Fremantlebiz - Paul's Letter from Australia

Daylight saving, chooks, insects, frogs and our Chinese garden

Its been a week since daylight saving started and I can say the changeover has been quite disruptive to our family life. The kids have all been finding the change difficult. It's harder to get them out of bed in the mornings and then there is a rush as they try to catch up with routines like having breakfast and getting ready for school or work. There has been a noticeable degree of bad temperedness from most of them.

Similarly at night there has been a reluctance for them to go to bed when we parents say enough is enough of TV. Often there have been wails of protest.

The children are not eating as well either. They've become more picky with their food and this week there have been a lot more leftovers. Since we had our old dog sent to the great kennel in the sky, dealing with leftovers has become more of a problem. The hens struggle to cope. We only have three of them now. One died last week of natural causes. Too many household scraps maybe. It was pretty heavy when I buried it. The others are getting pretty old, but we are still getting a couple of eggs a day from them.

I've noticed over time that hens seem to react in a certain way when I have to deal with one of their deceased companions. When I arrive to do the job they go very quiet and sort of murmur to themselves. I always make sure that I treat their friend with dignity and do the burial out of sight. Usually they quietly mumble to eachother for at least ten or fifteen minutes afterwards before recovering.

Last summer there was a significant decline in the insect population around here, so much so that I mentioned it on a couple of occasions, including on 9 February 2007. I was concerned about the implications for the frogs which inhabit our garden.

In our front garden pond, only four adult frogs got through the winter, all apparently males, None of the many tadpoles we managed during the summer there seemed to survive the winter, possibly because they provided nourishment for the insect-starved adults.

Last week one of our neighbours along the street, whom we had originally supplied with tadpoles for their pond, told us they had taddies in abundance this year and did we need topping up. So we now have about a hundred impported youngsters which we are rearing in an old glass fishtank. We feed them on flakes of dry fishfood. We'll raise them to a suitable size before releasing them in one of our ponds in a few weeks time.

In our backyard we have a what we've called a small Chinese garden. We built it last year in anticipation of the Beijing Olympics. It has a surrounding stone wall on all sides and a very nice frog pond with three teenage frogs, which also managed to get though the winter.

In the past few weeks we've noticed that all our frogs have been fattening up because this season there is an abundance of insects of many kinds. But fat males are no good without fat females in the froggy world, hence our decision to bring in some fresh tadpoles.

Since we built the Chinese garden we've had a lone pottery replica of Chinese warrior keeping guard. It's a very nice replica and came to us via Bunnings in a small wooden crate. It was about as authentic as one could wish and had been made in Xian Province where the original entombed ones of Emperor Qin Shihuang had been discovered. Bunnings were getting rid of them for a few bucks each when we bought ours. I wrote about this deal on 29 May 2005.

We actually bought seven, which was all they had left. They were all sealed up in nailed wooden crates, with foam and shredded paper. My guess is that Bunnings figured they were too much trouble to unpack. They were too. After we unpacked the first we decided to stash the others away for some other time when we were more in the mood.

Yesterday was that time and so one by one our collection of Chinese warriors gradually emerged back into daylight. Now they all stand guard in a small garden against two of the walls which overlook the frogpond. We think they look like they should be there. Each statue is about two foot six inches high. They are made in one piece, except for the heads which are solid and plug in to the top. All the faces are slightly different. We were rather pleased to discover that the very last one we unpacked, while the same scale as the others, was quite different. This figure has a top knot and a beard, and looks more officer-like than the other six.

While my wife was doing most of the unpacking, I was putting the finishing touches to a small wooden gate I'd built for the entrance to this garden. It's in preparation for the arrival of our cocker spaniel pup in February. Pups and special gardens don't necessarily get along very well.

Mounting a gate on a relatively soft limestone wall has its problems, but I overcame these by carving out rectangular recesses in the stone to take a pair of wooden blocks. These have been secured in place with Silastic and a single four inch brass screw driven into a plastic plug. The gate hinges have been mounted onto the wooden blocks.

Today my wife will paint the gate - red of course because it is the entrance to the Chinese garden. Red also goes very well with green frogs.

© MMVII Paul R. Weaver.

About the writer

Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write a couple of million words.

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