Meerkats of South Nowra

Spotted in the garden of a cabin in the caravan park at South Nowra.
(I've also seen them in the Penny Miller homewares catalogue.)



From my Mum's hanging basket. I've had great success rooting cuttings from my own goldfish plant, so we'll see how successful I can be.

When life hands you a lemon...

... make lemonade!



First ripe lemon of the season. Last year was a dismal crop; I don't think more than four lemons survived. It seems that every second year produces a bumper crop.

Blooming what?

Unknown flowering plant in a hanging basket. When this was purchased from a garden centre at Batlow, several years ago, it was a mere stick, with one flower on it. Despite a short unproductive time at first, it blooms very successfully these days. When photographed, the flowers appear as if they are delicate butterflies!

On display!

Overhead shot of new growth from my
Silver Lady blechnum fern. 23 August 2009.


Great title for an upcoming movie! 24 August 2009.

The little black pantha who tried

Alas poor little black pantha (lower half of image, centre). He tried and tried but just couldn't make it. Already a "late bloomer", with all his much taller blue brothers and white sisters long turned to garden mulch, it seems he's not going to make it. Four days of high temperatures appear to have crisped his unopened deep purple agapanthus blooms. RIP.


There he was!

Sunday's not so magic number: 96.5 - Oh dear. Too much post-Christmas cheer. Hey, it's just been too hot to do much walking! Mind you, I was out walking all day on both Thursday and Friday.

Decorating the outdoor room

I'm just back in from decorating the big pine tree in the back garden for the festive season. I had to make two trips up the ladder; I realised on one of the very last small baubles that tubes of Christmas balls from the bargain shop (@ $4 per tube of twelve) are not going to have a high level of quality control. One bauble was missing a string, and several others had to be retied - but I ended up gluing all of their plastic connectors, even though they were already on the tree, since the summer sun is bound to make the plastic brittle and they were only clipped into place.

The larger balls are sequined, and were only $1 this morning at The Christmas Cave's massive sell-out. Not much of a range left, but these balls will probably last okay. If they don't get blown over the fence. The previous batch of outdoor Christmas decorations lasted about three annual outings.

At least this year I didn't step back from the ladder to admire my handiwork when I was finished. Yep, straight in the pool that year... - wallet and all.



Sunday's not so magic number: 95.5 - 'Tis the season to be naughty.

Poo!

I was just fielding a phone call from "Super Poo", who sell racing horse poo for the garden. It's wonderful stuff - the planrs love it - but I told her, "Cork those horses' bottoms! I still have plenty of poo here!"

I hasten to add that "Super Poo" is an excellent product. The garden is about seven years old now and - due to racing horses not eating any weeds in their superior brand of hay - the garden has never needed serious weeding in all those years. Perhaps a few sprouting weeds from seeds dropped by passing birds.

The plants love "Super Poo".

How does your garden grow?

It's a little bizarre that the grass is growing so wonderfully in the middle of a drought, but we've been getting a combination of frequent storms, that can dump a month's rainfall in ten minutes over parts of Sydney, followed by days of gorgeous sunshine. You can practically watch the blades of grass growing!

I'm particularly thrilled about my gardenia bushes, which are blooming extremely well this year. Gardenias were my paternal grandmother's much-treasured flowers, due to her daughter Elaine's fondness for them (Aunty Elaine died at age 17, although she has ben an influence over several generations who never met her). I once bought my grandmother a potted gardenia for her balcony as a gift and it was an annual celebration whenever that first fragrant bud burst open. When I bought my own flat in 1984, a gardenia for the balcony was one of my first purchases.



Since moving to the house in 2000, I've made a point of picking up a new greenhouse-reared, ready-to-bloom gardenia plant each year, mainly because they have had more promise of many blooms than the ones here, which have traditionally granted only about ten blooms each per season. The last few years, despite careful spraying for pests, some little caterpillar has been tunnelling through the tiny unopened gardenia buds and this either mutates each bud as it grows to full size, or causes it to not open at all.

This year, anticipating disaster again, I bought a new, ready-to-bloom gardenia plant - which has started performing well - but all of the other plants are covered with buds and flowers, too! Mind you, there've been some black caterpillars threatening to start munching but so far so good. (I squished one in the centre of his body the other day - and his brains shot right out of his head. If that's where a caterpillar keeps his brains.)

I'm also enjoying the development of this year's agapanthus blooms (but so far no action from my two Black Panthas), the gorgeous self-seeding portulacas, and the amazingly hardy pigfaces (first time this year) in their numerous colours.


Fingers crossed for a black pantha!


Sunday's magic number: 88.6 I'm so excited! It was a difficult week, watching a friend tuck into Krispy Kreme donuts when I had a skinny milkshake, and I even refused to partake of free Christmas cake at work. Sigh... I guess it's been worth it.

Pussy patrol

These things work, you know.

When I lived in a flat in Lakemba, I had terrible trouble discouraging pigeons from nesting on my balcony. If you went on holidays for any longer than a few weeks, you'd come home to a pair of eggs sitting in a pot plant. (The woman next door even let a few hatch on her balcony, and the subsequent baby pigeons continued to "home" for many years.)

I read somewhere that all I needed was a cat silhouette, and the pigeons would go elsewhere. but I never got around to making one. (Of course, for the first six years or so, I had my own pet cat on guard.) Rubber snakes were also supposed to be effective, but I made do with totally ineffective wire coathangers, that were supposed to jangle in the breeze and scare off the birds.

Moving to Penrith and a house with a garden, the pigeons were no longer a problem, although magpies and other birds often sheltered on the back decking. The problem was particularly noticeable when I bought new outdoor furniture. You'd come outside with your breakfast - and every chair would be covered in bird poo.

The garden also attracted birds rooting around looking for grubs. Now, attracting birds to a garden is supposed to be a good idea, but they do create a terrible mess, tossing all the bark chips into the pool in their enthusiasm The rubber snakes trick actually works, I've discovered - although they can give humans a nasty shock as well, particularly when you hear of real brown snakes caught in your street. Not to mention the huge red-bellied black snake I met near Penrith Railway Station one spring.

Then I found the cat silhouettes. They look really cool and they really freak out the birds. The cats do work themselves loose from the fishing line every once in a while, and they were rather ineffective just propped against the fences. But I put them all up again the other day and, just a few minutes later, it began to rain. Sure enough, a young magpie winged into the verandah, seeking shelter... straight into the path of a cat silhouette. He took fright, made another pass, meet a second hanging cat, squawked an annoyed comment - and flew off to perch on next door's balcony. And crapped on it. ;-)

One kayaker, one Jack Russell, one portulaca

Today I took Jack for a looooooong walk at the Sydney International Regatta Centre on Penrith Lakes. "Set on 196 hectares of native and landscaped parkland", the Centre hosted all the rowing and sprint kayak events during the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games. "It has now been re-invented to become a popular sporting, corporate and social venue", and is said to receive an average of 50 000 visitors a month.

Jack undertook the challenge of two x 1.5 kms (to the starting line and back to the car park) with great gusto, always trying - and succeeding, if his Extend-a-lead permitted - to stay just ahead of any walker on the path. He'd only been there a few minutes, but you'd be convinced that he knew the place intimately, and owned the path, the river, the water, every tree and blade of grass, and all of Penrith District. Typical Jack Russell. Jack was quite interested in the ripples of tide against the pebbled edges of the water course. Not to mention the groups of ducks and other waterbirds. But what really caught his attention was the sole rower on the water. Suddenly, as he or she passed by, Jack decided that that person had no right to be paddling a kayak on a Sunday afternoon and Jack began to bark enthusiastically.

He's incredible sleepy tonight, of course, and just looked at me with big cow eyes, indicating that it was time for the toy tiger to come out of its cupboard, so that Jack could retire to his sheepskin mat beside my bed. Mind you, it's only 10.30 pm as I type this, and he's normally content to wait until I'm ready for bed myself.

From lone kayaker to lone portulaca! Several of last year's glorious (self-seeded) portulaca display, here at home in the backyard, have themselves self-seeded - and they really do look fantastic, spilling casually over the rock walls of the elevated garden alongside the pool as if they had been artfully placed there on purpose. Today, a single stem of portuca plant, which had grown up, unnoticed, from a thin crack in the concrete surrounds of the pool, bloomed with a glorious red flower. Amazing!





The single portulaca joins the lone Black Pantha agapanthus (below) that has graced us with its presence this year. Although they are more of a deep purple colour, last year both of my Black Pantha specimens took a rain check on putting out flower stems. Very annoying when they cost so much more than the average blue or white agapanthus (many of which were no-cost hand-me-downs from elderly relatives and friends), and which grow like the introduced noxious weeds they were recently labelled as by the Blue Mountains Council.