A mate for our avocado

In the wedding anniversary tradition, year four is fruit...and so the OE gave me an avocado tree. We'd heard that avocados can be pretty finicky and the secret to success is good drainage. They like plenty of water, but if their feet stay wet for too long, they just roll over and die.

So we thought we'd use our steep block to our advantage, and planted the avocado tree at the top of a bank. I leave the septic sprinkler next to it so it gets plenty of water, but it's also well drained. It seems we picked a good location, because after 18 months it's now over 2 metres high and very healthy.

Since it's so happy, we've been looking for a mate, hopefully to help with polination. Avocados seem to be pretty light on at the nursery so the OE was pretty chuffed when he picked one up today.

I'm hoping that this is a match made in heaven and we get lots of little avocados in a few years time.

Ribbit, croak, ribbit

Apparently we've had the wettest spring in 'our neck of the bush' in 111 years, and many folk are starting to complain that we haven't yet seen any sign of summer. But there are other folk out our way who don't seem to mind a bit...the frogs.

Inadvertently it seems we have created a small frog sanctuary in the gardens around our courtyard...hooray for us! We have plans to add a frog pond to the backyard at some stage, but it seems we don’t have to go to that much trouble. We often see little frogs hiding amongst the lily turf that lines the edge of our paved courtyard and under leaves in the planter box.

After a downfall last night we could hear at least three different types of croaks. I’m not a frog expert, but I think we mainly get sedgefrogs and rocketfrogs. I couldn’t tell you who made up last night’s chorus. We went to a frog call workshop a few months ago, but I wasn’t very good at recognising between a cr-e-e-e-k and a criiiiiiik-ik. Though I do know that none of the calls were toads.

And we’ve found it’s not just the toads that are hunting the frogs down. OE (the Over Engineer) found a little frog swimming in the pool during the week, but before he could fish it out a kookaburra swooped down to help himself to breakfast. Ah, the serenity.