Koala portrait & $8.00 Eggs.....

This is a better portrait of the Koala which visited our garden last week. He came on Sunday and on Monday I found him in the Ash tree looking very comfortable. However, he disappeared since then and I have not seen him again.
What we did have on the patio this morning was a young hare, we have rabbits as well in the garden of course, but this one had longer legs and longer ears and loped away rather than hopped.

The vignerons hate the hares because they chew through the irrigation lines to get at the water.
So they shoot them but the kangaroos will also chew through the irrigation lines to get at the water, I don't know what happens to them though.
I can't get over how vibrant the autumn colours are this season. Usually we thought the colours were not much good in drought years but this has been an extremely dry summer and autumn so our theory doesn't hold ......

Above are the Golden rain trees with the pomegranate on the right and the Claret Ash behind them all.
On the left is our neatly stacked starter wood for the winter, our gardening friend is an artist as well as a gardener and very organized and neat in our somewhat dishevelled and normally wild garden. So it is a pleasure to see works of art like this instead of the woolly mess we may have left it in.

Well, now, I am pleased to say I happened upon some laying hens for sale yesterday on the way back from Aldinga. I went in to inquire and the man I spoke to was not very communicative but called his brother out to explain to me how old they were ( supposedly 2 years old but how can you tell with a bird? you can't look at their teeth like you would with a horse...). So I took his word for it and at $4 a hen who could argue? After some very strange antics to get them out of the trailer they were in, they were put into two bags, as I had nothing with me to transport them home in my car.

They look pretty miserable in the picture of course because they are moulting.  They did find the Chook Palace they were put into a bit posh after their farmyard shed and could not believe they were expected to sleep upstairs....
When I went to check on them last thing at night they were all sleeping on the ground floor...
Then, wonder of wonders, there was an egg in the actual laying box upstairs this morning and later I found one on the ground floor... so here they are, two eggs at $16 = $8 each, we will have them tonight and enjoy them.

On the right is my mothers sewing box she brought with her when we migrated from Holland in 1952. It had been sadly neglected by me and another kind friend who loves restoring old things, mended the lid and put in new hinges and a few screws and stripped it and varnished it.
So now it looks like new and I will use it again.
I remember my mother sitting at the kitchen table at Anlaby, darning  endless socks and mending shirts and sewing on buttons......
How wasteful we are now, toss out socks and other clothing when we think we are merely sick of them.....

New Wildlife in our Garden at Willunga

This morning, when I went to empty the teapot on a favorite plant by the patio, the Noisy Miners were more hysterical than usual up in the gum trees with the magpies equally  upset. When I went to investigate there in the fork of the red flowering blue gum was a Koala..... where did he come from I inquired, how had he arrived here?
He just looked down and wasn't telling.....
We are mostly surrounded by vineyards and the last Koala I saw in the wild was at Kuitpo, probably about ten km from here

 so it is a mystery as to how he came here. And I wonder will he stay , do we have the right gum leaves for him? I always thought they could only survive on Manna Gum leaves but perhaps he finds the gum blossom OK at the moment.
The plant on the right,an Agave of some sort, has taken about five years to get to this stage. Brian raised it from some seed we got from a plant in McLaren Vale near Hardies' winery . It has been the most difficult plant to photograph as I just could not get the whole of the flower stalk in, it is so tall.
It has lovely flowers on branches,  beautifully marked inside on
the flower walls.
Below is the photo of the flowers and perhaps if you click on the photo you can get a better view of it.
We have two more which are growing next to the Studio wall but on the south side and they are much smaller than this one is.

I guess it will die after it has finished flowering and I wonder if it will leave pups or only seeds.
The gum tree it is growing next to was sold to us as a Mountain ash but no way is this a Mountain ash tree. It is very annoying to buy a plant which turns out not to be the one labeled as such. We once bought Plane trees, thinking they were London planes but they turned out to be Oriental plane trees and did no good here at all.

Autumn has arrived and though we have hardly had any rain the bulbs have popped up anyway and it is always a delight to see the Nerines , which may look all dry and shriveled on the surface, suddenly shoot up stems and show their red/orange flowers in groups, giving colour to the otherwise brown and  desiccated garden.
They flower for quite a long time as well.

The paintbrush lilies are also on display now.
Of course they will send out their enormous leaves afterwards and each year I intend to dig them up and transplant them where the leaves will not be  in other plants way.
Bulbs are such a satisfying plant to have as they will die back and go through the hottest summer only to pop up again when the weather cools and the sun is no longer so severe. Great in our dry climate.

This year for some reason, the autumn colours are much deeper and the Virginia creeper is just gorgeous in all its red glory with the Golden Rain tree setting it off even more so when viewed through the morning light. My photo does not do it justice, perhaps I should have doctored it in Photoshop before posting it......
I am doing a photography course at the end of this month....hopefully I shall learn a lot from that..........