Summer's here! In fact, it seems that it's been here for a while, and the temperatures are
still what you'd expect in midsummer. The Ballarat
Courier confirmed the concerns with the main headline “Hot days, little
rain”.
That was the least of our concerns today, though: we still don't have anybody to bale our
hay, and more rain is forecast for tomorrow. Yvonne spent most of the
day telephoning around and getting rejection after rejection. Finally, round evening, Damian
showed up and told us that he could do it—on Tuesday. It seems that some minor part of
his tractor has failed, and he won't get a replacement until then. Oh well, it's been rained
on once, and that heavily. Hopefully the rains tomorrow, if they eventuate, won't be as
bad.
Watering the garden is still a bit of a kludge, and I somehow managed to get myself
thoroughly wet a couple of times. Yvonne took Pam Hay to the station today, and also did some
shopping, bringing a hose fitting with taps, but we really need proper pipes.
The phone rang early this morning, and we didn't get it before it rang out. Whoever called
also didn't bother to leave a message. Later I got a call on my office phone, but it stopped
after 2 rings.
None of this would be unusual, except today was the day that Damien was supposed to be
coming to bale the hay. He didn't. Yvonne spent all day trying to find
somebody, to no avail. It looks as if the hay will be left to rot.
Didn't do much work, apart from a bit of pruning in the garden. I wish I understood this
better.
Still nobody to bale the hay! Damien, who promised to come yesterday, is completely
unreachable, and we can't find anybody else. It looks as if we're going to have to let it
rot.
Still nobody to bale our hay! And rain promised for this evening; we've given up hope of
getting it baled, and are planning to put a lot of Chris' horses on the paddocks to eat it up
before it rots.
A couple of days ago I talked about breeding mushrooms; today I found we actually are
doing so:
What is it? On the face of it, it's an Agaricus Campestris,
which we also had in Wantadilla, and this is a particularly good
specimen. But is it maybe Agaricus
Xanthodermus, which is poisonous? They look pretty much the same except for the yellow
coloration they get when damaged; and look at that yellow spot. Chopped the stem off and it
didn't really go yellow:
We've finally given up on having our hay baled, and Yvonne and
Chris brought 6 horses over to eat up what's left, with another 6 scheduled to come tomorrow.
Over to pick up some watering containers until we can move a spectacularly heavy cast-iron
bath.
In the evening, ate an omelet with the Agaricus Campestris
that I picked a few days ago. I've had this
suspicion that they're not as harmless as is claimed—in particular, they give me loose
bowels. That's not exactly dangerous—sauerkraut does the same—but certainly
something to consider. They don't taste so spectacular that it's worth the trouble.
..., then off to buy some tyre valves: I have had an
idea to use the new tyre pump to pressurize the garden sprayer, which uses a manual piston
pump to generate the pressure. All I needed was a tyre valve.
Finally back home and put the valve in the sprayer:
We still need more attention to the garden. In particular, we're planning wooden framed
elevated garden beds. Over to Chris' place and borrowed a circular saw, then cut some old
fence posts (about 2m long) into two lengthways; two sets of them will give us a square bed
of 4 m². Lots of sawdust.
Despite the availability of sufficient water, some of our plants are not looking very
happy, notably a couple of the hebes. Decided that it was time to plant them into the ground,
prepared or not, and started a hedge to the north of the house. Getting them out of the
plastic pots was difficult: the roots had penetrated all the drain holes, and it was almost
impossible to disentangle them. These are small ones; the bigger ones were much worse:
That looks pretty much like some fungal infection; hopefully the new environment will
solve that problem by itself.
Spent some time working on the frames for the garden beds; they're a surprising amount of
work, and by evening I had only done half of them. Well, it's not as if we could just put the
soil straight in them anyway. Looks like being plenty of fun for days to come.
After ripping out the purple daisies from the
flower bed at the south of the house, we were left with not very much of anything. Gradually
some plants came through; one was obviously capeweed, another shoots of the purple daisies,
and a third one looked like weeds, but there was also a fourth one which I decided to let
grow before making a decision. A good thing too: it proved to be heartsease (wild pansies, or
as the French call them, savage thoughts (pensées sauvages)):
It rained all day—more like a European November day than an Australian midsummer's
day. Yana left for Bendigo to visit my mother, and I found another agaricus campestris, which
Yana didn't want to take with her. That may have been as well; when I looked at it later in
the day, it had changed colour:
That's a decided yellow tinge, something that agaricus campestris should never
have. But it smelt OK, and it doesn't show the typical bruising of agaricus xanthodermus;
it heightens my suspicion that it's another related species; certainly the Wikipedia page shows enough of them. So I
think we'll give up eating any agaricus out of the garden.
There's still plenty of work to do in the garden, but the weather is getting hot again;
today it hit 35°, and the forecast is for continuing hot weather until the New Year. As a
result, spent most of the day indoors.
The bottlebrush that I pruned so radically 3 weeks ago seems to have decided to survive.
About a week ago the first suggestion of shoots came out, and already that suggestion has
become a real shoot, and many more are coming:
The old year certainly went out with a bang, not a whimper: at 8:30 this morning the
temperature was already 26°, and it climbed through the morning at 4° per hour, trailing off
in the afternoon to finally hit 40° in late afternoon.
One effect of the hot weather was to attract birds to the bird bath:
Got a number of photos, though as this one shows (taken with a 210 mm telephoto,
corresponding to 420 mm on a 35 mm camera), I need a much longer focal length. Spent some
time looking at what's on offer—there's a 650-1300 zoom on the market, but I need to
convince myself I can afford it.
