First Day of Summer

The first day of summer was as usual spent working in the garden. It was a pleasant enough day in the high 20s, but a little muggy after the rain we had on Saturday and early this morning, we had a very healthy 48mm and the water tank is now full and the weeds are thriving!

Last week we had some work done on the Body Corporate common property, the common property is the bushland around the estate and as a Body Corporate we have to maintain it. Lantana had gone wild and vast tracks of the common property were over run by it. The BCC had given very specific instructions as to how the Lantana was to be removed. A special rubber tracked Bobcat with a large grinder mounted on the front was secured to carry out the Lantana reduction.

Lantana everywhere

Our house is up there somewhere

More Lantana

Jungle like.

A full day was required to do all that was allowed, no Lantana was to be removed by machinery where the slope was greater than 1 in 4 and all basal roots needed to remain intact. At the moment it looks a bit barren, but the Lantana will regrow and we will have to control it further with a frog friendly Glyphosate. I am thinking of contacting LandCare to see if we can get some more trees planted.

Lantana gone - for now.

Hopefully the trees will grow now.

Big difference, dead trees choked by Lantana.

Today we focused on the area under and around the trampoline, I finished off the garden edging, thankfully it is now all completed, all 55 metres of it. Once the edging was complete we hit the weeds with Glyphosate and then mulched the whole lot. We used Hoop Pine mulch, it is ideal for sloping garden beds because it resists being washed away due to its curly bark. The down side is that it is near enough to impossible to shovel. So 5.5 cubic metres of mulch were moved by picking up handfuls and chucking it in the wheel barrow. I can tell you now the skin on your fingers is not tough enough to handle 5.5 cubic metres of mulch! I am currently typing this with my toes so please excuse any spelling mistakes.

Biggest Trampoline ever?

Charlie is happy with the job!

Fountain Grass is thriving.

In the New Year after the weeds have been poisoned a few more times we will start to plant throughout this garden area, more grasses are the favourite to get the nod at this moment in time.

We managed to get a thriving self seeded tomato plant growing in the garden on the west side of the pool, it was producing plenty of fruit, however, we were not able to get any ripened. It was apparent they were being eaten by something, up until this afternoon we did not know what.

Beautiful male King Parrot getting a belly full of Tomato

Not fussed by us at all!

We have a Tomato loving male King Parrot that has taken an obvious liking to our plant. I can only imagine that there will be plenty more self seeded Tomatoes popping up around the area due to this bloke!

Our neighbours saw an Echidna last week so we are keeping our eyes wide open in anticipation of seeing him, here's hoping we have some photos for the next blog update. I am pretty sure he is responsible for a fair percentage of the holes in the lower part of our garden, the Bandicoots did the rest.

We have had some solar panels installed to help reduce our electricity bill and cover the running costs of the pool and the A/C when it infrequently runs. We have  changed the timing of the filter pump and we will be doing all our clothes and dish washing during the day now to get the most out of the power we produce during daylight hours. Our first full quarter bill with the pool was $850 so we look forward to seeing how much smaller the next one will be!

So Christmas is less than four weeks away and we can't wait to catch up with our Families, the girls are super excited about seeing Nan, Pa, Grandma, the cousins, aunt and uncle visiting! They are not at all excited about the Chrissy presents.