March Mayhem pests and weeds

Egad, with our Eco Creative Exhibition last month, and working hours extending, it's been remiss of me to leave this blog a little bit unattended for well over a month! I am spending what spare time I have on my other website converseconserve.com and learning of all things WELSH! It's a beautiful language, and I just seem to have an affinity with this culture, the people, and their love of excessive uses of consonants (d, w in particular), and sing-songy, tongue-twistery way of expressing themselves. It's no surprise that this country is famous for singing, poetry and performance competitions in the form of the Eisteddfods. (Hope I spelt that right, with the right number of consonants, and not too many vowells!)

Have been doing some scouring of the internet to find groups who are active on environmental weeds in Melbourne and haven't really stumbled on anything specific. There are groups that are active on the outskirts of the urban corridor, and in terms of our green wedges, but am eager to join up with people active in relation to suburban weeds. I am on the Futures' Committee of Sustainable Gardening Australia but haven't really wanted to admit to my own ignorance on this point about local networks. There are produce gardening groups galore, but weeds seems to be less of a focus group topic. I have now girded my loins and written an email to the President asking for his help.

Speaking of SGA, here is a page from their section on 'pests and diseases' written by the talented Helen Tuton. Very funny way of combining information with a jocular style of writing. Their Footprint Flicks videos are well worth a viewing.  This is eco-creativity to the max! I have a philoteca that is not doing well, and am afraid I will have to pull it out, so will need to bone up on my diseases knowledge more. With record summer temperatures all March long, am looking forward to get back in the garden and start planning some very resilient plants which I will mention in coming blogs.  So far I have some grevilleas, a leptospermum continentale, ficinia nodosas, and some woollly bushes (adenanthos sericeus) which are divine.

Arty SGA

I attended a fantastic fund-raiser last night for Sustainable Gardening Australia. It's a wonderful organisation and the website is very extensive, with no end of topics, information pages and factsheets on sustainable gardening.

Some performance art at fund-raiser -  there were these paper mache sculptures of skyscrapers (attached to two men crouched below sand-pit tables), and when the haunting music started, slowly came to life,  uprooting the soily buildings from the sand-pit and wearing monster masks, proceeded to scare the crowd with their moans and roars, dispersing soil everywhere.  The cantankerous monsters obviously represented the earth, having a good whinge at us humans.

I thought with all the art I have posted on this blogspot, I should have a dedication to all artists who help us to give the earth the good press it deserves.  So I thought it was time I posted this painting, by Andrew Ioannidis again.  Bellisima!

Today we will deal with the letter 'W'

UK is facing its most diabolical drought in many decades. Sent a tweet just now on this topic.

Wicker beds are just one way of dealing with drought, as the technique actually encourages a kind of reverse absorption, going against gravity, I believe.  Wicker beds are something to be researched as I personally have never dealt with them so the Sustainable Gardening Australia website is one to look up.

But on another 'w' topic, I got a call from one of the councils about weeds, and they said they are having more difficulty with chilean needle grass, as this one is harder to detect than the one I have been banging on about ad nauseum.  (Us greenies do get a bit nauseatingly repetitive, don't we!)

So just to bore the reader a tad more, the next weed I will raise is the very lofty and weedy Desert ash (Fraxinus angustifolia subsp.angustifolia).  Now I only realised at the beginning of my course a couple of years back that this is a naturalised envrionmental weed.  It pops up all over my area, and it has a habit of popping up just next to a fence, or a house and if it gets tall enough it will start to uproot your house.  Thrice it has popped up in very awkward positions around  my home.  The trouble is it can grow to literally a height of a 3 storey building, it grows really quickly in all the rain we've been having, and it involves so much maintenance.   The one on my boundary with the neighbours is lifting up the concrete path next to the fence.  I am happy my neighbours love it as it gives them tonnes of shade on the north western side. However, for me it's not so lovely.

I will attach a photo when next it is light!  Perhaps one of my next topics will be non-weedy trees, that don't take so much maintenance.

On another note, the thing I really love about summer is the sound of the cicadas, or is it crickets.  Anyway they make a great noise that lulls you off to sleep.

From this ...

To this !

Benefits of lawn aka fake turf

http://www.greenlivingonline.com/article/why-lawn-care-green

This is quite a good article on why lawn is actually very good for the earth.
I think lawn deserves to get better press.

The Sustainable Gardening Australia also has a good page entitled
Turf Wars which is hugely informative.