Nature
-
Hiking @ Ferny
I’ve mentioned before that my husband has moved to a 4-day work week and I work casual hours from home, so some weeks we can do some fun things during the week. Last Friday I wanted to hike, and G had been wanting to take me up to Ferny to show me the running trail so I don’t get lost when I go up with the crew to run. The weather was lovely for hiking—about 22C and fluffy clouds dotted in a blue sky. A lot of the trail is in the Dandenong Ranges National Park. The Dandenong ranges are on the outskirts of Melbourne, about 30km from us and…
-
In The Garden – December 2023
This has been a year-long project where I photograph our garden each month. The garden is still sporting some thigh-high weeds that grew up while we were away but I’ve got a fair bit of it weeded and I gave the Myoporum a massive haircut today. I thought it might be fun to compare with the photos from January. The growth in the garden over the year has been amazing. I’m looking forward to the plants growing enough to fill in the gaps in the next year. The biggest surprise in the garden has been the everlasting daisy I planted in February. It has been flowering constantly since then and…
-
In The Garden – November 2023
It’s now the 30th of November here, so the end of NaBloPoMo. I just checked my number of posts for November and there are twenty-seven, this post makes twenty-eight and I just found two that didn’t post on schedule. I think WordPress may not have liked my multiple time zone changes. So today you get this post and the two that are sitting in my scheduled folder. In the interests of keeping it real here, I now present to you my garden after a month away and no one to tend it.
-
In the Garden October 2023
Now it’s Spring everything is taking off in the garden. When I planted it last year I chose a mainly purple, yellow and white flowering scheme. The long-purple flags went in after they would have flowered so this is the first time I’ve been able to enjoy their flowering. They tend to flower in one hit and they are winding down now. They are so bright and cheery when they do flower and go well with the yellow flowers. They open up in the morning and close again in the afternoon. I caught this one peaking out between the neighbouring everlasting daisy which has not stopped flowering all year. The…
-
In the Garden September 2023
I’ve had these photos sitting on my camera since I took them in September. The section of the garden near the water feature has really bushed up, filling in a lot of the gaps, although there are some spaces where Riley dug some big holes that we might need to look at. I planted several native orchids in this section and at least one has survived and flowered this year. The flowers only last a short time but it made me happy seeing them there. The section of the garden above still has a bit of growing to do to fill in the gaps but it’s getting there. I’ve cleaned…
-
A common sight … but still beautiful
It’s not hard to spot a Rainbow Lorikeet around our place. It wasn’t always this way though. They disappeared from Melbourne in the 1920’s but are now back in greater numbers than before settlement. Experts think this is due to the flowering gums from other parts of Australia that were planted by councils and gardeners in the 1970’s. The trees provide an excellent and more abundant food source than indigenous Victorian bush and the heat island effect of the city provides a warmer environment which the birds prefer. Rainbow Lorikeets also need tree hollows to breed which are in short supply which leads ecologists to believe that most are probably…
-
In the Garden August 2023
I pottered around the garden today and marvelled at how much more pleasant it is to garden in mild weather. Even though it is still officially winter here we are having a spring weather day so at least for today I didn’t come back into the house with freezing hands. I even had lunch outside which was a treat. The garden is looking reasonably good. I finished my tidying after our holidays and because it has been fairly cold it has remained mainly weed-free and neat. Unfortunately, our dog has been digging and dug a big hole in the corner behind the tree below. I’ve replanted the plants he dug…
-
In the Garden May
I’m doing this early in May because we will be away on the 22nd. We leave this Friday, so I spent some time today tidying the garden and preparing it to look after itself for six weeks. I finished trimming my unruly herbs, mulched the broad beans, pulled a few weeds, and then swept the tiles. I also picked all the chillies which will go in the freezer and gave the plant a trim to help it survive the winter. Later today, I’ll pick and cook up some rhubarb as well. The maple tree suddenly changed colour in the last week and has almost dropped all its leaves. The strawberry…