Monthly Archives: February 2014

21 Friday Feb 2014

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

February 21, 2014

The rain – not heavy, but constant light showers – has brought a cover of green to the paddocks, and life back into the struggling trees. The creek is not gushing but trickling a fresh line of life.

The rain has also brought bugs. Moths and butterflies are careering around in a last chance bid to lay their eggs. We inspect the trees and find that the olive’s top branches have been stripped by a massive finger-like green caterpillar that is now motionless, starting to pupate. Neither of us is able to interrupt this cycle of life, and Martin flicks it onto the grass instead.

I’m not so sentimental with the little bugs. The eggplants have managed to survive last week’s wallaby attack only to become infested with metallic flea beetles. They’ve turned the leaves into lace and are now clustering on the purple flowers. We had them last year on the eggplants as well, but not on anything else. Bugs are so specific. The brown spot on the silverbeet doesn’t affect the kale, and the caterpillars that are on the kale don’t touch the rocket or the silverbeet. There is scale on every citrus but not on any other trees. The red mustard has been decimated by something that ignores the zucchini plants in between.

Back to the books. Ignoring the carbaryl again, Jackie French recommends glue spray – her favourite spray – for beetles. It’s easy to make – mix flour with hot water then dilute with cold water and spray. You’d think after years of making custards, white sauces and playdough I could mix water into flour, but I end up with lumps in my glue spray. I strain it and spray it, all over the metallic flea beetles, and all over the pumpkin beetles (not so picky – they’re in the tomatoes now) for good measure. Now sit back and wait for them to die!

Aside

14 Friday Feb 2014

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

,

February 14, 2014

A little rain in the night. When we wake there is mist rising from the forest while light rain continues to fall. The mood is not yet of exhilaration, but of quiet optimism. A little cloud of red-browed finches hovers into the garden, descends on grasses and parsley, then one darts off and the others follow in a ragged bunch. From the creek we hear low trills and a gentle coo – probably the brown pigeons (brown cuckoo dove) we see on the tobacco bush. A whip bird breaks through with a triumphant note, and the call fades away in the gentle morning. The steady background hum and rise of the bellbirds is muted.

A large waterbird flies along the valley and loops over the creek, its languid stroke brushing through the soft air. I’ve always called these birds blue herons, but I check Cayley this time and find it’s a white-faced heron. They’ve been more visible during the drought and we’ve seen them in twos and threes, searching for the merest speck of water and food. This one perches on a dead tree, its grey back merging into the grey of the lichen-covered trunk.

The rain continues to fall, sometimes in stronger showers where you can hear the drops falling on the forest trees with a steady rush. A neighbour visits and says we had 9 mm to 9am.

The dead leaves on the vegetables near the house stand more starkly yellow and brown against those that have survived, revived and green and newly washed. I want to see new leaves grow, I want to give the heron on the tree a running creek and a good meal, but we’re all going to have to wait a bit longer.

Aside

07 Friday Feb 2014

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, ,

February 7, 2014

Coming in to the farm yesterday afternoon, the dusty paddocks, sparse trees and dried out creeks, the river still trickling but only just, were almost more than I could bear. I had hoped, beyond reason, and with no assistance from the weather bureau, that we would have had some significant rain. That we would drive in to a lush landscape. Lush is a description that confounds reality. Even the slime on the creekbed is dry, blackened and cracking. The bare hill reveals red bones of soil below dried-out roots of grass.

Driving in the second time, after yoga in town, it’s mercifully dark. But the afternoon’s images stay with me. I lie in bed doing the crossword, trying to distract myself with word games. It’s working, when I hear a noise outside. A noisy lapping, just outside the window. Is it rain, falling softly? Moving quietly to the dark bathroom, I look out. A small head with sharp triangular ears pops up from behind the water chestnut trough, and appears to look straight at me. I think calm thoughts towards it. The head disappears and the lapping starts again. This is where the water has been going – not in evaporation. We’re watering the local wallabies. The noise becomes slurping, loud and unbroken. It continues for longer than I can stand there, and I go back to bed, my spirits revived by the glimpse of those quivering ears, the sound of one wallaby lapping.

In the morning it’s still dry, but the view has become less desolate for me. A family of bluewrens hops through the remnants of the garden, calling, jumping, flitting, preening. They find the birdbath has been filled so they splash and fluff. The cows, high up the hill, take fright at something and gallop down to us. They stop outside the fence to butt and tangle their heads together, then run on. Their bellies wobble as they run, their feet kick up and their tails lag behind.

But in the late afternoon I hear, again, the crash of a tree in the forest. It’s the third time in as many weeks that I’ve heard that mighty splinter and fall. The trees are stressed; nature is shedding what it can.

Aside

01 Saturday Feb 2014

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

February 1, 2014

When I turn on the lights in the bedroom I notice a film of movement on the glass doors. I look closer and hear the faint tick tick of feet climbing the glass. The doors are often covered in insects on summer nights, and we’ve watched armies of them rise and fall. They climb to the top and drop down again, creating waves of motion in the periphery of vision. Usually they are tiny flies, so tiny that we’ve had to close the glass doors because they can crawl through the fly wire. These are much larger, about a centimetre long, with a bulbous yellow back and a red stripe. I am less amused by this waterfall of bugs when I recognise them as one of the creatures I’ve seen on the kale, one of the many reasons (along with the cluster caterpillars and the pumpkin beetles) that the few kale leaves that the wallabies have missed look like lace.

I’ve never translated those nighttime insects into daytime evidence of destruction before. This time I see nothing but the potential damage that is climbing up and down our door. Although I’m ready for bed and more suitable bedtime reading, I go and dig out the book by Judy McMaugh called What Garden Pest or Disease is That?, a depressing litany of beetles, caterpillars, flies, scale, fungus, rot, spot, blight, canker, rust. I shield my eyes from the more gruesome pictures of bundles of sawflies or infestations of mould as I flick through its pages. You wonder why you bother when there’s a whole double-page dedicated just to things that attack macadamias. Eventually I match tonight’s bugs to the photo of the redshouldered leaf beetle.

It turns out they are native beetles that occur in swarms – yes – most common in late spring or summer – yes. They chew ragged leaves in foliage – yes – and attack a wide range of plants. The author doesn’t mention kale, but I get the idea that it could easily form part of their diet. There’s something about a swarm that brings out an antagonism towards invasion in me. My eyes are drawn to Judy McMaugh’s usual response to insects – spray with carbaryl – but even she admits that this chemical is ‘of relatively low toxicity to humans but highly toxic to bees’. I remember to ask myself why I have a garden, and how that garden sits in the grand scheme of our environment, and my feelings soften. Awww. Red-shouldered beetles get hungry too.