Windy Weather

It certainly was. We've just had one of the Spring storms we're prone to here when a cold front comes up from the south bringing strong winds and heavy rain - rain is much needed so you won't hear me complaining about that at least. The wind was blasting the house, so much so that when I went out to put something in the bin I was almost blown off my feet.

We had very little damage although the sound of bits of tree - only gum nuts and small branchlets fortunately - hitting the roof above my bedroom at the height of the storm was a bit disturbing - and we are certainly better off than those left as some were without power or with roofs blown off or fallen trees. The veggie patch took the brunt of it here. When I went out yesterday morning the coriander was flattened - luckily it's still only in flower or I'd have lost all the seeds - and the borage was a mess. I grow that against a trellis given its tendency to snap stems at the drop of a hat - or a careless brush past - but that wasn't enough to protect it this time. Those weren't the only casualties. Half the snowpeas had been ripped off their trellis, too - not that this was too much of a loss since they've just about stopped producing and are starting to die off. There were other minor problems but they are just that - minor.

The coriander was in most urgent need so I started by making a temporary fence of stakes around its bed high enough and secure enough to hold the plants upright. Luckily they're in a long narrow bed and their stems aren't broken or it would have been much more difficult. When I turned to the borage it was obvious the bulk of it was too damaged to rescue - though I did manage to save a couple of plants ready for a certain small girl who loves to eat the flowers - and I ended up filling two big bins with it and the remains of the snow peas.

My back was telling me I should leave it at that but I had some sweet corn seedlings that desperately needed to go in and Pisces had obligingly shifted a big bag of sheep manure to that part of the garden and all I had to do was to spread it and plant them so, of course, I did. You know how it is. You start with one task then you see another and another. Gardening is especially like that, I think, which is why I then remembered I had started to empty the compost out of one of the bins a few days ago and I should move and spread the rest. Then I saw some weeds that needed to be pulled out and really I should put around some slow release fertiliser and so it went until suddenly it was around 3:30 PM and Pisces was hovering around looking worried because I had seized up so much I could barely walk.

It might seem silly to push myself so hard but the truth is working in the garden clears my mind and is deeply satisfying. I was talking to a friend a couple of days ago and we decided that gardening was good for the soul and it is. I'm still struggling a bit today - the arthritis I've had since I was a girl is not forgiving - but it was definitely worth it.

Yes, It's Definitely Spring

because the masked woodswallow is back. I only see it at this time of the year and my favourite bird guide - The Field Guide to the Birds of Australia by Graham Pizzey and Frank Knight if you're interested - tells me that they are nomadic and migrate seasonally to the coast which all fits in with their regular appearance here. As you can see below they are handsome birds and I suspect it is here to breed since their main breeding period is September to December although there can be earlier and later nestings.

Adult male masked woodswallow
Photo by Peter Jacobs
 from Australia

Licensed CC BY-SA 2.0









I'm more than happy to welcome them because they are insectivorous and, as a gardener who tries not to use any sprays or poisons if at all possible, I need all the help I can get in controlling pests naturally. I'm not completely pure in this as I'm occasionally forced to use Dipel (a naturally occurring bacteria that is fatal to caterpillars like those of the Cabbage White butterfly but has no effect on anything else and I confess I did spray the swarming big headed ants (yes, that really is their name and they are a exotic and significant pest here) out on the paving a couple of days ago although I'd probably have left even them alone if they hadn't swarmed over my feet and bitten me. Mind you if they excavate much more under the paving they are likely to find me less accommodating.

Well That Was Odd

I went into the kitchen to clean up after lunch and there on top of the plate of food scraps on the bench was a small (about 2.5 cms in length) piece of brown plastic with a couple of prongs jutting out. Where it came from, or for that matter what it was, I had no idea. I couldn't think of anything it could have come from so I put it out of my mind and disposed of the scraps. Then I opened the dishwasher and there was another similar small piece of plastic on the open dishwasher door. That they appeared on opposite sides of the kitchen made it even more bewildering.

Weird, I thought. Then I noticed that the two prongs on the new one were hollow and seemed to correlate with those on the other piece. Even more odd. I pushed them together and the prongs connected and clicked into place. Then I noticed writing on the top piece. It was a brand name but as far as I know - and, as I've now felt compelled to go through every drawer in the kitchen and trawled the manufacturer's web site, I'm pretty sure - I don't have and, if I remember correctly, never have had anything that made by this particular manufacturer.

We'll probably never know where it/they came from but I have a theory - formed after living here for many years of strange things turning up without explanation. We're either located on top of a portal into another dimension or we have some very tricky fae folk, with far too much time on their hands who like to amuse themselves at our expense, living nearby. The only logical conclusions, don't you think.

Ducky Tales

So there we were a couple of days ago just about to go out when I heard a loud honking noise and I went to look. Coming along my neighbour's driveway was an Australian shelduck with four ducklings in tow. She was obviously very distressed and under attack from the resident ravens while a pair of kookaburras were looking on with definite evil intent.

Our neighbours heard the commotion and joined us as we tried to encourage her to find shelter. These ducks often nest quite a distance from water and all would have been well if we could have persuaded her to change direction so she was heading towards Lake Karrinyup which is about a five minute walk away. But she was determinedly heading in quite the wrong direction. There are other watery places in that direction - Star Swamp (misnamed as it it is actually a pretty little lake in a bushland reserve) on the other side of several very busy major roads and Lake Carine, also in bushland and over major roads. Both are about a twenty minute walk from here.

My neighbour tried to contact someone who might be able to catch and release them in a more appropriate place but could find no-one available. So things were looking pretty grim. We had an appointment and had to leave - there were five other people there by now and I figured they would be able to handle the situation and truthfully, however sad it was, I was starting to think it would be more appropriate to let nature take its harsh course.

We were coming home three hours later when we spotted a neighbour who lives five houses down standing by the side of the road staring into their neighbour's garden and stopped to see what was going on. And there was mother duck and now there were only two ducklings being dive-bombed by the ravens and kookaburras. Mother duck was still heading in the worst possible direction towards the busy roads but she suddenly veered off through their open garage. She'd spotted their swimming pool and all three dived in happily bathing. We left our neighbours working out where they could find a large enough net to try to catch them since chlorinated swimming pools do not provide much in the way of sustenance and that was the last we expected to hear of it.

Not so. Yesterday we heard that they had finally managed to catch them and taken them to our local vet when mother duck had one final surprise. Of the two remaining ducklings one was a shelduck but the other ... was not. We had noticed that it was considerably smaller than the others and much darker in colour but how mother duck ended up with it remains a mystery.

Ovenless.

After the oven caught fire a week or so ago - why, yes, it was a tad exciting but fortunately I was in the kitchen so was able to deal with it quickly - I have been left without an oven. The flu like virus I came down with shortly after has meant I haven't been able to replace it yet. I've done the research now and so it's only a matter of getting to the shops to have a look at the shortlisted ones before we - and by that I mean I, although Pisces thinks his opinion counts even though he never uses the oven - make a final decision.

You'd think that choosing an oven would be fairly simple, wouldn't you, but I've learned a few things over the years and I have some very specific requirements. Firstly it has to be self cleaning because life is too short to waste on cleaning an oven, it needs to have controls that aren't likely to snap off - ask me why I'm even thinking about that sometime and I'll be happy to fill you in - and it must have an internal grill that can be used without having the door open - again you're hearing the voice of experience. Apart from that it can be relatively simple since I don't want twenty different cooking functions  - and I've seen some that have at least that. I have no idea what you'd use most of them for and I have no intention of finding out.

In the meantime while I've been trying to slot in time to go to buy the oven I've discovered I also need to buy a new washing machine. My existing one is still working but the noises it's making are, to put it mildly, alarming and, given it's fourteen years old, it's probably wiser to buy a new one than to spend on what would obviously be an expensive repair. They says bad things come in threes so my fingers are crossed that this time nothing else is going to die on me.

As you can imagine being without an oven has limited my cooking somewhat but it has also brought back memories because when we were newlyweds and moved into our new home the first unpleasant discovery we made was that the stove didn't work. This was in the days before houses were inspected before purchase - and I'm not going to tell you how long ago that was. Luckily, since we had no money for luxury items like stoves, we had been given two electric frypans as wedding presents and that was how all our meals were cooked for the next year.

So today I've been reliving the past a bit having brought out my electric frypan - a much fancier version than my first ones - and baked a tasty meal in it. I'm not so enamoured of it that I won't be going oven shopping this week, though. Nostalgia is all very well but convenience beats it any day.

Springtime

Okay today it's officially Spring - which brings me to quote Shakespeare from As You Like It

'In springtime, the only pretty ring time,
 When birds do sing, hey ding a ding ding;
 Sweet lovers love the spring.'

Well I don't know about all that 'hey ding a ding ding' stuff but for the past three nights starting at about 10:00 PM the park magpies have settled in the tree outside my bedroom window carolling and it's lovely. There isn't a much more glorious sound than a clan of Australian magpies in full voice in my opinion and as far as I'm concerned they are welcome to keep doing it for as long as they want.

This is a pale version of what I've been hearing because there are only three of them but you can perhaps imagine how lovely it is on a night when ten or more are singing in a full moon. This video does not do magpies justice as regards to appearance either as they are soaked and looking seriously bedraggled. Actually they are very handsome birds as you can see here. This fellow is having a lot to say for himself, not only singing but also squawking and chatting unlike my nightly visitors who are simply carolling.