These guys are rather large..see my thing for a sense of scale..I wish I knew whether they were edible..would love to gently saute them in butter...
we have so many fungi erupting out of the warm, moist mulch that covers The Big Bush Garden at the moment...
look at these with their delicate veiling
another crop of maybe edibles...
you half expect a leprechaun to be poking out from behind these guys
Well Steve made it safely back from Casino this morning but this is the 'bridge' 5 hours later at 4.30pm..the flood height sign which is over 2 metres high is well and truly submerged. People are stranded of course on both sides of the creek.
Luckily we don't need to be anywhere else. With some luck we the heaviest of the rains are over and the creek will subside so our friends Grant and Kelly from Sydney can get here tomorrow arvie and Piglet and Murray can get here the day after.
Chris and Steve overlooking what should be our rainforest plantings
water, water, everywhere...we've had 102mm in 24hrs which brings the monthly total to 409mm with four days to go...though the rain has stopped and only scattered showers are forecast for the rest of the week.
And it seems our gym has become a tad wet as well. Luckily Steve had the foresight to unplug the gym equipment...Chris is deciding whether to take a jog or a swim...
OK, so this pic has a tad more realism about it than the previous one...Merry Xmas from Steve, Taylor, Chris and me. 
'Cloudy. Rain' That's the forecast for up here for the next three days, if not more. As you can see from the radar image, we are in the thick of things, precipitation-wise.
We were initially going to simply cover the excavation with pond liner on the naive belief that the walls would remain intact and not need any strengthening. Ha. After a few heavy northern rivers downpours one side of the pond started to collapse into itself and became progressively worse over the next couple of weeks. So...
the only option really was to use these blocks and create interior walls for the pond over which the rubberised pond liner will be placed to create a waterproof seal. This has been an excruciatingly slow and tedious (and heavy job) which Steve carried out pretty much on his lonesome...
and with help from Taylor yesterday with mixing the concrete and concreting the whole structure nice and secure. We are off to Newcastle for a few days today and then hopefully we might be able to make some excellent progress on completing the pond and starting on the deck properly. We are picking up another Helper, Chris, French guy, from Newcastle, so progress could well be boosted.
We created this garden just on two years ago - compare with the pic in the banner. The Lomandra (mat rushes) are growing really well and are a nice habitat for some dwarf tree frogs, and as you can see, the Westringia or native rosemary, that greeny-grey bush on the right, is loving itself sick. The 'road' out the front is our driveway, for those who have not yet visited.
Today was a lovely day. Yesterday we copped over an inch of rain in a couple of hours, sending our creek up over our bridge and isolating us from the rest of the world for the rest of the day. Today started out being very iffy, but nevertheless we drove over to The Channon Market, hoping it was not cancelled, which it wasn't, and so we spent an enjoyable couple of hours there. Unfortunately we had to leave before Oprah's 'people' arrived by hot air balloon...not even The Channon is safe from the ubiquitous Ms O. Then back home to prepare lunch (Thai beef salad and quiche lorraine followed by chocolate cake, strawberries and cream) with our friend Gio, from Clunes. Oh and there was some wine and beer consumed as well.
We have a few resident green tree frogs, who I'm hoping will adore the pond we are presently creating (pics coming soon). This is the largest of the regulars and it hopped into view on Saturday night on our entry porch. For the first time since living here, we've been seeing quite a few cockroaches, so lets hope the frogs get in a bring the numbers down a tad.
Last Wednesday afternoon I rescued a lovely carpet python from possible death by gently persuading it to leave the Rock Valley Road and head back into the bush on the other side. Then, when we got home, Taylor and I were feeding the boys their afternoon treat when Taylor spotted another carpet python literally a metre from us. It was rather calm and quiet and allowed us to pick it up and I took a few shots for Taylor. However, the python in these shots will be well known to regular readers of the blog: Kimba the woma.
Taylor quite likes being Kimba's nanny and takes him out for some sunshine (on the rare occasions we are getting sunshine at present)..Kimba has grown quite a bit from the 40cm hatchling he was when I first got him three years ago. He fed on a rat a few nights ago and I suspect he'll eat another tomorrow evening.
Every afternoon, on the sage advice of the all knowing one, Shane of Murwillumbah, we offer our boys a mix of molasses, pollard and grains in their special red bowl. They are addicted to this stuff so much that they literally gallop up the hill when they hear me or whoever else is feeding them, in this case, Taylor, banging on the side of the container.
This is the only time that the boys will let us pat them...both allow us to scratch their heads and necks and Baxter will let me pat his sides and rump as well. This means that when we need to apply some kind of chemical treatment, they are reasonably willing to accept the treatment.
Taylor doesn't have many skills (yet) in kitchen-related activities (ie cooking) so we set him a task yesterday to produce some no-bake peanut butter and chocolate cookies. He set to work right away and successfully negotiated his way around softened butter, vanilla essence and rolled oats to produce a fine batch of cookies.
His hands were a little on the chocolatey side after he had finished, however.
And here they are...very rich, very delish.
Taylor joined us last Saturday and is staying with us for a while as a Helper. He comes from a small town in Saskatchewan, Canada, called Hoey and has been travelling around Oz for the past 5 weeks on various backpacker tours. The other day he came to work with me and in the afternoon we took him to the koala hospital that is located on SCU's campus. Taylor was very impressed by this big fellow, Tonga, who decided to put on an astonishing vocal performance, tilting his head back and producing the distinctive (and surprising) sound that only a male koala can make - more wild boar like than what you would imagine being produced by a cuddly koala.
photo: Queensland Gvt
So the project for this weekend was to cement in the 'stirrups' as they are called - all 26 of them. The bearers are then bolted or maybe screwed, not sure, into each of these...anyway our friends Warwick and John stayed with us for the weekend and John was pressed into service helping Steve do half of these on Saturday while we did the rest today.
We had about an inch of rain this week so that made the site rather muddy and a tad dirty to work in. You might also notice that part of the pond wall has given in - this is not good.
And that's what things look like now, Sunday evening. We moved the two fox-tailed palms that were growing at the top right of the pic as well...hopefully they will survive the transplant. Next week hopefully will see the bearers in place.
The beautiful mauve flowers of the jacarandas are now falling freely from the trees and within a week or so the trees will be green again. The fallen flowers carpet the drive way and the bush garden with the most lovely carpet of mauve.
Our little Xmas bush provides a little bit of contrast with the mauve carpet.
This spectacular flower belongs to one of our Banksia robur which is growing very nicely and has about five flowers on it at the moment.
Quite a lot of these phalloid fungi have pushed their way up through the mulch over the past couple of days...they smell a bit like rotting meat and attract flies which I guess transfer their spores around the place.
There are a couple of young joeys that have just left their mum's pouch for good on the property at the moment...here are a couple of adult females and a little fellow who will be on his own soon.
The soil that we dug out of the hole for the fish pond was dumped in five separate mounds throughout The Big Bush Garden and then mulched over. We'll then use these as sites to plant more low shrubs. The mounds will break up the rather flat topography of The Big Bush Garden and make it more visually interesting as well as create more habitat for all the Bush Critters I hope will take up residence there, like...
the owner of this shed skin, which I suspect is the green tree snake we saw last week. It's very heartening to me when I see signs of life like this in The Big Bush Garden. On Saturday a small goanna, a bit under a metre, came pelting out from some of the shrubs in this garden and made a bolt from this garden down across the lawn for some reason. Was nice to see!
Phase 2 of Building The Deck was carried out over the weekend. This involved digging out all the holes for the deck's footings (which I did on Saturday while Steve was in Brisbane at a matinee of West Side Story) followed by digging out the fish pond. We carefully marked out the shape using pink twine (what else) before cracking through the hard clay. It was great to feel the warmth of the sun (at long last) but you can see by Stevie's shirt that it was hot, sweaty, dirty, dirty work.
Looking somewhat like an archaeological dig, we dug and we dug and we dug and we carted and carted and carted barrow loads of soil from the site where we dumped them in mounds over in our bush garden (see previous posting). Adding to the general discomfort (but hey who are we to whinge) were huge march flies the size of small mice that were intent on sucking at our perspiring sweat. Luckily they were easily dispatched. We were lucky that we had had some rain earlier in the week which had softened the clay-ey soil, otherwise it would have been like digging into concrete. As it was it as bloody hard going until we reached a softer, sandier horizon.
Ta daaa! Fish pond now completely dug out. It has a sloping 'floor' so that one end is shallower than the other deeper end (which is where I am). We will add a layer of concrete blocks around the edge before lining the whole thing with pond liner, thus increasing the deep end to about 90 cm which should be enough to grow some water lillies in. Next week is Phase 3: cementing in the footings. Stay tuned.
After a very physical and tiring couple of days we finished Sunday off with an hour soak in the spa, me with a beer, Steve with a ginger and soda water, looking down the valley in the last light of day. Bliss.
A fair bit of this weekend was given over to building a retaining wall which was necessary to complete before we begin actually building the decking for the space between the two pavilions of our house. It was a very physical weekend and quite tiring but it's great to have that part of the project finished. It also meant driving down to Bunnings in Lismore on Sunday morning to buy another 10 bags of cement.
And here's the retaining wall in all its glory. Clay-ey soil had to be shaved off and levelled; 5 holes 60 cm deep had to be dug; 16 bags of concrete had to be mixed with water and shovelled from the wheelbarrow into the holes; timber had to be cut and fixed with concrete or bolts.
The very last things we did before soaking in the spa while the sun was setting was mark out where the pond would go and where all the holes for the footings for the deck would go. Now we just need to dig something like 26 holes and a pond 3.6 x 1.2 metres and 70 cm deep!
After we came back from having lunch yesterday and just about to start back working on the retaining wall, I noticed we were not alone. We had a visitor. In the shape of a green tree snake. How lovely. I had seen a sloughed skin of such a snake hanging from the roof of our entry area two years ago, but hadn't sighted the real McCoy. Till Saturday.
It was reasonably OK with me holding it, though snapped a little bit. I held it just so I could remove a couple of large ticks from it and I then released it in amongst the hydrangeas which are looking very lush at the moment.
It seemed to like where I released it because it spent much of today sunning itself on top of the hydrangea leaves exactly where I had released it yesterday.
