On gurus and mentors

'The time has come,' the Walrus said,

'To talk of many things:

Of shoes--and ships--and sealing wax--

Of cabbages--and kings.'

- from Through the looking-glass by Lewis Carroll
(Recognise the jabberwocky?)

Today it suddenly occurred to me, that refers back to a poem that mystified me as a schoolgirl.

And kings as cabbages

re-enter Rome

by .... any English literature or poetry students out there? 

If you DON’T Blot or blog, lots of good blogs here, and the pictures are for you. The Ungardener sat for an hour with his tripod, watching the mountain, and waiting for the moon to rise on the 19th of January.

Moon rise 1  -  
(The sun ...)

These are mostly Blotanists I have, do and will ask when I need HELP! Stuart has the new guru dashboard up in beta. There were new blogs from Britain, Canada, Germany, South Africa, and many US States! Got a friend who is waiting for approval, see if she is on that list … (Last one - Lexington, Kentucky - going going ...)

Guru Sylvia has no blog of her own, no fretting ‘What shall I blog??’ and has picked 18855 posts.

Guru Frances of Faire Garden is the most faved. One of the first Blotanists from December 2007.

Guru at Jean’s Garden is a sociologist. If I ask nicely, will she write us a blog post - To a new Blotanist from her mentor? One size fits all, but it doesn’t, as Jean could explain so lucidly. Bloggers-and-Blotanists-continuing-the-conversation

Moon rise 2  -  
(... shall not smite thee ...)

Guru Susan of Ink and Penstemon to bridge the gap between tweets on Twitter and long posts. 'Many may also feel intimidated by the prospect of maintaining a blog, but not of a Twitter feed or FB page.'

New Fellow Carolyn to represent commercial sites. She writes so it appeals to me, on another continent, in another climate. Not just an advertorial.  New-Natives-ask-Doug-Tallamy

Guru Nell Jean because she and I have been waiting impatiently for Blotanical Mark 3. She explained some things to me, which I just couldn’t fathom! Polls-are-likely-skewed

New Fellow Fer because he is a new blogger, so popular that his World-garden-blog-carnival drew 50 entries (I am green, with envy, but he earned those 50!).  He is a Mexican living in Japan, speaks Spanish – bridging language and geography divides. And he gardens on a tiny high-rise balcony in Tokyo Yokohama. 

Moon rise 3  -  
(... by day ...)

Guru Donna GWGT because she loves anything to do with computers and understands the software that makes me want to run screaming into the night. January-magazine

New Fellow Gesine from Germany to draw in a larger circle of German Blotanists.  Vom-Apfelbaum - goodbye old apple tree. BTW if you use Google Chrome as your browser, it says politely ... This is in ... German ... Shall I translate?

Fellow Carol at May Dreams of Garden Bloggers Bloom Day. Joined in March 2007, Blotanical rank 4, her mailbox is currently overflowing with birthday wishes.

Busy Master Meredith at Great Stems sharing her delight and sense of wonder between little people and nature. A mother who started at Blotanical with me and has gone on to create a wildlife garden at her children’s school. School-daze

... Nor the moon by night!

What I am missing is a foodie, grow our own, allotmenteering, smallholding … mentor.

That new blog from Cape Town We-can-fly has two women behind it, in the tradition of Masters Helen and Sarah at Toronto Gardens Where-do-creative-ideas-come-from? and Gurus Town Mouse and Country Mouse in California But-is-it-a-garden? Two people doing ‘What shall I blog??’ is less stress for you, and two gardens are more fun for us.

Oh and gurus, remember Valeri and her small Cornish garden? The garden blog is dormant, but her dyeing2sew is flying high! 'I am busy dyeing fabric for our debut at the Exeter Quilt Show at the end of March'.

PS If you are a Blotanical Guru, been busy, out of the loop ... next time you are on your My Plot, click forums to catch up, then go to your new dashboard to investigate blogs in waiting ...

Pictures by Jurg, and words 

by Diana of Elephant's Eye

- wildlife gardening in Porterville, 
near Cape Town in South Africa   

   

(If you mouse over brown text, it turns shriek pink. 

Those are my links)

Wildflower Wednesday, South Africa in January

I started last Christmas, to record what is blooming in my garden each month. Not an exhaustive record. More a strolling around the garden, what catches my eye. As a garden resolution for this year, I’ll join Gail at Clay and Limestone for her Wildflower Wednesday, and this year I will only record indigenous/South African flowers. (Leaving the roses and other exotics to shine on my mid-month garden walk).   

This January has been perhaps not as hot as usual, but it is as dry as usual. The level in the town dam is sinking to muddy summer water.  The garden shows itself in summer’s drab greens and browns. I need to take Town Mouse’s advice and cut back perennials and shrubs hard this autumn, so we will get fresh green.

Cyperus and bulrush

Restio and wild grasses

There is some colour in the garden, apart from a few beleaguered summer roses. An ankle-high drift of orange and yellow Bulbinella spreads across the garden. The wild Jasmine we planted outside the bedroom to cover a rainwater tank. Vibrant pink Phyllis van Heerden Ruttyruspolia (a hybrid whose parents come from Tropical and East Africa, gets thirsty!) And a gentle bluey mauve Freylinia, with long trumpets, supposed to attract moths and butterflies.

Freylinia, jasmine
Bulbinella, Ruttyruspolia

There are spots of colour scattered around from a variety of wild pelargoniums. Species, rather than horticultural, this year’s, must have, NEW!

species pelargoniums

Salmon Pelargonium

In Paradise, our rose garden, the blue sage has claimed the white/winter/pale bed. But our Mandela’s Gold Strelitzia, having moved with us from the Camps Bay garden, is coming into bloom. Butter yellow, with a soft blue tongue, unlike the intense colours of the original species. Whose leaves you see beyond and to the right.

Mandela's Gold Strelitzia

Between that sage and lots of Plumbago the garden shows itself in a blue mood. We have Plumbago in the original white and faded sky blue. And also the new, more intense blue, of Royal Cape.

Plumbago, Royal Cape below

Looking for flowers today, I was trying to capture these tiny yellow paintbrush daisy flowers. Where I found Gail’s tiny bees. I did! The camera didn’t. And these harvester ants hard at work.

Harvester ant

Trying to find a way to show you just how tiny these flowers are, I used the macro in a Mason jar technique. Using the rim of the jar/bowl/vase as a tiny tripod to sharpen the focus. The garden is blue, but neither the sage nor the Plumbago survives in captivity. Once picked, they sulk and shed flowers. This is my January garden bouquet for Noelle. (I  do have tiny vases with roses here, almost every month).

January flowers

Behold, the ghost of blue sage. Like a homeopathic remedy. The flower is out of sight, leaving a shimmer of vibrant green from the calyx, which looks more purple in life. And a wash of sea green enhanced turquoise, from flowers which are a much quieter faded blue to my own eye.

Ghost of blue sage

Pictures and words 

by Diana of Elephant's Eye

- wildlife gardening in Porterville, 
near Cape Town in South Africa   

   

(If you mouse over brown text, it turns shriek pink. 

Those are my links)

Goodbye Adsense

I spend a lot of my time on this blog. Writing. Sorting pictures. Preparing posts. Most of my readers come via Blotanical so I network there, reading blogs. Leaving some comments each day. Following up Picks and Favers and new blogs and Followers and Commenters. Sometimes ploughing desperately thru my Google Reader, which is overflowing because I dared to miss a day. I’m sorry! I went to Cape Town to have lunch with my mother!

Altogether, a few days each week. Many hours most days. As Esther shared her motivation for earning ad revenue strawberry-pot-dream, and Jodi bloomingwriter, here is my spin. Living in a small country town, having worked in university libraries, my opportunities to continue that line of work are … So I fell for the Google Adsense hype.

Jaundiced eye
A weaver

I deliberately tried daily posts for the Twelve Days of Christmas - fourteen rand, one pound, two dollars - not better than a slap in the face with a wet fish. In seven weeks I have earned fifty-six rand, five British pounds, or eight US dollars. Autumnbelle at mynicegarden my-first-google-adsense-money. Google would have paid me when I reached one thousand rand. After YEARS of us looking at their ads? I don’t think so.

Adsense for Feeds was futile. Earned zero zilch nada nothing – in the weeks I had it up. You my readers, as I do, use the Feed as an alert to a new post, click thru to the blog, and never even see the ads.

There was the odd ad which earned real money when clicked, but most earn cents, at the very best. Our cents, not yours. Heartfelt thanks to each of you who were kind and clicked to support me.

Adsense and I
Dove and sparrow

Moral of that story is - Google is earning the real revenue from umpteen tiny blogs like mine, who fall for the hype. Townmouse has an ad-free-blog and a badge to prove it!

What made me delete the ads today was this. With difficulty, I worked out how to block the lonely hearts ads you see everywhere. Those are the ones that earn a little more. Today those cheap nasty ads were back! Enough. I’ll forfeit my R56. Goodbye Adsense.

Pictures by Jurg, 

words by Diana of Elephant's Eye
- wildlife gardening in Porterville, 
near Cape Town in South Africa   

   

(If you mouse over brown text, it turns shriek pink. 

Those are my links)

Fruit of the Mediterranean

Checking where, which site, my blog visitors came from, I fell over gimcw??? Gardening in mediterranean climates worldwide. They have added me to the gimcw list of blogs. One of my earliest comments was from a Spaniard – ho ho ho a Mediterranean garden way down South at the bottom of Africa! So yes, thank you, for a lower-case-mediterranean!

For years, ever since it was just an idea, I have wanted to visit the Eden Project in Cornwall. Was fascinating to see mediterranean plants from around the world gathered together, where I could see the actual growing plants. Not just a dry list of names, nor even frozen pictures. There I learnt that my lemon verbena comes from South America. Mexican born Fer in Japan (currently hosting a blog carnival) has promised to find us some good South and Central American garden blogs. Company for our lemon verbena, granadilla (South American, that's why I can't spell it) and guava.

A sparrow and weaver sharing our figs

Admit it - a thing of great beauty!
No wonder Cecil John Rhodes brought us
European starlings

Sadly Australian plants mostly make me think of invasive aliens. There’s the waratah, an odd looking to South African eyes, protea. Geraldton wax flower is a pretty little thing beloved by florists. Oh and the creeping Australian violet my mother has been growing in her garden since I was a child.

The Californians I have only represented by some sulky thrift. We want cool sea breezes – it is too HOT here! THEY are awash with our invasive aliens, but we don’t seem to have acquired theirs for our gardens. Shirley poppy?

Lemons and olives

Citrus swallowtail
If you grow oranges and lemons you have seen the 'orange dog' caterpillars
Flashing their scented horns at you! 

And of course the true Mediterranean – figs, olives and lemons. Lavender, oregano, basil and my Dusty Miller. All present and correct.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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(Warning – rant coming!) Lately I have come up against depressing, despairing, demoralising posts about food, and farming, and if we are what we eat, WHAT are we? Buckets of poison, cruelty and suffering? Elephant’s Eye is vegetarian, but we sometimes eat eggs. Always free range, preferably organic. In our pushing 40C summer heat, we often drive past long metal sheds of battery chickens. The two of us have milk in our tea/coffee, yoghurt on our breakfast muesli, usually cheese for lunch, so we share some responsibility for veal calves and cows. However organic or free range the milk was, there are still the calves …

South American granadilla and guava

The bees destroyed by poison, save the bees? Pigs, pregnant and confined to pig sized cages for life. Their legs just pillars to stand on, no walking possible. What fish do you eat? Are you aware, do you care, that some species are endangered? And the seabirds that depend on your ocean fish leavings to survive? Big-fish-fight. The ultimate greenwash is biodiesel. How can we, in a hungry world, grow food crops and turn them into diesel to burn in a car’s engine.

Plums and apples from up North

What bemuses me is, if you look at lists for the main cause of death in people – half of us die of obesity and the dis-ease of too much, and the other half die of starvation and the dis-ease of too little. What a paradise our world could be, if we would just shift a little of the too much across to those who have too little. If that wasted food could have been diverted to the hungry instead? 'When the price of oil is high, it becomes economically attractive to divert crops from use in food to use in biofuels.'  Food inflation hits the poor hardest. The poor women who feed their families. Reduce your FoodPrint by choosing Cool Food - organic, local and seasonal - from Food-and-global-warming. 

Pictures by Jurg and Diana, 

words by Diana of Elephant's Eye
- wildlife gardening in Porterville, 
near Cape Town in South Africa   

   

(If you mouse over brown text, it turns shriek pink. 

Those are my links)

Sunbirds, malachite and collared

Return to October November last year. There were young sunbirds. We have two obvious sorts. The large green ones are the malachite sunbirds. Striking for two reasons. First they are twice as big, 24 cm, as their smaller 12-14 cm cousins. Then they go for the shimmering malachite green all over.

Malachite sunbird

Malachite sunbird on Melianthus

Malachite is the banded stone containing copper. Think of the bluey-green of verdigris. When we had our white metal garden furniture repainted we chose ‘verdigreen’, vaguely turquoise. The string of beads comes from Zaire. From Vicky whose family lived there. In earlier days, her grandparents had fled the Belgian Congo. Her grandfather was an artist, worked for our Department of Nature Conservation. There is a poster/billboard we still see. Bokkie the grysbok, with a devastated landscape smouldering behind him. Mediterranean climate bloggers can paint their own picture with their wide eyed ‘grysbok’ saying Look What You Have Done!

Malachite beads from Zaire
on a bed of Lamb's ears
Dry shade? But is is TOO HOT!!

Malachite

The littler cousins have the catchy names of (greater and) lesser double-collared sunbirds. This for a bird the same size and ecological niche as humming-birds. Tho ours don’t hover, if they can perch somewhere convenient nearby. She even contrives to perch while bathing, on a fig leaf.

Juvenile sunbird

Juvenile sunbird

The Melianthus or honey-flower, was planted both for these birds to harvest the nectar, and for me to enjoy the glaucous blue-green leaves with their pinking sheared edges.

Juvenile sunbird

Juvenile sunbird

These birds add moths, spiders, larvae, beetles and flies to their nectar diet. The lesser double-collared likes trees and they spend a large part of their day hunting insects in the shade of the ash trees. And chatting to Spirulino, whose cage hangs there.

Juvenile sunbird in the secret garden

This garden is not so disciplined about Planting a Succession of nectar-bearing plants for our little birds. We do have aloes in winter, but the brightest and best, tall spike broke before they could finish it. I see the birds on the pig’s ears Cotyledon orbiculata which grows with joyful exuberance, so that’s good! We have yellow, Jodi’s porange (pink-orange) and red Tecomaria capensis. Scrambling shrubs like Plumbago from the Addo sub-tropical area, expecting to be trashed by a passing herd of elephants, in our garden they need grooming to shape.   

Chocolat, NOT black

Lying in the afternoon sun at the garden gate, Chocolat catches the low rays and shows why he is NOT a Black Cat. Buzz off now, I'm asleep!

Bird info from Joy Frandsen’s Birds of the South Western Cape.

Pictures by Jurg and Diana, 

words by Diana of Elephant's Eye
- wildlife gardening in Porterville, 
near Cape Town in South Africa   

   

(If you mouse over brown text, it turns shriek pink. 

Those are my links)

Water, drought in Beaufort West, and floods

When we visited the Karoo National Park last November we hadn't realised that the 10 km distant town of Beaufort West is gripped by a severe drought. Such severe drought, the worst in living memory, that the town is installing a system to recycle sewage effluent into drinking water. As they have done for years in Namibia. As many of us do, if our water source is downstream from the next town. So many  pharmaceutical drug residues lurking in our drinking water.  

Beaufort West dam from news.za.msn  for 9 December

Notice at the Karoo NP
NPs ask us to JOIN them in conserving water! 

Tourists who come to the Karoo National Park neither expect nor want suburban bright green lawn. If you must have a lawn at the park manager's house and the offices, try  polyculture-lawn-primer. You've seen those notices in hotels – please reuse your towels – save water. Do what we say, not what we do. These sprinklers were running. All day. Every day. About one quarter of the rise in global sea levels is due to the transfer of fresh water into the oceans, as much of the groundwater used for irrigation is running off into rivers, or raining into the ocean circleofblue. And this next to a town that is begging passing travellers to bring them bottled water! 4-million-litres

Karoo NP
On the left what we say
On the right what we do!

Karoo NP
Why the suburban green lawn?
Why waste that water??
Why not lead by example and garden for and with nature??

In Colorado they are only allowed to use water once. Throwing-out-the-dishwater. Why? Is it already too polluted? Or may they not pollute it twice for the next user downstream? Reusing grey water, from the bath and washing machine, converts the phosphates from laundry detergent, and mere human dirt into plant growth. Instead of polluting and contaminating rivers, and the sea. If we use grey water systems 40-60% would be returned to the water table via the garden.   solarwaterharvest .  This frighteningly chemically green lawn is sending artificial fertiliser running off into the pristine Karoo National Park.

Karoo NP pristine Karoo landscaping for the guest cottages!

Beaufort West has drought. Queensland, Brazil and Sri Lanka have floods. Dams on the Vaal and Orange rivers in South Africa are overfull, the sluice-gates must be opened, downstream is flooded. saweatherobserver. Update: no water, so we will use it for fracking!!!!

Water was formed with our planet 4.45 billion years ago  worldwater. About 97 percent of water is ocean saltwater. Most freshwater is locked up in the polar icecaps. Only .003 percent of the earth's water is available for us to use  landscapeforlife

Karoo NP but those clouds brought no rain

I've been reading about rain, said Jean. That utterly distinctive smell, when rain first starts to fall – two scientists have analyzed it. They’ve named it ‘petrichor’ from the Greek for stone and for the ‘blood’ that flows through the veins of the gods. It’s the scent of an oil produced by plants partially decomposed, undergoing oxidation and nitration, a combination of three compounds. The first raindrops reach into stone or pavement and release this plant oil, which we smell as it is washed away. 

We can only smell it as it is washed away.

– From The winter vault by Anne Michaels. (The term was coined in 1964 by two Australian researchers, Bear and Thomas, for an article in the journal Nature. In 1965 they showed that the oil retards seed germination and early plant growth.)

Pictures by Jurg and Diana, 

words by Diana of Elephant's Eye
- wildlife gardening in Porterville, 
near Cape Town in South Africa   

   

(If you mouse over brown text, it turns shriek pink. 

Those are my links)

Blotanical's Stuart is back at work

Since Nell Jean asked poll-blogging-gardening-facebook-and-Blotanical, this is just in Blotanical-forums-suggest-features-Stuart-TODAY

Just to let you know that Blotanical is beginning the start of a major update. I envisage that this major update will take approximately 3-6 months to fully implement and will be a complete overhaul of the site and its functionality.

In the meantime, new features will come on stream sporadically. At present I am working on a Guru dashboard that will start to offer Guru level Blotanists more functionality and control of the site. The first part of this feature will be allowing Gurus to approve/reject new garden blogs and offer themselves as mentors to the new members.

This is an exciting phase of this site's development as we render control of the site back to those who use it most. 

I look forward to your feedback/comments/suggestions.

PS. If you have some skills with Javascript/Ajax and would like some extra contract work then please get in touch with me via my email at scrobins[at]westnet[dot]com.

Link from Diana of Elephant's Eye
- wildlife gardening in Porterville South Africa   

   

(If you mouse over brown text, it turns shriek pink. 

Those are my links)