Colours, Crabapples, Currawongs & a Cat!

The colours of the Persian Witch-hazel are utterly brilliant this year - so vivid as to be almost unbelievable.
This tree currently has pride of place with its autumn display in the front garden now that the English Elm has lost just about all her leaves.

Immediately outside one of the front windows (and 90 degrees from the window that displays the Persian Witch-hazel) is our sole Crabapple tree.
Two years ago I harvested the fruit and made Crabapple jelly - six full buckets of Crabapples gave me less than a dozen small jars (250 -300 grams) of the jelly.
The process was so tedious that last year and again this autumn I decided to let the birds have their fill, so we've seen King Parrots, Cockatoos and Currawongs make the most of the crop.

The Currawongs are the keenest.
They come down - usually in groups of 8 or 10 - and go for the fruit that has fallen onto the ground.
They swallow them whole and must have nitric acid in their stomachs in order to digest them!
They are as tart as a bushel of unripe lemons and if you pluck a ripe one (all red) and nibble it then you'll end up with grimace to end all grimaces.

 

Maybe next year I'll be masochistic enough to have another go at the Crabapple jelly but in the meantime the birds can have their way with them.

I mentioned the Cockatoos.
Here are three of them going for the parrot food that my wife puts out each day.
She doesn't like the cockies getting to it - she makes it available for the King Parrots but you can't stand out there shooing the cockies away.

Rosie, our 18-month old cat, has found a lovely sunny spot on these crisp, clear autumn mornings.
For about an hour she wedges herself into the gap between the side window at the front door and the indoor pot-plant basket and soaks up the rays!
When the sun moves away, so does she - off to another window to follow the warmth down the northern side of the house.

Autumn is nearly over



It is now the start of the last month of what has been a very dry Autumn for 2013.
But the colours of the deciduous trees and shrubs in our garden have been magnificent this year and this past week the English Elm has finally decided that enough is enough and over a three-day period she has dropped most of her leaves.

I did a quick (2 minute) video on May 1st., which you can view here or, if you click on the You Tube in the bottom right-hand corner, you can view in a larger format on You Tube's page.

After 6 Months of Retirement.........

I couldn't believe it when I looked at the calendar a couple of days ago and realised that in another week or so's time I will have been out of the workforce for six months.

The time has flown and the reason is that I am one of those very fortunate people who have a multitude of interests and hobbies - so many that I don't have the time to subscribe to them all.
Not for one minute have I been bored and the days just seem to flow from one into the next so fast that I sometimes have trouble keeping up.

My radio program on the local community FM radio station (Valley FM 89.5) occupies six hours each week and that isn't including the time I spend researching and preparing music and associated "stuff" for each broadcast.

A couple of days each week is spent in the yard and garden, carrying out the normal maintenance as well as a few projects that have been undertaken during this past summer.
The first was the creation of an enclosure for my wife's three Chinese Silkie chooks.
A pre-fab coop was bought, in "flat-pack" format, and when it arrived from Brisbane I assembled it.
Then I built a picket fence & gate between the end of one side of the garage and the back fence (seen in the photo below), which was painted after completion.

The other major job was the demolition and filling-in of the fishpond, which had been a feature of the garden in the backyard for many years but which had just become a maintenance chore, particularly the surrounding garden. It also hindered the access to the Photinea hedge for trimming.

So the pond went and was filled in with rubble and then two trailer-loads of crushed blue metal and is now in the last stage of work, with paving slabs having been laid (the photo below shows the preparatory work for the slab base).

I am just needing to get a load of garden soil to surround the paved area, which will then be home to the barbecue. 

During the very hot weather that we experienced here in Canberra over January I hibernated into the cool of the air-conditioning and continued - in a somewhat random manner - working on my life's story that I have been writing for the past few months.
This continues to be an interesting project but one that I only do when the mood strikes me rather than as a regular exercise on a fixed itinerary.

I have coffee with old workmates on a regular basis - catching up and keeping in touch.
One such friendship goes back to 1998, when I worked for a company associated with the production and publishing of digital information for the legal profession.

I've joined the Canberra branch of the Australian Railway Historical Society and in the cooler months I want to become involved with helping them out in a voluntary capacity.
Before moving to Canberra in 1984 I had joined the Zig-Zag Railway near Lithgow but never had a chance to become involved as we upped roots and moved down here.
I have always maintained an interest in all things train-related, so am looking forward to helping out when I can.

Then there is my return to painting figurines, which was a prime hobby way back in the late 1970s - early-1980s.
I have had a resurgence of interest but, like my memoirs, only do so when the mood strikes rather than as a regular commitment.
If you have to do something to a timetable then it doesn't remain a pleasure, it becomes a chore and one might as well be back in the regular workforce, having to work for a living!

To all the above I can add reading, computing (browsing, emailing, playing simulations, researching music tracks), catching up with the occasional rented DVD movie, letter-writing (on my 1970s IBM Selectric typewriter) and domestic chores and each day is full, from around six-thirty AM until I conk out around eleven PM.

How did I ever find the time for even half of these activities when I was working?!!

Yellow Days - the colours of Autumn in our Canberra garden

 

This is the last month of Autumn for 2011 and today was a beautiful sunny, blue-sky, no wind kind of day. The trees in our front yard have reached the peak of their colours; from now on they will lose their leaves very quickly and in a week or so their branches will be bare.

So I armed myself with my camera (Sony DSC 717) and ventured into the shrubbery, accompanied by several birds who were plucking the last of the fruit off the Crab-apple tree.

Above is a YouTube montage of those shots set to "Yellow Days", chosen because I thought it was an appropriate piece to use.
You can watch it in a larger format by clicking on the YouTube wording in the bottom right-hand side of the little screen above.

Spring has sprung......well and truly here in Canberra.

(Click on any of the photos for a much larger image).

In what must be the best start to Spring that we have had for many years - maybe a decade or more - Canberra has literally flowered as the deciduous trees burst into blossom and the flower beds go berserk.

In our garden we have several Camellias - three red and two pink.

This one - outside our back door - has exploded into flower, with so many buds that the branches are leaning over so far that negotiating the back steps is an OH&S hazard!

The photo above shows the shrub laden with blossom and this is three weeks after it started to bud. There seems to be no end to the production of flowers and the poor old thing (about 26 years-old now) can't support all the flowers and is dropping them not long after the buds open into full flower-hood.

We have a continual pink snowfall and I am having to sweep the porch and path every morning before going to work and every evening after returning home!

Not that I am complaining, mind you.
With Canberra's water-supply dams at a ten-year high (79.9% today; this time last year they were at 45%), spring rains, green grass and flowering trees and shrubs, it is very, very welcome.

In our front yard we have a beautiful English Elm that has been a feature for about 20 years.

This afternoon I took this photo (above) because this is the most magnificent display of seed-pods I have ever seen on it.

I expect the summer foliage to be quite dense this year. The birds love it and it provides excellent shade across the front garden.

The next photo was taken two weeks ago when our Prunus Elvin - or "fairy-floss trees" (as the kids referred to them) - were smothered in blossoms.

Even the local school-children and their parents were stopping to look at them as they went past.

Yep, it's a wonderful thing to have our yards, parks and gardens looking so nice after many years of drought conditions.

It will be very interesting to see whether the same sentiment can be expressed at the end of summer!

Summer has arrived...........

(All photos - Sony DSC-F717. Click for full-size images)

............with a vengeance, too.
We had some record temperatures during November. Spring? No way - it was full-on summer!

 

It was a year ago that we decided to redesign the front yard due to water restrictions and the continuation of the dry weather. The grass (or weeds, more to the point) just had to go.
So in November 2008 we started on the project, finishing the job by Australia Day 2009.

The grass was poisoned and then after it had died we spread what seemed like three million cubic metres of forest mulch to a depth of at least 100mm over the entire area.
A brick pathway was laid from the front border to the side walkway along the northern wall of the house and it joined up with the existing paved area at the front under the English Elm.

Over the past year - and particularly over the past two months - Shirley has been busy planting a variety of hardy shrubs and ground covers through the area. She has also added some lovely blue pots as features.

So the result is a front garden that appears to be doing very well under these drier conditions.

It will be interesting to see how it fares through to the end of this summer.