We have a star bath. It’s a heavy cast iron bath in a very unfashionable shade of green with a fireplace under it. It sits out in the open with a clear view of the wide starry sky, and on cold winters nights we fill it up and light a fire under it. A glass of wine, a candle, a hot bath that stays hot for as long as you…
This morning, lying in bed with my cup of coffee (yes, I get coffee in bed every morning), a mother antechinus ran along the window ledge with four babies clinging to her back, and dropped them into my handbag. A few minutes later, she was back with another lot, and another. In total, there were twelve babies, dropped into my bag. And she was off. Handbag day care.
Outside my bedroom window.
Aren’t they cute? I found them when I was recycling potting mix from some seedlings that I didn’t need to plant out. There are two different kinds. I think the larger ones might be land mullet eggs, and the smaller ones the little skinks I find in the shadehouse and garden.
I hung the quilts out to air on the verandah clothes line, forgot about them for just a couple of days, and when I went to bring them in, a pair of microbats had decided that hanging upside down inside the folds was a perfect place for a nap.
I have Oceans Eleven being enacted in my garden. I’ve got just nineteen pea seeds up so far this year! I thought it might be birds getting them before they germinated, so I put some net over the boxes in the shadehouse. But they still got got. So I moved the boxes out into one of my fortress fenced garden beds. But they still got got. So I planted all…
One morning in 2000, I came out and every single seedling I’d planted the day before had been dug up. It was the beginning of the end for a style of gardening that had served me very well for over a decade.