Vegetation decorative and edible: plus invertebrates

We seem to be getting rain at pretty much the right time to get the garden happening this year.  (Also getting the brambles and briars happening, but that is another story.)  This afternoon we did some stuff in the garden and I took a few images that may be of interest - especially for those in the North who maybe finding colour and daylight a bit hard to come by.

These flowers come from a large bed on the Eastern side of our house, which Frances has pretty much created from scratch.
The first 2 images are of Penstemons.

 These foxgloves appear to self regenerated from last year's flowers which is good.
 After many attempts we have some Acanthus flowerig: and very attractive they are as well!
We have a row of Globe Artichokes along the bottom of the bed, partly for appearance, but they are on the menu for tonight.
In addition to these 'pure exotics' we have some nice Australian Natives - possibly not from anywhere close to here - blooming.
This is a mini-melaleuca
 and a small leptospermum
In the purely edible department the strawberries continue to go gang-busters.  I didn't pick yesterday so got about 2.5kgs this morning.
 The broad beans are also going extremely well.  There is probably one more pick like this before we remove them.
There were a few invertebrates around.  As with last year I intend to take images of the ones which interest due to their colouration or structure.

The first was an Icheumenon wasp that visited our kitchen window this morning.  Neither Brisbane insects nor Life Unseen are strong on the Latin for this family and I think it is the second Banded Pupa wasp on the former site.  It is clearly a female - no male would be seen in public with an ovipositor like that!
While picking the strawberries I have noticed these tiny (perhaps 20mm) grasshoppers most days.  Brisbane Insects is silent about 'hoppers which like strawberries!
Looking over at our vines I found lots of flowers and several of these caterpillars wandering about with their biting parts.  Although visually attractive, there were several less of them after I passed by.
On returning indoors this spider was found wandering around on the floor.
More research is needed to ID it.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Insects from pine trees

Image
This afternoon (13/1/2015) we were looking out of our sunroom and noticed a strange bit of mist.  On getting my binoculars on the case I found it to be a cloud of tens of thousand of insects.  They appeared with naked eye to be flying away, but with binoculars I thought they were circling. Here are some images In the second one it may be possible to see there are two streams coming from the top of each tree. There was a loud buzzing noise but that could just be several thousand wings. Earlier in the day Frances had been to some nearby willows and they were infested with many little black soft bodied insects.  Perhaps they shifted to the pines and were swarming? Help!! Any information welcome. A colleague, from Wamboin, had noticed a similat phenomenon, but involvng eucalypts rather than pines!  Here are the photos he took with his phone. I have consulted some expert friends.   Their responses were: I would have gone for chironomids. I rec...
Read more

A tour of the West (part 1)

Image
A friend from my time in the UN sent me some photos of her family trip along Route 66.  They did this is a large camperwagon rather than a Chevy Corvette (apparently the kids jacked up about being offered a trip in the trunk).  It seems to have been a very good trip for them and most interesting to see their photos.  It was also educational for me, as I found out the German for rocking chair (schaukelstuhl, since you ask). They did 7200 miles in 30 days - a pretty serious bit of distance. This made me think of the trips we did in 1981 when living in Denver.  Frances initiated that idea by getting a book about the National Parks of the West  and marking interesting places.  I then worked out a route on a Rand-McNally Road Atlas (GPS was unknown then  - as were iPhones, personal computers and the internet).  From memory, taking nearly the whole Summer school holidays we covered about 10,000 miles in 70 days.  Here, approximately,  are ...
Read more

Maslins beach rules

Image
Anyone who was in Adelaide in the 1970s will be having a good nudge nudge at that title.  However the beach is really nice even though it is the haunt (in Summer ) of naked people.  (As an aside one of the 'van park staff was talking to some other guests and commented that the sights on the beach in Summer were not at all exciting.)  In April it is the haunt of seniors, many of them exercising their dogs, and thus a far more attractive place. Getting to the beach was a walk of about 1km along roads, from our van.  The second half of this went past a rather daggy looking paddock with many formed ridges in it, as though it was irrigated, although a water sources wasn't evident.  The paddock got interesting towards the end as some green parrots appeared.  Thanks to Frances eye for detail we have subsequently identified these as Elegant Parrots: my first lifer for 2014.    The locale is indicated by the red lines in this mudmap: Here are the bird...
Read more