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).

Tasty Rainwater

Last year I blogged about getting a rainwater tank and said I’d be drinking rainwater soon. I got it at the end of winter, but it filled with rain from the unusual downpours in November. I didn’t start drinking it then because my dad suggested I don’t drink the initial water, to ensure any contaminants from manufacture were washed away. Over summer I used the water on the garden and the tank filled again this winter. Now, nine months later, I’m drinking rainwater from my tank.

The first time I drank water from the tank it tasted so different to mains water from the kitchen tap. I thought it tasted purer, but that might be the only way I can think of to describe the difference. I have an old house, with ancient plumbing and I’m sure this does something to the water. In summer I don’t like drinking it straight from the tap, I refrigerate it first. In winter the cold air refrigerates it, so I don’t taste whatever it is I don’t like* (and it is the plumbing that affects the taste, not chlorine or fluoride or whatever, I’m happy to drink water straight from the tap at other houses). After drinking rainwater for a few weeks I’ve got used to whatever the difference is and it just tastes like water now, but I still love drinking it. Water is my favourite drink.

Government Visions

I just read Quarry Vision by Guy Pearse. I’m a bit slow because it’s no longer the most recent issue of Quarterly Essay. When it came out I wasn’t sure if I wanted to read it. I assumed it was more of Pearse’s results from his PhD thesis on Australia’s greenhouse mafia, otherwise known as the Australian Industry Greenhouse Network (AIGN),

an alliance representing almost all of Australia’s biggest fossil-energy producers and consumers, either directly or through their industry associations. [1] p.38

Not that I wasn’t interested in his research. He wrote High & Dry [2] a couple of years ago and I thought I’d heard all there was to tell, but I was wrong.

As I read the first few pages of Quarry Vision I thought, don’t we all know CCS is a pipedream of the coal industry and something drastic needs to be done about greenhouse gas emissions, but no government wants to. I kept reading and now I know why nothing much has changed in terms of Australia’s climate change policy. Rudd et al would like us to think otherwise, but while a different political party is in power,

the deep pockets of the Australian carbon lobby have made its members ubiquitous. [1] p.37

Reaching for the sky

Earlier this year I blogged about the insect infestation of the young tuart in my garden.

Unfortunately the insects that have already made homes among the tuart’s leaves are causing quite a bit of damage…The problem is the sap-sucking psyllids, also known as eucalyptus lerps, because the nymph constructs a “lerp” to hide under.

In the course of my investigations as to what insect was causing all the damage I decided it was lerps, even though the lerps I’ve seen on other gum trees looked nothing like what this lorikeet is eating in my garden (see above). I figured there must be some lerps somewhere up high that I couldn’t see. This is an example of why you shouldn’t believe everything you read on a blog (or the web) because I may have been wrong :P

Pond Matters

The rain over the past couple of days has filled the pond in my garden and it’s very close to overflowing. I planted Phlebocarya ciliata, a bog plant, in the area where the overflow will run, so it should enjoy this winter wet area. It’s in the Haemodoraceae family along with kangaroo paws. The plant structure looks similar, but it likes damp swampy ground, unlike kangaroo paws. I also got hoary twine rush (Meeboldina cana) for the water and removed one of the Villarsia from the water and planted it in the overflow area. Villarsia like boggy areas or shallow water, so it should do as well in the ground as it did in the pond.