I’m planting some tasty greens for autumn/winter soups – a few Asian greens I’ve never tasted individually- tatsoi, yukina, and mizuna red and kale because it’s an incredible superfood.
Also one of my old favourite Dragon’s Tongue Beans. I love the name as much as their beauty.
I’m quite excited as I like growing things that aren’t easily available in the shops and it should be a great learning experience in the garden and kitchen!
Tatsoi
Yukina
Mizuna Red
Kale
Dragons Tongue Beans
We have two beautiful trees in our front garden and I’ve managed to find out that they are native frangipani’s. There is nothing to me, more exciting that finding out what grows in the garden when you move house.
Hymenosporum flavum - Native frangipani seeds
They are such beautiful trees with fragrant flowers, so I took the opportunity of some seed saving, particular after reading that the plants can be hard to find. The seeds are a thing of beauty in themselves.
Had a lovely close encounter with two beautiful immense wedge-tailed eagles last week on our property. I was lucky enough to have my camera in the car so I pulled over on the driveway and got some photographs. Being looked down upon by these powerful birds makes you feel pretty small.
It is hard to judge their scale from these photographs, but when you see them, they are so incredibly large that you can’t help but gasp when watching them soar over the valleys around here. They are the largest bird or prey in Australia and their wing span is up to 2.5 metres and quite rightly, they are a protected species. We were lucky enough to be able to watch them from our lounge room window over the weekend.
Fionna was safely in the car when I took the photographs and in fact it was probably lucky that she slept through my excited exit from the car and cries of “oh my god, eagles! eagles! <expletive> where’s the camera???!!!“ I’m looking forward to when Fionna starts to engage with the environment – she has responded to our goat, but ignored the cows, dogs, cats and chickens so far. 
There has been a population explosion of dust bunnies here! The research I have conducted online suggest that ours are special – they free-range and effectively live wild.
I was going to add a fascinating discourse about my recent observations and research on these dust bunnies (including a photograph of a wild one!) but I’ve noticed that all the links to images in my posts on this site from 2006 are still pointing to my old URL and will need uploading again … a job for the next few days.
Sorry, looks like any of you interested in dust bunnies will just have to wait … and if you don’t know what dust bunnies are … perhaps you will intrigued enough to return here one day to find out …
Relax. We haven’t got yet another animal resident on the farm.
There is possibly no worse case of tragic hopelessness than seeing a turtle on the edge of the bitumen road speedlimited at 100. He’s chosen a sharp corner to attempt the crossing, eyes googling ahead at the beautiful dam on the far side.
With the right epic-sounding music and the sweet tones of David Attenborough’s narration, people would be weeping into their tv guides.
The only thing more tragic is being the driver of the car.
Driving down the road and seeing Timmy’s little outstretched head align itself perfectly with my passenger side wheel was to be my Sunday wildlife experience. (Without the music and David Attenborough).
I had that hateful split-second to decide to swerve in front of on coming traffic to avoid the turtle and his outstretched neck, or simply wipe him off the road. Of course I had to wipe him off the road.
As it was, I mini-swerved and managed to clip only his little exposed head. This flicked him like a worthless pebble onto his back but off the road. I couldn’t stop safely at the time, so I went home.
My “I killed a turtle” sobs spurned Richard into quickly taking 6 bottles of red wine out of a box. I was confused for a moment, thinking he meant me to forget what I had done to Timmy through the powerful magic of wine, or perhaps he intended to block out my ‘turtle sobs’, by having the six bottles himself. Logic prevailed and I realised that of course the box was to rescue Timmy the Turtle (or Tammy)!
Timmy was alive, but bloody. His face didn’t look right. His neck did not look very necklike at all. It wasn’t a patch on the outstretched strength of muscle he’d displayed strutting onto the road as though he were a Teenage Mutant Ninja (turtles in a half shell! – a reference for all you TMNT fans of old).
Yes, it was pretty obvious that Timmy’s ninja days were counting down, the tea party was indeed over. So we took wee Timmy back to our place and made him comfortable on the edge of our dam, around 2pm. We nestled him in some reeds, even putting a little water on his back. Hopefully turtles like that.
The last time I feared for the life of a turtle was in Year 4 in Mrs Mac’s class when a boy called Andrew put 2 baby turtles into the yabbie tank for a laugh. Shy girl vs class bully – I scared that boy that day, and got detention for it.
So here I was on the other end of the story as the perpetrator of violence against turtles.
Timmy was dead when I checked him at 7.30pm and hadn’t moved from his reedy abode. Maybe when he died he believed that he had actually made it across the road to the dam by himself. Maybe he just watched the dragonflies and felt turtley peace. Maybe Timmy forgave me for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I pushed him into the water like in those Arthurian tales and away he went. I thought he would give some nutrient back, but Richard later told me that no, he would just rot and challenge the biodiversity of the dam. Fantastic, so now I could have more death on my hands!
Maybe I’m looking at this all wrong. It shouldn’t be a tragic tale about how I took the life of a turtle. It shouldn’t be a hopeless tale about little Timmy’s vain efforts to cross the road, – instead – he’s an inspiration. Faced with a design fault of having excellent armour around every part of your body except your neck and head, he literally stuck his head out and legged it, in that slow turtley way.
If we all took that approach to life, maybe more of us would be dead … no that’s not the thought I’m looking for .. maybe more of us would get where we are going.
There’s a little life lesson in the tale of Timmy.
The place where he was hit is actually called ‘Breakneck Creek’. It really is.
Saw our first echidna outside our farm gate on the neighbours land. It was around 6:30pm and was burrowing down into the grass (I would too if there were a group of humans standing around looking at me).
Hopefully there are more out there.
Last Sunday, for 20 David-Attenboroughesque minutes I held a dragonfly (or rather it clung to me) on my hand. I watched as this frail thing dried its wings while perched on my hand and put its trust in my clumsy human hands . It has been resting on the net over our olive tree when my hand came into its life.
It was hard to tell whether it was deliberately moving its wings to dry them, or whether just the breath of wind made them move involuntary. They fluttered like long grasses in a storm. How can wings so fragile withstand such gentle violence?
It’s stick-like abdomen was resting on the tip of my fingers, passing on the vibrations of its tiny wings. The sensation of buzzing through my fingers was the same sensation as when a purring cat rests in chin on your neck – its like communication on another plane, felt and not heard.
I’d never seen a dragonfly this close and it struck me, that although they’re not related – just how like a fly it seemed. However, flies are associated with maggots bacteria and germs and I don’t think many people remark at how beautiful they are when you get down the macro level. Yet here is a fly-like head, fly-like legs and even a fly-like face and eyes, and yet so delicate and beautiful.
I tried to convince it to move off from my fingers onto a tree, but in the end I convinced myself that it’s tiny legs clinging to my fingers were intentional. It didn’t mind spending the dragonfly equivalent of a few years in my company. Maybe it grew old in my company.
I watched as time passed by and it moved on, straight up into the air – hidden against the sky before I even had time to wave.
For a person, who until about 6 years ago had never really noticed even one dragonfly, I recently seem to be having beautifully close encounters with what are my favourite insects. I am generally fascinated by insects and even the ugly ones and the ones that can kill you. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not inviting cockroaches to live in my house or anything (unless they pay rent!) – but I do get excited by bugs and beetles. I’ve done the “white sheet” thing where you hang a white sheet on your clothes line at night, shine a light on it and watch the freaks arrive! It’s great fun! In fact, the only thing I haven’t done is eat one, at least, not intentionally.
I digress. I can’t remember ever noticing dragonflies in Australia, and it wasn’t until I was in the UK and found those winged dryads living in my garden, that I developed my fascination. I used to spend time trying to convince them to land on me. I must have looked dumb – holding out my hands like a would-be-landing strip. It wasn’t the most scientific excursion into dragonfly observation, but then again, I’m not a scientist (something I keep forgetting obviously).
That’s right, dragonflies and I are purely an emotional/spiritual connection. When I think of my favourite places there’s probably a dragonfly in there somewhere. By nature, I’m a symbolist (the Yeatsian in me) and the dragonfly symbol is pretty strong in my house space.
You can never have too many dragonflies I’m guessing. Do they plague? They are so short lived that I can’t imagine that. I’ve seen hundreds at a time, dizzying me as they crazied around the cool forests in the late evening sun in Tamil Nadu in India, and yet still – a single dragonfly can make me feel at the door of wonder. I step through ever time , hypnotising myself by watching sunlight sparkle on their wings – the pattern reminding me of the solar panels you see on solar garden lights.
So, longingly I hoped that we’d have a healthy population of dragonflies here, now that we’ve moved here on the hill. Of course, they are here and maybe they know I want them around. It took me 4 years in the UK to find a dragonfly at rest long enough to take a photograph, and now I have photographed four within the space of less than three months.
Not only that, but today, behind the chicken sheds, at twilight, near to the water-lilly covered dam, a newly emerged dragonfly flew past and settled on the grass by my feet when I was walking along with my camera. So delicate and so transparent – such a random meeting with a tiny frail not-yet-straight- body. All worlds came close in those moments as I watched this fleeting short life beginning.
First dragonfly of the season spotted today on the university campus where I work. The beautiful winged dryads are back!
