The Garden in October

I took these photos on 15th October, but I'm actually writing the blog post much later.

The day was grey and wet, as was much of October. We went to look at Lal Lal Falls to see how much water was there after all the rain. I took a small number of garden photos between the house and the car:

The tulips have been bashed around by the rain, but these pinky ones are still not finished:

Ajuga:

A terrible photo of what I think was the first rugosa rose for the year:

Clivea:

 

At the Falls there were a lot of people, and a lot of water:

The sun even peeked through for a moment:

 

Back home again, I took a look around the orchard. I just looked at this photo and thought, was that a peach or a nectarine?

Fortunately I took a photo of its label at the time. It is actually a "Peacherine", a peach/nectarine cross. 

The quince had a few flowers that weren't quite open, and lots of buds:

The is the "Red Love" apple, which has red flesh, red blossom, and red leaves:

A more normal apple, although I don't remember which one:

Next, the Gondwanaland bed. My protea "Limelight" has quite a few flowers this year:

This amazing plant is Acacia denticulosa, known as sandpaper wattle because its leaves are rough like sandpaper. But look at its flowers:

The rain has flattened them a bit, but they are like huge yellow fuzzy caterpillars. And much softer than the leaves!

This grevillea is a ground-cover variety, possibly "Bronze Rambler":

The Digger's Speedwell is beginning to flower, and I can see in the background of this photo that another wattle was flowering, but I don't remember which one and I don't seem to have photographed it on its own:

 

Along the driveway the melianthus buds are just starting to open:

And the Euryops daisy is going strong:

These must be the last of the various daffodil varieties:

These photos were taken at 2pm, which shows you what a grey old day it was. It looks like dusk!

Loropetalum:

Tulbaghia:

Thryptomene:

I was surprised there were any open flowers on the pigface (Carpobrotus), as they normally only open in the sun:

In the back yard, my redbud buds are opening:

And the wisteria is doing its thing. I hope I have a better photo of it somewhere, as it looked fantastic this year. Will have to search my photos.

And maybe lastly, this echium just starting to flower:

With bonus Portuguese millipede.

That's probably not everything, but I am writing this so long afterwards I don't remember what I might have missed on the day. Just glad to have got this blog post done!

Blowing out the Cobwebs

Are these dogs having fun?

 

They are.

And so was I on a morning walk before the weather turned cold in the afternoon. Here the dogs are running past a former pine plantation that has been harvested. I wonder what it will be replaced with?

The wind was strong, and as well as turning the turbines, it blew away some of my stress.

The Shepherd's Daughter

This morning the desire to go for a walk somewhere "different" struck us, and I thought of a place near Lal Lal I had heard of but never visited. 

Getting there was an adventure, as we had to drive down rough unnamed roads, (tracks, really) through forest it would be easy to get lost in. We saw a mob of kangaroos at one point, but they disappeared into the bush before we could get photographic evidence.

I parked near this patch of grasstrees:

And wildflowers:

Epacris impressa, the common heath

 

We set off on foot, not knowing quite how far we needed to go. Along the way we found this fungus:

Ghost fungus, Omphalotus nidiformis

Ghost fungus glows green at night, which would be amazing to see. But I'm not driving down those tracks at night! Plus this fungus was right beside an old, unmarked, unfenced, mine shaft, which could be just a little dangerous in the dark.

Eventually we found our destination:

The grave of a young girl who died in the 1860s. This article from the ABC in 2018: Shepherd's daughter's grave includes some information about who she probably was, and when she probably died.

The wooden fence was put up 80-odd years after the girl's death, and these carved details were added some time since 1951. The photo from 1951 shows bush including grasstrees right beside the grave, but now the surrounding area is bare. Too many visitors, perhaps. 

Some of those visitors leave things behind:

I wonder what a 6-year-old in the 1860s would have made of plastic flowers, or a stuffed toy dog.

At the Falls

With recent rain, the Lal Lal Falls are flowing again. We drove down to the falls a couple of days ago to have a look, took one look at the huge crowds of people, and kept driving and went straight back home. Today the crowds were much smaller, so we got out and had a look:

 

As we were walking around the reserve the dogs alerted us to the presence of some wildlife:

Photographing the echidna they found, to add to iNaturalist and EchidnaCSI:

 

It was a long way down there, so I stayed with the dogs and didn't get a photo of it myself.

Dot got excited about a kangaroo footprint in some soft ground, and tried to dig down and find the kangaroo. Or something...

Looking cute with her nose covered in dirt:

Lal Lal Sights

On the second day of my friend's visit, we took a tour of the highlights of Lal Lal.

We went to the falls, where there was actually water flowing, but I didn't photograph it. I was trying to photograph a bird of prey which was flying over the gorge.  This is the only photo that actually had the bird in it (I got a lot of blue sky), and there is no way I could identify it:

If you haven't seen any of my previous pictures of the Lal Lal Falls, a few of them are linked in this post.

We took a walk around the falls area, and saw a mob of kangaroos.

Then we visited the blast furnace, which you can see at my earlier visit last month.

We drove past a couple of old buildings built from bricks made of the local clay, the old bluestone station building, and the Falls Hotel which is still closed because of the virus. I forgot to point out the water tower. And I can't find photos of any of these on my blog so I obviously need to get out and take some.

Blast Furnace

While we've been keeping isolated, taking the dogs for a walk has covered pretty much the same ground each day. This map of my iNaturalist observations over the last two months shows how limited our horizons have been:

At the top of the map you can see a blue marker where we drove up to the Falls about a month ago. Today I felt the need for different scenery again, and you can see the result on the right-hand side. A short drive lead to a few observations of plants and fungi here:

There were a couple of other people in the car park when we arrived, but they were just leaving. So we enjoyed an isolated walk around this historic area, the remains of an iron mining and smelting endeavour at Lal Lal from 1875 to 1884:

There is little left but some stonework, and this ruin of the blast furnace which operated from 1881 to 1884:

It turned out not to be economical to run; iron produced here was more expensive than imported iron. It is a fascinating bit of local history though. There is a Wikipedia article with lots more detail about it if you are interested: Lal Lal Iron Mine and Smelting Works.

Walking

This walk around the block is about 3km:

Although it takes longer than you might think. Hills, dogs sniffing things, and people stopping to photograph items of interest for iNaturalist observations, all slow us down.

Walk at the Falls

I don't know if it is quite within the rules, but today we took the dogs to Lal Lal Falls for their walk. I thought after all the rain we have had lately that the falls would be falling, but I was wrong:

No flow at the moment.

It was nice to go somewhere a bit different, rather than just walking up and down our bit of road. There were no other people at the Falls. In fact the only living creatures we saw were a flock of cockatoos enjoying acorns.

The birds were taking bites out of the acorns, but I don't know if they were eating them or just having fun stripping them off the trees. A lot of acorns seemed to be falling to the ground, anyway.

The birds were having fun, and we enjoyed the fresh air, but no-one is allowed to have fun here at the moment:

It is hard to "close" a playground with no fence around it.

You probably can't read the sign clearly, but I think the top line could do with a bit of physical distancing itself. It reads:

LET'SALLWORKTOGETHERTOSTOPTHESPREAD

How about some distance between those words?

Watery Weekend

On Friday evening one of our neighbours asked us why there was a fire engine out the front of our place? We hadn't been outside due to the heat, (top of 40.3) so didn't have a clue what was going on. This is what they were doing:

Setting up a water tank for fire-fighting purposes. The company that built Lal Lal wind farm, Vestas, has donated several of these tanks to the local area. They will allow fire trucks working in this area to re-fill without having to travel back into the centre of Lal Lal for water. It is a really practical gift that could save lives and homes if a fire comes through here.

When I took this photo on Saturday, we seemed pretty safe from fire:

Actual rain! We ended up with 15mm for the day, which gave the garden a good drink, and filled up our own water tanks.

Today was "World Wetlands Day", so to mark the occasion we joined a Ballarat Environment Network excursion to two local wetlands.

First stop was the Mullawallah wetlands in Cardigan. When we visited in April last year there was hardly any water to be seen, but today was a different story:

It was green and wet, and we saw many species of birds, including two Australian spotted crakes (which I had not even heard of before) and an endangered blue-billed duck. My little camera had no hope of photographing elusive birds. I had enough trouble with swans:

Only one of these swans is in focus. Other people on the excursion had lenses up to 500mm, and probably got some great photos. Over 100 species of birds have been seen in this wetlands, and about 20 were spotted by members of our group today.

Our second stop was somewhere we hadn't been before, the Haddon Recreation Reserve wetland:

Believe it or not there are more swans in this photo, as well as two species of grebe, and various other birds. We were fortunate to have experts with us who could recognise them. When "some sort of raptor" (my description) flew over, the experts could tell us it was a whistling kite.

The sky became quite threatening by the time the excursion ended:

and we drove through light rain on the way home.