Farming, like nature, is messy. It’s nice to see the smooth green grass of spring covering the hills and disguising the rocks. The modern golf course look. Unfortunately, that’s not necessarily what you need either for wildlife or for grazing stock. 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, 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
