Moving

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Airport vs Black Cockies and Orchids

Update 19 Jan: The link to a copy of my letter from the black and red pic is now fixed and you can download it to amend and send your own letter.

Last Wednesday the environment program Understory on RTRfm radio interviewed WWF’s Southwest Australia Policy Officer Katherine Howard about a land clearing proposal at Perth Airport in Jandakot [1]. The Airport’s owner Jandakot Airport Holdings (JAH) is the second owner of a 50 year lease since privatisation a decade ago [2]. Their clearing proposal is detailed in Jandakot Airport Expansion – EPBC Reference 2009/4796 [3] and includes bushland home to three endangered species:

• Carnaby’s Black Cockatoo, (Calyptorhynchus latirostris)
• Grand Spider Orchid (Caladenia huegelii)
• Glossy-leaved Hammer Orchid (Drakaea elastica)

While 40% of the proposed area is designated for a fourth runway and extension of the other runways, the other 96ha is earmarked for Jandakot City, a development which would be largest homewares complex in the southern hemisphere [1] (they must want to compete with the biggest ikea in the southern hemisphere that killed my fav swamp). WWF provide a simple breakdown of the areas proposed for clearing [4]. JAH have previously cleared 79ha of banksia woodland for a commercial precinct and there is dispute whether this was done with appropriate authority and permission. Currently 90% of this development is vacant [5].

CPRS: Carbon Politics Renders Squat

The whole point of introducing an emissions trading scheme is to make sure that polluting industries phase out and are replaced with cleaner alternatives, renewable energy and energy efficiency programmes. [1]

While the Australian Federal opposition dithers on passing the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) legislation which would enable carbon trading, Australia’s weather gets hotter and hotter.

The Bureau of Meteorology’s Annual Australian Climate Statement for 2009 noted last year was Australia’s second warmest year since high-quality records began in 1910 and the past decade was the warmest on record.

Fields of Lettuce and Tomato

I was planning to blog about the field of lettuce growing in my garden, but that thesis took over and since then it’s become a field of lettuce and tomato, with lettuce getting pretty dismal and tomato in ascendency. A month ago when it was just a lettuce field, I gave one to my neighbour and he said it was so much tastier than shop bought lettuce and what did I do to make them grow so well? I was at a loss for words. I don’t think “water them every day” was the answer he was looking for. Then I realised what it was.

Winter Mushrooms

I love it when mushrooms pop up in my garden but now winter’s over there’ll be no more until next year. I like looking through my friend’s copy of The Magical World of Fungi by Patricia Negus [1], to ID fungi I come across. Although it may be the drawing of a fairy sitting on a mushroom on the last page which makes me love this book. A Flickr friend told me about the Perth Fungi Field Book [2] which is free to download, so I had my own ID source. I had lots of fun IDing fungi I found and not so much fun realising how difficult it can be to ID fungi.

Fungi species often appear slightly different in different regions. [2]

In August I found some very unusual mushrooms growing in the pine bark mulch of my native garden. They had pointed caps which were intricately crenulated. I’ve had mushrooms with “ordinary” caps popping up in my lawn or vegie garden, but never something quite so alien-looking. The Perth Fungi Field Book came to the rescue and identified them as edible black morels (Morchella elata), not native to Australia, thus like the weed growing behind it, messing up my “native” garden. The name confused me at first because the morels in my garden weren’t black until they started dying, but after picking one to give to my brother to eat, it turned black inside the crenulations.

The Sad Tale of the Weeping Hose

This is not a sad tale because the hose wept. The hose’s function is to weep, due to the holes punctured in intervals along its length. It’s connected to the drainage hole at the bottom of my rainwater tank and on days when there’s no rain in sight, I turn it on for 20 minutes to water one of my vegie garden beds. The sad part of this tale happened this morning. I went out to turn it on, finding to my horror that it already was and had been weeping for twenty four hours! If only its sobs were louder, I would have ended those wasted tears.

I like to blame Sheeba the dog for any problem in the garden. She’s the culprit when freshly dug holes are concerned, but I don’t think she’s quite mastered turning a tap. The culprit in this instance is my brain on thesis. Zoë S. drew an anatomically correct diagram of this phenomenon. As you can see the (red) area of brain left for accomplishing tasks like turning on and off taps at the correct time is very small, thus it’s amazing such a water crisis hasn’t happened before.

A day ago there was about 1200L in the tank, now there’s 300L. The bean seeds that I bemoaned were taking so long to pop up; all have now thanks to the generous soaking. I wondered if 900L would be enough for their whole life, but I have a feeling it doesn’t work like that. The tomato seedlings I just planted in the very sunny other vegie bed got none of this soaking, which they needed – stupid weeping hose. Why do you do everything wrong!?

Last year my rainwater tank was installed at about this time. I didn’t think I’d have a tank of water til winter this year, but the unusual spring downpours filled it before summer. It would be nice if the same huge amount of rain fell this November, but I’m not counting on it. No more rainwater to drink this summer :(

And cause it hasn’t rained the pond really needs a bucket or two of non-chlorinated water right now – stupid rain, stupid hose, stupid thesis!

=^.^=

Delicious

Flying through the mowing

long grass in need of mowing

I hate mowing, so I’ve been getting rid of lawn and replacing it with garden beds for vegies and native plants. There’s still a bit of lawn so mowing is still a chore.

daisies flowering after mowing the verge

Last year I got a push mower and mowing became so much easier. At first it took a longer time, but because I wasn’t pushing a heavy power mower, it wasn’t such hard work. Unfortunately long grass is difficult to mow with a push mower, so you have mow regularly. In winter this means every two weeks. I didn’t think this would happen with me, but after having a hell of a time with the long grass sometime in August, I’ve been mowing every second weekend. Due to the grass not being too long (and the small amount of lawn) it only takes five or ten minutes.

Are we getting rain this winter?

My title came from a search someone did and ended up at my blog. I’m not sure where “we” lives, but if they live in Perth, on 29 July when they did the search I thought Perth’s rain was over for the winter. I was wrong, but we did have 11 days of no rain from 26 July to 5 August. Temperatures hovered around 20°C and it felt like summer had arrived.

In July rain fell on only 16 days, half a month of no rain when July is Perth’s wettest month. I can’t believe I had to water some of my garden!? It was from the rainwater tank so it’s been replaced since then, but one morning I spent too long watering, missed my bus and had to wait half an hour for the next one. Despite so many fine days we still received 149.6mm of rain, only slightly below July’s average rainfall of 152.9mm. In June we received 20mm above the average, so for the two months rainfall was higher than average.

The past week the rain fell in earnest, with high winds to make for real winter weather. At 9:30 yesterday morning there was quite a bit of cloud cover over Perth, the southwest and the wheatbelt, which has been dumping the downpours on us. Today there were lots of sun showers and fine periods. When I was a kid my family called a sun shower a Monkey’s Picnic. I thought this was what everyone called them. It was only a few years ago that I discovered my family are the only people in the universe who call them that, but I still say Monkey’s Picnic whenever it rains when the sun’s shining.

A Shady Hedge

My house wasn’t sustainably designed. It faces east west, which you want to avoid when designing with passive solar principles in mind. The back of my house was once a verandah, but whoever enclosed it didn’t bring their brain to work that day. Glass walls facing west aren’t a good idea. Every summer afternoon my back room bakes, lightly toasting the rest of the house. It’s a nice place to pass the time on a sunny winter afternoon, but during summer the blinds are permanently closed and still my house cooks.

The solution was a hedge of woolly bushes, not against the windows, but against the back fence a couple of metres from the house. Although I should have done this five years ago, a hedge is now growing to shade my wall of windows. It’s not quite hedge-like at the moment, more a row of foot high plants, but in a few years it’ll be up to 4m high and in need of regular pruning into the hedgely shape I desire.

There is a problem with woolly bushes – their shallow root systems. My friends at Nuts about Natives have a planting of Albany woolly bushes which are all about 4m high and last winter one was uprooted in a high wind. It didn’t cause any damage because it landed among its neighbours. In the last weekend of June this winter the very high winds caused a lot of damage in Perth. The gusts of up to 72km/h uprooted two of a neighbour’s pencil pines which knocked down part of his fence. I hope this doesn’t happen with any of the woolly bushes as my new hedge grows. During the winds of that weekend my tuart was severely buffeted but the flexibility of its young trunk meant it survived without damage. As it grows taller it’s more likely to lose branches and cause damage, but I hope this won’t happen. The tuarts and other gum trees (particularly illyarrie) in the park where I walk Sheeba the dog lost a few branches that weekend.

Dingo, Dingo

Last year I blogged about whether dingos were Australian, due to their (relatively) recent arrival in Australia from Asia. The Complete Book of Australian Mammals includes dingos (Canis lupus ssp. dingo) in the Introduced Mammals section [1]. The Introduced Species Summary Project of Columbia University also lists dingos, but describes them as “a near-native species of Australia” and details conservation measures needed to protect the species [2]. The Federal government lists the dingo as native fauna and they’re protected in National Parks, World Heritage areas, Aboriginal reserves and the ACT [3].

Indigenous Australians arrived in Australia 50,000 years ago and dingos were thought to have arrived with them [2], but it’s now believed they arrived more recently with Asian seafarers [4]. In 1983 the oldest dingo fossil was an almost complete skeleton aged about 3,000 years [1], although more recent fossil and archaeological evidence dates their arrival around 3,500 years ago [2] (improved carbon dating techniques and new fossil finds lead to amendments in the date of arrival).