I’m just boasting here … not that I did any of the growing myself. These plants don’t seem to mind standing around on a south facing balcony …
Australian native fig (proper name later)
This is a rainforest species and starts in the undergrowth, so the conditions probably right up its alley.
Bolly gum … it’s reaching for the outdoor light I’ve been leaving on for the fishpond. It’s grown over 30 cm in 6 months. A sprig of its new growth.
This velvety kurrajong is also putting out new growth. I think I finally found the place it likes.
Isn’t that a lush and verdant growth of parsley and Chinese cabbage? I suspect that their success is more to do more with growing in thinly covered composting vegetables.
Most of the rest of the plants are struggling in various different ways. But never mind, I heard from my neighbours that we do get sun for a few weeks! Maybe then there will be various growth spurts. We’ll see.
Day two of the demolition stage … a brand spanking new machine is busy taking out the vegetation so carefully nurtured by the gardening crew only a few days ago.
Someone could’ve saved themselves a swag of money, time and useless busy work if they only worked together.
When I watch a machine like that at work, I always wonder whether a couple of men on the ground couldn’t do that work more efficiently.
Chainsawing the shrubs, stacking them on a pile or dragging them to a truck. There aren’t any real trees in that section. How can it be cheaper?
Yes. Don’t worry. That was a rhetorical ‘big world’ question. I realise that by the time an employer pays humans their holiday pays, sickness benefits and super, one driver is cheaper than three laborers.
By ‘big world’ I mean the ESG costs as well as just running a demolition company.
E = environmental; S = social; G = governance … I’m still in the dark about the significance of the last one. You?
I love Ursula Le Guin’s writings. I have The Latheof Heaven on my shelves and as soon as I’m done with The Revenger series–any day now– I’ll be re-reading The Lathe.
In the meantime read this fabulous review by Sam Matey, and his reminders of how much ‘we’ (humanity) have/has progressed since the 1970s … And even though we’re trying to get used not progressing, not using more resources, these kind of progressions are needed.
The season has been very busy in these climes for most of August, somewhat earlier than the calendar announces it.
This delightful show of gold along the verge at the entrance to the complex.
One of the flowers … vaguely funnel-shaped with an extra fold in one of the petals. I picked it up from the ground, so it’s a little battered.
It’s the third tree flowering along that verge, as if they calculated the sequence to put out their blossoms. The first was mauve-pink, then a pink, now this yellow.
From my balcony, it’s possible to hear—if not see—the scraping complaints of young Torresian crows waiting to be fed. I suspect the Carindale crow ‘murder’ calls the trees in in the Carinya grounds their home.
Would you belive I’ve been here for almost two weeks?
This is me at my breakfast. The old woman gives me canned salmon for breakfast and dinner. Sounds special, I know. She thinks I’m too bony, the breeze will blow you away she said.
But she gives me titbits to try out at lunch time and if I don’t like them she’ll hide them in the fish at dinner time.
The other day I ate a scrap of omelette I’d politely left at the side of the bowl. She does not take no for an answer. One on her scorecard.
Mind you, I had a bit of cooked chicken today and it was delish. Bring it on. Right mow she’s out there on the balcony.
At her gardening. Where’s the garden I might ask, when it’s just leggy plants in pots, so elongated they might run away. We’re waiting for grow-lights to come in the post.
A gripping read, I think partly due to the verifiable facts often quoted with present day or historical dates attached to them.
Although promoted as fiction, it’s worrying when you’re reading about increasing bushfires in Australia, for example, the fires in 2019 (!) are part of the story.
And that’s only one incident among hundreds. most events that happen in this account have their verifiable roots in the last decades of the 20th century and the first two of the 21st century.
And by 2020, Powell posits, it all already was too late. Even if by some God-decreed disaster, CO2 emmissions had stopped right then … four years ago … it was too late to stop or even ameliorate what he calls the baked-in effects of global warming.
This book is powerful enough that I will change my political affiliation and vote for the party that promotes nuclear power.
The final and short chapters in the book “Look to Sweden” twice. Sweden turned to nuclear power starting in the 1970s and was able to ride out the cascading avalanche of effects because of having enough power … presumably to power aircon and grow enough food indoors to keep their population from starving.
By the late 2010s, 10% of the world’s electricity was produced by 449 power generating reactors in 31 countries. the final chapter describes why nuclear failed in the story.
More than two dozen countries, including the US, China, Russia and India had says the author and have say I, the necessary experience and controls to build enough nuclear power generating reactors between 2030 and 2050 to limit global temperature rise to 2 degrees Centigrade or 3.6 degrees F.
Yep. I know it’s supposed to be fiction but I call it a thin veneer of fiction tieing together the masses and masses of facts into a palatable account of what’s facing us.
I doubt I have another ten years, but there are all you and you, my kids, and grand kids. Go read this book. Hate what happens to your country. Do something about it.
The first day of the westerly winds? If it is, then they are about two weeks earlier than expected.
In the past it was the August Westerlies people talked about. The coldest weeks of the year. The westerly winds come straight from the mountains picking up the scent of snow and ice crystals and frost.
Rita de Heer 