Having experimented with growing Aussie plants from seed last year, this year’s efforts have focused more on growing from cuttings and finally, from this morning, replicating the seed propagation experiment. Turns out that things are rooted, but not the way I had hoped. I started trying to grow cuttings from our extremely successful grevillea about two months ago. Following instructions online and from veterans, I took over a dozen cuttings from branches, added a growth-stimulating hormone powder to the ends, stuck them in pots filled with kanumatsuchi, watered them and covered the pots with plastic. I basically left the two…
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Having put in the most demanding week of work I’ve done in years, then been woken early after a mostly sleepless night, I’ve kicked off this long-awaited weekend by sitting at the living room window and gazing for hours at Japanese tits. In a life increasingly marked by failure, it’s fair to say that one area in which I’ve excelled is in having a good eye for the birds. With a constant companion twittering away while nibbling on my ear, it’s hard to keep my mind of things like boobies and other types of tits, and before I come across…
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Having caught the propagating bug last year, I’ve decided to try my hand at growing my own plants again in 2024, this time turning to the difficult proposition of raising banksias, the flower that most symbolizes Australian flora in my eyes. So far, my luck with banksias hasn’t been great, mainly thanks to ignorance and ill preparation to be fair. And impatience, perhaps? Kangaeroo Corner has a banksia that has grown well since it’s initial planting almost two years ago, but it has yet to flower for us. I expect it will do so one day. But I still want…
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Nobody else but me is gonna understand just how ironic this post is (provided it even makes it onto the site) as I type it out in an MS Word file rather than directly into the blog as I would usually do. With a couple of extra hours available to me this morning, I always had it in mind to write a post with the above title. What I hadn’t calculated was just how accurate that it would turn out to be. I was going to write about how 2024 has been nothing like how I had imagined it would…
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Courtesy of a great act of kindness, this post is the result of receiving a gifted camera. An old mate read my previous post and generously passed on a camera he had not been using. I took the camera out in the garden this morning and got to snap away. I was very pleased with the results. I’ll need to study more on how to use the Sony NEX-7, having been an almost exclusively Nikon user for the past 35 years. It’s glorious weather today, which helped with taking photos. I turned the camera on some of the critters in…
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Magnificent people made 2023 a much better year than I thought it was
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It’s raining today, and while that would normally be grounds for disappointment, considering the dryness of the year, the precipitation is actually welcome. Nowhere is that more obvious than in Kangaeroo Corner. The sprinkle made the garden sparkle. The yard always looks nicer after good rainfall, which makes the greenery glisten. I’m still in pretty much full-time panic mode, so I woke before 3 a.m., had brekkie and readied myself to head out on my customary morning ride. After I kitted up and readied, I looked outside in the dark and noticed raindrops falling into the bird bath. I opened…
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Winter is probably the worst time of the year to try to grow plants from cuttings, except, like for me, you’re desperately trying to avoid doing something unpleasant and you’ve been handed unseasonably fine weather. So, instead of taking a trial test for a potential new job as I could have done sitting in front of a computer for a couple of hours, I looked up how to propagate a grevillea. It seems the process is pretty easy (at least from the standpoint of the pros giving the advice online), but a lot of the available information was for the…
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Summer in Tokyo this year was just how I like it: boiling hot and dry, probably the driest I have experienced in 35 years of living in the Japanese capital. But while I loved the heat, my garden in Kangaeroo Corner had mixed feelings, especially the lawn that went from vibrant green to burned brown. Trees thrived! Most delightedly, the jacaranda we had written off as dead in the spring powered back into life and is now one of the tallest growths on the block. The “branch” silver wattle goes from strength to strength and the golden wattle beside it…
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Fortune smiled favorably on me this morning, too, as I got to ride out to a nearby sunflower field and get some awesome photos. There’s not much I can elaborate on, other than to say the field was a spectacular sight. There were lots of people around, even though the dawn had only just broken, so I rushed in and out before I became too much of a nuisance with my bike around, too. Also got blessed with some wonderful spurts of rain that I hope will rehabilitate the lawn at Kangaeroo Corner, but was distressed to discover the first…