The back raingarden has taken a festive turn, courtesy of recycled orange bags that I’ve put over the grape bunches in the vain hope that we might score more grapes than the birds this year. We do love the rainbow lorikeets visiting, but they are much less frequent visitors/pillagers than…
The Melbourne Stream Network app allows you to explore the streams and rivers of the Melbourne region. Until now, the app was challenging if you weren’t sure of the name of the stream you were looking for. I’ve now changed some settings and added features to make it easier to…
Congratulations to Julia White for the first paper from her PhD published in Ecological Applications. In the paper we report on an experiment testing if wood with more surface complexity would be colonised by more individuals of and more species of invertebrates (as expected by ecological theory, but inconsistently detected),…
urbanstreams.net has moved to a new server. To celebrate the move, I have spent some time giving the site a spruce-up: please have a look around. As previously announced, the interactive apps that urbanstreams.net used to host have moved to a separate server. My aim for urbanstreams.net now is for…
Maybe that’s just me. Can any leaky tank be good? Well, for many years, starting with the Little Stringybark Creek Project, we have been promoting tanks that leak for passive irrigation, as a good stormwater management solution. A well-designed leak (to an adequate garden space) does little to alter the…
The self-seeded pumpkins have taken over the front raingarden. The grapevine’s leaves are turning brown and slowly shedding in the back. The raingardens’ productive summer ends with us in lockdown, giving me time to reflect on the raingarden news I have let slip over the last year. A year ago,…
The shiny apps that urbanstreams.net has been hosting are migrating to a new server at tools.thewerg.unimelb.edu.au. Three are there now, with the rest to come on line soon. We are also in the process of migrating urbanstreams.net to a new server, where it will become primarily a repository for my…
The raingarden‘s vine has provided us with great shade from our horrible, hot summer, and come March, it has provided us with a bumper crop of grapes that we have struggled to keep up with. As we reach the end of the season, the local lorikeets have discovered them. They…
Thanks to Angela Ross and Annah Fromberg of the ABC for putting together their story on stormwater solutions featuring our raingarden. Nice work! It’s enough to shame me into keeping my new years resolution of resuming my raingarden story. The raingarden has really hit its straps this year, with a…