More tulips yeeeees?

Spring Green

 

 

Orange Emperor

Early Tulips - Furand & Yellow Present

Species Tulips - 'The First'

 

 

Ah the wheat, waiving in the, waiving in the... MANUEL!!!

When I told people that I wanted to grow some wheat a lot of them said, what? For a variety of sensible reasons, wheat is not really grown domestically. It's got a poor square meter to loaf ratio, you've got to de-hull it and thrash it and mill it etc, and it's also of no real value as a green manure. On top of, or perhaps because of all this it's quite difficult to buy. You won't find it in the seed section at Bunnings or even on the funkier new age organic seed websites. I didn't  much feel like driving to the Mallee to buy a 20kg sack of grain and was about to give up when I found a website selling 1kg bags of wheat seeds for wheat grass juice. Even more than that, if you were a high powered business executive you could order your wheat pre-germinated and delivered in ready turf format. So for $10 I acquired my grain and it was sown. i wanted to grow wheat because a lot of my recent reading has been about the history of agriculture and all its recent nasty developments. I wanted to grow something that we eat (most of us) everyday but we never see. Possible sequels include sugar cane, cotton, soy beans and canola, climate permitting of course. It's been a bit of a let down I must say. The wheat certainly hasn't reached elephants eyeball height and waiving in the wind has only resulted in it getting mashed into the ground. I am looking forward to watching it change colour as it dies off and then deciding whether to make flour with it or feed it to the lawn mower.

 

Nibbles and Jiggles

When plums are being delivered by stick it doesn't take too long for the word to get around. Nibbles, featured in the previous post, has returned with a lady friend named Jiggles, for an evening of high-wire plum munching acrobatics. I think there might be something going on between these two as Nibbles is clearly showing off with his unusual inverted plum eating style and unnecessarily prominent man possum bits. Nibbles' gluttony gets the better of him though as he goes all rodentey and Jiggles leaves him to it.

Jiggles (left), Nibbles (right)

The Night Nibbler

As a night gardener you often cross paths with other travelers of the night. This was my third encounter with a very tame ring-tail possum that frequents our roof via the power line. On our first encounter, my first reaction was to poke him with a stick. Finding him (or her) unphased by this simple but effective form of communication we proceeded to play a game of tug-of-war to settle the battle of hand vs tail. On our second encounter I extended the olive branch of peace, or as it happens, bamboo garden stake with plum attached. On this occasion the offering was rebuffed, trust it seems was slow in coming. Last night however things were different. After a second day of +40 degree temperatures a cold plum was well received. With two hands on the wire and two on the job, the offering was soon reduced to a pit and a second plum was hoisted up to replace it. Despite the damage caused to my trees it's hard to dislike these little guys. Perhaps it's the lack of connection to the animal world you feel in suburbia, or just the charm exuded by any creature with fur and a wet nose. If he touches my apples I might feel differently but until that day a visit on the wire will be rewarded by a plum on a stick.