A new friend in our garden: rainbow lorikeet

I have a post half-written about how the Occupy Wall Street movement relates to environmentalism, but I’m on holidays right now and I wanted to show you something more fun.

This little fella decided he liked the look of our garden recently. He’s a rainbow lorikeet, which means he’s not native to WA. The population here came from aviary releases, according to Birds in Backyards. The other birds here don’t seem to mind – maybe because lorikeets eat nectar and the other native and introduced birds near us are all about the insects.

He’s got a cheerful little chirp and loves our bottlebrushes and grevilleas. I think he must have been tame, if not an actual pet, because he landed on my father-in-law’s head and was happy to run up and down his arm. He didn’t mind the noise of the guys loading up a trailer full of building rubble either, while the other birds kept their distance.

The funniest part was when I brought out a bread bag with a couple of crusts in it to see if he’d eat them (we didn’t know then they prefer nectar) – he perked up and ran right towards the bag making lots of chirping noises! I guess he knows that bread bags mean it’s lunchtime

We’ve given him some fruit now – apple and strawberries. Not that he needs it, with our driveway-length of bottlebrushes and 3 grevilleas, and some unknown orange-flowered thing that he seems to like too. It’s just that Dave can’t bear to have an animal so close and not provide it with food, water and pats on the head!

Update!

It turns out that lorikeets are considered a pest in WA. We only found this out after a bit of an adventure though.

About 5 minutes after I finished posting what’s above, we could hear our little guy squawking madly in our neighbour’s yard. Dave looked over the fence and her dog was having a go at the lorikeet. Dave jumped the fence and rescued him, but he seemed to be a bit injured in the foot. We rang the Wildcare line, which is run by the state government to put people who find injured wildlife in touch with vets or rehab places that can help them.

We ended up at Kanyana Wildlife centre, where a lovely volunteer took our feathered friend and told us what happens next. Because lorikeets are a pest here, they can’t be released back into the wild. However, there’s a lady who takes them in, and keeps an eye on the newspaper ads to see if anyone’s lost one so she can return them. We’re going to call back in a day or two to find out how the little fella is doing.

Guess what this is…

My in-laws brought this little fruit with them when they came to visit us this weekend. It came from their vegie patch. Some of you might have seen one before, but none of us had. Can you guess what it is?

It’s the fruit from a potato plant, after it flowered. Frank went to look at it and it just came off in his hand. It’s very much like a cherry tomato, except that it feels tougher and the skin is more like a capsicum.

Apparently if you chop it finely and put it in water, up to 300 seeds will be released and sink. Once you’ve salvaged the seeds, you can plant them and get what I can only imagine would be a lot of potatoes! I’m used to growing potatos from tubers or seed potatoes, not from actual seeds. Have any of you used one of these fruits before?

Vegie patch update

How’s your green thumb doing? We’ve had good results with our winter plantings which are still going strong now.

As you can see from the lower-right of the pic, our original “soil” barely qualifies for the name. It’s pure grey sand! We’ve added a lot of organic matter to the vegie patch itself, but there’s still a long way to go yet.

We’ve had huge quantities of snow peas and carrots, and more parsley than I know how to handle. Seriously, if you’ve got a way of using great big bunches of parsley I’d love to hear about it!

We’re still waiting on the garlic and onions but I think it won’t be long now. And I’ve finally worked out what to do with the larger/older spinach leaves: espinacas con garbanzos. It’s a Spanish dish in a simple home style (although there’s a fancier version here), and just right for cooler weather. It also makes great leftovers on toast the next day.

The best sign of a healthy garden

What do you think is the best sign of a healthy, diverse garden? Large leafy plants? Lots of wildlife, like birds and earthworms?

It’s having a frog decide to make your garden it’s home. Frogs live in a variety of habitats – some like trees, some like bogs, some like running water. But they all love to live in places with a complete ecosystem: sources of food like insects for them to eat, water, protection from predators.

In the wild, biologists think of frogs as being similar to canaries in a coalmine. If you’ve got frogs around, things are going well. If they move away or die off, then there’s either non-native predators around, too much pollution, or the soil is too salty. They’ll also disappear if there’s not enough water around, or it’s too hot for them to survive.

Which is why we were thrilled to discover this little lady in our garden. We’ve had a frog pond for about 6 months now, to go with our vegie patch and bird bath and pollinating plants and beneficial insects. The lady at the native garden centre promised us that we didn’t need to bring a frog in (and they don’t like being moved anyway), they’d find the pond themselves if the environment was to their liking.

We think it’s either a motorbike frog or a slender tree frog, both of which are common in our area. The best way to identify a frog is to listen to it’s call, but usually only the males will call during mating season. It is mating season here now, but our frog has been very quiet so we think it must be a female.

We looked up the frog in the database kindly provided by the Frogs Australia Network. If you’ve got a little amphibious friend, or want to know how to attract frogs to your garden, they’ve got tons of info for you to check out.

Long weekend

Here in WA we’ve just had a long weekend. I spent Friday through Sunday getting over the last of this damned cold, which meant I missed out on a Grand Final party, a picnic with friends and my niece’s birthday party. Luckily, the Grand Final and the picnic were able to be rescheduled

Today I spent catching up with various greenie friends! Helmut and Eugenie from The Green Swing in the morning, and Tricia from Little Eco Footprints in the afternoon. It really is a treat to chat with like-minded people about issues you’re passionate about.

Meanwhile, Dave was hard at work in the garden while I was recuperating. He keeps expanding the vegie patch by stealth, digging up a bit more lawn each time new plants go in. I don’t miss the lawn, but it’s getting a little higgledy-piggeldy out there these days.

To think we started with just this:

And now we’re up to this:

I think we’re getting better with succession planting, so we don’t have all our food ready to harvest at once. And we also switch between seasons better now, without such a big gap between harvests.

Seriously, if you’ve ever had the slightest desire to try vegie gardening but have been intimidated by some of the huge patches you’ve seen – don’t be. We started with the tiniest little experiment, and added things only as we felt confident. Pop something in the ground now and you could be eating fresh, homegrown vegies by Christmas.