Dad's old house, which he built of stone, mud bricks and glass bottles.

We had a very productive weekend on our property over Easter; it’s amazing what a bit of machinery can do! Steve Hart, a local farmer, came up with his tractor and did some slashing, clearing and road repairs for us. In just five hours Steve widened our driveway and built some drainage humps, and then cleared the whole area between the bamboo and Dad’s old house, pushing out the old garden. I felt quite sad thinking about all of the work dad had put into the garden, rock walls and paths hidden below 18 years of growth that we have now pushed over the edge. The site looks like a big open wound right now but I hope we can create something beautiful that Dad would be proud of.

We had marked out all of the trees we wanted to save, but unfortunately we had a few casualties including a mulberry tree, the tree where my cat Joe was buried, an old grape vine and a Chinese lantern tree. The clearing allowed us to discover a few new trees including an ice cream bean, custard apple, star fruit, and a black sapote.  Also, one of the citrus trees near the new house turned out to be a mandarin.

A lot of the fun of visiting the Mountain is watching what happens over the seasons. This time of year the loquats and star fruit are ripening, and there is unripe fruit on the citrus trees (bush lemons, orange and mandarins), which means we should have some good picking next visit. The black sapote and custard apples have small fruit (we’re not sure when they ripen), and there are remnants of ice cream beans which indicates that they ripen in March.

The Lantana were in full flower, as were the Cassia. We are still and probably will always be battling against these invasive weeds; however, we are becoming more familiar (thanks to sites like the Australian Government’s Weed Identification Tool) and ruthless with them. The cut and poison method seems to be working but I think we need to get better with our timing. Specifically we  need to catch many of these weeds before they go to seed.  There is a weedy legume tree with pinnate leaves (like the Cassia’s, only smaller) which has millions of seed pods falling off of it at this time of year — these kinds of weeds are very difficult to fend off when you only visit every month or so.  Interestingly there is another plant that is growing like a weed up there—coffee!  This is a weed we might be able to live with.