A Gardeners Forum Forums General Discussion New Members Hi from Oz

Hi, I'm new to this site. We live near Melbourne, Australia, and love our garden. We have a haven in our back yard; it backs onto a park as well, so it's nice and quiet. Gardening in Melbourne has been challenging lately, as we've been in drought conditions for most of the past 11 years. Sounds like many people who use this site are from the U.S.A. Guess you've been having your own weather challenges over there too.

We have had weather problems here. Some too much water and others too little.
Welcome from drought territory in California. We do have world wide members here, like S Africa, Malaysia and Briton. Look around and have fun here.

Welcome stevie g Nice to have a person from Down Under.
Enjoy the forums they are wonderful!

welcome stevie! glad to have you

Thanks very much for your welcome messages; I'm sure I will enjoy the forums. Now all we need is a few extra hours in each day!

Hi, Stevie! I'm Thornius in Nashville, TN, U.S.A. in the Southeastern U.S. My best friends ever are from Ballarat, and Brisbane Australia. I am the Birdman Here. I have studied nature all my life and have concentrated on birds for the last 20 years. Welcome to the forum!

welcome stevie. so nice to get members from other parts of the world.
have you noticed the 'critter corner' forum? maybe you could send us pics of kangaroos and such.
enjoy!

Hiya Stevie.........

We can do anything on here.. Almost.
Till someong stops us.

Joking ......I thing your in a very attactive area.. We see on tv.

Yes show us your life , even without flowers.. That is next best thing to being there.
I am dodge.......everyone dodges me.........

Great to hear some of you are also into critters. Although we do live in a reasonably suburban area, there is a hill at the top of our street where there are heaps of wallabies (no kangaroos that I have seen, but i think there are some around this area). Our favourite critters apart from our pets are the magpies, which come to our back door for food. They will take cheese, meat etc from our hands. In spring, they are very aggressive defenders of their nest areas, and tend to swoop on passers by, but the ones around here have never swooped us; I think they see us as their friends. They are magnificent song birds, probably one of the best we have in Australia.

Sorry, Thornius, I should have mentioned, Ballarat is not far from here. It's about 1 hour west. It's a beautiful town. Bit cool for me, always a few degrees cooler than here. It's probably most famous for the gold rush that took place there, which helped Victoria become a prosperous state. Hope your friends are well.

Stevie--welcome from Illinois.

glad to have you here. I am sure yo will enjoy this forum.

I believe you and thorny may have a lot of bird talking, and photo swaping to do!
I saw a show on tv a while back about how aggressive the magpies are. people were swinging clothing and such around their head so the magpies wouldn't swoop down on them.....or something?? (weren't hekle and jeckle magpies???)

I'm guessing Thornius knows a fair bit more about birds than I, and I would love to see some photos of the birds over in TN. As for me posting photos, I will really have to get my act together, as I don't have a digital camera yet (although I do have a scanner), and I will probably need some advice on how to post a photo!

Yes, the magpies do worry quite a few people in spring. Some people put stickers of eyes on the back of their bicycle helmets to scare them off. I believe heckle and jeckle may have been magpies, but then again they could have been crows! Are there any magpie-type birds in your part of the world?

Welcome to the forum :)

To see the Tennessee and other U.S. birds, go to the Bird Lovers thread in this forum. To post photos here, you have to first upload them to a site like Photobucket, THEN download them to THIS site.

Heckle and Jeckle Were Magpies and we DO have Magpies in the U.S., but only on the West Coast. Here in the Eastern U.S. we have close relatives of the Magpies. Crows, Ravens, and Jays. We also have a similar bird called the Grackle, but they may be closer related to the Jackdaw, found in much of Europe.

Thanks for all your messages- I feel thoroughly welcomed. Thanks for the tip about the photos, Thornius. Guess that I will have to get onto it now, photograph our magpies, and post it soon!

Hi stevie g, arn't they a friendly bunch? I'm near Coffs Harbour in NSW.
Hi everyone :)

welcome aussiepete!

Hi Jiffymouse :) Rather than the drought that stevie g is experiencing, here on the NSW north coast is green and lush with a 52 inch annual rainfall and a sub-tropical to warm temperate climate- which means maybe one or two very light frosts each winter and year-round vegetable growing, including frost sensitive things such as tomatos.

nice! we get more than one or two frosts, but we do have pretty good weather here on the east coast of america, in the savannah georgia area.

...I wonder just how similar the climates are- okra grows well here, with ornamentals like hybiscus, frangapanni, bouganvillia and of course citrus, limes in particular...and the most common birdcall is the whipbird, along with plenty of magpies just like melbourne.

the ornamentals you mention all grow well here, except i'm not familiar with frangapanni. citrus not so well, we do get just a little too much freeze for that. most veggies grow well here, as long as we plan around our summer heat/humidity and the brief (no more than 4-6 weeks total) cold spells.

i have mockingbirds that live here, and we have an abundance of grackles, a relative of the magpie.

ok, i just googled frangapani and it is the plant/tree i know as plumaria. from what i understand, if you get them established, they grow well, but i don't have any, yet. we loved them when we lived in guam and the philippines.

Isn't Magnolia icecream the best you have tasted, JM? I used to live in Baguio- as for balut, that is something the Filippinos can keep to themselves, I think.
Those plumaria/frangapanni will grow easily from a branch if the end is dried out for a week or so- so that the sap stops running, but maybe you know that already.

no, i didn't know that. and i never ate magnolia ice cream. but i've had so many good things there. we lived there 3 years, have many friends/relatives who are filipino, and we eat filipino in the house here a few times a month. we also have a filipino member who now lives in ca.

how long were you in baguio?

Hi aussiepete, and welcome to this forum! They are friendly, and it's good to learn a bit about gardening in other parts of the world. You are so lucky, living up there. We keep on talking about how it looks like paradise, but of course there are things like family, good friends and work that keep us in Melbourne at the moment. My brother and his family live in Coffs Harbour; I am envious! Of course, when we run out of water down here, we'll all have to move north!

Frangipanni- that is one plant I've been dying to grow, as the exquisite flowers and fragrance remind me so much of growing up in Darwin. My parents in Perth can grow it, but I haven't been quite brave enough to try it here. I may do it now, though, because I planted some murrayas in autumn, and they came through the winter quite well.

Oh, yeah, you are right about balut; it's never going to take off here!

Eighteen months, JM, twenty years back, and we have many fond memories- and food memories. Pancit, Adobo, and San Miguel..what a great combination.

Hi stevie g, so you have crunched on balut as well, huh..? Yuck.
Lack of employment is the downside up here, as your brother no doubt will agree...the upside is no insect screens because there are almost no flies or mozzies, so we eat outside most days unless it rains.
Maybe frangapanni would grow if it's near a north-facing wall?... after all I have seen palms growing down there.
We are very much non-urban here, our power comes from solar panels, water comes from our rainwater tank or from the creek and the shower for the garden, and the net comes via a satellite dish. Do you have space for a vegetable garden,stevie g? If so, what are you growing?

I'm getting even more envious!

I haven't personally tasted balut, but one of my brothers (who lives in Perth)was in the Philippines a couple of months ago, and he described them.

We have a reasonably large back yard, but the only things I've planted that are close to veggies are a eureka lemon, a valencia orange and an arbequina olive. I do want another olive tree, but there's no room at the moment; something will have to go! It's mainly natives such as calistemon, eucalypts, grevillea etc. I had some ginger lilies in beds, but they went berserk, and now I've cut them all out and just kept some in pots. We also have some flower beds; it's my attempt to get my 2 daughters into gardening!

You may be right about the frangipanni; I think the best I can do is the garden bed at the back, which gets sun for most of the day. Or, I could keep it in a large pot and bring it in during winter.

What are you growing there? Do you grow a fair bit of your own produce?

Most of it, stevie, I have a veg garden around the size of a tennis court, while the flowers are the wife's area of interest.

Living in paradise....growing your own food... hard to see how it can get any better than that.

Did you get any bad weather from the storms that hit QLD the other day? I hear it was a disaster up there.

Just a lot of rain, stevie, but thanks for asking. The downside of solar is unless you have a huge battery-bank, which we don't- there is not enough power to run the sat modem, which chews up a lot of juice, which means we can't acces the Net. It's been like that here the last few days, but it's great for the garden:)
Any luck in getting those daughter's fingers to go green?

Well, the youngest is showing some signs of it. She is the one who will ask for a plant for herself whenever we are at the nursery. She is also very observant with little flowers and things, and i have almost taught her to like spiders (just not the red and black ones)! I think the older one will get there; she is more of the indoor, reading type.

Glad to hear you got some good rain.

a.pete, i had to laugh when you said put the frangapani by a north wall, up here, we put things by a south wall!

and for the filipino food, when we came back to the states, we brought 2 cases of san miguel with us. it's available here too, but anyone who's had the "real thing" will tell you what is sold here isn't the same. we will have pan de sal for thanksgiving