Golden Joy

One of our favourite things about living here is the abundance of beautiful small birds.  We are prepared to spend the time and effort netting the planned berry bushes and fruit trees, so that we can still love the little birds and still harvest some produce! 

One of the most beautiful of the small birds is the Golden Whistler, we don't see them often as they seem to spend a lot of time high up in the trees, but their call is unmistakeable so we know they are around.  You can imagine our delight whilst having a cuppa on the verandah, when this one sat himself on the compost bin, fossicked around my pot plants, ate a bee, poked around amongst the lettuce then flew off.  Wonderful.

Then not long after the scarlet robins came in.  They are a such show-offs, they love to sit on top of star pickets and fence posts, proudly showing off how lovely they are.  This one is a young male we think.

Steve has been a busy busy boy constructing the vegie patch fence.  He is digging down 1.2 metres to sink each pole and has just finished them all.  Temporary wire surrounds the beds for the moment while Steve has busied himself on the computer reading up on different ways to construct strainer posts corners.  It's all coming along very well and once it's finished there will be room for Steve to build another three big vegie beds inside the fence. Which is great as it gives us plenty of scope for crop rotation and leaving a bed fallow if we choose.  We plan to build the chook yard and house beyond the lower fence of the vegie beds.

I've been creating a new bed for my comfrey.  Where our shed was cut into the hillside, we have a cut slope behind it, about 1.5 metres high.  I've been digging into it to make a terrace/trench bed. One because I think the comfrey will like it as it should hold moisture fairly well, and two because I wanted to put in a plant that has deep roots, to help stabilise the soil on the slope.  Comfrey, once established, has very deep roots, plus I'm also going to try and grow lemon grass in the back of the trench as that has deep roots too.  I love comfrey as a garden aid.... I'm a compost fanatic and comfrey is a you-beaut compost activator, either by adding the leaves to the compost heap, or rotting them down in a bucket of water (with a lid, and positioned well away from your house, as it stinks!).

I am pleased to see that the natives I've been planting around the place are starting to establish and grow, to the point that I've started removing some of the green plastic protection sleeves that have been around them for 6-12 months.  Here is a nice, healthy kunzea.

 And this is "Little Nessie", Melaleuca nesophila.

 On a final note, we got this letter in the mail the other day.  Hooray, planning has been approved, just awaiting the issue of the building licence then things can start moving regarding our house.  Yay! :-)