Swooping Season

Today is beautiful. Melbourne spring sunshine comes and goes, but is beautiful after what seems like a grey winter. The grass is growing quickly, as are the weeds. The local birds have also felt the spring calling.
The Masked Lapwing has nearly finished raising its first two chicks. I am waiting to see if it has another two later on in summer. We hear its loud, penetrating calls early in the morning outside the bedroom window as it alerts its young to possible dangers. This seem to happen every few minutes and is a result of the birds nesting in a busy urban area.
The Magpies have been swooping cyclists and runners for a couple of weeks now. My youngest was cycling to school the other day by a route which misses the worst of the Magpies. Unfortunately, the route coincided with a maniac driver who nearly hit him. Both the rider and bike were forced off the road onto the kerb with some attendant damage. A shaken boy was scathing of the car driver but fortunately had good enough reflexes not to get hurt.
Smaller birds are fighting off the huge black Crows and the Little Wattlebird seems to be flirting with a mate. A beautiful Eastern Rosella flew past the car recently and plenty of Magpie Larks are fighting car mirrors in a vain attempt to repel their images.
I do hope the Australian birds continue to survive the drought, fires and consequent lack of feed and habitat this year.

Sustainable House Day

Today we visited a couple of properties as part of the Sustainable House Day. I have been meaning to attend one of these days for several years but work often intervened. I wasn't sure what to expect so we picked 2 properties moderately close by (in our unsustainable car) and had a look along with a fair few others.
The properties were quite different.

The first,  a newly built house which had the luxury of in-slab heating, plumbing under the slab to allow collection of water to a central area to be re-pumped to a large water tank at the back of the property. The house was built with double glazed windows which I so wished we had undertaken when building our current house (a long time ago). The property had no developed garden as yet , a sustainable one as no effort is needed! And the piece de resistance - a basin over the cistern in the loo!

The second property was also very interesting. A retro-fitting in process by a passionate owner. It had huge photovoltaic pannels and underfloor bladder tank. The owner has stopped taking mains water from earlier this year and has installed a moderately sophisticated water purification and filtration system. He personally gave a tour of the house to hordes of interested people., sharing his views on a wide range of sustainable issues outside of the building ones.
So now I have a range of glossy pamphlets and may as well get a green home assessment. Then I might have to spend few more $$ on the place. I also entered the competition on the Sustainable House website but was a little concerned about some of the conditions of entry - namely REC's are to go to shmeco.com, a web2 site on sustainable living. However, I never win anything so nothing lost, I suppose!!

Harvest time

In Melbourne, I find that this is the best harvest time for the garden. At this time of year the vegie garden is producing lots of good stuff, from peas, cauliflower, broccoli, lettuces, asian greens and almost broad beans. These last plants are so tall the recent wind has caused a sizeable lean.
My freezer is now home to 8 cauliflowers and the family is getting sick of cauliflower soup. The heads have been large and pretty free of insects which makes processing them easier.
The lawn has grown lush and rank with weeds. However, there will be several sizeable brown spots due to the ongoing saga of tree cutting following the August storm. Hopefully we will be able to move the 2 stumps out of the way this weekend, plant another couple of native trees and back fill with the leaves of the fallen trees as a coarse mulch. That way the recent reasonable rain can do its magic in the dry soil.
None too soon as the Weather men predict an unusually fine weekend. Melbourne at this time of year often fools one into thinking summer is on its way. In a couple of weeks time it will probably throw a last frost or two.
How is your garden faring?