This is on my mind...

 This little critter got me thinking...

I've disturbed what I originally thought was a baby Cane toad (for those not Australian, this is a introduced species which competes with our native frogs and is a pest) on many occassions when moving debris around in the garden lately. I've not been fast enough up till now to actually get a good look at it to be sure, but the other day I managed to corner one in a pot plant and although this isn't a great photo, it's enough to put my mind at ease that it's not a cane toad, but that leaves me with the question what is it I have in my garden and where did it come from?

I've seen other frogs in my garden, and it gives me a thrill each time I do. Mostly they've been either a largish green tree frog or little tiny green frogs (some with an almost silvery hue to them) not much bigger than a finger tip as you can see in the pictures below. (These three were sitting happily on the flowering branches of my fennel).

I'm keen to find out what this latest species is and whether it's friend or foe for both my garden and my other frog friends. Especially now...

Last year I convinced hubby to help me put in a small pond. A pond is an integral part of the permaculture garden and I was concerned that by not having one I was limiting the wildlife that would help to control my pests. I investigated lots of options for how to create a small pond. Space was limited and it needed to be situated near a large tree, with giant roots, so I opted to use a large container of sorts. The perfect thing presented itself via my mother networking on my behalf. I managed to get an old canoe mould, not quite what I'd imagined using, but at $50 and in the spirit of recycling it seemed a lot better than the preformed ponds I'd initially thought I'd need to use.

We half buried the canoe (that was as far as we could get it due to the big roots underneath) and put it on a slight downward angle at the far end so that any excess water would flow off into the garden areas below it. Next came the all important contents. I chose to try some edible water plants such as Taro and Water Chestnut and then because I'm a sucker for flowers, a water hyacinth with a pretty blue flower and a water lily. I also really wanted to encourage more frogs to the garden to help with natural insect control, so carefully chose frog friendly fish that would devour the mosquito larvae which are a huge problem here on the islands. The ones I chose love a good feed of mossie larvae but they are too small to be a problem to tadpoles. The downside of these is that they are temperature sensitive and died off during the winter last year, so needed to be replaced again this spring. To finish off I put some largish rocks in to create a dry space for emerging frogs or other wildlife that may fall in by accident and to give them a way out of the canoe.

So, a year or so on, I've had some failures, but also some very satisfying successes.

Well, it's been a long wait, but back to my dilemma, the other day I saw my first batch of frogs eggs. They were quite well concealed amongst the Vietnamese mint which has happily taken over one end of the pond. Then yesterday when I went to see how they were doing I couldn't find them, instead, there are hundreds of little tadpoles scooting around amongst the submerged leaves.
So do I now have an upcoming batch of good frogs or bad???

I've tried to google some frog images, but I couldn't find one that looked exactly like this one. If you know your frogs please let me know?

New year, new additions to the garden

It's been so long since I posted last. Welcome to the new year. The end and beginning of last year was pretty busy for us. I had a largish tree fall down over my back fence during one of the storms we've been having, wiping out the fence and a chunk of my garden at the same time. The rockmelons were wiped out, so too was a raspberry bush, but it at least has sent some new shoots up since, and my peach tree was pretty badly damaged, but recovering slowly. Then to herald in the New Year I caught a virus going around work and ended up sick in bed for a week. And the rain didn't seem to let up at all here. Brisbane had the flood (we weren't personally affected and my thoughts go out to all those who were), which shut my work down for a couple of days and gave me time to recover from my virus. All the while the weeds in my garden were thriving and getting out of control. A few weeks on and I'm getting it back under control. The tree has been cleared, the fence temporarily patched, the dead plants removed. Over four wheelbarrow loads of weeds had to be removed from that garden and even more from the other which I'm only part way through. The rain has been good to the garden, my latest corn patch is thriving, the pumpkins are beginning to traverse the yard, the passionfruit vine is fully loaded with fruit, and the citrus trees too. We've dug all the weeds out from the base of the Lemonade tree, mulched around it and propped the heavily fruit laden branches off the ground with some stakes. The bannana trees have become huge and one has it's first sapling appearing at it's base. The comfrey under them has flowered prettily. And life in the garden goes on.

Banana Plants, the one at the back has it's first sapling, weeds in the foreground were looking to take over!

Since then, I've added an arrowroot plant to the garden. Unfortunately it wasn't the type I'd expected. This one is not the Queensland arrowroot, but rather an idian one. It will still make a nice addition, but not what I had originally intended. A tumeric plant has also been added. I have used tumeric in cooking plenty of times, but had never realised until researching it, that it is a type of ginger. So my little garden now has Tumeric, Thai ginger, and Galangal. All I need now is a Cardamon plant to round out the ginger collection.

I'm thrilled to have also added two peanut plants to my garden. I've been looking around for whole raw peanuts that haven't been treated in any way in the hope of being able to use them to grow my own, when to my greatest surprise my husband spotted growing plants at a local Bunnings Warehouse while looking for an electric whipper snipper (ok, the whipper snipper section is nowhere near the plant section, but you can't blame any gardener for detouring past the plants first!).
Peanuts have self pollinating flowers, and after the flower is spent and has died back the plant grows a shoot down from where the flower was, and into the ground, here the peanut forms. From different websites I've read regarding growing peanuts, a bush (they grow to around 50 to 60cm high) will produce up to 50 peanuts. To harvest they normally pull the bush out of the ground roots, peanuts and all and turn it upside down for the nuts to dry out for a couple of days before harvesting them. I'm hoping my first two will turn into many more down the track.

We've also replaced our plum tree. We bought and planted one last year when we put in our peach and nectarine trees. It never really seemed to take and in the spring when it didn't get new leaves I had to face the fact that it was definitely dead. We were given some good advice when we went looking. The first one I had selected at the nursery was not suitable for our subtropical climate, we wouldn't have had enough cold hours to encourage it to produce fruit. The gardener at the nursery was very helpful and looked up which would be best variety for us and that's the one we finally bought. It looks a much healthier and is a larger tree than the old ones and we know it's suited to our environment so hopefully this one will survive.

I mentioned the electric whipper snipper earlier, and yes we did end up getting one, to go with our new electric mower. Our old petrol mower has died and parts are unavailable to fix it. I always struggled with putting petrol in it. Our petrol cannister would leak everywhere, even when I used a funnel it would run all over the place. I worried about using a petrol mower in a garden where I've shunned any unnatural or non organic fertilisers and pest control, so this time around it's electric for us.



One of the wheel barrow loads of weeds removed from the garden!

 We bought an Okra plant at the same time as the peanuts. I bought seeds for these ages ago, but hadn't gotten around to planting them. From my reading I believe one plant will provide quite a few Okra, and as I haven't cooked or eaten them before, I'll try this one before getting too many going.
I'll leave it here for now & get this posted! I'll try to put some images of the new plants up on my next post.