Where was Dame Plum the Kelpie dog? She was only here a moment ago. We’d been working splitting boulders down at the forest edge. Without noticing, Plum had entered the forest. I’m very uncool about unsupervised dogs, there’s a lot to go wrong out there, and dogs can be stupid. Come! The firm command was yelled off into the forest. A moment. Then from out of the trees emerges Dame Plum, but she looks a little funny.
One of her front legs was acting a bit weird. The dog valiantly ran to my feet with the last of her energy. She flopped onto her side and began performing the funky chicken dance. Dame Plum was having a seizure. All you can do at such moments is try to calm her down, and simply be there for the dog. It looks painful with her back arched back, the eyes a thousand miles away and her tongue hanging out. Hope she doesn’t bite her tongue.
After a few minutes the worst of it passes and the dog sort of woozily resumes normality. After ten minutes, she’s mostly back to normal. In four years, the Kelpie has had five seizures that I’m aware of. It would be hard for her to hide the fact she’d had one that I’d missed, because for a day or two afterwards, the dog isn’t running around as fast, and this dog breed does everything fast.
We keep a record of the dates, and also the duration of the seizures. Some dogs can have them on an alarmingly regular basis, so once or twice per year is at least something to be grateful for. Looking back over the records a pattern emerged out of the primordial fog of information. It was odd though that Dame Plum only seemed to have the episodes during spring or autumn. Hmm. Wonder what it means.
Sometimes it pays to think about a problem for a bit and consider patterns, because it is then you remember that Ruby (the other Kelpie) did something weird about two weeks ago. Remember, unsupervised dogs = not cool, but then they’re fast so trouble strikes quickly. Turn your back and attention away for but a moment, and the dogs are a quarter mile away. They’re that fast.
Thinking upon the incident with Ruby, she’d also been in the same area a fortnight ago. It was another back turned for a but moment. Come! Was again commanded. This time however, Ruby was off and racing in the wrong direction, all crazy like. The dog ended up heading down to the fern lined creek at the bottom of the property. Fortunately she was barking a distressed call, so we knew where to find her. And when we did, Ruby was running backwards and forwards in a small creek gully as if she were held fast in the grip of a brain lock, whatever that is.
Without wanting to scare the dog and have her run off again in a new direction, we watched her a few moments. Approaching slowly was the order of the day. But seeing us humans broke the brain lock, and Ruby came over and sat. She too was a bit woozy, but unlike Dame Plum, the unsettled dog had to walk the half kilometre back up the hill again. The kelpie was way too heavy for me to carry her that far. It’s uphill and through the bush. At least the creek was a very beautiful spot to have a brain malfunction.
Regular readers will recall the other bit of dog weirdness from last week. Ollie knocked over a wallaby in the orchard. Wallabies are a slightly smaller lone forest dwelling kangaroo. Whilst they are smaller than a kangaroo, they’re still big enough to give the sensitive to danger person pause for thought. Yet Ollie knocked the wallaby to the ground. I had to launch in and remove the large dog out of the altercation by his collar. The dazed wallaby bounced off and headed away and down the hill. It was something of a mystery because what was the usually nocturnal marsupial doing in the orchard during the daylight hours? That like never happens, except last week. And why didn’t the wallaby hop away for its very life? That’s the usual reaction from the marsupial at the sight of humans and dogs.
Frankly, there were more questions than answers. Like all good detective stories, there was something nagging at the back of my brain about the dates of Dame Plums seizures. Spring / Autumn. Autumn / Spring. The idea kept bouncing around my head. Surely it meant something? A few days of cogitation upon the problem yielded nothing. The dogs activities were curtailed.
One morning when reading the news, there was an article about some person dying from alleged mushroom poisoning. Awful. Oh yeah, spring and autumn are mushroom season. Hang on a second: spring / autumn. That’s when the metaphorical penny dropped. Those idiots (excluding Ollie) had been eating magic or toxic mushrooms. Being surrounded by forest, there are mushrooms everywhere at this time of year.
An immediate meeting of the canines was called for. There the dogs sat at attention looking up at me with three little innocent faces waiting upon the words of wisdom and otherwise sound advice. And I’d inadvertently become just like the school councillor in the South Park cartoon.
Now then kids, we’re going to talk today about psychedelic mushrooms. You shouldn’t do mushrooms. Drugs are bad, mkay?
The dogs probably ignored me, so they’re all restricted for the foreseeable future. All canine freedoms have been curtailed. They can sook. They can whine, it’ll do them no good. My mind has been made up.
It’s my opinion that the dogs didn’t consume the mushrooms directly. I believe that they have eaten the scat of a forest critter (like a wallaby!) which had dined directly upon the mushrooms.
Wind is changing though. Ruby is in dog obedience school and has been for a two months. Dame Plum is on a short leash. We’ve had dogs of various breeds here in the forest with us for eighteen years. It’s not always smooth sailing with dogs in this wild environment, but there’s never been anything like this level of mischief before. Those two kelpies are like having a pair of wolves living in the household. Both of them are wilful, and you can see them thinking about matters and weighing up the situation and their options. The challenge is fine, and we’ll learn and adapt faster than them. The mistake the dogs made was that by escalating their bad behaviour, they’ve caused me to start thinking about them. This crazy situation can’t continue, mkay!
Being near to a forest, there are a lot of mushrooms growing right now:
At the beginning of the week, the local council lifted the burn off restrictions for rurL landowners. During the warmer and drier parts of the year, landholders are prohibited from burning off forest materials out in the forest, for obvious reasons – people are not to be trusted. It rained late last week, and so we thought the conditions were good to burn off some more of the old loggers mess.
Bizarrely, in the new area we cleaned up, the loggers had also left the tree stumps out of the ground, but this time with the right side facing upwards.
Observant readers will note the tree stump has a distinct line of burn marks. At a guess the tree was harvested after the 1983 Ash Wednesday bushfires. The loggers have about five years to harvest trees killed by the fire, before their milling value is reduced. At least this tree stump was easy to roll down onto the burn off. This next stump was much bigger, and had to be cut up into smaller chunks.
Chainsaws are an amazing technology. The much larger tree stump was cut into three sections all of which were rolled into the burn off fire.
Best to clean all this stuff up, before another 1983 style bushfire arrives all uncontrolled and stuff. It will, sooner or later so best be prepared by slowly reducing the forest fuel loads, that way the bushfire won’t burn as hot. The really hot fires kill everything in their path, birds, forest critters, trees, soil life etc. The burn off fire ran for three days, but was much smaller on the second and third days.
The low centre of gravity mower is a real beast of a machine, and we run it over the clean up areas afterwards. The cutting blades mulch up anything left over thus enriching the soil. It’s also powerful enough to level out soil mounds, and generally makes the area easier to attend to in the future. The machine gets pretty dirty though, especially the underside of the steel cutting deck. The forest soil is acidic and if left caked on to the underside of the machine, it’ll slowly rust the steel.
We do most of the maintenance work with the machines nowadays, and a month or so back I noticed the mower had a pipe for a deck washer. A deck washer sprays water under the mower whilst the cutting blades are in operation. The water and cutting blades basically wash the under-bits of the mower which are the dirtiest and hardest to clean. I had to make up a series of connectors to get a normal garden hose to plug onto the pipe. Then we hooked the machine up to the hose.
I’ve never used a deck washer before, but this will become part of the normal after use care of this particular machine. Cheaper than replacing the expensive steel cutting deck, blades and arms.
It’s been remarked upon elsewhere, that regular maintenance saves a lot of unnecessary cost with expensive repair bills.
The plants in the greenhouse are growing well. We’ve had another great chilli harvest, and the fruits will hang onto this bush for a few months. The plant is now in its second year. Chilli plants are productive I believe for about six years, but outside of the greenhouse, they’re annuals.
A few weeks ago, we sowed some radish seeds in the greenhouse. Despite the now cooler weather, they’re growing really well and we have enough to get through the winter months.
Near to the rose terraces there is a dwarf pomegranate bush. It’s produced a fruit.
Is it any good though?
Onto the flowers:
The temperature outside now at about 10am is 14’C (57’F). So far for last year there has been 333.2mm (13.1 inches) which is up from last weeks total of 325.0mm (12.8 inches)