Life and Wildlife on the Banks of the Murrumbidgee
Grasses make my head spin. There are so many of them and I can still only identify about a dozen types confidently. About half of those are non-native, and the worst of them is African Lovegrass (eragrostis curvula). It was accidentally planted in the Monaro area, south of us, as a contaminant of the closely... Continue Reading →
I was lucky enough this year to get a small grant to put in thirty paddock trees through Yass Landcare and the Yass Local Land Services. The huge remnant paddock trees we have are both impressive and essential, for wildlife to move around, as well as for sheep to have shelter and shade. Many of... Continue Reading →
In a big rush, in the last month I like to plant (August), we got this year’s trees finished. 1200 in total for 2022. The final big planting day was both horrible and beautiful. Horrible was the weather, which was wet and windy, with everything mud-coated. Rain-catching coreflute discs that I now use instead of... Continue Reading →
Each year I worry I won't get my army of new plants into the ground. Each year it's a huge relief when the main planting begins. This year we were waiting for the new windbreak fences to be completed, so we did individual paddock trees and little triangles first and finally started the main windbreak... Continue Reading →
A few years ago, I went to a workshop on erosion control, which gave me a number of tools to use against soil erosion. One of them involves using logs and brush to make multiple leaky weirs, which slow water and sediment moving down a slope, allowing the silt to drop out instead of being... Continue Reading →
I have a love-hate relationship with fences. A good fence is essential for stock management and control. On the other hand, I hate having to get over barbed wire, as I’m not good at the seamless leap over. Barbed wire is particularly important if you have cattle who like to lean on them. Sheep don’t... Continue Reading →
After months of weed control, plus stripping tree covers among the Stinking Roger and Saffron Thistle, we’re finally into the planting season, despite being still surrounded by the post-drought thistles. My mini-forest sits outside our bedroom door reminding me to keep it watered and fed. Mini forest The retrieved covers are stacked high in the... Continue Reading →
When the whole world is sharing a pandemic, I thought it would be nice to share some of the beauty we're "locked down" with, including the dragon's breath sunset above. Our friends George and Rosie from Berkeley also gave us some wonderful long lens photos of birds and kangaroos, stars and sunsets. And of course,... 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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
One Bend In The River 