Bees that make me go SQUEEEE!

Okay, yes. I am getting excited over bugs again, but yesterday I saw some native bees that I have not seen in a while. And I even got a picture, although not a very good one.
While watering my borage yesterday, I spotted a blue banded bee.

The are another solitary bee and the females dig burrows to live in, while the males hang out in plants at night. They are really had to photograph because they are very fast moving. They apparently do have a sting (Didn't know that we had native bees that did.) but they are non aggressive and probably would only sting if you tried to catch one.
If you want to read up on these little guys, you can find more info here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amegilla_cingulata

http://scienceillustrated.com.au/blog/nature/backyard-bugs-meet-the-blue-banded-bee/

I am now planing to plant more blue flowers in my garden, as they seem more attracted to blue. I am so happy to see these little guys making a home in my garden.

Cacti Explosion

Some of my favorite things in the garden are my cacti. I used to have quite a collection of them in pots. Unfortunately a large infestation of mealybugs decimated a lot of them. I still have a few and some were saved by planting them in the garden, where the mealybugs were more exposed to predators.

One of these has proved to be truly spectacular. From one small plant in a pot I got five very tall plants.

We had a very good winter here and they are absolutely covered with buds.

And just before Christmas the first of them opened.

I have more in the garden but none have been as dramatic as this one. Kind of gets me enthused about my prickly friends again.

Health kick! (Ouch!)

Well one of the reasons we started our own veggie garden was to get our own healthy food, none processed and chemical free.
We are slowly getting there. the berries have been fantastic and other crops are coming along. It is hard to keep things going in summer here so I am not starting anything new at this time of year, it is going to be hard enough to keep what we do have alive and if we get too low on water (We only have rain water tanks here.) I am going to have to let things go.
Anyway that is the food production side of things.

One of my biggest problems is eating, I don't do it regularly and having rampant diabetes in the family, this is not a good habit to have.
Winnie's issues are heart disease. He already has had surgery to insert a stent and he has lost his brother to a heart attack.
So we have good intensives to try and keep healthy. Winnie's photography helps him. It keeps him fit with light regular exercise. He takes fish oil in his diet and keeps an eye on what he eats, although he still loves all those processed meats.
I am starting to have problems with my skin now, it's never really been great, but it is getting worse again now. At my age, 44, this could probably be attributed to hormone changes. 
I am going to be trying something new, as well as going back onto the fish oil. I am going to try apple cider vinegar  and honey. I have been reading up on it and it all sounds good. I did now a fellow, many years ago, who swore by it, he was well into his nineties, so that was a good recommendation in itself. It has a lot of suggested benefits, from aiding digestion and relieving stomach complaints, to helping with weight loss.
So I am giving it a go, along with making myself eat a regular breakfast. It will be interesting to see how I go.

Frozen Fruit Smoothies (No Dairy.)

Winnie found a recipe for these on the net and we have been making variations of them for quite some time now. They are thick enough to eat with a spoon, depending on how you make them and we have been using them as a substitute for ice cream.

What you need for this is a strong blender, one with the power to blend ice.
The ingredients for the original smithies were;

1 Frozen banana.
6 Frozen strawberries.
4 Ice cubes.
Enough orange/passion fruit juice to blend the mixture.

We have changed amounts and combinations to suit our own taste. The liquid component is important to help blend the ingredients and stop the mixture from seizing up. The ice cubes can add extra volume to the mix and strangely give it a kind of creamy texture.
Since trying these we have tried a number of different things in different combinations; pears, kiwi fruit, pineapple, watermelon,  berries and different kinds of juice.
It is a great way of not wasting fruit too. Anything in our fruit bowl that is getting a bit too ripe and we are not going to eat it in time, goes into the freezer. When we do buy strawberries we eat what we want at the time and the rest goes in the freezer. No more wasted fruit for us.

So give it a go, it's something yummy and is good for you too. Not many things can boast that.

Have been getting a good feed.

Winnie and I have been munching out on strawberries and raspberries every day now since they have started fruiting, we are getting quite a good feed out of them, now that they are in full production.

The noises made while eating these are obscene. The boysenberries are just starting to color up now and I am looking forward to tasting them soon.

A Boiling Sky

We have been getting some pretty spectacular thunderstorms here. Not good in bushfire season and these have not had much rain with them either. Still, they have been rather amazing. The other day is sounded like the sky had a bad stomach, just constant distant rumbling. We had mainly blue sky here and once the storm finally his it was still a bit surreal with blue sky at the edges.
Winnie of course headed out with his camera to capture some of the cloud formations. He had a bit of a hair raising experience, as one close strike gave him a bit of a tingle and after that he came home. I was thinking about him as I heard the closer strikes and was contemplating sending out a search party, (Me) if he did not return shortly after.
Anyway the reason for this post is here are some of the shots he got.

Wasps

The other day I had a small insect drop on to the floor of our laundry, I think I had shaken it off my clothes, as I had been working in the garden most of time that day. At first I thought it was a native bee. It was very similar in shape to the little solitary burrowing bees we have here. I managed to scoop it up in a cloth and show it to Winnie before it flew off. To day I have been trying to identify it and found that is was not a bee, but a wasp, a cuckoo wasp, from the (Chrysalidae) family. A very interesting little creature indeed.

http://australianmuseum.net.au/image/Cuckoo-wasp/

http://australianmuseum.net.au/Cuckoo-wasps/

I hope I see more of them as they are incredibly bight in color and very pretty, in my opinion.

Another wasp that has come to our garden over the years, is the sand wasp.

http://australianmuseum.net.au/Sand-wasps/

They came one year when we had a lot of extreme heat and made their burrows across the road in the one of the garden beds of the little park. Now you may think, ew, wasps, but these little guys were cute and fascinating. Winnie and I had a great time photographing them and unlike honey bees they showed no agitation at us getting too close. Their attention was more on the flowers in our garden and on each other. It was very funny to watch them become rather frenzied with mating and mistaking the honey bees for their intended mates, needless to say the poor old honey bees were not impressed.
I am going to have to see if I can dig out the pictures we have of them.

On of the favorite visitors to our garden is a wasp, commonly referred to as a Blue Ant.

http://australianmuseum.net.au/Blue-Ant/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_ant

We have only identified the females, as they are the easiest to spot. I will often see a flash of blue in the grass and fine one hunting around the grown for victims for her nest, we have occasionally found them in flowers as well. We also have pictures of them and I will see if I can dig them out too.
Found a couple of the pictures I took of this little creature.

The last on my list of wasps is the aphid wasp. I could not find info on the one that we have here but they all feed the same and this will give you an idea of what they are about.

http://www.ipm.ucdavis.edu/WATER/U/parasite.html

Between these little guys, the ladybugs and hover flies, we have very few aphids around, they are tiny, only about 2mm in size and very hard to photograph, as they are very busy and fast moving.

We are seeing more and more diversity in our garden all the time and the fact that I do not like using chemicals is playing a big part in that diversity growing and becoming stronger. I don't panic when I see pest insects in my garden, in fact I get rather exited at times, it means our little warrior aliens will arrive soon and the battle will begin.
Who needs TV? I have real aliens living in my own back yard.

Super Model!

I was laughing my arse off the other day when I saw this.

Winnie has been setting up shots on the light table lately, and someone just had to get in on the act. The results aren't too bad either.

WORMS!!!

If you have been reading this blog, you may have seen me refer to worm juice. Well I thought I would post the production center, where it is made. This is one of my favorite places in the garden.

My worm farm is made out of an old fiberglass bath tub, located under two very shady trees.
There are small air holes drilled about half way up, for ventilation and to stop things going stagnant. The tub itself is half filled with gravel, that is topped with shade cloth. The worms live on top of this and are insulated with fibered carpet underlay and a couple of tubs for extra weather protection.
I have a container under the tub to collect the liquid which is produced when it rains or I water the worms in warmer weather. The white container you can see on the left is where I store it when not using it.

Insulation from rain and heat is one of the most important things.

We feed them all kitchen scraps, except citrus or any of the onion family, they don't much like those. They do get some of the garden scraps and also the leaves off the trees in autumn, that fall in the tub.
I love my wormies and am hoping to never have to buy any artificial fertilizer again, with these little guys in production.

Borage

I have been studying up on companion planting and one of the plants I came across was Borage. I have never seen it before and apparently is is good for your strawberries, so when I found it at the plant nursery I bought a plant.
It has turned out to be very pretty and the mad photographer in the family has already taken some rather stunning shots.

I will definitely be collecting seeds to have more of these throughout my garden veggies, to attract the bees and be attractive.

Little Kitty

This is our elusive outside cat. She is very shy and a little wild. I have always felt bad about having a cat live outdoors here, our native animals are very vulnerable to cats, dogs and foxes.
Although today I saw something that makes me think that having her outside isn't that bad. The blackbirds have been steeling her cat biscuits and they are not shy about it either. I was about two meters away when one came and helped herself. The funny thing was, so was Kitty. She just watched the bird with absolutely no interest. The blackbird just looked at both of us as if to say, "What? I'm eating here, what's the big deal?"
Once the bird had had it's fill, Kitty went back to eating.
That same bird shot around my feet a few weeks ago, when I was painting outside and gave me a telling off for being in her way when she was eating, she is getting really cheeky.

The elusive Kitty.

Tasks performed today 24/11/12

Finally got around to poisoning weeds. Not something I really like doing but it's the only way to keep some of it under control. Hopefully once the worst of it is eliminated it won't be so hard to keep up with. It was very warm and still this morning so it was an ideal time to get it done.

Todays tasks 23/11/12

Seasoled and worm juiced the garden tonight. Winnie tackled some of the bigger weeds growing around the fence.

Old ladies like to sleep in.

Just some cute pics of Lilly. She is getting on a bit now, 17 years old this month. She likes getting up early to have her breakfast but when the rest of us are up she tends to go back to bed.

Not sure how much longer we will have her, she is starting to feel her age now and has trouble jumping up, but apart from that she is quite fit. After her lengthy sleep ins she tends to head out to the garden and sleep in the sun or under the wattle tree if it is hot.

The little brown dog.

My mum's dog, Tigger came to stay with us for a week and it was really nice to have a dog in the house again. He is getting on a bit now and found our front steps a challenge, but otherwise he settled in okay and I think he had a fairly relaxing time  with us. Lilly didn't seem to mind him at all.

One of the only problems we had with him was that he blended into our floor too well and liked sleeping right in the middle of walkways.

We have missed him this week and Winnie is still tripping over imaginary dogs on the kitchen floor.

The harvesting has begun!

 Along with the strawberries, we are starting to get raspberries too. The noises Winnie makes while eating them are almost obscene. LOL. They are incredible strait from the bushes. We did have a problem with the birds getting in at first but that seems to be solved now.

Another thing that has that has been very prolific in my garden is the chamomile, I had to trim it back from the red current bush, it was getting so high. I am not usually a drinker of chamomile tea but I am going to give it a go, the flowers smell amazing and I am curious how different the tea will taste when picked fresh. I am drying some too, to be stored.

Some of my picking lettuce has already gone to seed but there is still plenty to eat for a while and I noticed the first flowers forming on my peas today.

Blackberry flowers

The hotter weather is coming in now and the blackberries are starting to flower. This pic does not quite capture the pretty pink color they are, it kind of echos the stains of the future. LOL

Some macro shots from Winnie

Grape moth caterpillars and praying mantis.

Little creatures photo shoot.

I mentioned the little cricket I found before. Well now there are two on the currants and also five baby praying mantis on the blackberries. I used one of Winnie's cameras and tried my hand at getting some shots.

This last shot is Winnie's

Which proves who it the photographer in the family.

All these little guys are about five millimeters in size.

The view from out front door.

This was the view last night as we had our BBQ tea. You really can't ask for more than this, can you?

Little cricket

Found this strange looking little cricket on the currant bush today. Thought he looked rather amazing so I took a pick.

Task completed for today 12/11/1

Fed the plans this morning with worm juice. Yum, yum.

Planted The Zucchini!

My favorite veg is the zucchini. I slice these things in half and cook them in the sandwich press with salt, pepper and sometimes cheese. I also grate them into omelets with parsley and cheese. I have put in three plants this year so the family might be getting some surplus.
I am also growing cucumbers for the first time, it will be interesting to see how they go.

You can just see the two cucumber babies up against the fence and one of the zucchini plants near the pot. They were all raised from seed.

The Veggie beds

The veggie beds are doing great. They have definitely come a long way from when we started in September.

These troughs contain two different varieties of tomato, parsley, dill, basil, spinach and capsicums.

We have been having mixed results with the corn. I didn't plant the seedlings deep enough to begin with so they were not to stable till we added more soil. One plant was plucked out by birds but has survived after replanting and a couple more have just died back for no reason. They seem to be growing at different rates too. The do seem to be coming into their own now though and we need to keep an eye on the watering.
There are also two self sown tomatoes in here and one I just recently planted.

This bed is going nuts. Dill, peas, lettuce of the picking variety and also single plants,  spinach and carrots.

I have harvested my first greens from these beds and have enjoyed them in a steak sandwich and also as a salad. I get to have these all to myself as Winnie does not like them.

They were yum!