Autumn Gardening

The BoM forecast minimum temperatures for the next few nights look suspiciously as though Summer has ended: 2 degrees C  on Tuesday and 3C for Wednesday.  As, being 200m higher, we are usually a couple of degrees colder than the Airport, for which the temperatures are given, it could be a reasonable frost out here.  Thus it was time to shift into cool season gardening mode.

There were two parts to this: cleaning up the remaining crops in the vegetable garden; and shifting the pot plants from the deck and nearby areas into Frances potting shed.

Part 1: Why Pumpkins are different to birds
While I was picking the pumpkins a flock of migrating honeyeaters passed overhead.  This was very pleasing as there were 3 species in the flock: the usual Yellow-faced (YFHE) were accompanied by White-naped and Fuscous.

This led me to think of the ways in which the pumpkins were different from the birds.
  1. The birds are a lot lighter than the pumpkins.They weigh about 15 grammes while the smallest pumpkins weighed 1.5 kg.  So a days worth of honeyeaters going over this place (100 as we are not on a main migration route) weigh about the same as a small pumpkin.  The biggest pumpkin was 9.4 Kg, which is probably a season's worth of honeyeaters!
  2. The honeyeaters fly themselves and don't need to be shifted in a wheelbarrow.
  3. The honeyeaters would not tolerate a small dog standing on them.


The Queensland Blues totalled in at 39.6Kgs while the Petit Marron (the orange jobbies) were 18.6.  In addition to these we had already got a couple more Blues and a solo Butternut.  So we are not going to be short of pumpkin this year.



Part 2 Still some nice flowers around
Our dahlias have been semi-successful this year in that the mauve ones have really stuck on a good show, but they are the only ones which have.  One yellow one has deigned to flower and a couple of red cacti-style but many of the ones we purchased last year seem to have done nothing.  The pot plants have done really well, despite being moved around in the painting project.  The two images below are of ones Frances has grown from cuttings: we think they have done better than in the original garden as they have had plenty of sun.










Here are some dahlia photos.
and one of a pin oak!

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