Just wanted to send good wishes and empathy to all of our friends in Queensland. Hope that you didn’t suffer too much from the dangerous storms and flooding that have just happened. It looks like the worst of it hit south of @JeffH, but I am an inherent worrier, so I want my buddies to be OK!
Hi & many thanks Dawn. We got some decent rain that was very welcome for us. Not so welcome for those who got flooded.
A decent drop of rain over a few hours is what triggers the dragonfruit to come into bud, which is happening now. I’ll see what happens in the coming weeks.
Things look good on the dragonfruit side of things, however not so good with sweet corn, thanks to a rat It demolished 2 cobs from out of my first little crop that was nearly ready to pick, so I harvested the whole lot the other day. I’ve had my trap near the corn with no luck. Now it appears that it’s eating the silk of the new cobs developing in the next stage of corn, which means those cobs wont develop without the silk to get fertilized. I NEED TO CATCH THAT RAT!!!
Drown it and then use it to fertilize the next batch of corn!
Thank you for letting us know that you are OK
That’s great advice, you’re welcome & thank YOU 
I drown the rats that get caught in my live trap. I’m putting them in my worm farm, therefore they do turn into fertilizer. I’m going out later to look closer to see if in fact it is eating the silk. If that’s the case, it’s demolishing a 100% of the next crop, whereas before it took about 10%. If it is eating the silk, that’ll be a first for me. I’ll google it 
Hi again Dawn, just an update on our weather. I don’t recall seeing this in the weather forecast before. Sometimes they’ll say a high chance of rain & thunder storms, with the possibility of large hail & damaging winds. They’re saying all of this for today, except for the large hail bit. Instead of large hail, they’re saying “giant hail”. I don’t want to see any “giant hail”.
Maybe there has been larger than normal hail in recent days as they show on tv, so maybe they’re saying giant hail to cover themselves, in case it happens.
That rat has been elusive, I’m hoping to catch it tonight. It doesn’t appear to have eaten the silk on the next stage of corn, it just hadn’t appeared yet.
Hi Dawn,
Wilma here. Jeff asked me to tell you we didn’t get any hail. We have lost our landline and internet, so can’t complain. So many people have been devastated, and lost everything. It is heart breaking.
Jeff is asking me to tell you we caught the rat, that was eating its way through our corn crop. It was a huge male. We used the left over corn he was munching through in the garden,as bait. We pulled all the stalks and stripped the tiny side cobs for the trap, and He took the bait
It is a beautiful morning outside, so hard to believe the weather has been so wild.
We are so glad we live on top of a mountain.
We saw those huge waves on the west coast of America.
We thought of you.
These are the honey comb ginger flowers outside our bedroom window. We had one last year and three this year. They are so beautiful.
This one was taken about ten days ago the little flowers that look like orchids have died off but as you can see the one I just took from inside is developing more.
They have a lot more growing to do.
