One Bend in the River

Greenfleet’s team has been back at the land they planted in 2024. Unfortunately, that’s because the dry season after the first planting killed all but 1500 of the 19 thousand seedlings they put in. The Greenfleet team wasn’t happy with the results, which were similar in Victoria to here. That’s the frustrating thing about being reliant on rainfall. If it doesn’t come, things don’t grow. These…

The Kurrajong trees on our hills are some of my favourites. They are, however, also mysterious and strange. They were valuable to the local Indigenous community for food (seeds), string (bark) and shade, and I’ve heard for memorials. Many of our big, old, ones were planted inside hollow stumps, to give them a head start with the fertility of the rotting timber. One on Adnamira always stood out,…

Back when there were six gates between Esdale and the Wee Jasper Road to Yass, when going to town meant harnessing up a horse and buggy, fruit trees in the garden must have been precious things. When my parents first arrived at Esdale in 1980, the garden had a whole orchard with apples, pears, nectarines, peaches, apricots, mulberries, walnuts, almonds, cherries, figs and 3 types of plums. Many…

Apparently, kangaroos really do like to eat kangaroo grass. As soon as I started to plant some seedlings, they were nibbled to the roots. The wombats, on the other hand, prefer to yank things out of the ground instead. Then they leave a calling card of square poo displayed on a rock. Very annoying. The kangaroo grass was part of my new meadow, using a completely different planting style to what…

For a lazy gardener, wicking beds have a lot of attraction.  There’s not the same level of rushing about with hoses and sprinklers trying to keep a steady supply of water.  I’d looked at a few designs, including ones made from old IBC’s (Intermediate Bulk Containers) which are waterproof and only need to be cut in half to make two raised, wicking, garden beds.  Craig wasn’t wild about the…

We haven’t had a proper grasshopper surge like this for years.  Not exactly Darkness at Noon with plague locusts blotting out the sky, but really too many for my taste. The most visible ones were initially the wingless grasshoppers (Phaulacridium vittatum) which as the name says have relatively short horns and don’t fly, just jump.   Every step you take across the grass leads to the “tick, tick,…

Back when we were planning to move back to Australia from California, I explored permaculture as an option to improve our land.  I had a permaculture design drawn up as some expense. It was really pretty, and I still consult it from time to time. There are some excellent things about permaculture, and its younger child, regenerative farming.  It’s a whole different way of looking at the…

Barley (Hordeum vulgare) is an ancient grain that is used to make beer and many other useful and fun things. Barley Grass (Hordeum Murinum Leporinum) is frankly a nuisance. In the spring it pops up from previous seeds and covers the ground, crowding out many more useful pasture plants. It is edible (by sheep) while young and green, but soon goes to seed, then dries up and disappears leaving bare…

We had to wait a long time for the soil to be ready to plant, this year. It continued very dry well into May. Then it went cold. Chilly. Bleak. Wet. Luckily the actual planting days were clear and sunny, which means morning frost. On the first day, the frost crystals were still visible in the riplines at midday. That’s cold. But because we chose local plants that can take those conditions, the…

When I look at our big remnant eucalypts I have often wondered how old they are. For many of them, they could be anywhere from one hundred to five hundred years old. Some types of trees I know to be much younger, particularly the ones I planted myself, or were planted by someone I know within the last fifty years. That includes the Peppermint Gums (eucalyptus Nicholi) in our lawn that were…

My wonderful farm assistant Dmitry Grishin is doing a study on water in the soil at the Australian National University. To do it, he’s setting up probes all over both of the farms and measuring the penetration of rainfall. Initially we didn’t have any rainfall (horrible dry season), but in the last couple of weeks we’ve begun to have some, so it’s likely he’ll have some real data to work…

Is the method I’ve been using to plant native trees too slow?  Is there a better way?  I’ve just had an example of speedy planting, which if it works, will do ten years of my work in two weeks.  Impressive. I signed a Forestry contract with the carbon capture company Greenfleet late last year.  They were recommended as an established group that not only sells carbon credits (where their profit…

In December we got a reminder of what it means when climate change increases the force of a storm. Some evening thunder rolled in as we watched calmly from the verandah. “That seems pretty fierce” Charlie remarked, looking concerned. We soothed him with “Just a summer storm. We get them all the time.” And then the wind picked up even further. I went to look around the corner of the verandah and…

This is my year for filling in gaps (not just in my blog, oops), but among my trees.  Lots of non-tree things have also been happening, but I’ll fill those gaps in separate posts.  First we had to go back and find the trees that didn’t quite make it from last year.  I’ve now conclusively established that Phalaris grass is a killer of young native trees, and has to be sprayed out to stop it doing…

At the moment butterflies are everywhere, including, unfortunately, smashed on the windscreen of my car. There’ve been many years where there have been grasshoppers throwing themselves in front of speeding vehicles (I don’t think they intend to). Craig and I had one trip to Swan Hill years ago where we had to keep stopping and scraping off the deceased from the windscreen so that we could see…

A Walkabout in the Wildflowers

It’s been some time since I saw new wildflowers. The weather has been mostly lousy for visiting the best areas we have, Luckily, being on the Murrumbateman Landcare committee recently gave me the privilege of a walkabout in Nanima with the people most skilled at identifying all the fabulous things around us. Unlike our place, it has only intermittently been grazed by sheep and the historic…