Week Nine

A few happy discoveries this week…. 

My property has large lizards!

What a beauty. Walks past my bedroom every day at around 10:30. Right past where I wanted to put the chook house.. 

Last night I walked outside to find there were fireflies everywhere. It was pretty glorious. Tonight, no fireflies. The internet doesn’t seem to have much information for me on how to attract fireflies or what to expect of them. Any info welcome.

One of my grafts has been looking sad for the last … 12 months or so. I finally got around to doing something about it.. the pereskiopsis it was attatched to had rotted out some time ago.

The loph has been trying to root without any soil to root into.

Its still healthy, just a little dehydrated

This is one that was done at the same time and hasn’t rotted out. Lovely.

So when I cut the lophophora for grafting, it looked quite unusual. I haven’t seen the insides look like that before. Any thoughts?
It’s been a pretty quiet week for me, though I must say I have some wonderful new friends up this way.

I visited with a new friend I know off the shaman australis forums and was given lots of new healthy pereskiopsis stock for more grafting, and a beautiful grafted trich crest which I shall show off later. Thanks mate when you read this! 🙂

I pulled my finger out and planted a bunch of food/herb seeds.. small pots with moist soil was my method. I even labelled things this time. After three days I got impatient with nothing germinating so I tried putting some seeds in sphagnum moss inside take away containers to see if that would work any better. Turns out I didnt actually look at the pots very closely theres already giant sunflowers and chamomile coming up. Yay!

I have also been potting things up this week, I don’t yet know where I want to put things in their permanent place, so big pots in the meantime. Audrey, my permaculture consultant designer and friend is coming up in a few weeks to help me sort out my design. I would hate to put fruit trees down only to find out thats where the bulldozer needs to go.
Thats it for now. 

Week Eight

Well it has been a fun week for me. I got to spend some time in Brisbane again with a good friend, I travelled up there to check out the greenhouse I think I want to assemble on my property.

It is called the Windjammer series 5000

That isn’t actually the one Iwould be buying .. the one I am after looks more like this at the moment:

It is about 9mx20m. A good size for expansion of my garden 🙂 Iam going to need to get some earthworks done to fit it in… haven’t actually bought it yet, but the chap is nice and it seems promising. The initial ad quoted $4000 for the whole thing with skin.. but I am waiting to see his revised total as it will also need shipping and he hasn’t actually got the skin at the moment. There are actually several of them for sale – if any of you are interested, here is the manufacturer website and details on the structure and instructions etc.

http://www.gpstructures.com/literature.html

So Iwanted to touch again on my safety gear. I didn’t really display any of it very well in my last mention. I am using chainsaw and brushcutter up here on my own, so safety gear is super important for me. This is what I actually use when Im on the chainsaw or the brushcutter… We have good solid gumboots, helmet with earmuffs and faceshield, gloves, safety glasses, big bottle of water, phone and chainsaw pants. Wearing the chainsaw pants is pretty brutally hot, so I don’t like to wear them if I am doing brushcutting so much. Im lucky enough to have mobile coverage everywhere I have been working so far.

I bought a new brushcutter, the one I had is about 20 years old, and it just couldn’t handle the thick scrub around my property. I bought the Stihl FS94c :
http://www.stihl.com.au/STIHL-Products/Grass-Trimmers-Brushcutters/Professional-Brushcutters/22338-1621/FS-94-C-E.aspx

It is bloody great. I have been smashing through the lantana and thick grass with this much more easily. My productivity in clearing has dramatically increased.

Heres some fresh ground I have uncovered

..

The area is really opening up now. Iam discovering lots of pots and trash and secret places hidden in the lantana.

So I cleared my way to this big patch of Devil’s Fig. Bloody awful thorny pesty stuff.

See how thorny it is?

So I chainsawed it all down and painted the stumps with Glyphosate. Hopefully I will be able to dig all the stumps up before it gets into the soil… I am trying to cut out as much of it as I can find before it fruits and spreads more.

Much more access to my bananas now too! Ican see  some fresh banana flowers coming out … but way to high for me to reach them still.

As I have been clearing up, I keep discovering these discarded pot plant bases. Someone has been up to mischief!

So this is the gross old pool that was left by the previous owners.  I was hoping I would be able to use it as a fishpond, but it has holes. I was going to dismantle it, but it had tadpoles in there, so I was waiting for them to frog..

I think it will end up as a weed mat or tarp to clear areas for garden beds or something. The structure might come in handy eventually.

Gross.

So while Ihave been writing this a snake has popped out of a rotten board in the ceiling and has been trying to fit back in there. Thanks snake! Ithink it has shown me where the rats were getting in (before the snakes woke up).

ID on this one anybody?

Also last night the mystery animal returned.. four times! There were actually two of them. They both came into the bathroom and tried to eat the peanut butter in the live rat trap. Both of them were bigger than the cage and couldn’t fit far enough into it to get to the peanut butter. I believe it is a very large bandicoot. It is always just a  bit quicker than the camera when I leap into the bathroom to photo it. but the link below shows what I think Im looking at. I want to get a trail camera to observe the wildlife at night. One of them appears to have a sore on its rump. I shall try and observe them more and see if it heals up ok.

http://www.bandicoot.net.au/types_of_bandicoots.htm

Thats about it for now!

Week .. umm.. Seven?

Some good times had this week. My good friend Interbeing had a party, I got to meet lots of cool people including many fabulous local plant people. I am hoping there will be many more meetings (You all know who you are)

There have been several days of slobbing around doing nothing post party, but I still got quite a bit done. Ihave been working with the brush cutter trying to get a better idea of what lies beneath the mountains of grass. My poor old brush cutter wasn’t really made for cutting through scrub, its more of a backyard job.. so Iam thinking of getting a new one.. any suggestions?

Ihave come to the conclusion that I haven’t been sharing as much of what my setup looks like as i should, so even though things are not as Iwant them, I will try and document so there will be before and after and Ill understand all my mistakes so much better. And of course you can all tell me your wisdom! 
So this is my current generator shed. Due to having no solar currently setup, this gets more use than I would like. But Itry not to use much power, maybe an hour a day at the moment. Its about 25m from the house, and it doesn’t make too much of an ungodly racket. This is also my gas chamber for rats. I have a pipe that goes over the exhaust leading into a big plastic bag that the live trap goes into for humane deaths.

This is my first banana. Yummy!

This is what the bats do to my bananas when I go away for 10 days. The bananas are too high for me to reach them so Ihad to chop it down to get them. I would like to be able to bag them on the tree but Idont know how Iwill do that yet. Suggestions welcome. Maybe some kind of big pole contraption.

Here is my current compost setup. The middle is on the ground, Ihave paved the edges hoping it will keep the rats from burrowing in there. So far so good.

So Icut my way into the wilderness and found some unexpected stuff

Looks like Imight be able to use that as a garden bed!

And the other pile of corrugated iron looks like it used to be a structure once upon a time. IT has rotted out floorboards but all the metal seems fine. It looks like the roof used to be shadecloth. I wonder what they were growing in there…?

This is the view from the unknown structure… you can see my bamboo field stretching off into the distance…

Week Sixish

My the time goes so fast.

This week has been up and down. I regularly feel overwhelmed with trying to figure out what I should do or feeling low on energy or motivation. Its a little overwhelming I guess. So when that happens I just kick back with a book and before I know it, its dark again and I try again in the morning.

My bathroom has no door to the outside, I was getting paddymelons or very small wallabies having parties in there, which is very cute, but also rats are a problem so I have been using live traps so Idont kill anything native accidently. I have been gassing the rats with the generator when I catch them. The other night I heard the trap go off and went to have a look. Something had tried to get the peanut butter and set the trap off.. but it was too big to fit in the live trap. I got a quick look at it but Idont know what it was. It didn’t hop, it scampered. it was mainly brown, It had to be at least 60cm long and 20cm tall. It had a tail. I think it was way too big for a bandicoot. Any thoughts?

At the moment I am reading brotherhood of the screaming abyss by Dennis McKenna. Its been on my to do list for a very long time.
So here is my new friend Mittens,I don’t think I managed a photo last time. I hve a new camera so in future picture quality should be much better.

I found this out in the bamboo forest. It looks like a nest! it is about a metre deep and 3 metres wide. Any ideas on what would make such a nest? This isn’t brush turkeys is it?

Safety stuff! I bought this helmet with my chainsaw, and boy am I glad. I have been using it with the brush cutter and it has saved my face from so many things. I should really still wear some safety glasses underneath as Iget the occasional little dust bit in my eyes. And those gloves are great! Gel padded work gloves. Haven’t had a single blister since I started using them.

My Kaffir Lime seedling is coming along nicely!

This is how I am attempting to propogate my Pereskiopsis cuttings. I never had any success with them in the past, but Inever put them in a humidity chamber before, so here’s hoping these ones dont die!

Some Psychotria cuttings…

Banisteriopsis cuttings… not looking as happy as the Psychotria, but hopefully will perk up.

This was a gift from a friend in Melbourne, it was looking real sad when I got it, when it got up here it lost all its leaves and looked like a dead twig, but I left it out in the rain and it has perked right up! Brand new leaves now. Go Yopo!

Heres another style of humidity chamber I am using for some cuttings and seedlings. It seems quite effective as you can see from the moisture on the glass.

So a slow week this week.. not much progress to report, planted some acacias and khat, having cut back a lot of the dense grass I am getting a better picture of where all the trash from previous owner is.. Iwant to put it all into one big pile, trying to decide where to put things is my major difficulty at the moment. Collecting rocks for the rockwall continues very slowly. It is hot work lugging those bloody things about.