ANNE
LAYTON-BENNETT

By the time March comes around all the daily harvesting of produce does become a bit tedious and rather a grind, but there are compensations. One of them is having a steady crop of raspberries and strawberries for weeks on end. The strawberries have been into their second fruiting for…

Green and gold frogs that is, and who continue to call the sunken bath tub beside the little garden potting shed, home. Actually our whole back garden seems to be something of a frog nursery, and although the green and golds rule, we’ve also spotted tiny tree frogs amongst the…

At least not when the temperatures are as warm as they’ve been this summer, and there’s a lot of harvesting to be done. I'm rather over getting up at 5.30 every morning to walk Della dog, and then start the picking. Breakfast has become a hasty meal for the duration,…

Now we have two (at least) green and gold frogs in the sunken bath tub. Although both are a similar size neither is the bright green of a mature frog, so we’re assuming they’ve still a bit of growing up to do. One of them especially was quite timid to…

We’ve always had frogs on the property, both where we are now, and at our previous place a few kilometres away. Initially though we didn’t realise the large green frogs that we regularly spotted basking in the spring and summer sunshine were becoming increasingly rare. The first inkling these frogs…

A month on and we still have 11 chickens so all three mothers have done well. Being an old hand at parenting Granny Chook has abandoned her brood already so the oldest teenagers now have to fend for themselves. They’re all proving to be skittish, but the rather daffy, and…

Following a quoll attack last year, (or that of a feral cat; the jury is still out on that one), we were down to just three bantam chooks, one of whom is ‘Granny’ and well into the equivalent of chook menopause. Or so we thought. We saved a young bantam…

Summer time, and the living is easy, or so the song would have us believe. Personally I'm not so sure. At the moment my life involves getting up at the crack of dawn, taking Della dog for a walk, eating a quick breakfast, and then it’s on with the sunscreen…

Death is hardly the most cheerful topic to be writing about on the first day of a brand new year, but as the saying goes, it comes to us all eventually. And for my 19-year-old Aggie-cat her time to depart this Earth is rapidly approaching. For most of us there’s…