add mulch... Continue Reading →
The spy camera team arrived yesterday, armed with a big blue plastic crate full of gadgets, plus a couple of star pickets and a mallet. While the wildlife wasn't looking, Corin, Steve and Andrew set up three cameras in plausible places for passing four-legged traffic. Or wriggling snake traffic. Or winged traffic. I had hoped... Continue Reading →
I now have a wonderful kit that will tell me what's in the water that flows past our house. Finally, we have some way to tell what's going on underwater, other than just admiring clear water rippling over rocks. Or staring at turbid brown floodwater, with the occasional tree or wombat carcass floating by, while hoping... Continue Reading →
Topsoil is that thin band of living matter that lies across the landscape. Except when it is undermined or dissolved by rain and carried downhill into first the gullies, then the waterways, leaving the water silty and the landscape denuded. As a child I loved to play among the eroding soil spires where you could imagine... Continue Reading →
We regularly see mistletoebirds (Dicaeum Hirundinaceum) around the house and around the hills. They're a flowerpecker with a taste for mistletoes. Mistletoes grow all over the world, not just at Christmas for romantic kissing purposes. Unlike the area north of us, near Lake Burrinjuck, however, our eucalypts have few mistletoes. I'm not sure why. Maybe they're... Continue Reading →
In the last couple of years we've netted the most accessible of the peach trees that have naturalized along Mullion Creek to keep the cockatoos from eating them. The whole operation is worse than trying to get a giant bride and her veil through a forest. Four people were needed (one of them tall) and a lot of... Continue Reading →
Mum and I were having a walk around the garden checking out all the growing things when we passed the callistemon bush that grows on the edge of the lookout. I'd been seeing the flowers from a distance but it wasn't until we were up close that I realized it was amazingly alive with insects... Continue Reading →
I get a certain amount of flak for my untidy veggie garden. I let things go to flower and seed and see what comes up from them next year. I love that I can grow carrots without having to do anything at all but throw around a bit of compost. I enjoy the flowers.... Continue Reading →
For the third time in three years, many of our trees are looking like ghosts of their former selves. The immediate, obvious, culprit is the Christmas Beetle (an anoplagnathus species of scarab), a bit of seasonal joy in a shiny suit. If the weather's right, it digs its way up from underground in November or December,... Continue Reading →
The Murrumbidgee River is a significant part of our landscape here. But it's only in the summer that we really get to play with it. Charles and his cousins Will and Alex had intended to go out in our old Canadian canoe. I was doubtful it would hold three large young men. However, it filled... Continue Reading →
One Bend In The River 