ONCE A YEAR

As you come down my driveway you can just drive straight around a small garden and back out again, so the garden is virtually in the middle of a roundabout lol. In this garden I have many succulent type plants and amongst those I have a plant that only flowers once per year and the flower blooms at night and by the next morning it is dead, so once a year (around Christmas time) I watch out for the flower. It is quite large, as big as my hand. I dont know the name but here is a photo.

KING PARROT

Australia has some beautiful wildlife and this is one of my many visitors. It is a male King Parrot, when he comes to visit he sits on my back deck and chatters to get my attention so I come out and put a tin of parrot mix on the table I can sit and watch him while he eats the seed and as you can see he is not too shy LOL. We never try and touch them so they feel comfortable around us. Someimes I put seed in my hand and he eats straight from my hand. It is so cool that he trusts me.

FROG

It doesn't take much to bring the frogs out of hiding, with the recent rain we had there are hundreds of them all around the dam area and a few around my spa LOL. This green tree frog was sitting in the open in a sandy area in full sun and didnt look too good, so I moved him into a leafy shady area and poured some cooling water over him, at least he sat still long enough for me to take a photo.

RAIN

Yesterday we had a deluge of rain, it came down that hard and fast that my driveway was like a flowing stream.

Then it stopped, in 5 minutes it was all over. Later on last night it started to steady rain again and continued throughout the night. Oh boy didn't the frogs love it, they (hundreds), croaked all night long. This morning at 5.30am I got up to check to see if the dam wall was still there, yep it was and so is some nice catchment of water. Checked the rain guge and all up we got 50mm rain (2 inches) my water tanks are full again YAY !!

MOON Closeup

I had some nice emails about my moon photo posted yesterday and thought I would add this closeup one I also did, sorry its a bit blurry. I love going outside at night and just looking up, the milky way with its millions of stars are so visible, and the ever present Southen Cross constellation is always there reminding me of this country that I love.

Moon

Ever since I was a little girl (which is a long time ago now LOL) I have been fascinated by the stars. We have a telescope, nothing expensive (under $100) and used my canon A560 which is only a 7.1 megapixel digital camera through the eye viewer and took this photo of the moon, it was very difficult getting it just right as the eye viewer is not made for taking photos through LOL but nevertheless we got this great shot so thought I would share it with you.

Water is precious

I had a comment on my photo from yesterday about water. We dont rely on our Dam for drinking water, that is purely for recreation, water plants etc. However as we are so far from town we have to provide our own water so we have a few water tanks attached to the house and sheds to catch the rain from their roof (when we get it LOL) This one holds 5,200 gallons, it is partly dug into the ground. We also have the tanks set so we can pump from one tank to another if one gets too low. We are water wise so dont waste water, it's a precious commodity but if we were to run out completely there are companies we can buy water from, they bring out a water truck and pump 3,000 gallons into your tank, we have been on this property for over 9 years now and only had to buy water when we originally moved here and put the tanks in. Even though we dont get much rain, every drop we do get on our roof areas go into the tanks and although they have been low over the years we havent run out yet. The last rain deluge we had that broke the dam wall filled all tanks so there was a positive after all.