Life and Wildlife on the Banks of the Murrumbidgee
The Great Aerial Ocean above our heads, for me, is a reminder that we all live on the one planet. Only a thin band of atmosphere comes between us and the inhospitable vastness of space. I love that living here, we now have a grandstand view of the turmoil, as well as the sunny days,... Continue Reading →
Our lovely neighbour Cathy Campbell has a new project. It's called "Managing Mange in the Mullion" (that's the title of the Facebook group also) and involves counting wombats, working out how many of them are affected by sarcoptic mange and treating them using "burrow flaps" that deliver a dose of medicine automatically at the entry to... 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... Continue Reading →
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. In 2011 we planted a lot of mixed trees and shrubs as tubestock on a... Continue Reading →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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... Continue Reading →
The ancient trees that stalked across the paddocks when I was a child were my first clue that something was wrong with our landscape. They started to die. "Theý're old" said Dad. "They've had their time. We just need to plant some more." So he planted more. The Goodradigbee Shire supplied Sydney blue gums in... Continue Reading →
A big attraction of setting up the "small bird stepping stone" plantations on Esdale this year (five 20m x 20m areas that link the Mullion Creek vegetation to the Murrumbidgee) was the promised monitoring of the plants and animals. I'm really interested to see what the changes will be as the trees and shrubs grow.... Continue Reading →
In my short career as a radio journalist for 2XX in Canberra, I had precisely one news scoop. That was, tah dah, the discovery of a new species of wildflower, weirdly called the "button wrinklewort", at the Queanbeyan Municipal Dump in 1983. It seemed sort of cool that someone had found a new flower, even... Continue Reading →
One Bend In The River 