Category Archives: Findings

Lightening! And Thunder!

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We had a storm a few weeks back. Not a huge, long one. Not one that was memorable in any really big way from where we were, inside, with our torches and candles, because in our part of the world if it’s even just plain old raining the power goes out. For a short while, it was a loud storm, with some impressive thunder, but nothing that I would have pegged as remarkable, or even that close.

We were therefore rather surprised to find this on venturing down the back paddock later in the week:

One of our pecans had been hit by lightening! Truly. We could see where the lightening had entered at the top, and traveled down the tree, exploding the base of each branch it came to. We’re still cleaning the tree up, and doing what we can, and we’re not sure whether it will need to come out or not. We really don’t want to lose it… but may have to if it will just up and die anyway. This below is just one of the split branches, taken when I shimmied up the tree to saw a few hangers off:

On the bright side, losing the tree could mean MULCH! Oodles of mulch. We’ll see.

Hole in one

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When weeding one of the perennial vegie beds out the back, using a mattock as you can see (isn’t that what one uses to weed?), I found this:

It was a hole. It seemed pretty deep, and the sides opened out under the ground, and we couldn’t tell whether there were tunnels attached or not. Rats and rabbits crossed our minds, as both have been sighted around the place…

We looked, and looked, and carefully excavated some more, and found that it had some weird dead wasp debris in the bottom, though we couldn’t guess how it had come to be in there. It was a little like finding the insect equivalent of an ancient tomb, complete with dessicated bodies! Ick!

From the point that we pulled out a bit of the waspy remains, and began talking in David-Attenborough-type hushed tones, it all got a bit left of centre and surreal. Eventually we stopped joking about resident rodents tunnelling under our vegie beds, pulling seedlings down by the roots, leaving no trace, and just filled the hole in and got on with the weeding. Using the mattock, of course.

And now there’s a zucchini on top. I hope decomposed wasp agrees with it!