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 we’ve had sunny days and warm temperatures.
We’d ripped and fenced and prepared for the arrival of the mystery volunteers. Ben didn’t say who they were, just that there were lots of them. But as we waited for the buses to arrive, the sunny morning began to sour. Matthew ran around putting rocks on each coir mat to keep them from flying away. The piles of pink corflute covers heaved and flapped against the heavy weights we’d put on them.
Looking at the surging clouds, Craig, Ben and Matt began digging some “demonstration” holes, to shorten the planting process.
Then the rain came down, just as the two big buses arrived. 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 do with the hundreds of covers that stay on, doing their job, and then need to be recycled? 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. 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.
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.
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, and hope that native grasses and forbs can do all right on their own.
On both farms, my parents made a big effort to “improve” the pasture with introduced grasses such as phalaris, clovers, and lucerne, which increase the carrying capacity for sheep (you hope), but need fertilizer and water to survive. During the “Millenium Drought” from 2001-2008, it was the native grasses that kept at least some coverage on the bare hills because of their ability to withstand lack of water. Continue reading
My goal this year was to:
What actually happened: Continue reading
There’s nothing better than a beautiful day out on the hillside, unless it’s a beautiful day out with lots of lovely people planting trees.
This year we had the wonderful team from Justin Borevitz’s lab at ANU, along with another hundred yellow box (eucalyptus melliodora) that they raised from seed, genotyped and either pampered or subjected to all sorts of tests (drought str
ess, various sprays etc). In the last two years we have planted 30 to 50 of these which despite some setbacks in the way of frost, not to mention last autumn’s endless dryness, have been doing well. The main challenge is transporting the big pots (this year big sections of pipe) up to where they’ll be planted. The rest of our plants come from Murrumbateman Landcare, Greening Australia or Damian DiMarco’s nursery on Wallaroo Road, making as wide and balanced a range of species as we can manage. Continue reading
There’s a look that weeds tend to have: often spiky like a thistle,;definitely fast growing; pretty flowers perhaps; obviously not delicious to sheep (so still in existence in a paddock);and setting lots of seed for example. Continue reading
It’s that time of year again, when we happily send some young trees out naked into the winter.
The ones that seem large enough have their wildlife and frost resistant covers removed, so that we can recycle them for this year’s plantings. That’s hundreds of covers to be jerked up, flattened and carried back to the truck, then transported to our overcrowded garage for storage. Continue reading
Extreme tree planting
Seed collecting is a new art for me. It requires timing, observation and knowledge of what you’re looking for. Mostly I’m nervous that I’ll just take the seeds off a plant and waste them by not planting them in time. Continue reading
As I wandered outside on my way to bed a few nights ago, I noticed a speck of red light on a hilltop.
A star? I’ve been tricked before by how bright they can be in the bush. A red star? Venus? Wrong direction. Definitely not a car tail-light, on the top of a rocky ridge.
As I dithered, the single speck became two, one above the other. Definitely a fire, probably caused by the lightning storm that played around us all evening, making the tv signal jump and flicker. Still uncertain, I consulted the only other person awake at that time, my brother Andrew. He at least has had some experience with fire fighting.
“Definitely a fire. Definitely too wet to do any damage.” The rain was still pouring down. “Go to bed and look at it in the morning.”
Okay, useless consultation over. That ridge is at the back of my Box Gum woodland planting area, full of long summer grass and baby trees. No way was I going to leave it until morning. Although the ground was wet now, a few hours of wind would dry it off to a flammable state. We had a similar lightning struck tree three years ago that smoldered for two days, then took off, burning about forty hectares before it was put out, needing several trucks and firefighters. 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. 
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. Also known as “Georgia’s Patch”. Some of the wattles are now pretty tall and visible from a distance. That’s great for being able to see them when you drive past. The eucalypts have also taken off since the last time we looked at them in January, although the apple boxes (eucalyptus bridgesiana) tend to flop about when they’re released and disappear into the long grass. 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 and a stout pink corflute plastic cover to help preserve the humidity, among other things. Then we walk away and hope for the best. We give them more water if the temperature goes over 40 degrees celsius (that’s 104 in Fahrenheit for people on the old-fashioned measurements).
Our truck mounted fire and tree watering pump plus 800 litre tank
But out new plants have the best chance of doing well if the general ground moisture is good and there’s regular rain after they’re planted.
Ground moisture when we planted this Easter – nil. Continue reading
We regularly see mistletoebirds (Dicaeum Hirundinaceum) around the house and around the hills. They’re a flowerpecker with a taste for mistletoes.
Mistletoebird (Dicaeum Hirundinaceum) photo by Leo from iNaturalist.org
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 too widely spaced. It’s probably for the best given all the other stresses on them. Parasitic mistletoes are a big drag on a host tree’s resources.
Eucalypt with many mistletoes, Wee Jasper Road near Yass
It’s puzzled me what the mistletoebirds are eating around here.
Meanwhile, Lesley Peden and I were jolting around the paddocks looking at the sites I want to use for tree-planting this year. 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 feeding from the cascades of pink blossoms. 
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, munches its way to February, then dies.
Their larvae are called “curly grubs” around here and can be found pretty much wherever I’ve tried digging – from high up on hillsides to the sandy soil along the river, under the casuarinas. They don’t seem to lay their eggs where they feed, necessarily. Beetle bodies lie thickly under our eucalyptus nicholii peppermint gums that they don’t eat at all.
I hoped that meant that peppermint gums poison them, but I think they just like the shade. The shade that they remove elsewhere by eating the leaves of the Blakeley’s and Yellow Box gums. Continue reading
Nick and Nick’s Patch aka K2C Exclosure 4
Last autumn we planted up five mini enclosures to provide protection for small native birds and to re-establish a corridor from the Mullion Creek down to the Murrumbidgee River. It turned out to be a great way to get a lot of connection done without a massive amount of time spent planting.
At the time I was glad to see a lot of native speargrasses and scattered clumps of native bluebells (wahlenbergias) among the introduced grasses and weeds.
WHAT WE PLANTED
| Acacia dealbata | Silver Wattle (1) |
| Acacia genistifolia | Early Wattle (3) |
| Acacia implexa | Hickory Wattle (3) |
| Acacia rubida | Red-stemmed Wattle (5) |
| Acacia sp. | a wattle (1) probably Sydney Green |
| Bursaria spinosa | Sweet Bursaria (3) |
| Callistemon sieberi | River Bottlebrush (5) |
| Eucalyptus macrorhyncha | Red Stringybark (1) |
| Eucalyptus melliodora | Yellow Box (4) |
| Eucalyptus polyanthemos | Red Box (3) |
The numbers in brackets show how many of the enclosures include that species.
I’m really happy to have this list as I sometimes lose track of what I planted, and it’s a long hike uphill to check. In the heat of the moment I also sometimes make some odd choices. Putting river bottlebrushes on the top of a ridge, for example.
After we were done planting, Rainer Rehwinkel and Lesley Peden from the Kosciuszko to Coast Foundation came out and paced back and forward in each little area recording all the plants they saw. It was early in the season, so many of them were very tiny.
I looked up and made links on the names for many of the plants that interested me or I didn’t know well. I chose sites that had good information if I could, including the Atlas of Living Australia. There wasn’t one site that covered everything well. Some were fascinating, such as EattheWeeds.com Continue reading
