First day of Autumn

Popped down to the plot today to do some staking of late tomatoes and tomatillos. And got some nice surprises. Aphids have plagued summer broccoli, but luckily the calvelry flew in and the little buggers are being gobbled up by some good tempered ladybirds and their offspring. 

The tomatoes and eggplants are kicking on, tomatillos are flowering their heads off, the sunflower heads are ripening and there are all sorts of self seeding surprises popping up - cucumbers, more tomatoes and teensy, baby love-in-the-mist. Quinces are swelling on the tree and all in all, Autumn is looking promising.

strange beast

Lots of posts from out the back at the moment. It's all really happening out there. My true love has been building stuff at his work bench which he followed by a big clean up and all of a sudden it's a gorgeous place to be.

We had a little darts session out there with friends who are visiting from interstate. The orchids are throwing up new shoots, mouse melon is climbing all over the place (though sadly not fruiting), the lemon myrtle is flowering and so is this weird little cactus. The strange flower looks like something from a rockpool but smells like rotten meat. Fly pollinated, I'm guessing. Awesome.

Breakfast for two

I've never been lucky enough to grow a prolifically fruiting eggplant bush. The bloke a couple of plots over seems to have a knack for it. I shall never forget the gorgeous plant, more like a tree, he grew a couple of years ago, covered for months in glorious pale purple flowers and long skinny purple-black fruit. Awe inspiring.

I have no such luck. After an optimistic burst of growth early in the season, my eggplant plants tend to stay fairly stationary for most of the year, producing a scattering of flowers and if we're lucky, one, maybe two fruit. And it's tricky to know what to do with a single eggplant. 

Now hopefully, things will be different this season. It's been a slow start but the other day we got our first fruit. Just the one, there are others but they're a while off yet. And rather than buy some more eggplants and spoil the specialness of eating our homegrown fruit by mixing it in with the others; or wait for the others to ripen and risk having the first one spoil, I decided to find a recipe I could make with just one eggplant.

And I came back to a recipe I made sometime last year. Smoked eggplant salad. From Turkish Flavours by the intimitable, Sevtap Yuce. You should get her books, they're delish. The salad uses two eggplants, and serves four. So one eggplant - breakfast for two!

The recipe is simple: toast the eggplant on the stovetop until the skin is crispy and burnt and while it cools, chop a handful of parsley, a garlic clove, a tomato (I used a handful of yellow cherries from the garden, quartered) and a small green chilli. Peel the burnt skin from the eggplant and chop it too. Throw it all in together and season with salt, pepper, olive oil and lemon juice. Mix it all up. Serve it on crusty bread.

Everything but the garlic, olive oil, salt and pepper came from the garden. And it was perfect - I can't bloody wait for the next ripe eggplant.

January moments

Cornflowers in the kids' corner.

Self seeding tomatillos to share.

Garden art.

And backyard lotus, one year on.

allium and roses

The gorgeous globes of the leeks have blammed into bloom. They're busy attracting insects and looking divine. I'm not sure why you'd want to pull them out before they flower. Unless it was to make something delicious, of course.

And here is a little something I threw together. Supermarket roses, sweetpeas and love in the mist seedpods.

And on the way out...

curry flowers and camouflaged crawlies

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the curry plant, after a winter of languishing miserably, put on the most tremendous flurry of new spring growth. And the new growth was topped with, for the first time ever, a burst of buds. Today, the first two flowers opened and my floral curiosity was assuaged. What little cuties!

And even better, as I was attempting to snap a pic of the little lovelies, I was lucky enough to spot (and photograph, badly) a stealthy little larvae of the green lacewing. You can kind of see it perched on the edge of a petal in the picture below, it looks like a dark blob. Anyway, I can't tell you how happy I am to see one of these guys in the garden. Although tiny, they're easily identified by the zippy way they scurry across leaves and by their fiendish outerwear. Lacewing larvae eat by sucking the bodily fluids from the aphids and whitefly they catch amongst the leaves. They then attach the dried, empty exoskeletal leftovers to spines on their backs to create a gruesomely awesome camouflage costume. Sort of like a bizarre cross between a trophy wall and an invisibility cloak. Harry Potter eat your heart out.

,

Lacewings in general (order Neuroptera) are a pretty cool bunch.  Green lacewings belong to the family Chrysopidae. Their relatives in the Myrmeleontidae family, have a larval form known as antlions, which, for my money are pretty much the coolest pet a kid can have. Antions build conical nests in very dry fine soil or sand. The creature itself lies hidden under the sand at bottom of the cone which is cleverly engineered to have unstable sides that slip away at the slightest touch. Any small insect, usually an ant, that stumbles unwittingly into the trap is unable to gain purchase on the sloping sides and it slips down to the center and into the hungry jaws of the waiting antlion. Unlike its fashion-conscious cousins, the antlion has no use for the dried-out remnants of its finished prey so, once done eating it flicks the empty corpse fastidiously out of its nest. If you look closely at the outside of an antlion nest you can see the ground littered with black specks that used to be ants. 

In Queensland, where I grew up, you could find clusters of their cones in the soft dry soil under houses. Occasionally, I used collect them, gently scooping up the soil, cone and all and putting it in a container. Before long, my pet antlion would construct a new cone (really neat to watch) and lie quietly out of sight waiting for me to provide it with a steady supply unfortunate ants. It was a ghoulish but fascinating past time which I highly recommend to any curious backyard naturalist, large or small. 

But back to my current garden and the baby green lacewings, which I suspect arrived in order to feed on the horrible infestation of white fly and spider mites we have at the moment. I was actually thinking of ordering a batch of lacewing eggs (white blobs on stalks, picture below) from a company called Bugs for Bugs, who send out predatory insects via the mail to help produce growers and gardeners control the pests in their garden. I still might order some (nothing quite as exciting as receiving live insects in the post!) but I'm overjoyed to see the little critters showing up on their own. Their fascinating approach to fashion and murderously efficient eating habits make them a delight to have in the garden.  I'm also looking forward to seeing them develop into adults. 

Because it's not only the laval lacewings that are voracious predators. The adult green lacewings also gobble up backyard pests like aphids and whitefly. They're much prettier than their baby incarnation though. In fact, the aptly named, adult lacewings, with their delicate green bodies, gauzy wings and metallic poppy seed eyes, are one of my most favourite flying insects. And with a bit of luck I'll soon have lots of them fluttering around, feasting on pests and laying their eggs on the underside of my plants, so the whole cycle can start again. 

If you're curious to know more about the lovely lacewing, the Australian Museum website has a great info page, just click on through. 

Lacewing eggs. Photo from blackgold.bz

What a little cutie! Photo from scienceblogs.com

Occasional verse #6

The poppies for Remembrance Day,

Harboured a little stowaway,

Tucked out of sight, until we slept,

Then from her hiding place she crept,

And set to work, amidst the flowers,

To weave her lovely silken bower.

Next morn, when I came down the stairs,

I spied her sitting sweetly there.

But there the lady couldn’t stay,

The flowers were for school that day.

I picked her up and begging pardon,

Returned her gently to the garden.