Life and Wildlife on the Banks of the Murrumbidgee
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 →
It's the time of year to see reptiles out and about on the roads again. Bearded dragons (pogona barbata) do threatening push-ups as they try to frighten off approaching cars. Or they lie as flat as possible like this one is doing, before scuttling quickly away. Blue-tongues (Tiliqua scincoides) try to be awesome by opening their mouths... Continue Reading →
This is the time of year for walking in gardens, when they're often at their most beautiful. They're also the most work if you want to choose a particular look, rather than just take what comes. Out on the hills, "what comes" is pretty good right now. I'm particularly pleased to see flowers on... Continue Reading →
My goal this year was to: Check and do some replanting if necessary on last year's plots on Adnamira and Carkella. My guess was 50 to 80 because I knew some of them had had a hard time with the dry weather. plant 30 trees/shrubs in tiny triangles on Adnamira 30 trees/shrubs in a small... 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... Continue Reading →
I've started adding some tiny triangles to my collection of revegetation plots over our hills. My plans for tree-planting have been evolving over the past four years since we moved back to live at the family farm. I started knowing we needed to do something substantial, because the small amounts of revegetation we'd been doing... Continue Reading →
All those months waiting for rain in the autumn, and now we have too much. While the hills are green and the ground is perfect for planting, this year's fences are delayed because vehicles that try to get up with loads of concrete and posts are in grave danger of getting bogged. Or sliding... Continue Reading →
The Big Wilt has finally come. Every year when the frosts arrive, the summer plants die back and make way for the ones that can take the cold. This year we waited a long time for the changeover. In some ways it was a vindication of my messy, lazy style of vegetable gardening, the one... 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. Back in February I was showing Hannah Morgan and Charles which weeds to take out with a mattock from... Continue Reading →
Even in the dark I can tell when the river has started to flood. I love to hear the normal soft rushing sound at night, a little like distant traffic. This is more. It's a freeway roar that means big standing waves crashing against the rocks. Big water on the move is magnificent. Whole islands... Continue Reading →
A few old trees make all the difference when you're doing a bird survey. The bare, newly planted paddocks on Carkella and Adnamira were limited to a few species, mainly parrots (galahs,red-rumps, rosellas) and a small family of magpies. On a grey morning in April three ornithologists from Canberra Ornithologists Group (Sue Lashko, Chris Davey... Continue Reading →
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 →
One Bend In The River 