Last year, this was my water chestnut pond. And it worked so well. In this little suburban garden I have so little space that everything has to be miniature, but the discipline of making every centimetre count has been an epiphany. Water chestnuts in one side, kang kong in the other, and as much of each as we could eat in its season. I still have a couple of tubs…
Striped Marsh Frogs moved in of their own accord. They don’t mind urban environments except that, like all frogs, they are highly sensitive to RoundUp ®. Use RoundUp to get rid of your bindii-eyes or lantana, and you end up having to use insecticide on your skin to ward off mosquitoes. And then snail bait. And then whatever it is they use against malaria plasmodiums and rat lung worm.
We just split the first of our native bee hives. Late spring is the time, when they are warmed up and living their best life, and when there is still plenty of time for them to regroup before winter. There are over 1700 species of bees in Australia but only 11 of them build hives and only a few are stingless. We have two species, both stingless hive building, honey…
Usually I leave the slugs to the bluetongue. I’d hate to starve him (or her) into deciding to live somewhere else. But he’s a bit too well fed, and I’m not. A cup with an inch of beer, buried so the rim is at the soil surface, overnight collected all these. The chooks will feast on beer marinated slugs.
This is the boy, and it’s hard to capture his true beauty in a photo. He is a beautiful satiny blue-black and his eyes really are that colour. And this is the girl. She came inside to try to steal tomatoes and couldn’t figure out how to get out again.
In our olive tree this morning, no doubt blown around in the wild weather of the last few days. Anyone a better bat identifier than me? Is it a very young, small black flying fox (Pteropus alecto ). It’s the right face and colouring, but it is only about 30cm long and they grow to much larger. And it was all alone and usually they roost in colonies. And it…
Like me, the carpet snake likes warm weather. He (or she – we’re not that friendly) has not gone properly into hibernation yet. She’s just decided to have a little snooze, in the sock drawer. Lucky it’s bare feet and sandals weather still.