THE VALUE OF SHADE

Recently, when reading Peter Andrew’s book Back From the Brink, it made me take a good look at my upright willow trees and ask myself if I was utilizing them to full advantage. I planted these trees in 1998 at the end of a drainage system to serve three purposes.

• To soak up excess water
• To create a green view  behind our vegetable garden
• To provide a wind break

I quickly became disenchanted with these trees, as they spread their roots out into the area where I had previously planted pumpkins. It was a space where the pumpkins could spread. But, with the willow trees stealing all the moisture from the ground, my pumpkin crops began to fail. We ripped the ground and pulled up the roots, but within 6 months the roots had again colonized the area. The past couple of years this ground has remained bare. The trees were serving their intended purpose, but they had restricted my use of this portion of my garden.

Pruning willow

The willow trees had grown too tall. In August 2008 while they were deciduous, I hired men to reduce the height of the trees by cutting them back with a chainsaw. I used the solid wood for the fires and the twiggy branches for support structures for climbing beans and sweet-peas. When they grew again they had a bushier shape. I have seen trees like these repeatedly cut back to fence height to create a dense hedge. Read the rest of this entry »

TEA FOR TWO, OR MORE

As a child I was only allowed to drink milk or water until the age of twelve, with a soft drink as a special treat during an occasional visit to town. My parents drank Bushell’s tea with their meals.

Nowadays there are multiple drink choices available for adults and children alike. One has only to walk into a supermarket to see rows of bottles and cans stacked high containing cordials, fruit juices and carbonated drinks. At the dairy counter there will be different sized containers of milk, in plastic or cardboard, offering a variety of flavours.

Move to the racks of tea and coffee and you will have a choice of roast coffee beans from all over the world. You can buy beans or ground coffee, some of it decaf. Usually in the same aisle it is possible to select dried teas in surgical dressings, as one of my friends once described the sachets commonly called tea bags. You will be confronted with brands and varieties from many countries.

It was on a trip to the USA in 1981 that I first encountered the powdered concoctions mixed with water which the local people called iced tea. Later, when I visited my German in-laws in 1990 I was offered a choice of herbal teas with the evening meal. These were always served as a hot tea.

In 1992 we moved to the Granite Belt to establish Das Helwig Haus B&B. Amongst our first visitors were Meg and Peter Stevenson with their children Darren and Belinda. During an excursion they discovered a herb farm and returned with several pots for my garden. One of these little plants grew into a Lemon Verbena bush.

Lemon verbena

Read the rest of this entry »

THE REMEMBRANCE FIELD

Most visitors to my garden understand the significance of the red Flanders poppies growing in the Remembrance Field and the edging hedge of the herb rosemary. Rosemary is the token worn on ANZAC Day and the red poppy is worn on 11th November the date the Armistice Treaty was signed at Versailles to end World War One.

“But, what is the significance of the blue cornflowers?” they ask.

Cornflowers and poppies

My answer is of particular interest to the residents of Brisbane, the capital city of Queensland, because the planting of blue cornflowers represents our remembrance of the crew, doctors and nurses of the Centaur an Australian Hospital ship sunk off our coast by a Japanese submarine. Read the rest of this entry »

CONTROLLING WATER FLOW

Our farm at Glen Aplin is blessed with both a river frontage and an area which was a swampy flood plain when we bought the property in 1992. That swampy area had an eroded gully, was over grown with tussock grass and thistles, and also dotted with deep holes.  It was infested with blackberry brambles, riddled with rabbit warrens and I hardly ventured to enter the area for fear of snakes. When I saw my little Jack Russell Terrier dog fall into one of the steep sided holes filled with water and that he couldn’t get out without assistance, I decided something must be done. Eberhard, is almost pedantic about tidiness, so the sight of this wild area affronted him and neither of us thought it gave a pleasant outlook for our Das Helwig Haus B&B guests.

With the assistance of neighbours we burned off the tussock grass and brambles. We employed a contractor with a grader to level the region, filling in all the holes, but still leaving the eroded gully. Then we went to the Queensland Department of Primary Industries and paid for a water engineer to design two dams with a connecting water course and an overflow towards the river. In 1996 contractors were hired to undertake this work. No sooner were the earthworks completed and before they could move their machinery off our land a week of steady summer rain filled our dams and river to overflowing. To illustrate what happened I will used photographs taken in 2008.

Flood entry

The Stanthorpe Shire Council built three of these culverts which channel flood water under Mt. Stirling Road and into our first dam. Read the rest of this entry »

THE DARLING DOWNS

When I was a child I was taught that the Darling Downs possessed one of the best areas of agricultural soil of the world - the black color indicating the wealth of humus. But what is the Darling Downs? It is a region of country west of the Great Dividing Range of eastern Australia in south-eastern Queensland. Toowoomba, at the crest of the Great Dividing Range, is the city gateway to the west. This city has become notable not only for it annual floral ‘Carnival of Flowers’, but as a city of boarding schools plus a University to serve students from the south western portion of the State.  It is also a haven where the elderly retire because of large hospitals, other medical facilities and a cool mountain climate. Warwick is a smaller city at the southern end of the Darling Downs. Dalby is at the northern extremity and by the time you have reached Roma in the west you have left the Darling Downs and entered the grazing country of the Maranoa.

In my youth I lived north of  Dalby near the Bunya Mountains and attended boarding school in Warwick - another city of private schools which provide high school education for children from more isolated regions. When I married Stewart McIver I lived on farms at Bell prior to moving into Dalby. When that marriage ended I moved to Toowoomba where I met and married Eberhard Helwig and we later moved to Stanthorpe in the border highlands south of Warwick.

Map of the Darling Downs

Last weekend we left home on the Friday morning and drove via Warwick and Toowoomba to reach Dalby 3 hours later where I spent the afternoon signing books at the Dalby BOOK CITY store. The next day we caught up with family and friends at Bell where my 94 year old father was the guest of honour at a Campdraft. Sunday we spent another 3 hours driving home on the western route through Millmerran to Inglewood before turning east to our home just south of Stanthorpe. I sketched this map so you could follow our travels. Read the rest of this entry »

BOOK LAUNCH 2

1. I wrote a manuscript
2. I found a mentor
3. He became my literary agent
4. He could not convince an Australian publishing firm to produce my book Wildflowers, wilderness and wine
5. He edited my book and place it online with http://stores.lulu.com/strictlyliterary
6. It began to sell ‘Print on Demand’
7. 94% of readers gave it a positive review. Lulu gave it 5***** and placed it on the Amazon.com site
8. I arranged to have the book printed for distribution within Australia.
9. I launched the book
10. I must market the book

Border Post article

Read the rest of this entry »

BOOK LAUNCH

My book, Wildflowers, wilderness and wine has been selling Internationally since February. Now the first consignment of printed books is ready for an Australian book launch.  Wildflowers, wilderness and wine will be presented by our local member of State Parliament, Lawrence Springborg, at the Stanthorpe Art Gallery on Tuesday night 28th July. Eberhard and I are putting on a typical Granite Belt party. We have hired the art gallery as our venue, arranged for the serving of wines from Harrington Glen Wines and for Claudia from Thunderbolt Farm to provide her quality hor d’eouvres.

Front cover

What are my hopes, what are my dreams, what will this book do for my community? Read the rest of this entry »

HONG KONG 6

It will be no surprise to you that I spent a day in Hong Kong walking through two gardens. I’m going to write two separate posts to describe these gardens to allow me to use sufficient photographs to adequately illustrate their differences.

The first garden we walked through was the Kowloon Walled City Park. This was once a lawless, high-rise slum which was transformed into an award winning park in 1995. It features a Qing dynasty almshouse, the Old South Gate, pavilions, sculptures, flower gardens and a playground for children.

Old stone walls

Drs. Jean Stone Willans and Rick Willans brought the message of Charismatic renewal to Hong Kong in 1968 and started the Society of Stephen. This movement of the Holy Spirit united many - Chinese and Westerners, Catholics and Protestants, from all walks of life - in the fullness of the New Testament faith. In 1973, Miss Pullinger brought a heroin-addicted Triad leader to the Willianses; he withdrew in their home without sickness or pain (with no medication) through repenting from his crimes, believing in Jesus and praying in tongues given by the Holy Spirit. The news spread - even to the Walled City drug dens - and soon the Willanses were pastoring several “House of Stephen”, where scores of addicts likewise began new lives with the help of volunteer workers.

This paved the way for the law to enter into this once dangerous area and by 1995 the slum was cleared and the area established as an inner city park. Read the rest of this entry »

CHRISTMAS AT DAS HELWIG HAUS B&B

I have been blessed by the arrival of a useful young Korean man called Jerry, who majored at a Korean University in tourism. When he returns to Korea he plans to work for an Uncle who has a resort on the hills overlooking the eastern sea towards Japan. Jerry told me that I was the ‘busiest’ grandmother he had ever seen. I think he was referring to the amount of work I do. I have found him helpful at cleaning bathrooms, hanging out washing and pressing sheets. He is excellent with meal service too, cleaning up the kitchen and packing the dishwasher after meals. He is a Wwoofer - a Willing Worker on Organic Farms and came to me expecting to undertake garden work. www.wwoof.com.au There will be plenty of that! Now he says he is delighted to be here as he has found himself gaining experience in a tourism business. The photo below shows Jerry emptying compost onto a garden patch where I’ll plant potatoes and sweet-corn next spring.

Korean Jerry

I’ve had an exhausting time since my brief days of rest and recreation in Hong Kong as I’ve been preparing for our winter season when every Saturday night I serve a German style, roast goose Christmas dinner to our in-house guests. This is our 17th year of providing Bed and Breakfast, plus a Saturday night dinner for our guests at Das Helwig Haus B&B who come to visit the sixty wineries of the Granite Belt. Read the rest of this entry »

HONG KONG 1

This is the first of a series about my days in Hong Kong in May 2009. The business part of this trip was quickly finalized when I signed the contract with a Chinese firm to have copies of my book Wildflowers, wilderness and wine printed and shipped to Brisbane for Australian distribution. It now appears that these books will be available for me to autograph by July. During my absence  our business Das Helwig Haus B&B was closed. My eldest daughter, Carol, accompanied me. Both of us had been to Hong Kong on previous trips and knew how to travel around the islands of Hong Kong, Kowloon and the New Territories using the efficient underground trains, ferries and buses, all of which are inexpensive forms of transport. Our hotel was centrally located in Kowloon near the Mong Kok entrance to the subway station and from our window on the 36th floor we were able to look across the buildings to the island of Hong Kong. Our window gave us a view towards the west with the morning light shining bright on the tall buildings over which we looked towards the island. Although the whole region is commonly known as Hong Kong and there are several islands within the area, this one hilly section ringed by sea is called either Hong Kong Island, or The Island.

Western view across to Hong Kong Island.

It was interesting on my first early morning start -  I was still functioning on Australian time which is two hours ahead of this region, to look out this window and see almost no movement in the streets below, but people practicing exercises in the park. Like all Asian countries Hong Kong is slow to swing into action in the mornings, but residents party or shop well into the night. Read the rest of this entry »