Tractor Envy!

Birds and Blooms 5

Birds and Blooms 4

Birds and Blooms 3

(Silver pheasant's feathers, top right, and a Cape Barren goose bottom right?)

Birds and Blooms 2

Autumn leaves and pheasants for J on her birthday.

Birds and Blooms 1

This month the gardening club visited a local garden which features a lake with waterbirds and waterlilies and an aviary in amongst what felt like miles of flower-bordered paths. It set me to thinking about adding some more colour to our garden.

I'm also very tempted by the idea of an aviary with exotic birds - maybe under the deck when we reach that stage of the renovations...

Here's a series of photos for future inspiration.

Happy Easter!

Packing up. Again.

Our builder has promised that he isn't going to move to Christchurch to take up all the building work on offer there and instead will be starting work on our house at the end of next month. And he wants us out from under his feet.

So J has cleared space in the shed for all the belongings that we've accumulated in the house since moving in almost two years ago and we'll be packing up over the next few months and making space for workmen.

I can hardly believe we're going to make progress after all this time - watch this space!

Weeding 2

My other enemy is the convolvulus. We've had a patch of it sprayed with Round-Up and that seems to be under control now. But there's another invasion on our native griselina hedge along the road. Unfortunately it's strangling the hedge which is looking a bit sorry for itself now. And I don't think spraying would help the situation.

Recently a neighbour told me she was itching to grab hold of it and pull it off the hedge. I should have told her to feel free and go ahead but instead I took it as a challenge.

But the evil weed has developed such a strong foothold (tendril-hold?) in just one season that yanking it just isn't doing the trick. After landing on my backside on the verge a couple of times, thanks to the tug-of-war that was required, I've decided I need some shears to hack away at it with.

Weeding 1

Weeding is no small exercise in NZ, particularly on a lifestyle block. Around here, weeds grow like - erm.... - super-weeds.

The weekend before last, weeding consisted of taking down a whole eight-foot tall tree which had grown in the two years since we bought the place.

It was quite a pretty tree with lovely yellow flowers. But it's those lovely yellow flowers which are the source of its evil. It's an invasive Australian species, a wattle, which spreads like wildfire.

Luckily the jaws of death made light work of it.

New Toy

Thank you Allan!

Don't even think about putting your paws on my bowl!

Time for a trim

I was feeling particularly unsentimental at the weekend and it was a sunny day - the perfect combination for pruning our rosebush.

We've had some lovely blooms on the bush but not many and the leaves always look quite sad - probably a result of a combination of humidity and heat. Apparently Auckland is not prime rose-growing territory.



The other motivation for pruning was that the bush is against the house - and the asbestos fibrolite - which our builder will shortly be removing and replacing with much healthier weatherboard. I felt sure that he'd prefer not to have to wade through a big thorny bush to get to work.

So, taking lessons from members of our gardening club who are rather vicious with their pruning shears, I hacked away at the plant which had grown rather leggy.



Now I just have to wait and see whether it grows back...

Daisy, daisy...

Sunshine and Shadows

Autumn is here in Auckland. The days are getting shorter and the shadows are growing longer. The nights are cool and the stars bright. Toadstools are bursting forth and the leaves will be turning soon.

Chickens: Chillaxing

Toadstools

Shield Bug

The Plagues of Auckland

To go with our frog, we also have an infestation of grasshoppers - the local equivalent of locusts? Every time I go in the garage, half a dozen little creatures scuttle off.

I don't think this one will be leaping out at me at least - it seems to missing one jumping leg, poor thing.

Frog-in-the-hall

When I opened the front door the other night to feed the rabbits, I found this little creature waiting for me. And then he hopped inside! He must have thought that our carpet was a lily pond.


We've worked out that he was a Southern Bell frog, a descendant of one introduced from Australia in the 1860s from Tasmania. He has a number of special features which helped us to identify him:

• Dark brown or black blotches on the back
  
• A pale green stripe down the middle of their back
  
• The belly looks granular
• The fingers lack webbing while the toes are almost completely webbed
• There are no suckers on the ends of their toes or fingers

The grass is always greener...

I'm beginning to worry that our neighbours will have bought their land, designed their house, obtained consent, built their house and moved in in the time that it's taken us to start renovating. They've chosen a G J Gardner home - I just hope that it's an interesting one to look at...