Baby Pineapples

It's taken a while to find the ideal place for pineapples to grow successfully in my garden but with almost all in flower for the second year in succession I may have it right now. Here are some of them.

The flowers are about the size of my fist but the fruit will soon start to form - and when they're ready to pick I'll save and plant the tops and in a year or so there will be another crop. I do love plants that keep giving.

Here's a close up of a flower.

Random Bits

 This is not so much a post, more a collection of what happened/is happening or interests me at this moment.

One thing is Joe Biden's inauguration as US President went off without disruption which is good for USA stability and therefore for the rest of us. What happens next there - well, we'll just have to wait and see, won't we.

On a less planet affecting level here are a few things happening here. 

1. I found the remains - the hind legs and a bit of its gut - of one of the large motorbike frogs which live in my garden. This is strange because you'd expect any predator to have eaten the legs which are the most fleshy part of the creature.

2. I picked a tomato and found it full of tiny ants. I came in to tell Pisces I'd never seen such a thing before. Then I opened Facebook to find a memory from January 2012 about exactly the same thing.

3. Pisces and I went to lunch yesterday with another nine couples, most of whom have been getting together on a monthly basis for much of our adult lives. Many of us have been friends since our school or student days. When we married we formed a more formal group bringing in our respective partners. Over time some sadly have passed away and others have moved to different parts of the world but the core has always remained together. Virgo describes it as growing up with a whole lot of extra aunts, uncles and cousins. Thinking about it we've achieved something worthwhile here. 

4. Something has been been destroying my sweet corn plants. Whatever it is - and for once I don't think it's rats - has been shredding the stalks as soon as the plants reach the flowering stage. I suspect the galahs from the park have been visiting. Sigh.

5. We have enough ripe blueberries to pick for lunch! Yay!

Life Gets Teejus Don't It

 This is the version of this monologue I remember my Dad having - and playing frequently - on an ancient 45 record when I was a kid. We all learned it off by heart and it would be quoted at times when things were getting a bit fraught. I don't know why it suddenly came to mind today but it seems somehow appropriate for these times. 

Here is Carson Robison and Life Gets Teejus Don't It for your enjoyment.

And They're Gone

The Christmas decorations I mean. They were a little low key this year - I just didn't have the enthusiasm somehow. I'm not sure why given Christmas here was pretty much what Christmas always is. We kept up the family traditions with the decorations going up on the first weekend in December and coming down on January 6. They were a little sparse although that sounds more grim than it really was. We still had a bauble laden tree with masses of shiny strings of gold and red beads and a wreath on the door - and the Christmas cards made a cheery display on the sideboard in the dining room. 

We only give children's presents these days - and let's be honest watching children open their gifts is far better than getting a gift yourself anyway. When we went around to Virgo's on Christmas Eve Miss Four and a Half was all but bouncing off the walls with excitement - while Master One was more interested in my walking stick until his ride on car was revealed. I gave Virgo and her husband a large jar of shortbread and Miss Four and a Half was already "sharing" it by the time we left. That was followed on Christmas Day by lunch with our extended family and another family lunch on New Year's Day. So all pretty much the usual.

Somehow, though, it didn't seem the same. We may have been going about our lives here but so many others weren't. Friends and family in other parts of Australia were caught up in yet another outbreak and even more were in lockdown in the UK and Canada. There's no doubt that this pandemic has quite a way to run and when it will start to wind down is anyone's guess.The new vaccines are very promising but we don't know how long immunity will last and what the new mutations may bring. It's all a guessing game and to be honest that's more than a little depressing.

All we can do is to try to keep people safe - and if that means lockdowns and social distancing so be it. I for one am not complaining about any measures put in place to protect us. We need to keep our heads and yes, I get that people are over living like this, never knowing when or if they might get infected and what the repercussions of that might be but we can't afford become blasé or to fall down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories and doubt. Just remember that this will eventually end. All we have to do is to remember that. 

For me there is hope in the words of the English mystic, Dame Julian of Norwich, back in the Middle Ages, "All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.". She was a woman of great insight, much admired in her time - and she had a pet cat apparently. Obviously a woman of taste as well as wisdom.

Windy Days and Consequences

I live not far from the coast close to the top of a hill and my house is oriented pretty much to the north. This means there's only with only a small part in full sun at any time of the day. The front where the afternoon sun would otherwise beat down on the front of the house is shaded by a huge and very lovely marri tree. And I'm used to windy days. They are part of what makes summer living here so pleasant.  We get the cool easterlies from inland in the summer - well, they're cool in the early mornings until the land heats up by mid morning and then the The Doctor - the sea breeze - arrives around midday or a little later and cools it down again.

Sounds great and usually it is but this year is not quite the same. I mentioned a while back that we've already hit 40° C several times and, while this is not unheard of, it is more common in February, not December and early January. Then there's the wind - and recently it hasn't been our friend. 

Early in the evening of New Year's Day quite suddenly after a warmish humid day the wind decided it was tired of gentle breezes and sent us a blast of furious and hot easterly gusts which have only just started to ease a little. The gusts were so strong they blew down the shade cloth covers over my veggies, tore small branches off my neighbour's trees while each gust rattled the windows making sleep difficult and the sea breeze? Forget it. 

While all this wind has been exhausting there are other consequences. We've had bushfires in several outer suburbs with mass evacuations required while several are raging out of control a bit further up the coast to the north of the city. We have bushfires every summer, some years worse than others - a couple of years ago a whole town was destroyed - so fires aren't unexpected and fortunately so far at least they are nothing like the scale of those that wreaked havoc on the east coast last summer. Folk there are slowly rebuilding their lives with many still living in caravans and sheds - and for those in the mountains it was a long, cold winter. However, it's only the start of the bushfire seasons so we can't afford to get complacent and the fierce winds are making any fire control difficult to impossible. 

The truth is the British who came here as colonists made some bad mistakes as far as farming and other land use was concerned. While fire has always been present here - most of the continent is hot and dry and always has been - the indigenous people those colonists supplanted had had something like 60,000 years of living with and managing it. Instead the newcomers disrupted systems that had sustained many generations and tried to transplant European land management to an alien and completely different landscape. It was successful for a time - Australia was supplying large amounts of meat, wheat and wool to the world market for more than a hundred years - but now the consequences of that form of agriculture and the logging of our old growth forests are showing in salinity, dust storms and out of control bushfires.

How we are going to deal with these problems I don't know - successive governments have shown little ability to grapple effectively with them - but we certainly need to. It's probably too late to go back to the indigenous systems but we certainly need to do something. Climate change is happening whether we like it or not. It will bring more damaging fires and other consequences. We ignore it at our peril.

Happy New Year

 And because 2021 doesn't look as if it's going to be all that wonderful (at least in the early stages) here are some strawberries in one of the hanging baskets outside my back door.

They tasted as good as they look. It's something of a surprise that the strawberries are doing so well given we've had a very hot spell with the temperature hitting 40°C on several days. They and the blueberries are in places where they get shade from early in the afternoon but the paving under them stays hot for a long time and generates a lot of heat until well into the evening. 

We had a modicum of relief yesterday when the temperature only reached 31°C but it was horribly humid so not pleasant. The forecast for today is 35°C and the sun already has a sting. I've just been hanging out the last of the washing and the first lot is already nearly dry so it looks like the forecast is going to be right. 

Wherever you are I hope you're having a great day - or one as great as you can in the current state of the world - and that the New Year brings you and yours happiness and good health.