Welcoming Kangaroo Grass

Date: 2009.04.04 | Category: family, Horticulture | Response: 1

I have not written a post for so long….argh! I am sorry, but fishing has been a high priority for me lately and I have been trying to ‘wet a line’ when ever I can! It seems like the old bug has bitten me again…fiercely!

Along with my brother we have caught lots of lovely fish lately…and just tonight had a great time catching some Slimy Mackerel.

They are lots of fun and very easy to catch. A great little fish to catch if you are looking at introducing your kids to fishing. Actually we use them for bait when trying to catch bigger fish, but some people tell me that they are yummy smoked or cooked on the bbq.

Anyway….what I was getting to with this whole post that has gone completely off the topic is that I have this just lurvely grass by my front gate. It ain’t no ordinary grass either. It is beautiful, bronze in colour and bows and sways in the wind. It welcomes me when ever I come home, from where ever it may be…such as my recent difficult days out fishing! OMG how I have loved those days!!

My sublime and my absolutely number 1 favourite native Australian grass is Themeda australis or Kangaroo Grass. Apparently the seed heads look a little like a kangaroo…..hrmmmm, I honestly cannot see that.

Readers of my blog probably know I LOVE native grasses and oh there are so many new hybrids and cultivars out now! Just you wait till I show you them all. I’m in heaven

Naked Ladies In the Garden

Date: 2009.03.17 | Category: Horticulture | Response: 3

The other day as I was driving down one of our local streets on the way to an appointment, a bright splash of pink entered my peripheral vision. Now this appears to happen to me quite often…I can be just driving along, minding my own business when the plant kingdom seems to shout out at me to stop. I am often quickly glancing into my rear-view mirror, indicating and screeching to a halt on the side of the road somewhere!

On this particular day the beautiful tall and shapely flowers of the Naked Ladies or Belladonna Lily’s (Amaryllis belladonna) had caught my eye.

This particular one was such an intense bright pink when most of the time I have seen very pale pink ones. The plant grows from a bulb and the thick, purple stems appear first above the ground. They are about 50cm high or so and then the stunning, trumpet shaped, fragrant flowers appear. It is because of the stalk appearing with no leaves that the plant gets its name ‘Naked Ladies.’

Another great thing about this plant is how drought hardy they are. They seem to require very little attention and I have seen their beauty bursting forth from the most hostile places and conditions.

I really don’t mind my day being interrupted by all these gorgeous flowering plants that I stop top visit. Even my kids don’t mind anymore… except when we do the eight hour journey to Melbourne during wildflower season!

A Close Encounter With A Red Bellied Black Snake

Date: 2009.03.05 | Category: home | Response: 3

This morning I was taking a walk around our property, enjoying the glorious sunshine. I had my son with me and the dogs, including the garden terrorist.

We have a dam on our land that we use to water the garden. It was here that I was marvelling at the dragonflies flitting over the water, when one of the dogs had a close encounter with a Red Bellied Black Snake.

Image taken from the Museum of Victoria.

He was sunbaking only a few meters from us and I watched him as he rose up his body in a position ready to strike. Quickly I growled at the dog to immediately come to me, which she did thankfully and the snake slithered off into the scrub near the dam. This particular species of snake is usually not very aggressive, but is considered docile and will try to escape a situation at the first opportunity.

I was relieved that it wasn’t my son who discovered it. He has walked by one on a different occasion and came close to just about trodding on it’s head!

The red bellied black snake is probably one of Australia’s most well known snakes. They really are quite beautiful ( if you like snakes!) with a glossy black body and intense red belly. They are venomous which means that if they happen to bite you, they can kill you, although these snakes are not as poisonous as many other Australian snakes. Some people say they are a good snake to have around as they actually eat the baby snakes of the more venomous species like the Eastern Brown’s and Tiger snakes.

We are right in the middle of their breeding season and apparently each mother snake can give birth to up to 40 young live snakes!

I am usually very conscientious about walking around in the bush during the Summer. I have encountered around 5 snakes in the few years we have lived here. In fact one was right up in the house when we were building! It is actually quite late in the season to be seeing them and in fact this is the first one I have seen on the property all Summer.

I am not much of a snake lover, lol, and I would be happy actually not to encounter him again for a while

Superb Tropical Grevilleas

Date: 2009.03.04 | Category: home, Horticulture | Response: 2

One of the most spectacular flowering plants in my garden would have to be the native Grevillea ‘Superb’.

It is a fairly common Grevillea and many people have it in their gardens because of it’s wonderful hardiness. It can tolerate light frosts and very open exposed conditions on tough, gravelly soil.

It also flowers just about all year round and the nectar feeding birds just love it! Sometimes the flowers really do droop down quite heavily as they are so laden with nectar.

The bush grows to around 1.5 metres in height and also about the same in width. It is classified as a ‘tropical’ Grevillea, although I am not really sure why. It may be because it looks like a tropical kind of plant or because it actually originates from the more tropical regions of our country.

There are now just heaps of these fantastic tropical type Grevilleas being bred. All with amazing flowers and colours ranging from brilliant red, pink, intense yellow, lemon all the way to white. Some of them have amazing names like ‘Gypsy Moon’,'Majestic’, and ‘Honey Gem’.

One of my personal favourites that is also one of the foremost cultivars is ‘Ned Kelly’. Named after Australia’s notorious bush ranger.

The Garden Terrorist

Date: 2009.02.24 | Category: family, home | Response: 7

I am going to let you know about the real life hazards of blogging……

You see, I know the hazards.

The first hazard that comes to mind is ‘being totally engrossed.’

Now, I know of this particular hazard because it happens to me quite regularly. I spend my weekends and often my time before heading off to work, reading blogs. I am a blog-a-holic. OMG.

Anyway… One particular weekend, not too long ago, I was catching up on some very valuable reading. I had my macchiato in hand and the morning was spent perusing, otherwise known as “hey, I’m having me time!”

Midway between blogs I got up to go to our lovely composting toilet. I do intend to tell you all about our wonderful Rota-Loo at some stage…BUT…as I was walking along our wooden pallets towards the toilet, that is when I noticed we had been under a terrorist attack.

Now you might find this frivolous or you may find it serious, but I could not believe that one tiny little terrorist could cause so much damage to my beautiful flowering gum.

It’s poor roots all dug up and torn, exposed to the sun and wind. It’s leaves all wilted and forlorn…What could I do? I quickly growled at The Garden Terrorist and forbade him to come anywhere near my garden again.

I then stooped down and covered up the precious roots, watered, fed and generally just hoped for the best. A few days later, my little Corymbia ficifolia that was planted for my son is looking okay. I really do hope she will pull through…

AND the said ‘Garden Terrorist’ is a very new addition to the family here;

He also happens to go by the name of ‘DEVO.’

And here you can see he has taken a liking to the succulent collection……

At least I can now explain where those bite marks came from! For a while I thought I had one helluva caterpillar on my hands.

Pink Ivy Leaf Geranium

Date: 2009.02.21 | Category: Horticulture | Response: 2

A beautiful splash of PINK on a warm sunny day to make you smile

Knee Deep In Mud

Date: 2009.02.18 | Category: family, home, owner building | Response: 3

When we first decided to make the big ‘Sea Change’, moving from the city to the bush, we weren’t exactly sure where we were going to live. We knew we would like to build our own home and that we liked the idea of mudbricks but we didn’t realise the work that would go into our lifestyle change.

My husband or myself had absolutely no building experience whatsoever. I am a horticulturist and my husband is a musician so give us a shovel and a guitar and we were both happy. We had never laid a brick, thought about trusses or wondered on the finer points of water proofing! Oh how all that was about to change…especially for my husband.

We moved into a gorgeous area that was in the bush but close to the ocean. My parents live in the same area and they have a huge 10acre block of land. Most of it is bush. One night over a family dinner the idea was put to my husband and I by my parents “Why don’t you build yourselves a little mudbrick cabin on our land here. You don’t have to live in town and pay rent that way and it can be your own little place.” Well we thought that would be just great. So our ‘little’ cabin that turned into a HUGE project began.

Our wonderful neighbours gave us the loan of their caravan so this is where we first lived while we lay the foundations of our cabin.

It had an annexe on the side and every time it rained my husband would jump up on a stool with a tube of silicon to fix the leaks! We had old wood pallets on the floor and then carpet on top of that.

It was freezing in the Winter and boiling hot in the Summer.

My husband and I slept up one end of the caravan and our daughter who was 6 at this stage, slept up the other end. I wish I had more photos to show you of our caravan life but I didn’t have a digital camera then and so most of my shots were taken on an Instamatic. I think we lived in the caravan for a good 2 years or so. Some people would say it was ‘character building.’

I have written in a previous post about the fact that we made all our mud bricks or ‘muddies’ as we affectionately called them by hand. I had a few people ask me how we actually did that. Well, the cement mixer was a really integral part of the whole process. We would mix 1 mixer full of clay with 1 shovel full of cement. Mix it all around with water till well blended then shovel into the moulds. The clay we used for the very first part of our cabin was actually off our land. For the second part of our home, we bought in our clay from a quarry.

Most of the days spent making muddies were stinking hot and it was very heavy work. Each muddie would weigh on average around 18kg.

Most of the mud brick making fell to my husband with a bit of help every now and then from my brother. I think we would make on average about 120 bricks a day and around 70 if working alone. The first lot of bricks we made were quite crumbly and our cabin is in need of repair inside where cracks and fissures have appeared. We became better at them though and they are now ripper muddies!

Our mud brick making days have finished thank goodness sadly.

This part of the house is now finished. At this end are the two kids bedrooms and our bathroom ( which is not finished).

We have been in the process of building our own home now for 6 years. We have owner built and pretty much done every thing ourselves. We are very lucky though to have the help from my father who has also built his own mudbrick home. It has taken such a long time and my husband is certainly ‘over it’ but deep down inside I know he loves and treasures our home made with his own hands.

Sometimes people say to us, “Haven’t you finished it yet?” with a look of incredulity on their faces. This annoys us both as it isn’t a race for us to complete it…although I would ADORE having a bathroom and hot running water…what a luxury! When we started building we had both just moved here and had no other prior commitments. Now we are both working, I own a 7 day a week retail business and we have 2 small children. One of which decided to pop into our lives right in the middle of muddie making. We had to adjust our plan then and incorporate another bedroom for the little fella.

My kids still get bathed in a bucket every now and then, although we did have a solar shower for a while there. I sometimes think about putting it back up but then I worry it might mean the ‘real’ shower might take a bit longer. It might not, it’s just a niggly kinda worry.

When we finished the first little part of our home, which by now you have probably guessed we call ‘the cabin’, we all moved into it. Our little boy was only a few months old and it was in the middle of Winter. We put a Patriot wood fire in and it warmed up the cabin beautifully. So we all shared the one room, all in together.

Where the beds are is now our kitchen and there is a entrance way knocked into the wall at the top left that goes out into the new part of the house.

As you can imagine it was pretty chaotic at times..but it really was character building

Happy Birthday To My Little Girl.

Date: 2009.02.12 | Category: home, Uncategorized | Response: 3

Yesterday was my daughter’s 11th birthday. Happy Birthday Sweet Heart.

Her birthday arrived in the middle of a very hectic and scary week…with bushfires raging across the nation and one burning only 20km’s away from us.

We wanted to celebrate her special day and try to relax and have some laughter and fun.

So I decided to make a special birthday dinner and a yummy cake.

Chocolate cake with white chocolate ganache. This cake is usually delicious when I make it, but this one was a bit dry and hard. Have you read the book “Like Water for Chocolate?” The girl cries into the cake mixture as she makes it and then when all the guests eat it they are really overcome with sadness. I think a bit of tension and worry ended up in this birthday cake!

I made Southern Fried Chicken, which I have never made before but have always wanted to. It was very tasty but I just cant seem to get the frying bit right. They seem to brown quickly on the outside while still raw in the middle. I ended up finishing them off in the oven. I made Spicy Potato Wedges too with sour cream and sweet chilli sauce and of course, corn on the cob. My birthday girl loved her dinner, so that was good. Her and her little brother loved the pink Spiders I made too. So easy and delicious, just pink lemonade and ice cream in a tall glass.

We pushed the couch aside and danced to 11yr olds music Rhianna, Fergie, Christina et al.

I’m not sure why my 3yr old son thinks that what passes for dancing nowadays is to just sit on your bum and spin around a lot..Um..maybe that is dancing?

A beautiful birthday with lots of smiles and laughter.

Australian bushfires.

Date: 2009.02.11 | Category: home | Response: 6

I feel so overwhelmed with emotion that I feel sick to the pit of my stomach.

Australia has witnessed the most devastating bushfires and all of us have been affected in one way or another.

I have been living for the past week on ‘high alert’, as my home is in country NSW and only 20km’s from an out of control bushfire that has been raging now since late January.

We have the fire pump set up next to the rain tanks, all hoses checked and ready, gutters cleared of debris and leaves and twigs raked away from the house.

I am awoken early each morning around 4am by the smoke wafting over our property and curling in under the doors and through the fly screens on the windows.

I constantly check the rural fire service website and my email for fire updates and warnings to prepare.

I listen to the non stop news until tears well in my eyes and fall down my face at the nations loss, so many lives, so many homes, so many children, mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, sisters, brothers…..

We will share our grief, try to help the healing through talking and sharing stories. It’s going to be tough though.

There really is no way to express the feeling of shock, devastation and loss. I can only give and hope that in some small way I can help…..some one.

The Heavenly Perfume of Madagascar Jasmine

Date: 2009.02.03 | Category: Horticulture | Response: 2

The divine Madagascar Jasmine (Stephanotis floribunda) has one of the sweetest perfumes of any plant I know. The flowers are tubular, waxy and are pure white.

This is a climbing plant and can grow beautifully over a trellis or up against a brick wall where it can absorb radiant heat from the sun.

It can be difficult to grow in the southern states of Australia. Try to provide it with a warm, sheltered frost free position and the plant should do quite well.

The sweetly scented flowers of this plant are often used in bridal bouquets. I also remember it being used often in India where I would see flower sellers thread the blooms onto long garlands with vibrant orange marigolds.