Happy Spring to you!
I hope your gardens are starting to pop with colour. It was quite a warm start to spring. I spent the first couple of days planting and seeding, and I worked up a sweat out there in the sun. It was lovely to have a couple of days without the usual spring gales, but we've made up for that since then. We've already had a few days of scary wind -- the kind of wind where you don't want to walk under gum trees and you wonder what random item is going to suddenly get blown away. One of my favourite posts on our local FB group is still a picture of a trampoline that had blown for kilometres before finally ending up in the creek through town.
So what's been happening on the farm? Things really ramp up at this time of year. We've prepped 10+ new beds (ripping and bed forming them with the tractor, as well as spreading fertiliser, lime and lucerne by hand to add nutrients to the soil ready for planting. And then we've been seeding and planting. I've seeded lots of strawflowers, some poppies (which didn't germinate unfortunately), and I've started my sunflowers and cosmos. It feels like this year is going to continue with the warm weather so I've tried to cheat a little and direct seeded these. I've also planted more than 60 new native perennials. This wouldn't be such a hard task if we didn't also need to make wire cages for everything we plant, but the rabbits are destroying anything they can get to at the moment, so the tedious work of caging continues with each planting.
We've got lots of things starting to come into bloom now, which is exciting. Our first ever leucospermum flower is almost fully open. This is very exciting for me since I managed to kill several plants before I found the right spot for these. The jonquils and daffodils are going strong, the fruit blossom is popping, the ranunculus are coming through slowly, strawflowers are starting, and we have the most deliciously fragrant freesias budding up. I think freesias are my favourite flower scent. To me they are the fragrance of spring and the scent of summer fun to come. You can find these spring beauties at our Capital Region Farmers Market stall at Epic every Saturday in September.
And what's going on with the wombat wars? We have a very big, very determined male wombat making a series of holes under our fence into the gardens each night. He's even breaking wire to get in (see where he's ripped through wire below). We prevented him digging in some of his favourite spots by putting down a wire skirt (chicken wire horizontal along the ground out from the fence) and laying tree trunks and huge rocks on it to hold it down, so he then decided to dig his way through under our gates. He ripped one gate partly off the fence post, and busted through our brand new auto gates we saved so hard for. (That made me want to cry... ) I got an expert from the wombat rescue team to come and give us advice, but they were at a bit of a loss too. They gave us some plans for a wombat door to stop the damage, but we're not sure we can use it because it may then allow our dogs out and potentially other dogs/foxes in. We are going to see if some electric fencing might discourage him. If not we will have to apply for a permit to move him. He's costing us hours each day and causing a lot of expensive damage. If only he would meet a lovely wombat friend and move in with them away from our fence!
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