Australian Bush Life

Butterfly - Meadow Argus (Junonia villida). On Garlic Chive Flowers.

Garlic chives are such a great herb for your herb garden. Easy to grow in fact you can’t really kill them. Easy to harvest and prepare for eating. Simply cut the garlic chive leaves, rinse and chop as required for your meals. Garlic chives can be eaten raw or cooked and are a great addition to any meal where you would like the flavours of garlic and chives. Italian, asian, indian, mexican, quiche, roasts, salads you can add to any meal.

Garlic chives in flower.

Garlic chives are also a useful herb in your garden as they have really pretty flowers that last for months, they survived a bushfire by simply re-shooting from underground rhizomes (roots) and they attract insects in their hoards in turn fertilising all your indigenous plants and vegetables in your vegie garden.

Most suburban gardens might not have the full complement of wildlife so some human pruning of indigenous and native plants will help keep garden and bush plants healthy – they actually like this! We have found that since the bushfire we have lost some key australian wildlife from our ecosystem (mainly the mammals, possums, gliders and wallabies etc) and this has definitely added to the speed of growth of the new seedlings that have popped up in their

Caterpillar prunes Banksia sp. Creamy Candles in our bush garden.

1000′s over the last year. It would be far more difficult for the bush to regenerate if there were many hungry mouths harvesting plants while they were getting a hold on life.

We know that the australian wildlife will return once our native and indigenous plants have had a chance to recover from the bushfire and provide all the habitat requirements that our australian wildlife need. This process is already well on it’s way with insects returning in good numbers . This Banksia – “Creamy Candles” was heavily eaten by caterpillars in December, but the native plant has responded well with large amounts of new and healthy re-growth and looks fantastic within just 2 months.

Butterfly - Australian Painted Lad. on garlic chive flowers.

We have quite a few different species of butterflies who visit us. We tend to see most caterpillars through spring and then most butterflies through the summer months. They are a really important part of our living in the australian bush experience as not only are they are so beautiful, but also so useful.

During the months when the butterflies are in abundance they regularly visit all our indigenous plants and are also busy fertilising all the flowers in our vegetable garden. What a great help for us – improving our crops through fertilisation.

Butterfly - Imperial Jezebel on a native plant. Hakea flower.

Butterflies love an abundance of flowers, mostly more open flowers are easier for them to access the nectar. Butterflies also love to have a water feature with shallow edges so they can access water without drowing, they visit our birdbath regularly. Butterflies also like a mix of shady & sunny spots to find places of the right temperature, especially if summer gets too hot.

Meet our echidna who visits us regularly – we decided to call him Eric. We saw the echidna in the first couple of weeks after the bushfire. He survived and as echidna food (ants) were plentiful after the bushfire it provided him with plenty to eat. The ants after the bushfire were amazing and they took full advantage of the abundance of eucalypt seed that was all over the ground dropped by the tall trees in the couple of weeks after the bushfire event.

We have seen Eric the echidna many times again since the spring following the bushfire. We never see echidnas over the winter due to echidnas going into a kind of semi-hibernation called torpor through the colder months to conserve their energy.

Eric bathing in an old tyre…