GROSS!

The insects that live in our gardens are really interesting. Knowing a lot about insects helps us to protect our plants from the ones that do damage, as well as helping us protect the ones that assist us. Want to hear some really GROSS facts about insects? (They are guaranteed to make your friends go "Yeeeuuuuuck"!)

1. Spittle Bugs - Spittle bugs are also called froghoppers because they jump when disturbed. They eat sap from many native and exotic trees. To protect their babies they cover them in a big gob of what looks like spit, but guess what, it doesn't come out of their mouths… it comes from their anuses!

2. Dung beetles - Dung beetles are also called scarab beetles. When the female beetle is ready to lay her eggs she rolls up a big ball of animal manure. She then makes a shallow hole and rolls the dung ball into it. She lays her egg into the dung ball and covers it up. The larva eats the manure when it hatches, then it pupates and then emerges as an adult beetle. How would you like to spend your childhood in a dung ball? Dung beetles are actually very valuable because they get rid of a huge amount of animal manure in farming areas.

3. Robber flies - Robber flies have nasty habits but they are gardeners' friends. They eat a wide range of pest insects which they grab while they are flying - a bit like fighter planes. They have long sharp spikes on their legs which help them hold the prey. They first inject a poison to stop the insect from struggling then they inject an enzyme that makes the body tissues turn to mush. Then the robber fly sucks the inside out of the insect and just leaves an empty shell. Ugh - what a way to go!

4. Mud dauber wasps - You have probably seen the nests these wasps make. They collect blobs of mud from wet areas and build structures usually up under eaves, under houses or in any hollow spaces. The mud nests are made up of a number of chambers. The wasp captures a creature - often a caterpillar or garden spider - and stings it to paralyse it but not kill it. It carries the creature to the nest and puts it in one of the chambers and lays an egg on it and seals it. The maggot emerges from the egg and eats the paralysed creature alive.

5. Tachinid flies - These look like big green blowflies but they are very useful to gardeners. They lay their eggs in other insects such as caterpillars. The larva lives inside the caterpillar until it grows so big it bursts out and finds a place to pupate. Needless to say this usually kills the caterpillar.

You can see great pictures of these insects and learn many other interesting facts from a terrific book called Backyard Insects that is published by Melbourne University Press.

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The World's Biggest.....

If you have been on holidays recently you may have visited the Big Pineapple or the Big Banana or the Big Sheep or one of the other BIG things that have been built as tourist attractions. These are all fun, but there are some real life BIG things that are truly amazing.

Did you know that:

1. The world’s tallest hardwood tree is the Australian Mountain Ash (Eucalyptus regnans). The tallest ever officially recorded one was the Thorpdale Tree which was 114m tall. They were able to measure it accurately because it was chopped down. Isn't that sad.

2. The world’s tallest softwood tree is the Californian Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens). The Mendocino Tree is generally recognized as the tallest living tree at 112m tall.

3. The world’s biggest seed is the coconut. The biggest coconut seed comes from a plant called the Double Coconut or Coco de Mer (Lodoicea maldivica). It is native to the Seychelle Islands in the Indian Ocean and can weigh up to 22kg. People think it looks like a lady’s bottom!
See a picture

4. The world’s longest leaves belong to the Raffia palms (Raffia farinifera and Raffia taedifera). Their leaves can be 20m long. We often use string made of raffia to tie up presents and it is also woven into bags and baskets.

5. The world’s widest leaves belong to Alocasia macrorrhiza. The widest recorded is 3.2m wide.

6. The world’s biggest flower is the Titan Arum (Amorphophallus titanium). The flower can be up to 2.2 metres tall. Its other name is Corpse Flower because guess what – it smells like dead bodies!! The reason it does that is to attract blow flies that pollinate it.

7. The world’s biggest vegetable is the Tropical Yam (Dioscorea). They can grow to 3m long. The biggest cabbage ever recorded was 1.8m across and it weighed 56kg. Imagine how much coleslaw THAT would make! There are huge pumpkins too. The biggest grown so far in Australia weighed 251.7 kg and the biggest overseas was 557kg. You could certainly make a Cinderella pumpkin coach out of that one! If you get a packet of Atlantic Giant pumpkin seeds, you might even grow the world’s biggest pumpkin yourself.

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Fast Movers

All plants are able to move to some degree. Plants like sunflowers can turn their faces towards the sun throughout the day, many flowers can close their petals at night or when it is dull and if you leave a potted plant on its side for a few days its stem will begin to turn the right way up. Some plants though, have the ability to move parts of themselves very quickly. It can give us a big surprise when they do it.

Plants that move fast

Many of you will have Impatiens in your garden. Sometimes they are called Busy Lizzies. They get lots of colourful flowers on throughout the warmer months. (See the picture on the right.) Bees pollinate the flowers and seed pods form. These look like ribbed green capsules. When the seeds are ripe, the pods burst and the ribs curl back like springs. This means the seeds are flung a long way away so they can grow well away from the parent plant. If you carefully cup your hand over a pod that is very fat, it will usually explode in your hand. This is a good trick to play on someone who is not expecting it. They will get a shock!

Sensitive Plant (Mimosa pudica) is a weed you might come across in the bush or on road-sides. It is a low-growing bush with fine fern-like pinnate leaves. (Pinnate means having leaves placed opposite each other along a central stem.) It also has thorns and pink fluffy flowers. When you touch the leaves, they immediately fold up. This discourages insects and animals that might try to eat them. After a while the leaves open up again.
See a picture.

Trigger Plants (Stylidium) have a clever way of making sure that insects that visit their flowers collect and deposit pollen. When an insect alights on one of the flowers a "trigger" snaps forward and gently whacks the insect with a load of pollen. It then reloads but much more slowly. Later it does the same thing to collect pollen to fertilise the flowers. It doesn’t hurt the insects at all and they don’t seem to mind because they keep going from flower to flower.
See a picture.

You may have seen Venus Fly Traps. When flies land inside their "jaws" they snap shut and capture them. They then dissolve the soft parts of the body and absorb them. The jaws then open up again. That’s a very nasty surprise for the fly!

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You will have heard a lot about the shortage of water on the television and seen lots of pictures of the drought. Saving water is something everyone can do to help – kids included. Having shorter showers, using the half-flush when you use the toilet and making sure that you turn taps off properly are all important. There are things you can do to help save water for the garden too. Keeping the garden plants alive over the long hot summer is a big job when there are watering restrictions, so kids can be a big help.

1. If you have a lot of pot plants, group them together so that watering is easier. This also means that the air around the pots stays cooler and moister for longer. We call this creating a micro-climate.

2. Soil wetting agents work like magic. They make the soil absorb water quickly so it doesn’t run off and be wasted. Some good wetting agents are SaturAid, Hydraflo2 and WettaSoil. If you get some, you can do a little test to show Mum or Dad. Get two saucers and fill them with some really dry soil from the garden. Sprinkle the top of the soil in one of the saucers with SaturAid or Hydraflo2. Don’t put any in the other saucer of soil. Now very carefully pour a small amount of water from a little jug into the centre of each saucer. The water in the saucer with no wetting agent will often just sit on top of the soil in a ball. The water in the saucer with the wetting agent added will be sucked quickly into the soil.

3. Put wetting agent in the top of your pot plants and around plants growing in the garden, so that when you water them, the moisture will go down quickly to the roots of the plants and give them a drink.

4. Get some plastic buckets and put one in every bathroom, in the kitchen and in the laundry. Ask everyone in the family to put the bucket under the shower while they are waiting for the hot water to come through and to do the same in the kitchen and the laundry. You will be surprised at how much water can be captured every day.

5. Your job can be to empty the buckets every morning and afternoon. Make sure you spread the water around so that all the plants get a drink. Plants in pots will need water more often than plants in the ground.

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Yay – it’s holiday time! It can be hard on plants when everyone is away, but there IS something you can do to help ensure your favourite plants will be waiting for you when you get back.

1. The best way of taking care of your garden while you are away is to get a friend to drop by and water for you, but what to do when EVERYONE'S off to the beach? The best thing to do is to mulch.

2. Mulching means to cover the soil with some material e.g. straw, leaves, bark, dried lawn clippings. It forms a layer that keeps the moisture in and makes it harder for weed seeds to grow. Of course the soil needs to be really soaked BEFORE you put the mulch down, and be careful not to put it right up close to the stems of your plants.

3. When you are at the beach you can collect something that makes a great mulch for your garden and also adds lots of good food for your plants - seaweed! Hose it over and put it straight on your garden, or chop it up with a spade first. You might also like to add it to your compost bin.

4. Sea shells can add interest to your garden. Make sure that any you collect don't have living animals in them. If you grow plants in containers you can use shells as a kind of mulch.

5. Pieces of driftwood can look wonderful in the garden, especially if you let a plant climb up over them.

6. Some fertilisers are made of ground up fish, but I don't think you'd be very popular with the rest of the family if you brought any dead fish home with you in the car!!

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Witchetty Grubs

Grubs are very nutritious and when you think about it, eating them is really no different from eating oysters or scallops. It all depends on what you are used to. Witchetty grubs are a popular food of the Aborigine people.

Here are some facts for you.

1. Many people call the fat, white, C-shaped grubs they dig up in their gardens witchetty grubs but this is incorrect. These grubs are White Curl Grubs and they are the larvae (babies) of scarab beetles like African Black Beetle and Christmas Beetles. (They are sometimes called Cockchafers.) White curl grubs damage lawns and plants by eating their roots.

2. Witchetty grubs are the larvae of large moths.
See a picture

3. The name comes from Central Australia. The Witjuti Grub is found in the Witjuti bush (Acacia kempeana). The grubs live inside the roots of the bush. They are white and up to 12cm long. They pupate and turn into Cossid Moths.

4. The aborigines enjoy the grubs which are very high in protein. They can be eaten raw or cooked. The flavour is a little like scrambled eggs.

5. The aborigines also used to give babies witchetty grubs to chew on to soothe their gums when teething – a witchetty teething ring. They also used squashed grubs as an ointment for sore eyes and wounds.

6. The larvae of some other moths are also called witchetty grubs. These are found in the trunks of trees such as eucalypts and wattles. Cockatoos sometimes damage trees trying to extract the big grubs. The largest is the Giant Wood Moth. It has a wing span of 25cm and is the heaviest moth in the world. The grubs grow to 15 cm long. They are whoppers!

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Building a Bird Hide

Do you know what birds visit your garden? There are probably many more than you realise. It’s fun to discover who visits and to keep a record. In my garden there are almost always blackbirds, sparrows, spotted turtle doves, wattle birds and mynahs, but sometimes I get visits from less common birds, such as eastern spinebills, butcher birds and black-faced cuckoo shrikes. I record these in my bird book. The best way to learn about the birds in your garden is to build a bird hide. Have fun!

What you need: leafy branches or palm fronds, pieces of wood, large bits of shade cloth, hessian or dark coloured cloth, some string; a small stool, an exercise book and pencil, perhaps some inexpensive binoculars

What to do:

1. The idea of a bird hide is to make a shelter where you can see the birds, but they can’t see you. The best idea is to make it blend in with a shrubbery or some existing part of the garden so it won’t be very obvious.

2. Make the hide big enough so you can sit comfortably and have books and binoculars with you.

3. Make the hide out of old bits of wood, bits of canvas, tree prunings, etc. It needs to provide enough camouflage so that the birds don’t notice if you move to e.g. pick up your book or binoculars. Birds don’t see the colour green, but they notice red, blue and yellow very quickly, so try to keep to greens and browns to blend in.

4. Even more than providing food, providing water will attract birds to your garden in summer. A shallow dish of water placed up high away from cats will reflect the sky and attract birds to come for a drink or a bath. Put the water where you have a good view of it from the hide and where there are places for the birds to perch nearby.

5. You must keep very quiet in the hide and be very patient.

6. Planting native shrubs such as grevilleas will attract lots of honeyeaters to the garden.

7. Just watching ordinary sparrows can be fun. Did you know there are two different types of sparrows in Australian gardens? There are tree sparrows and house sparrows. Tree sparrows have chestnut brown heads while house sparrows have grey on the tops of their heads. Tree sparrows have black patches on their cheeks and house sparrows have no cheek patches. If you see a sparrow with no black markings on the face or chest at all and beige eyebrows, then it is probably a female house sparrow. Male and female tree sparrows look alike.

8. There is a lot we can learn about birds, just by observing their behaviour. This could be your first step on the way to becoming an ORNITHOLOGIST.

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