Flowers

A flower I was expecting:

First flower to open on a Mystic Sparkler dahlia.


And one I wasn't expecting:

Wisteria flower! Just the one, but it is quite a surprise as the main flowering was in October.

Skipton

The first field nats trip of the year took us to various sites around Skipton, a town about 50km to the west of Ballarat. We met up at Skipton Common, a 74ha reserve managed by Ballarat Environment Network.

Last year Wadawurrung people conducted a traditional burn at the common. You can read about it and see a video on the CFA website here: Skipton Common Traditional Owner Burn. Part of the purpose of our visit was to see what effect the burn has had on wildflowers. Many native wildflowers are stimulated to bloom after fire.

Some field nats looking for wildflowers:

The wildfowers are generally quite tiny, although once you start walking through the grass you see that they are everywhere. Here are a few we found.


Blue devil, Eryngium ovinum.

Lemon beauty heads, Calocephalus citreus.

Yellow star lilies, Hypoxis glabella?

Magenta stork's bill, Pelargonium rodneyanum.

Our next stop was Stewart Park, which contains the Skipton Historic Precinct and a platypus viewing point. Unfortunately there was no sign of any platypuses, but a swamp wallaby did hop right past us. No photo, it happened too fast. From the viewing point you can see this house, which was the childhood home of Sir Henry Bolte:

Another famous resident of the area was Francis Ormond, who founded the college that became RMIT, and donated huge sums for the building of Ormond College at Melbourne uni. This is the rather scary "Francis Ormond Bridge":

The scariness comes from how much it sways just from being walked on. Hold on tight!

Our next stop was lunch at Jubilee Park, where the trees were full of hundreds of corellas:

Waterlilies were flowering

and a family of non-native ducks followed us, hoping for food, as we walked around the lake:

Our last stop for the day was some wetlands along the Skipton Rail Trail, about 6km east of the town.

A few birds were spotted away in the distance, and some flowering eucalypts were attracting huge numbers of pollinating insects.

It was another interesting field naturalists excursion. I've never been to Skipton before, but will have to return to check out the op shop and the "old wares" (junk) shop that we didn't have time to see today.

Frolic Basting

Today was my quilt guild's monthly meeting, so I took along Frolic and everything I needed to get it sandwiched. There were so many people at the meeting that I thought I wouldn't be able to get it done, because there weren't any spare tables. Fortunately someone more forceful than me had brought along a quilt she was determined to baste. She got people to move, and re-arranged tables, and just made space. I helped her and another quilter pin her quilt, then the two of them helped me:

Hooray, Frolic is ready to quilt!

Indoor Flowers

This Bilbergia brom which has been inside for some months, has popped out a flower:

And the "lumps" growing under the leaves of my African violet are now definite buds:

Now I've noticed the same tiny lumps on another African violet:

I can't see it clearly even with my glasses on, as it is so small. But that tiny light dot in the middle looks like a bud forming on my first African violet, which Sue gave me last May.

View

My mother has been in hospital since Monday. When I found out her bed was beside a window, I was happy for her that she would be able to see the outside world. Until I got there and saw the view myself:

Straw Bale

Time for more straw in the orchard. This bale is not quite so well-wrapped as the last lot, so getting it off the ute and into the orchard was a challenge.

First step - pushing it with the tractor:

and tipping it off:

An extra strap to help hold it together on the short journey through the vege garden:

Tractor to the rescue again, tipping it onto its side:

Then two humans had to roll it through the vege garden and into the orchard. I'm not quite sure what happened at this point:

It hit something and wouldn't roll straight. But eventually

it was safely inside the orchard. No chooks or ducks escaped, and no trees were harmed in the manoeuvre.

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.