New Year's Resolutions

[old man emu]

Don't they have "gutter guard" in Britain?

[pmccarthy]

Lemon-scented gums look and smell great and AFAIK don't cause much trouble. We have a dozen of them, all about 15 years old.

[Jerry_Atrick]

2 hours ago, old man emu said:

Don't they have "gutter guard" in Britain?

Yes we do but the leaves get stuck in them and the water overflows quicker.. and they become a bugger to get off

[onetrack]

Lemon-scented gums are recognised locally as one of the worst "limb-droppers with no warning" trees you can get. I don't know if it's our local climate that affects them that makes them worse, or what it is - but every time there's a report of a limb dropping without warning, it always seems its a lemon-scented gum.

Many local shopping centre car parks were planted with lemon-scented gums several decades ago, but many shopping centres have now removed them, on the basis of the angle they pose too much of a litigation danger from shoppers, if a limb falls on them.

 

My current favourite tree is a Carob I planted in the front yard. Hardy, tough, and shady, they grow well in poor soils, and can withstand frost and drought. But the flowers can get a bit "pongy". However, they do grow very tall.

 

Edited December 30, 2022 by onetrack

[facthunter]

Bushy Sugar Gums and Silver gums are notorious limb droppers . Tall trees of most types also tip over if their shallow roots get wet feet.  Nev.

[Old Koreelah]

26 minutes ago, onetrack said:

My current favourite tree is a Carob I planted in the front yard. Hardy, tough, and shady, they grow well in poor soils, and can withstand frost and drought. But the flowers can get a bit "pongy". However, they do grow very tall.

I grew a few dozen Carobs to maturity. Being a Mediterranean tree, they are drought-hardy but none are tall; they grow to about five metres and a similar width. About half are females and produce bucketloads of large beans which are a chocolate substitute. Known as St. John’s Bread in the Bible.

Interestingly, like that other Mediterranean tree the Olive, they usually have a large harvest every second year.

[onetrack]

My Carob, despite having been in the ground for around 10 years, has never produced any pods. I suspect it's because its a female tree and needs a male tree nearby for fertilisation.

It literally exploded in growth rate once planted, it grows like a Tasmanian blue gum!  The trunk is already over 300mm in diameter and it's around 5M high already.

I've seen Carobs up the hills above Perth that are around 25M high and over a metre in trunk diameter. They seem to love the Perth climate and soils, possibly because of the great similarity to the Mediterranean regions.

 

Edited December 30, 2022 by onetrack

[Old Koreelah]

17 hours ago, Yenn said:

Trees near a house. I would go for a Se Oak.

One of my favourites, mostly because of the soothing swishing sound of a breeze thru their needles.

My dad planted Casuarina Cunninghamiana along the eroded creek banks of the farm he bought after the war.

I planted that variety along our bottom fence, where they get wet feet. Without cattle to control their lower branches, they can poke out the eye of passing humans.

 

On the rocky hillside I planted a few Cas. Cristata, a more hardy tree. 

 

Pollent cores show that Casuarinas once used to be the dominant Aussie tree in some areas until about 125k years ago, when Eucalypts took over. Some see this as evidence of human firestick farming long before the accepted date for humans on this continent.

[facthunter]

I like the odd BANKSIA as a  specimen tree. With fruiting trees you can graft the other sex onto a few branches.  Start with an individual Bud. and prune off what you don't want to continue.  I've even grafted gums to see if it works and it did.  Nev

[Marty_d]

They don't sell gutter guard over there?

[red750]

Marty, look at the top of this page.

[willedoo]

2 hours ago, Old Koreelah said:

One of my favourites, mostly because of the soothing swishing sound of a breeze thru their needles.

My dad planted Casuarina Cunninghamiana along the eroded creek banks of the farm he bought after the war.

I planted that variety along our bottom fence, where they get wet feet. Without cattle to control their lower branches, they can poke out the eye of passing humans.

They would have to be one of my favourites as well; I think they are a great tree. They look nice, sound nice, fix nitrogen in the soil, and are great firewood when they die. In a wood heater, they have a slight aroma when they burn, but it's not unpleasant. Being an oak like grain, they are a pleasure to split. They are fairly hot burning, but nowhere near as hot as mulga or gidyea. They share a similar quality to those two acacias in that they continually drop off a layer of coals with a glass clinking type sound as they burn down.

 

A bit of trivia about the sheoaks, the needles are branchlets made up of small joined segments. If you get a needle and pull a segment apart, you can see the tiny true leaves around the circular rim of the segment. They are triangular, and look a bit like the points on a crown. Most species have a different number of leaves per segment, so it can be another way of identifying the species.

 

The sound of sheoaks whistling in the breeze is very nostalgic for me, as I grew up in open prairie land with athel pines as windbreaks. The sound is much the same as the sheoaks. Farms had two or three rows of the athel pines running from the property entrance all the way down the driveway, and a windbreak around the windy side of the house. They were almost the sole tree in those areas, and as a kid I remember the spooky sound of them whistling in the wind at night. The attached Google Maps street view screengrab shows the athel pine windbreaks on our old place. The map street view is a few years old; the current owner has removed all the athel pines.

 

[red750]

The tree that concerns me is this one in my neighbour's yard. If it were to blow over it would take the two back bedrooms off the house. As it is, when it sheds bark, it litters my back yard, and birds love to sit in it over our clothesline and crap all over the washing. My house is on the right, behind the hedge.

 

 

[willedoo]

3 hours ago, red750 said:

The tree that concerns me is this one in my neighbour's yard. If it were to blow over it would take the two back bedrooms off the house. As it is, when it sheds bark, it litters my back yard, and birds love to sit in it over our clothesline and crap all over the washing. My house is on the right, behind the hedge.

 

 

Not the sort of tree you'd want on a suburban block.

[spacesailor]

IF ! ,

those branches overhang into your territory , you have the option to prune them back . (  N S W ).

spacesailor

[red750]

They're at least 3 storeys high, higher than the two-storey house on the other side.

[Jerry_Atrick]

I guess you can ask them to prune the tree and if they don't you can get it done and send them the bill.. But you will no doubt have to wait for the money.

 

[old man emu]

Whoa! Woodsman,spare that tree!

 

 

[nomadpete]

Woodsman, woodsman, spare that tree!

That be the only tree my wife can't climb!

[willedoo]

I was listening to the wireless this morning and they had people ringing in or texting their New Year resolutions. One bloke's resolution was to buy a new calendar. Fair enough, I thought; why complicate things.

[Jerry_Atrick]

Well.. Happy new year, all.. Tonight, I was the ocker in the village.. Loved it...

 

Almost had to invoke the upside down glass in a Broken hill pub because some outsider decided it was worth taking a shot at the girlfirend on a mate.. And he was biiger than me.. Thankfully.. he was a wooos (or whoos), and he backed away fairly quickly.

 

Apart from that, a great time, and.. yes.. thaty blasted Karaoke machine came aout, and despite my total lack of artistic talent, I belted out Waltzing Matilda... Dasly, Gangachan's "This is Australia" was not in the machine's repetoire..

[facthunter]

Australia is where they sent all the felons and WE made it better than the OLD Country quite quickly 'cause it wasn't THAT hard but there's a few things worth seeing in The UK. I picked up a cast brass Plaque at a church stall in Londongrad for a pommie mate of mine in Australia at the time. It Read." FAULTS I MAY HAVE but being WRONG isn't one of them".. HE loved that Plaque.  Nev

[nomadpete]

On 31/12/2022 at 11:43 AM, willedoo said:

One bloke's resolution was to buy a new calendar. Fair enough, I thought;

Yeah fair enough......

The ones labelled 2021 and 2022 didn't do me much good either.  This time I think I'll try one marked 2023

[facthunter]

Some have Pictures as well as writing and numbers.  Nev

[red750]

3 hours ago, Jerry_Atrick said:

he was a wooos (or whoos)

Wuss.