It’s such a good disguise.  It looks just like a ladybeetle. If I didn’t catch it actually in flagrante eating the leaves on my squash, I would think it was a good guy.

I was tempted to squash it. Tomorrow I might. But today I thought I might just leave it for the moment and see what happens. There’s only the one that I’ve noticed (though no doubt there are more, just I haven’t seen them yet).  It hasn’t done a huge amount of damage, and I’ve got enough squash growing to afford to run the experiment.

What might happen? It could survive.  Ladybeetles (the aphid-eating ones and the plant eating ones) have pretty good defences.  They can secrete alkaloids that taste really bad, and once a predator has tried it once, the bright orange colour is like a neon sign saying “I taste yuk”.

It could breed, fast, and cause a problem. Many pest species are fast breeders, growing exponentially by a factor of hundreds every week.  Lots of beetle sex is their secret weapon in the arms race with their predators. Predators – birds, lizards, frogs, spiders, mantises – are slower to breed.  They live longer, breed later, lay fewer eggs. So it takes them a while to catch up.

What’s more likely though, is that a predator will eat it today.  If nothing had ever found a way past the defenses, the dominant species on earth would be ladybeetles, not humans. The neon sign strategy could backfire –  If I can see it, so can they.  A tachinid fly could see it and know, where there’s an adult on the leaf surface, there’s likely to be larvae worth parasitising on the underside. If I had squashed it, that tachinid fly might not have found the larvae, and instead of one 28 spotted ladybeetle I’d have a hundred to deal with.

Hopefully something will thank me for leaving a delicious little spotty morsel for them, maybe feel so well fed they’ll go lay some eggs of their own. But I shall keep a bit of an eye on it just in case.

If you were after a grazing animal that grows at a phenomenal rate, the goslings have gone from this to this in just six weeks.

We lost one of the six at about four days old, found floating in the dam with a huge tick.  Since then, we’ve had to check them twice a day for ticks, finding one or two most days.  But apart from ticks, they’ve been pretty self-sufficient and resilient.  The adults are fantastic parents.  The whole five adults take on parenting duties, forming a defensive ring around the goslings at the least sign of danger and letting them have first pick at any food.

We haven’t named them, but I really don’t think I’m going to be able to eat them.  So much for me and meat animals! Lets hope I do better with the chickens.

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The first compost pile of the season, and it’s a good one.  It’s a lasagna pile with nice thin layers, with mulch from the Mulch Mountain every second layer.

It only took me an hour to build, but only because I have been routinely on the lookout for the ingredients, bringing home a bag of horse manure whenever my neighbour puts some out on the roadside for sale ($3 a bag), collecting a bucket of cow manure whenever I see cows out on the road reserve on my way home (I keep a bucket and shovel in the car for just this chance), collecting seaweed at the beach, cultivating the herbs and weeds I know are micronutrient accumulators, and lately making my morning walk  over to a neighbour’s dam to collect a barrow of azolla.  They all took time, but it was kind of incidental time.

The major ingredient was the mulch, and there’s about an hour’s worth of mowing in the pile.  But you could almost call it “incidental time” too, a byproduct of my Mowing Meditation.

It goes:

• Layer of mulch, then layer of horse manure
• Layer of mulch then one of azolla
• Layer of mulch then one of cow manure
• Layer of mulch then one of green herbs and micronutrient accumulators (including nettles),
• the whole lot wet down with the last of the Seaweed Brew, diluted 1:20.

I will turn it twice, next weekend and the weekend after, wetting it down again, breaking up any clumps, moving the outside to the inside and introducing more oxygen. It will take about an hour’s work with a pitchfork each time.  But it’s a good investment.  This pile will keep the shadehouse and planting out going all summer.  I’ll build another one in autumn to keep me going for the winter.  That, and the sheet mulching done by the chooks is most of my garden work done and dusted.

I am using it to clear a new bed along a fence, hoping to cover the fence with a perennial climber like Scarlet Runner Beans, or maybe passionfruit. But first I need to get rid of the cannas and the stinging nettle and the nut grass along the fence. A  good compost pile will get hot enough to kill everything under it.  As I turn the pile along the fenceline, I’ll cover where it was with a good thick layer of mulch and plant my seedlings into it (in little wire cages to prevent the bandicoots digging them straight back up again every night).

Happiness is a good compost pile.

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Our dam used to have lots of azolla, before we got geese. I was missing it. Azolla is a really valuable plant. It’s a rampant native waterweed, that is symbiotic with a nitrogen fixing bacteria, so, like legumes, it is capable of harvesting nitrogen out of the air and putting it into a form that plants can use as a fertilizer.

And it’s a potent fertilizer.  There’s good science saying that fertilizing with azolla is better in terms of yield than fertilizing with chemical sources of nitrogen like urea or ammonium nitrate.  I know that in compost, it works as well as any animal manure as a source of nitrogen – I can get “hot” compost very reliably using just azolla as the nitrogen source.  It thrives in water that has too much phosphorus, and since we’re already past “peak phosphorus“, it’s a good idea not to let any of it get away.

And there’s another reason to love azolla.  Urea, ammonium sulphate,  ammonium nitrate, anhydrous ammonia – all the forms of nitrogen fertilizer, are made by a process called the Haber-Bosch process, which uses natural gas as it’s main raw material.  A significant percentage of the world’s natural gas production is used in the process, making it a significant contributor to greenhouse gases, and a big market driver for coal seam gas mining.  I really really really don’t want to give any dollars, directly or indirectly, to Metgasco.

So happily, I’ve found a neighbour’s dam that is chokka with azolla.  It’s a nice 1 kilometre walk away, making it the perfect distance for my morning walk.  I have been collecting a wheelbarrow load every few days for the chooks.  They scratch through it looking for bugs accidentally scooped up with it, and mix it with the wheelbarrow load of mulch from the mulch mountain I give them on the other days, their own manure, and the household scraps and garden weeds they get routinely.

When I move them to the next bed, in a couple of weeks, I will have a beautiful bed of sheet compost to plant straight into.

PS. You can see the chook roost in the picture.  The piece of pipe at the bottom is donged into the ground and there is one like it in the centre of each bed.  The roost just slides into it. The chooks fly up to the lower rungs then climb right up as high as they can under the cone, the top of the pecking order at the top and the rooster keeping guard at the bottom.

The big carpet snake spent two weeks sleeping off a bandicoot dinner just metres away, but no chooks have been murdered in their beds yet.  It could get into the fence – I’ve never found a way to effectively fence snakes out, and so could a determined fox or quoll I imagine, but the chooks can just fly up out of reach, and the barbed wire round the leg has so far been effective at stopping the snake climbing.

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