Meet Antonin and Kevin, HelpXers from France

 Kevin and Antonin have been with us for a bit over a week and have fitted in very easily and very well to the Larnook lifestyle. They are great fun and wonderful workers. Here they are preparing for a French dinner party we hosted on Saturday night. They cooked a tasty savoury loaf and a quiche lorraine.

 Steve set up the table, creating a French flag out of three individual table cloths and Glen found some suitable vin blanc and vin rouge in Lismore. Jason and Dale and of course Shane, Steve and I, completed the table. We had a fabby night, and in the words of Calixte, our French son, we all got a little bit silly.

 So silly, in fact, that the boys didn't wake from their bed until 11am. I then took them up to Border Ranges National Park, which had been closed for the past six weeks or so because of the damage that had been caused by the cyclone event we experienced back then. As I was driving up to the park I started wondering whether in fact the walking track I wanted to take the boys on would actually be open. A ranger vehicle driving out of the Barr Mountain picnic area from which the track starts, pulled us over and the friendly ranger told us that indeed the walking track was well and truly closed. So we continued driving to the Pinnacle Lookout, from which you can gain a brilliant view over the Wollumbin crater. And I took a couple of pics of the boys (Antonin on the left, my namesake, Kevin, on the right - yes, Kevin is a reasonably common boy's name in France, apparently).

We kept driving westward until we got to Sheepstation Creek camping area, from which a number of walking tracks slither through the bush. Because it was getting a little late, we chose a short track to Brushbox Falls, which was quite lovely. A couple of goannas and a very cheeky yellow eared honeyeater topped the day off. And then it was home through a big storm via Kyogle.

Snakey Stuff

Larnook has been snake central over the past week or so. I was down the bottom paddock giving it a good Rogering two weeks ago when I saw the grass move very deliberately ahead of Roger. Expecting to see a big toad, I slowed Roger right down and was blown away and delighted to see a large rough scaled snake close to a metre long slither out from the grass to traverse the mown strip before disappearing into the longer grass near the creek.
I can't really tell you how lucky I feel to share our place with roughies. They have been a favourite snake of mine ever since I saw my very first one curled amongst the smooth rocks in Allyn River when I was on an end of year school camp in 1979. It was a huge yet placid one and I have not seen a bigger one since. However, I used to go searching for them at night with a mate, Theo, up in the same area, and I can recall seeing one slithering around the edge of a small pond one night with my friend, Andy. And, now I have them on my own place.  Such a thrill, though they are quite toxic.
Then, we have had two python sightings in two days. The first was a very healthy looking carpet in our shed,  just under two metres I guess in length while the second was a bigger carpet that Shane found in the garage. Thankfully, neither has decided to give the Chookery a go!

Pondings

 I thought it might be good to provide an update on the fishpond that we incorporated into the middle deck. The photo is very representative of what it and the deck look like at present with all the rain that we have been having. But it's not precipitation that is the focus of this posting but rather the ecosystem that has been developing within the pond. The pond is now just over two years old and we've been through two filters in that time. We now have a super-dooper filter where the filtering is done in a large plastic canister which is under the house. Water is sucked up through the pump and then transferred via tubing into the filter where it passes through several mechanical and biological filters before being returned to the pond.
The question of what kinds of fish to inhabit the pond has been a difficult one. I had wanted to go with natives but Australian schooling fish that spend a lot of time near the surface are mostly, at least in terms of what's available commercially, are mostly rainbow fish of northern Australia. They do fine during the warmer months but died during the winter. I reluctantly put goldfish in about 18 months ago but they proved messy so I've now relocated them into the big greeny-blue pot you can see to the left of the pond.
Instead, the pond is now alive with white cloud mountain minnows.

 I think I bought about a dozen just over twelve months ago and now I have a school of about 70 or so. I like them because they do spend most of their time in a big school, and while at first glance they appear silvery when you look closely you see the splash of colour of the red of their tail and a hint of yellow along their backs. I'm hoping that the pond will be able to support quite a large school of these guys. They don't eat frogs' eggs or tadpoles either.

 Apart from the fish, and the various aquatic invertebrates such as water spiders and backswimmers that somehow make their way, unassisted, into the pond, I have also bought three Mystery Snails to help check the algae. While the super-dooper filter includes a UV light which is supposed to kill most algae cells, it clearly isn't able to deal with all the algae cells present so the pond does have a fair coating of algae over its sides. In the height of summer this was starting to get a little out of control, hence the addition of the snails. At $3 per snail, these guys didn't come cheap!

These snails have an interesting and somewhat unexpected way of laying their eggs. The eggs are laid in this 'cocoon' like structure laid about 10cm above the water level. The eggs take about 2-3 weeks to hatch. Mine hatched about a fortnight ago, so I'm hoping to see these babies when they grow in size over the next few months. No doubt they shall slow their growth down over winter, but hopefully by next spring they will have grown large enough to be seen.

The Mystery of the Earthworm

We have had so much wet weather lately. We had almost 400mm in February and here we are on day 4 of March and we've had over 150mm. Everything is sodden and slippery. Anyway, I was feeding the girls this afternoon and happened to notice the pale pinky grey form of a dead earth worm - a good sized earthworm in their water container. Then, while I was giving the boys their afternoon treat of molasses and pollard I happened to notice the drowned bodies of another dozen or so worms on the bottom of their big poly water container. A glance in the cement tubs that we also use for water for the boys revealed yet more drowned worms of various sizes.  What the?
Thinking it through of course, what happens is that earthworms leave the soil when it becomes waterlogged (because their burrows fill with water) and go in search of drier (ie higher ground). When they come across a Tupperware water container in the chookery or the water tubs in the boy's feeding pen they must crawl upwards, ever upwards until they get to the top. Whether they just keep going or they lose their grip and fall in I don't know.
But what I do know is that each of the tubs will need to be emptied - yeah just what we need more water flowing into and across the ground - because neither the boys nor the girls will drink water contaminated as it now is by these little wormy bodies.

Yellow Tailed black Cockatoos

Each January and early February we are visited by a mob of raucous black cockatoos which spend a couple of weeks in the area working over the cones that have developed on the slash pines. This is the only saving grace in my opinion for keeping these introduced pine trees on our place (well that and the considerable cost to cut then down).

This year the mob was in excess of 50 birds, and the mob always includes a few youngsters that make a relentless raspy squarking for their parents to feed them. It's hazardous to stand beneath a tree that they are munching their way through as they let the pine cones that they are finished with drop to the ground with gay abandon (so to speak) and you wouldn't want one to hit your head.

Once they finish they fly across to another part of the property or neighbouring properties, usually calling their sombre 'funereal' like call as they do so. I can remember the very first time I saw these birds in the wild, when I was 14 or 15, and it was a grey wintery day, when I was with my mates, Waz and Flip, in the Watagan Mountains, just west of Lake Macquarie. We were walking along an old logging track in dense forest and we heard this strange bird call kind of like babies crying. Before long a small flock of these wonderful birds flew over us and landed in trees quite close. We were also lucky enough to be visited by a couple and their youngster a few years in a row when we lived in inner Newcastle. These birds had discovered the white cedar that grew at the front of the house and they would appear around August to tear open the branches and extract the juicy plump borer larvae that would be inside.  I'm very glad we share our place with them here at Larnook as well.

Some fruits

When we bought our place here at Larnook, the fruit trees which were already here were: a lemon, tangello, mandarin, mango, grumichama, persimmon, mulberry, loquat, longan and pear.  We've added: finger lime, banana, lime, orange, lemonade, sambol, guava, feijoa, paw paw, black sapote, Davidson's plum, grape, blueberry, grumichama, Brazilian cherry, mammy sapote, yellow sapote, white sapote, another lemon, wampi, pomegranate, peanut butter tree and giant lau lau.

 So we had a big mango season - apparently mangos fruit only every second year so it will be 2015 again before we get to gorge ourselves on our mango fruit (although Shane wisely froze quite a bit of mango pulp this time).

 Davidson's plums, a native rainforest fruiting tree, the fruit of which grow from the trunk. Although edible, they only become so with a heap of sugar and stewed into a jam.

 We have a couple of grape varieties

 This is one of the two fruit on my wampi tree. It has now turned a yellow colour so I'm going to try it in the next few days.

And OK, not a fruit, but gee it's been a great season for basil. Shane made a very delicious pesto which we had with pasta last night.

Banksias

These are just some shots of various Banksia species that we have planted in the Big Bush Garden to highlight the wonderful textures and colours of the flowers/cones and leaves.  Most of the Banksias flower in autumn and winter, along with most of the Grevilleas, which create wonderful warm tones of oranges, reds and creams.

 A swamp banksia, Banksia robur

 Another swamp banksia with younger cones

 hmmm not sure what this one is, but you can see the seed capsules developing on the outside of the cone

 another swamp banksia flower just starting to develop (we do have about half a dozen different Banksia species, honest)

I think this is a Banksia ericifolia (I think)...love the texture of this....