Farewell to September

It seems an age since I was in New Plymouth but then realised that I was there for 1 September - maybe my brain put the clocks forward a month instead of just an hour for daylight saving time! It's a tad hard getting up in the dark again but compensated by having time in the evening to work outside. Today has been a scorcher with my thermometer registering a low of 6°C and a high of 31°C. No wonder the plants get confused with a frost one day and midsummer temperatures the next!

Yesterday I filled up the ice-cream cabinet with soil, burying the dead possum in the process, and planted a new rhubarb plant on top. Today was the potatoes' turn and I now have 6 bags of sprouting spuds in the shade house. I'll take some photos when they poke some shoots through the soil.

Clearing out the shade house - I pulled out all the plastic
flooring and hosed it down. Old carpet would be better!

Underneath the plastic were 'knots' of long skinny worms - some over
30cm long - I thought they were threads to begin with

The fine weather is a good excuse to walk slowly round my traps each day to look for Darwin's barberry plants. It's easy to spot the adult plants as they are smothered in yellow/orange flowers but the seedlings are expert at hiding.

You're looking for a leaf like this...

...with yellow roots and stems if you cut through the brown outer layer...

...and this type of growth

It's great that I haven't found any flowering barberry on my section this year - when I first arrived there were plants all over the place.

Flowering Darwin's barberry - September 2011

When you're walking slowly then you see all sorts of things - how about this scurrying (and out-of-focus) barberry-flower lookalike...

 

Or this fly that let me get a photo before buzzing off...

 

It wasn't until I downloaded the photos to my computer this evening that I saw all the small white critters on the underside - can you spot any?

 

 

This beautiful orb spider is two steps away from the ranchslider so easy to keep an eye on it; the first photo shows the intricate detail on its abdomen and the second, taken after the sun went down, shows it keeping tabs on its web by resting one leg on a strand.