The Axe Creek Protection Project

One of the big drawcards for us moving on to this property in 2022 was the fact that one of our boundaries is formed by Axe Creek, a major tributary of the Campaspe River. While it is usually referred to as a “seasonal” stream that is dry for much of the year, there’s good evidence to suggest that this is only a recent phenomena. In fact, when we first mentioned to an old fisherman friend back in Mount Dandenong that we were thinking of moving here, he waxed lyrical about his time spent as a young man fishing for perch along Axe Creek at Axedale.

Streams of native Water Ribbons (Triglochin procera) at the tail of one of the pools on our property.

Nowadays however, the creek tends to flow well in wet winters and springs before drying up completely through summer – although we were lucky to witness an exception to that last year, thanks to the unseasonably wet spring. Of course, that unseasonable wet weather led to devastating floods in October 2022, with the creek bursting its banks multiple times and turning our paddocks into raging watercourses, taking our fences along with it.

Axe Creek resembled a large inland lake for much of September and October 2022.

Fast forward a year, and we’ve seen a couple of very dry months that have thankfully had little impact so far thanks to all that water last year, but which will no doubt start to bite as the weather continues to warm up. Whether you blame this on climate change, or natural weather cycles, or poor land management practices – or as I suspect, a combination of all of the above – it’s clear that the health of the creek has been suffering for many years, and so when the opportunity to become involved with a project called the Axe Creek Protection Project came along, we jumped at the chance.

Axe Creek at its most serene.

Essentially, what this project aims to do is to restore valuable riparian habitat along the creek, in the hope that improved erosion controls, better shade coverage and reduced weed infestation will all help to conserve water within the creek, restore environmental flows and improve the chances of native fish, amphibians and even platypus returning to the area.

A large area of cleared land beside the creek.

When our next door neighbour approached us about repairing the shared fence line that had been wiped out not once, but twice last year due to flooding, we agreed that it would be crazy to replace like with like and just simply put up another sheep mesh fence. Whenever the creek floods, the debris that is carried with the floodwater builds up in the mesh and acts like a dam, bowing and stretching the wire until the whole thing gives way. Instead we decided to run individual strands of wire that are much more flexible and allow all but the largest of logs and branches to pass right through. We also agreed that the initial 50 metre stretch back from the creek was the most prone to flooding, and as such we finished our fence shorter, creating a fenceless corridor that we could then devote to streamside revegetation.

One of the flood damaged fences, where debris has managed to build up along the sheep mesh.
Replacing the sheep mesh with individual wires should alleviate some of the issues with flood damage.

On our property especially, there are some magnificent River Red Gums that remain along the creek, but pretty much all of the native vegetation besides that has been removed. Through consultation with Tim Jenkyn of BushCo Land Management (the company leading the project), we’ve come up with a plan to return a small but significant area of grazing land to native habitat, and to diversify the number of plant species along our stretch of creek frontage.

One of the large River Red Gums (Eucalyptus camaldulensis) that dominate the lower part of the property.

The project has predominantly been funded via a $450,000 donation by Agnico Eagle, the operators of the nearby Fosterville Gold Mine, in collaboration with a number of community groups including Landcare, business groups, and the amazing volunteer group FOSSALS (Friends of Strathfieldsaye Streams and Land). More than 50 landholders, ourselves included, have signed up for the project and have given access to Tim and the BushCo team to conduct walkthroughs of our paddocks, identifying and spraying out any serious weed infestations and running rip lines along areas that are then going to be planted up.

A patch of Scotch Thistle that has been sprayed, and has started to die off.

Now before I go too much further, I do want to address the elephant in the room. There’s a small but vocal group of locals who are vehemently opposed to the gold mine and everything it represents. Mining companies, and especially multinational gold miners, don’t always have a great track record when it comes to the environment and as new arrivals to the area, the last thing we want to do is throw shade on these folk and their sometimes quite legitimate concerns. But at the same time, we’re also well aware that there’s a lot of good things that the mining company do for the local community, through sponsorships and grants, and if it means having to dance with the devil sometimes to get a positive outcome, then strike up a chord and let me put on my dancing shoes. Call it guilt money, or blood money if you like, but whatever the case, it’s money that is being handed back to the community, and I for one intend to make sure that it gets put to good use. Besides, with modern society’s love of technology, including mobile phones and electric vehicles, it’s not like we’re going to be curtailing our need for more gold any time soon, and we do happen to live smack bang on top of one of the richest gold deposits in the world.

Sorting out plants into buckets for dispersal among the volunteers.

With that out of the way, I can get on to describing the way the project is currently progressing. After a few false starts (why is it that it only ever seems to rain on a Tuesday?), the weather finally stayed clear enough in early October to allow about a dozen or so volunteers from FOSSALS to turn up for a tree planting day across the two properties here, and they managed to make short order of the 400+ native trees and shrubs that Tim had selected for our stretch of creek.

Planting underway.

At this early stage, we have concentrated on colonising Acacia species such as Blackwood (Acacia melanoxylon), Early Black Wattle (A. mearnsii), Silver Wattle (A. dealbata) and Wiralda (A. retinoides). Along a slightly elevated line further back from the creek we’ve also planted Yellow Box (Eucalyptus melliodora) and down in the lower parts of the creek bank we have planted River Bottlebrush (Callistemon sieberi) and Tall Sedge, (Carex appressa). The plan is that once these plants become established, (and these are all fairly fast growing varieties), they will offer protection for a secondary round of planting that will include some of the more delicate, lower growing shrubs such as Correas and Grevilleas and native grasses and sedges.

The rip lines slowly started to fill up with trees and tree guards.
The planting extends along the creek edge across the two properties.
With a lot more young red gums on Fraser’s property, the species planted here were predominantly wattles.

With a dry summer threatening, the important thing now is going to be to keep the watering up to the plants, but thankfully we have recently had more than 50mm of rain, which has managed to penetrate a long way down into the rip lines. That should encourage these fast growing species to send their roots down deep into the soil, binding it far better than the pasture grasses could ever do, and helping to minimise any further erosion.

On some of the more slightly elevated areas on my property, we also planted a number of Yellow Box.
Within the confines of the creek banks, more than 40 River Bottlebrush were also planted.

In addition to the planting along the creek, I have been working closely with Tim on a plan to revegetate one of the main flood paths, directly above our dam. The large soak here is currently full of Juncus, but we want to diversify this to include swamp-loving natives like Totem Poles (Melaleuca decussata) and Heath Tea Trees (Leptospermum myrsinoides), as well as planting up the higher, erosion-prone top of the mound behind the dam with drier woodland species such as Grey Box (Eucalyptus microcarpa) and Red Ironbark (E. tricarpa), interspersed with Rough Wattle (Acacia aspera) and Common Fringe Myrtle (Calytrix tetragona). On the face of the mound, the plan is to have a mass of Gold-dust Wattle (A. acinacea), Showy Parrot Pea (Dillwynia sericea) and Cats-claw Grevillea (Grevillea alpina), which should create a stunning visual each spring that will be visible from the house.

The soak area around the front of the dam that is also going to be revegetated.
This lower area leading up to the dam was inundated during 2022’s heavy flooding.
This slightly elevated area above the soak will host a copse of Buloke (Allocasuarina luehmannii)

Unfortunately for most of the morning on the Tuesday, Fraser and I both had to work, with several remote meetings on the agenda, however we did manage to join Tim and the FOSSALS for a bit of morning tea (including carrot cakes supplied by Vanessa), during which the crew presented us with a couple of plaques to go on the front gate, celebrating the fact that we’re now making a contribution to such an important local project. We look forward to continuing this new collaboration for at least the next twelve months that the project officially has to run, but hopefully for many more years to come. It may not happen in our lifetimes, but hopefully somewhere along the line, a young fisherman might one day wander the banks of Axe Creek once again. And if he were to stop for a moment under the shade of a Blackwood tree to watch a platypus paddling in a deep pool, then I know I will have done my bit.

Commemorative plaques for the front gate.

Spring loaded

AKA: “Click go the shears”

What a difference 12 months can make – September 2022 was one of our coldest and wettest ever, followed by a very wet and cold October, yet fast forward a year and the opposite is the case – after an extremely dry August, we’ve just experienced the driest September on record. Thankfully all of the wonderful rain we had in autumn meant that the ground remained quite moist, and then with the heavens opening up in early October and delivering almost 2 inches of rain in the space of 24 hours, we should now be in a good position coming into what is predicted to be a very hot, dry summer.

One of the highlights of spring at Greatrakes is the display of ornamental pears along the driveway, although with a smell reminiscent of wok-fried shrimp paste, it’s a sight best viewed from afar.

Spring at Greatrakes is always a busy time of year, and with the weather having been so warm and sunny early, the grass (and weeds) got a head start. Of course, whenever the grass begins to grow, the ride-on mower decides to have issues. We always knew the original battery wasn’t great at holding a charge, but after swapping the battery over for a new one and finally getting some lawns mowed, the very next time I tried to start it, there was nothing again. After a discussion with the wonderful folks at Bendigo Outdoor Power Equipment, we determined that it was probably a sticking solenoid at the top of the starter motor. Sure enough, when my Dad came up for a visit, we managed to get the cover off the engine, and with a quick spray of WD40 and a very light tap with the knockometer (otherwise known as a hammer), she was back up and running in no time.

The temperamental beast that is our zero-turn mower.

This allowed me to get another round of mowing done, until right on the last pass along the fence out the front of the property, I managed to pop one of the tubeless front tyres off its rim during a particularly tight turn. No amount of manoeuvring would get it into a position where I could pump it back up again, so it was another trip down to the mower shop for a tube. Effectively, this wheel now matches the one on the other side which did pretty much the same thing for a friend last year while we were away overseas. All these delays meant that every time I eventually got the machine back up an running, I then had to contend with grass that had managed to grow knee high again. I swear, at the moment I’m having to mow the back lawn at least twice a week if I want to avoid having to rake up big clumps of cut grass at the end.

The back lawn freshly mowed, fertilised and giving the irrigation system a test run.

Still, there’s nothing quite like looking out over a freshly mowed lawn to the green pastures beyond, and with the rain at the start of October I’ve even had to cut a few strips around the inside of the paddocks so that we can get around without having to worry about stepping on a snake. Speaking of which, it’s looking like a bad year for the old murder-noodles as well, with several of our neighbours having close encounters with brown snakes in their gardens, and Vanessa even running over a black snake on the road in to Bendigo. So far we haven’t had any encounters here ourselves, although we have had one false alarm which involved a warm sunny day during which I was working in Melbourne, a neighbour answering Vanessa’s distress call and blasting a hole in the back lawn with a shotgun, and one very dead stick as a result.

A beautiful display of Ranunculi in the front garden.

Out the front of the house, Vanessa has been busy this year with her display of Ranunculi, which were supposed to be all yellow to match with the hanging basket display of pansies, but actually turned out to be a mix of colours – one of those “happy little accidents” that the artist Bob Ross used to always talk about. The pansies themselves have been a vibrant yellow right throughout August and September, and are showing no signs of letting up any time soon. It’s amazing how visible they are from far away – as soon as we turn into nearby O’Brien’s lane, you can see them glowing from across the paddocks.

A vibrant display of yellow pansies at the front of the house.
The bright yellow against the white backdrop of the house is visible from a long way away.

Elsewhere in the garden, we’ve made a start on our summer vegetables. There’s always a dilemma here in Central Victoria about when is the best time to plant tomatoes. The accepted gospel for many years has been to get them in around Melbourne Cup Day at the start of November, after the last frosts have been and gone. Looking back to last year though, with the cold, wet spring and lack of sunshine, it was the tomatoes that I planted before we went overseas in October that gave us the best returns by far – many of those that I planted upon our return in November didn’t start producing fruit until late January, and with the season turning cold again quickly after that, I ended up tossing out a lot of unripe tomatoes (because there’s only so much green tomato relish you can deal with at any one time).

So, like last year, I have started my tomatoes off this year indoors in Jiffy pots, and they’ve spent the last few weeks soaking up the morning sunshine on the front veranda. I’ve struck plenty of different varieties again, and I’ve made sure that I have plenty of spare pots of each. This way I have been able to plant some out already, while holding some aside to either grow on in pots in the glasshouse, or to plant out as replacements should we get a heavy frost.

A pergola that will hopefully be covered in tomatoes by late summer.

One of the varieties I’ve managed to grow from seed this year is “Giant Tree”, a potato-leaf variety that is supposed to grow up to 6-8 foot tall, allowing it to be trained over a pergola. Unfortunately with this one I was only able to obtain a handful of seeds, so I’m trying to nurse them through any potential frosts with the addition of some cut-off Coke bottles to act as a shield until they get established. We’ve repeated our use of straw bales for the tomatoes this year, as they did well last year once we eventually worked out a proper watering regime. This year however, we’ll be sticking to deep rooted plants (like tomatoes), and thus avoid the mistake of last year in trying to grow shallow-rooted crops like beans and basil.

Musqee de Provence, a large French variety of pumpkin, with dog-resistant guards in place.

I’ve repeated the same early planting process with my cucurbits this year, but given that these go directly into the ground, I’ve also had to shield them with industrial-strength garden stakes, in order to protect them from rampaging puppies. I’m trialling a number of new varieties (for me, anyway), including several different types of pumpkins, zucchinis, cucumbers, watermelons and rockmelons.

A full bed of garlic, four different varieties and hopefully enough crowns to keep us going over summer.

Our garlic and onion crops that have been growing through winter are nearing maturity, and this year we have made sure to plant a lot more than we did last year, with a whole bed devoted to different varieties of garlic, as well as plenty of red, brown and white onions. There’s even a full bed of eschallots that should be ready to pick in early December. We’ve already harvested a bumper crop of beetroot, some of which we’ve roasted, and many more we’ve bottled up in anticipation of many summer barbecues.

A bed of mixed red, brown and white onions nearing maturity.
Another bed of garlic, with red onions and loose-leaf lettuce in the background.

The last major project for this spring will be the planting up of the annual display in the driveway. We missed the boat a little with this, in that we weren’t able to get the weeding and preparation of the bed finished before the crop of Sweet Williams I’d been growing in the glasshouse got too spindly, so we’ll probably end up making a dash to a local nursery in the next couple of weeks to pick up some established seedlings.

The annual bed dug over and ready for planting.

Of course, it being spring, shearing season is well underway, a task a lot more onerous this year since our numbers have risen to 21 (down from 22 as we sadly lost one of our little lambs a few weeks ago to an underlying heart defect). We managed to get the services of “Shane the Shearer” again this year, one of the few shearers around who is not only happy to offer his services to hobby farms, but is also set up to shear alpacas.

Shearing time.

Since our last post, we’ve changed the make-up of our alpaca herd slightly. Unfortunately, Queenie, the black-fleeced alpaca, still had some hormonal issues that had stemmed from her being surrounded by pregnant females while she herself hadn’t fallen pregnant. This manifested in her being quite domineering towards Rosie and High Class, as well as behaving aggressively towards some of the lambs, so after consultation with the breeders, they agreed to swap her over for Pandora, a fawn-coloured female similar to High Class. Apparently she and High Class had been best friends back at their original home, and she’s certainly proven to be a much better fit for Rosie as well.

Pandora, prior to being shorn.

Pandora has an amazing, milk-chocolate coloured mark on her neck that’s reminiscent of a love heart – it’s quite visible as a darker mark on her fleece, but it really stands out once she’s been shorn!

Pandora’s love-heart is highly visible after shearing.

Just like with the tomato planting, knowing just when to shear the alpacas is a bit of a gamble – too soon and you risk exposing them to frosts and cold, windy weather, but too late and they can overheat on hot days. Last year we didn’t get them done until late November (although that was in part due to the fact that we hadn’t been able to find a reliable shearer, and partly due to my falling ill with Legionnaire’s disease). This year however, with predictions of an El Nino and a early start to summer, we decided to bring the shearing forward a bit. Despite a couple of frosty nights, there have already been a couple of warm, sunny days this spring, and I’m sure the girls will be thankful that they aren’t having to walk around in their woollen jackets during the day. We’ve also reopened the lambing paddock that had been shut off since August, so not only do they have access to plenty of fresh grass, they can also take shelter down among the red gums if the weather turns too hot or cold.

The three girls make their way out into the main paddock.
High Class enjoying some fresh grass in the lambing paddock.
Pandora discovered a head-high patch of rushes to wander through.
A couple of the new lambs, enjoying being back in the lush grass of the lambing paddock again.

So as we head into summer, we luckily have lots of green grass in the paddocks, full water tanks, and plenty of moisture in the soil. The long range predictions all look good at this stage for this to be a short-lived El Nino, with a return to wetter conditions by late December. Fingers (and toes) crossed. In the meantime, we have a group of local volunteers about to come on to the property to plant over 400 native trees and shrubs down by the creek, as part of a project to restore habitat along Axe Creek between Strathfieldsaye and its confluence with the Campaspe River a kilometre or so downstream from us. More on that next post.

Looking across the main paddock, with the tree line of Axe Creek in the distance.