I try to remember the permaculture principle that a glut of anything is a feast for something, but I don’t really know that I want the population explosion in snakes that would logically follow this mouse plague. I am trying to keep my imagination focussed on lovely storybook owls feasting!
We are coming up to the winter solstice in about three weeks time, but until then the days are still getting shorter. So leafies planted now will not want to bolt, but rather wait until their lovely fine tuned endocrine sensing system tells them the days are getting longer, spring is on its way, and it is safe to set seed.
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…
I wonder if you can see this? It was stunning to see but hard to photograph. This is looking from my verandah down at the gum trees in the early morning light, and they are covered in cobwebs! Hundreds of them. There’s a major convention of spiders happening at our place. And we have no mozzies. No sign of the mozzie plague that is supposedly happening all over Australia…
Out in the garden this morning in the rain, little grizzle about picking in the cold and wet, until I remembered – no visit to the supermarket after work, no trying to find parking close enough to avoid getting drenched, no queues of tired and grumpy people. Just this lovely quiet of a misty morning with trees all sparkling with raindrops and happy frogs calling.
If I can keep the routine going, I can harvest a dozen or so carrots pretty well most weeks of the year.
I’ve learned, if I lose a variety, the best insurance is a fellow gardener who has kept the gene line going.