After Makeover

During Makeover

Garden Makeover - Before Shots

Our garden is having a mke-over this weekend. The straw is for mulching.

Garden Going Crazy!

We have had a lot of rain and the plants in the garden are really loving it. I have never seen these native orchids in bloom before; they are right in the front garden and are just stunning...

Gardening Weekend

Today we spent the day putting in plants in the garden, including the Blackthorn and Australian Fuschia plants pictured above. Very relaxing for Nancy, but Tim was trying out his new chemical weedkiller sprayer - less relaxing...

Garden continues to expand!

We had another spurt of gardening over the weekend, putting in lots of plants including those pictured above (from the top, native frangipani (small tree), native indigo (medium bush), hop bushes (which come in pinks and creams) and lime berries (which attract birds).

Our garden grows!

Over the last few weekends Tim has worked incredibly hard to clear out weeds in our garden, and we have planted a lot of plants from the Greening Australia nursery. Here is what they will look like when they are bigger:
Hakeas (several species) planted along the rear of the fence with our neighbor.

Fan flowers, which line the side of the driveway and (hopefully!) will spill over the wall artistically.

Saw banksia, a native tree with gorgeous flowers that grows gnarled branches with a windswept look.

Native flax lilies, which I've planted around our mailbox.

A groundcover with a great name: Creeping Boobialla.

A Kanaroo Thorn bush

And finally, in back of the house we've planted a "Wheel of Fire" tree, a native which grows about 30-40 feet high with spectacular flowers.

A Close Encounter, as Told By "Poor Tim"

"My project today was to take about this many weeds:


Out of this section of our front yard:


At one point when I was putting some branches on the brush pile, I felt something on my shoulder, and brushed it off. This is what it was:


You might look at that and say, 'it's just a stick, what's the big deal?', right?

Well, here is the 'stick' as it angrily crawled away...


and then went up the side of the trash can...



and finally settled on the first suitable branch it found:


That's right, it was the BIGGEST stick insect in history!"

POOR TIM!

(the name of this stick insect is the TITAN STICK INSECT, one of the world's longest insects, which can grow to be over 15 inches long... here are some more photos of them - notice the nice lady is HOLDING hers....)



Here is a rare photo of one dialing out for a pizza with everything on it...