things that wriggle

The worm farm is up and running.
Joe from next door supplied a handful of worms and we topped-up with some from the worm farm at Millicent.

 

They're a lively lot: whenever you take the lid off they're wriggling around eating the delicious left-overs gloop I vitamise for them:

 

remnant cucumbers from making bread & butter pickles

 

they also like newspaper, The Australian more than The Border Watch

Once a week they're  flushed with a bucket of rain water and the resulting liquid - worm tea/worm wee - is diluted 1 in 10 and used as fertiliser.
I'm expecting great results on the tunnel house plants.

 

HOWEVER
There are other things that wriggle, the serpents in Paradise.

 

David is away for two weeks fishing holiday with Roger Pfitzner in Coffin Bay - yes I know, a fishing holiday is ridiculous but they've been doing it for 22 years and hate to break with tradition.

 

My sister Jennifer came to stay for a week, and we came home after a day in Mount Gambier ready for our drinks and nibbles on the deck.

I had Willow on a long lead in one hand and a plate of smoked salmon in the other about to plonk it on the table when I noticed Willow sniffing at something long, brown and wriggly.

 

A snake!

 

I grabbed Willow and levitated inside, Jennifer and me both screaming and the smoked salmon left behind until I decided to risk retrieving it. We watched for ten minutes while the snake tried to find an exit: unable to climb the glass wall it slowly slithered down the steps, across the lower deck then UP the wooden retaining wall and disappeared under the bushes.

 

Willow didn't get much rest that evening as we kept waking her up to see if she was OK and she was; not that hot, floppy, flat-eared look that I remember so vividly from her previous snake-bite.

 

I haven't seen the snake since but now realise we need to make a lot of noise clomping around the deck to warn snakes to stay away.

 

 

crayfisherman's reward

 

David's patience has been rewarded at last.

After many fruitless trips to check his pots and raging over the unsportsmanlike types who may be pulling the pots for him - today he cracked it!

And the secret is to get up very early.

Here's today's catch - a jumbo weighing 2.16 Kg - proudly exhibited to those of us who don't get up early:

 

Willow is interested but she knows from experience you don't mess with those big fellows.



outside table finished

Rory supplied the timber and David did the finishing.


It's a slab of pinus halepensis (Aleppo pine) with an interesting history.
In the late 1880s the McGowans of Strathdownie in Victoria went to Robe South Australia to collect a shipment of tree seedlings which had arrived there by boat. On the return journey they had to go through customs at the SA/Vic border.

The much-travelled trees grew well until last year the current owners decided to cut down a few and Rory went over with his bush mill to do the job, his reward being large slabs of timber, one of which he gave to us. Others will go into the new house he is building at Cape Douglas.

 

David removing dust from the repeated sandings, a leg hanging on the right

Eight coats of plastic later the table was installed on our house deck and we had a ceremonial launch with Rory and Di.

At this time of the year, any outside function needs a can of Aerogard



fishermen at work

 

Daisy and Chris are determined to learn the fine points of fishing - and who better than the master himself to instruct them.

Here they are, life-jacketed and hatted, out the front of Beechwood hard at it:

And here they are several hours later with FIFTY FIVE tommy ruffs to scale and clean.
Some jobs are a labour of love.

 

thar she blows!

A 3-metre pilot whale was attempting to beach itself near us last night. We heard about it the old-fashioned way with ears -  some walkers on the beach told us - but  most of the onlookers had seen it on Facebook with some excellent photos. The power of social media!

 

By the time we arrived Adam, a Cape Douglas permanent resident, was in the water trying to send the whale towards the open sea. 

 

 

 

 It was trapped by a falling tide and the rocky reef and wanted to swim towards the sunset, but Adam patiently turned it around several times and nudged it along past the reef where it could head out and away to freedom.
A cold wet Adam emerged from the sea.

 

 

 

2 guys from the Dept. of Environment,  Water and Natural Resources turned up, summoned by telephone,  very grateful for Adam"s intervention: "I'll requisition a wetsuit tomorrow " said one.

 

Next day: Facebook reported "the whale didn't make it".
I drove down to have a look but no sign of it.

too many wallabies

The black swamp wallaby, Wallabia bicolor, lives next door to us in the Conservation Park. Wikpedia says: "The swamp wallaby is found from the northernmost areas of Cape York to south-western Victoria

It was formerly found through to south-eastern South Australia but is now rare or absent from that region."

Rubbish!

 

There's heaps of them, mostly to be found eating our lawn and hurling themselves in front of cars on the road.

 

It was cute to start with - hearing the clatter of toenails on the beach deck as they knocked over chairs to get at the water we leave there for the cat.

Then one morning there was NOTHING left of 5 large geranium maderense plants; the next day it was an entire large rhubarb plant gone; then judicious pruning of hares' foot fern and butterfly bushes (which I imagine to be dessert.)

 

Challenge: find nice plants that they won't eat - maybe holly?

 

early morning - at least it's not eating the hardenbergia which is growing beautifully on the screen

 

 

The tunnel house continues to produce rivers of cucumbers - and the odd one that gets away by hiding under a leaf - tomatoes, baby capsicums, zucchini and button squash. The kipfler potatoes are growing outside in almost pure sand and I harvest (no need to dig) just enough for a meal. Beans haven't been good, probably the soil is lacking loam.

 

 

the big cucumber went into the compost

 

blown away

Windy Wellington was back with a vengeance for the weekend - winds of 50km per hour on Sunday with occasional gusts you could hardly walk against.

 

Our hotel was the Copthorne at Oriental Bay, near the water behind a run of cute little boathouses which seem essential to the yachting fraternity who use them for storage.

 

Mount Victoria overlooks St Gerards monastery to the left, the Copthorne right and bathing huts all along the shore.

It's amazing what can be jammed inside a hut

 

Te Papa (meaning treasure box) Museum is a fascinating place and we paid several visits: my favourite is the Air New Zealand exhibit  with its flight simulator, display of uniforms and advertising over the decades including its latest air safety video with a Hobbit theme which has had 23 million hits on YouTube. We saw it in the plane and for once watched it.
You can watch it by clicking here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOw44VFNk8Y

 

Due to the magic of computers, they used only 29 actors in the battles scenes.
New Zealand is mad on The Hobbit and all the works of Peter Jackson - well his industry is a huge employer: even Te Papa has a fierce orc in its foyer.

 

Not something you'd want to see in real life

 

We saw The Hobbit 3 in 3D at the pictures and enjoyed the unrealistic  violence, wholesale carnage and ducking to avoid falling 3D stones.

 

 

On Sunday we did a hop-on hop-off bus tour which was terrific: loved the view from Mount Victoria, 

NZ Christmas tree in the foreground; looking towards the South Island

 

 lunch at the Botanic Gardens

 

David admiring begonias (out of the wind) at the Botanic Gardens

 

 and a great overall view of Wellington. Our second driver had a role as an orc in Lord of the Rings which he played for us on his iPad - he loved being an orc.

 

As we struggled against the wind to walk back to the hotel David spotted two enormous tree trunks and a guy carving totara wood in a workshop, so of course he had to have a chat.

 

 

David and wood-carver

 

Later we went to see Into the Woods starring Merryl Streep as The Witch at the cinema which I loved. David said it was OK, he didn't go to sleep.

It was a wonderful few days in Wellington and we were blown away, literally and figuratively.