Friends

This is one of the heritage roses at work. They were growing outside the old school before it got moved to Minnawarra Park, so they dug up the roses and transplanted them here to stay with the school. What cultivar of rose this is, I dont know. It was the only yellow rose on the bush, and the bud was far from perfect, however I think that just adds to its charm. Shine on you pretty little rose! When I studied floristry, we had to know meaning behind flowers and colours. Just incase we do something silly like, sending flouro pink flowers to a mans funeral, or something like that. Yellow roses, in particular, mean friendship. Yellow is a happy colour and will cheer most people up. Ive been hit with alot of bad news this week, and all of my friends have redefined wonderful when they found out. This is a very personal blog, I know, and in my bloggings, I typically dont include much more beyond opinions and what I know. However, I feel my friends all deserve a yellow rose each, and a massive hug, possibly even a medal too, as they are all truely awesome people. They say that prosperity is full of friends, its when things get tough you discover who your real friends are. Every single one of you is real and I can not thank you all enough for being part of my life. xx

Trolley Fishing

This is something we have to do occasionally. Some people believe its quite fun to push a trolley into the park and throw it off the bridge. Personally I dont understand the mentality, but I do like the fact we get to bring out the grappling hook. Theres something about a 4 pronged metal hook on the end of a long rope that just makes me smile. Usually 2 people are required to get the trolley out, as trolleys can be quite heavy, and the trolley has to be lifted vertically just above the water, then slid along the bridge to shore, in order to get it out. If you try to drag it without lifting it, it will just dig its self deeper into the silt and you'll never get it out. A word to the wise, always carry rubber gloves for this job, as when you get the trolley out it is usually covered in smelly, black mud. Believe me you dont want that hon your hands.

Week Old Web

Splendifferous news, peoples! I finally managed to save enough for a new phone. So we can go back to having pretty pictures again! So, to test it out, I took a photo of a spider web, that has been hanging at the bunker for just about a week now. Its quite a large web, and it anchors its self over quite a large area. The top thread runs a good 10m from the bougainvillea to the fertiliser shed. The web is built about 2m above the ground, so we have been walking underneath it. The rain of the morning is still caught on the web and I think it looks rather pretty. There is quite a large spider that inhabits it occasionally, but obviously she wasnt a fan of the wet weather either. So you just get a picture of the web.

Bring The Rain

Fun things about work. After a decent down pour of rain, Fungi! Fungi everywhere. Its delightful. I found these little mushroom like things poking their little heads out from behind a bush. Alas, there isnt much more of a story to them then that. Just a nice find last Friday afternoon.

Flavour Of The Month

Frangipani! The popularity of these plants has soared since I became a gardener 10 years or so ago. They have always been a popular plant for amenity horticulture, however about 7 or so years ago, alot of merchandise begin to come out with frangipani flowers on it (hair clips, mirrors, ornaments, etc) and this pretty much caused a popularity explosion. Im personally more a fan of the white frangi, then the pink. Different colours are more widely available now (from almost red, to orange red, orange yellows, pinks and whites). I think I prefer white because white is usually the least popular colour. Which is a shame, as white typically has the strongest of the subtle perfume that frangis emit. Frangis are really easy to grow from cuttings as well, which, I guess is why they are a popular tree to grow. Simply cut off a branch, leave it for at least 24 hours so the cut has time to seal, then plant. Dont let it get soaking wet, this will cause it to rot. Keep it moist and after about a month or so it will send out roots and Ba Na! you have a tree.

High Tide

When I took the first photo, I intended this blog to be more of a before and after shot of clearing out the spillway, but given the weather, its now a water level contrast as well. So, quite obviously, this is the spill way at work. Its where the excess water feeds away from the lake on Minnawarra. It was very over grown and needed clearing, as you can see in the first shot. Queue the job of rock climbing with a chainsaw. Yeah, I love my job. Basically we had to remove the small trees in the bottom and uplift the trees on the edge. Then there was the task of removing the weeds and just generally tidying up. Took a good day to complete and we did it the middle of the week before last, as we knew rain would be comming the following week and wouldnt have chance to get in there otherwise. The bottom photo was taken on the Thursday in the week just gone, when we had that delicious spell of rain. The spillway is fairly unaccessible, due to the water. Safety first, as always. Still blows my little mind, just seeing the difference a spell of rain makes.

Vruuuuuuum

This machine is a blessing and a curse. Meet The Auger. In very simple speak, a 2 Stroke powered drill. It basically means that instead of having to dig 250 holes to plant a hedge, I can drill the holes and do the job in half the time. The only main issue I have with it, is the fact that my lower back is about ready to throttle me after 5 minutes of use. It requires a bit of bending when you drill, so, naturally the lower part of your back begins to ache. So when you work in a team, you rotate auger use. Have one person drilling, one person planting, then swap roles every 10-15 minutes. Gets the job done in half the time, and believe me Im all for that!

Trimmings

This, folks, is the plumbago hedge at work. Plumbago has a very pretty powder blue flower on it and that makes it a very popular. Unfortunately it has a terrible growth habit. It suckers. Lots of different types and species of plants sucker, its where a shoot grows straight from the roots, instead of an existing above ground stem. Plumbago is such a dense shrub due to all of these suckers, it is fast growing and invasive. It will quite happily smother anything else around it. If you have an area where it can be contained, it can look rather nice. Hence the reason we have such a large hedge of the stuff. Unfortunately, like all hedges, it requires pruning when it gets too big. So armed with hedge trimmers and the pole hedge trimmer, we spend a good 3 hours trimming the bush back into shape. I get the bonus, that I am the tallest of the crew at the bunker, so its usually me on the pole hedge trimmer doing the center/top of the hedge as its easier for me to reach. I still have to stromp through the hedge to reach certain areas. Now, because its such a tangle of branches, stromping though it is no mean feat, especially when trying to balance a pole hedge trimmer as well. If you look at the photos, in the top one you can see the little billy goat trails I have made, while trying to reach certain areas. I quite often lose my balance, so in the bottom photo, is a me shaped dent I made when I lost my balance and couldnt get up easily. One thing I am grateful for, is the hedge doesnt receive alot of water, so we only have to prune it every 2-3 months.

Dangerous Job?

We, quite obviously, keep first aid cabinet in the bunker, and have to do an audit of it every so often to make sure that the supplies are fully stocked and well inside their expiry dates. So, after a thorough audit on the cabinet on Friday, it turns out that we stock an Amputated Parts Module (APM, for conveniences sake). I dont know why, but this really shocked me. Ive cut my knee a couple of times on a hedge trimmer, but for some reason the whole 'it wont happen to me' thing kicks in and thought that it was a bit overkill to have the APM in first aid kit. Then it dawned on me, we use an assortment of small plant that can do more then just sever appendages, so it makes sense to have one. Chainsaws, mowers, hedge trimmers, pretty much anything with a motor attached to it, has no regards for the flesh that operates it. Hopefully the APM never gets used, but if it does, it has this handy little picture of a severed thumb on the back of it in the instructions.

Grandma's Garden

Geraniums. One of the plants I like to refer to as 'The Great Unkillables'. They are a notoriously hardy plant and flower quite forgivingly, almost regardless of how harsh you treat them. Due to this, they were very popular with older ladies and gentlemen who like to go for that english cottage garden look. Remember, while they can survive in bland, sandy soils with little water, they do reflect your care and wont look 100%. At work we grow the pink one at the depot near the rose garden, and the red ones look quite spectacular in Memorial Park. Those ones are growing in some some rich soil (we had to rotary hoe a heap of mushroom compost into it when we planted up, as they decided to fill the beds with yellow sand .... idiots), and get sufficient water in places. When they get too big, just take to them with a pair of secateurs and prune them back. The good thing about geraniums is they are shockingly easy to propagate  Just break off a piece of stem, bury part of it in the ground, keep moist (NOT WET!) and it will grow. Doesnt take much and it works about 70% of the time. Gold.

Waders

This is quite possibly the second most narcissistic photo I have ever taken. I wanted to show waders in action. As you can tell by the last two blogs, the theme tonight is my adventures picking up rubbish from around the lake shore. Waders, for those who have never come across them, are like gumboots with rubber pants attached to the top of them. They are, quite obviously, for wading through water and will destroy any form of street cred that you have. They have this neat little pocking right on the inside of the front of them. If you look closely, you can see the bright orange of my drink bottle poking out. Store anything in this pocket, and you instantly look pregnant. They never fit properly. Well, let me correct that, they fit properly if youre a naturally skinny person. I wear a mens size 9 boot. A pair of waders with a size 9 boot will not go past my hips, The ones Im wearing in this picture are a size 12. This means you walk like youre a loping elephant, in saggy skin. This is amplified when in water. The most inconvenient thing about waders is theyre like a personal sauna. Great in winter, sucky when the weather is vaguely warm. Taking them off you are always greeted with a waft of sweat and your trousers are completely damp, if not wet. All that aside, I still find them fun and a great novelty, simply because we rarely get to use them.

It Lives!

Hard to believe, but in amongst all the rubbish and muck in the lake on Minnawarra, there is life! and its not just the ducks, coots and ibis. Durring my adventures in the lake, I came across these guys. A little yabby, and a freshwater mussel. The mussel was just happily sitting there as mussels do, the Yabby was hiding inside the edges of a road sign that had been tossed into the lake. The presence of these animals means that the lake is quite healthy (that being said, the place is full of frogs, dragonflies and mayflies, and they certainly dont breed in polluted water).

I dont know very much about freshwater mussels. Guess its something Ive never felt the urge to study before. I know they are exceptionally good at filtering the water they live in. They are one of the organisms that help to keep a body of water clean

Yabbys' are an introduced species to Western Australia. Here we have Koonacs, Gilgies and Marron. Yabbys' were introduced to WA in the 1930s, in farming dams and such. All of these freshwater crayfish (as they are called by the fisheries department) have a habit of 'walking' from one water source to the next when conditions change (over crowding, water is polluted, searching for a mate, etc), and as such they now inhabit various river systems in the Southwest region of WA. The easiest way I can spot this is a Yabby is by his claws. Both Yabbys' and Koonacs' have the chunky, round looking claws, where as marron and gilgies have more delicate and elongated claws. The way to tell the difference between a Koonac and a Yabby is that Koonacs have serration (jagged edges) on the inside of their claws, where as the inside of a Yabby's claws are smooth.

Silt

Well, today's blogs are going to have a bit of a theme to them. I love the variety in my work, I never quite know what the day will bring. Today's adventures included walking along the waterline of the lake to pick up the rubbish that is blatantly obvious now that the water level has dropped.

So, with waders on, I strolled casually round the edge of the lake with pickers in hand, removing what I could. Using gloves on the bigger stuff. I took this photo while I was under the bridge in the middle of the lake, enjoying the shade, and figured Id wander out and get the two stakes from out of the silt. Now, around the edge of the lake, its quite solid, but as you get further in, the silt is like the cartoon version of quicksand. I wish I had known this. I managed to walk out to the stakes, but once I had retrieved them, the boots on the bottom of my waders had become stuck in the silt and wouldnt move. It took me a good 10 minutes to work one of them loose, and I was very grateful for the stakes as a support. I can officially say that in that specific spot, a person can sink to knee depth in the silt, and mid thigh depth if you include the layer of water on top.

I managed to get stuck one more time in the lake, while retrieving a bottle that was a little bit off the ankle deep shoreline. The silt became soft very quickly and I was stuck, this time I didnt have a stake nearby and had to call my coworker for help. He came with a couple of stakes so I could repeat the same trick. He was greatly amused. Oh well, least he came to bail me out, otherwise Id still be out there.

A Nod To The Past

When Armadale and Kelmscott were founded as towns, they began life as logging and farming communities. The hills, in particular, have rich clay soils and cooler temperatures, which suit agriculture better then the bland sandy soils that Perth is notorious for. The gardens around the areas I work, try to reflect this heritage. In Memorial Park, we have lemon and lime trees growing. Unfortunately the fruit there never grows any larger then a golf ball, as the lovely creatures that inhabit the park tend to pick them and hurl them about the place. *grumble grumble*. There is also a pretty old Apricot tree that produces bucket loads of fruit that the delinquents always seem to overlook. For some reason, lemons and limes are more appealing to them. In another section up near the old Town Hall, you have a couple of Peach Trees and Apricot Trees. This is the first time Ive actually noticed fruit on them (as you can see from my photographic evidence). I always knew they fruited, as Im forever pulling up little plants that grow from the seeds of fallen fruit, but never actually saw it until now. I got quite excited when I discovered this. They are normally picked and thrown long before they get to this size. Then again, this is a much quieter area, so I guess they have a better chance at life then the ones in Memorial.

Little Surprises

Fungi are fascinating things. This isnt really fungus season. Too hot and dry, winter is the best time for it. However, these little ones pop up occasionally. They must cop enough water from the sprinklers. Makes me smile.