The untimely demise of a chook

Shane, Steve and I had just finished dinner last night when we heard one of the chooks cackling in that 'I'm trying to squeeze out an egg that can't possibly leave my body in one piece' kind of way, which rang alarm bells with us because they never squawk like that at night. Shane headed out to the verandah and noticed his dog, Bluey, wasn't where he should have been. I think you can do the math.
I had inadvertently left one of the girls out after locking what I thought was everyone back in the chookery last evening. Blue had gone down and found her and well, did what moderately sized carnivores have evolved to do. I think we all felt sad that one of the girls met her end like this. The goodness in her body will be unlocked as she decomposes under our banana palm.

One of the nice things about living on a property...

is that you can put bids on things like tin bath-tubs at the Tender Centre and you have somewhere to put the aforesaid item if you happen to be the highest bidder. Which I was. Today. Though, we were below the reserve price but the vendor still directed Brenda Tender to 'sell, sell, sell'...so we've got a bargain! Now, what to use it for....a tub for growing herbs or strawberries? An outside bath-tub once we work out how to heat the water? A water-trough for our sheep (stay tuned for the sheep story)...or something else..any ideas?

Terrific Long Weekend - my 2 year Northern Rivers anniversary

We've had a fantastic long weekend which also marks my 2 year anniversary here in Northern Rivers. As I mention below, our friend Warwick spent it with us and we began with a dinner party on Friday night with Stewart and Matt from the Jiggi Valley. I cooked a massaman curry in the slow cooker and Steve created his delicious bannofi pie. I'll have to put the recipe up for that at some stage, though there are plenty you can google. Anyway, then we had dinner at Mavis' Kitchen on Saturday night with Glen and another recent arrival up here, Damion, who has recently been appointed as an ecologist with Lismore Council. OK I'd better talk about the pic above: I spent time over the weekend weeding, digging around, manuring and mulching all of our fruit trees and they now look great with their grass skirts protecting them from the drying sun.

We headed over to Bangalow Market on Sunday (which has become a bit of a tradition for me on this weekend - my first visit was after I had taken Steve to the airport on my first weekend up here and then I took the German boys, Andre and Ollie there last year on the same weekend). After cruising around the market we headed over to a wonderful cafe called Harvest at a place called Newrybar. Fresh oysters, porterhouse steak sandwich washed down with beers and rose...yummo. When we came home I continued doing some outside work while Steve and Warwick baked a delisciously moist orange and banana cake. We then watched the sunset from the spa with a few glasses of moscato. Now to the image above: Steve spent much of Monday carefully cleaning up the edges of our rather long driveway. They look better than they have ever looked.
And as the sun sank low in the sky we watched these three red necked wallabies grazing on the freshly mown lawn. This shot was taken from the back verandah. It truly is lovely to end the day with these visitors.
This fellow has one of the reddest rumps I've seen on this type of wallaby.Very special, boy.

Tree naming ceremony

Our friend, Warwick from Melbourne (bur originally an Upper Hunter boy) spent ANZAC Weekend with us (making this his 5th visit here - he has edged out Piglet now). On one of the last trips that he and his partner John made here, they were kind enough to buy us a black sapote tree (they have the fruit that tastes like chocolate pudding) which is doing quite well. Warwick had a small but tasteful plaque made up signifying their gift so we had a plaque handing over ceremony on Saturday.
We take such events seriously here at Maryville.
We toasted the health of the tree with a bottle of Moet that Warwick had kindly brought up with him.
Hands locked in friendship, a small plaque commemorating a gift.

Delectable (home-grown) guava

I'd never eaten a guava until this afternoon. I'd drunk guava juice before but this was the first time I'd eaten one. And they are delectably delicious! We have a large guava shrub growing on our fenceline and it's now in fruit and I had noticed a few ripe ones on it the other day. So this afternoon I picked a few nice looking yellow ones and ate a couple of them.
The flesh is pink and a little creamy with quite a few seeds. It's fantastic to sample fruit that grows on your own land.
Beautiful reddy-pink flesh and quite juicy too. We have planted about 5 varieties of guava over the past year or so and hopefully they will start fruiting in the next 12-18 months. I'm keen to grow finger-limes too in some quantity as their fruit is quite expensive. We have one that I put in shortly after buying here but it still is some way from fruiting I think.

Now it's not like me to complain but really...

Is there a potato shortage that I'm unaware of? Would you believe that this amounts to $4.00 worth of chips from Cawongla Store, which is 5 minutes up the Cawongla Road from our place. I tell you what, you city folk...we might have fresh air and clear skies in the country but boy do we pay a price for chips! I didn't count them, cos that would have made me crankier. I think we might have to try Wadeville which is a further five minutes up the Murwillumbah Road next time. Lucky we no longer buy take away chips as we once did when we were urbanites.

Toads, toads, toads

Shane has been taking some of the pavers that we pulled up from the central courtyard at the beginning of the year in preparation for our fabulous Balinese deck and fishpond feature (yet to be realised but stay tuned) back to his place after each visit here and he and I stacked a couple of dozen for him on Saturday. There were 13 little surprises under the pavers sitting directly on the ground.
They were between about 12cm downwards and they were very easy to capture and place in a plastic bag. Then they had some quiet time in the fridge downstairs for a couple of hours to get that heart rate way down before their penultimate destination, the freezer where they stayed overnight. I then put the frozen amphibians in our dumpster at the corner of our road.

Bits and pieces

It's rather warm today - I'd say it pushed a little over 30 at midday and I'm sitting here at 3.00pm shirtless and under a fast-churning ceiling fan. Steve has gone down to Newcastle/Central Coast/Sydney for the coming week and will be doing some preliminary work on costume design for The Boy from Oz which Metropolitan Players in Newcastle is producing this year. They are all very excited that Steve agreed to design the costumes remotely.

Kerry and Jack visited us last week for two nights and kindly did a bit of yard work as well. They also admired the carpet python that was enjoying the sun amongst the pumpkin vine. It returned to the same spot four days running - I got to see it on Saturday morning - but it wasn't around this morning. It had milky eyes so it will be shedding in a couple of days.

I'm relieved that Kimba my woma python broke his 8 week fast today and consumed three small rats. These are much smaller food items than he should be eating but he just turns his little snakey nose up at the adult rats I have been offering him.

And I so hate weeds!

Bloody hell

I knew that the creek area had grown out of control over the past month but wow, I wasn't expecting this when I pushed the lawn mower down the hill and onto the creekside this morning around 7.45am. It was just a jungle - without all the nice jungle things like big rainforest trees and ferns and stuff.
Just a thick, dense mini-jungle of weeds and grasses. All the hard work of Shane, Steve and I over the past twelve months had been kinda obliterated by all of this wicked weed growth. Whereas we had a nice 'lawn' with a variety of young trees and shrubs growing in it, I now had an absolute mess.
But I fired up our trusty Rover mower and went to work. It was bloody hard work though as I could only push my way in to about a metre or so and then had to remow a couple of times because there were quite a lot of fibrous cm thick weeds about a metre tall that took a bit of effort to remove.
And, after 4 hrs this morning it was looking like this again - though it will need to be mown at a closer cut next weekend. I'm also hoping Shane might be down soon so he can work his magic with the brush cutter.
If you are thinking of buying a new lawn mower, I would have to recommend a Rover. They are brilliant workhorses. Nothing fazes them, although Rove tends to be a little smoky after a while...lordie knows what toxic fumes I have been breathing in this morning.

Cedar Tip Moth damage

I had been aware of the damage that the pesky cedar tip moth can do to red cedars but was hoping ours would somehow avoid this nasty little pest. Unfortunately that is not the case and each of the six young red cedars that we have planted down by the creek are now badly damaged by the caterpillars of this moth.
The caterpillar chews into the growing tip of the cedar tree and hollows out the stem. Google wasn't very helpful with suggesting ways of treating the infestation, but I shall spray some pyrethrum-based spray over them this arvie. Can't hurt I spose.

Carpet Python amongst the pumpkins

Our friends, Kerry and her son Jack stayed with us on Tuesday and Wednesday nights and this morning while out looking at our pumpkins they discovered this lovely looking carpet python sunning itself in the early morning sun.
It's possibly living in our garage or shed...woo hoo.
This is the first carpet python we've found so close to the house. And what a beauty it is. Well spotted, Jack and Kerry!

compare with May 2009

These shots are of the garden we started creating last May from scratch. Well there were a couple of tree ferns we had planted the previous December but that was all. We got a load of soil, mulched it up and planted lots of plants. The results are quite good.
We are going to plant a rododendron (frick my spelling abilities go out the window when I'm blogging - you know what I mean) in this space, probably tomorrow (well Steve will while I'm at work).

Some some random shots of green

Our galangal, planted in early 2009
This is a macaranga, a very good rainforest 'starter' plant as its quick growing, creates a shady canopy and its shed leaves mulch down really well. You can see Cliff Richard in the background.
Another new plant for us up here, an arrowroot. They have tuberous roots and stems that can be eaten like a potato or tarro.Fantastic flowers as well. Very fast growing in the right conditions.
Pumpkins are running riot here at the moment.
I think this is sorrell.

Sit yourself down and rest for a while....

A selection of seats (all bought for a nickel at various times at the Lismore Tender Centre) for you to enjoy our place on when you come visit....