After a series of steps, we have finally let the keets out of their cage so that now they can start to freerange. The steps were: teeny tiny keets in a little container with a brooder plate on permanently; still in a little container but with the brooder plate taken out during the day; moved into a bigger cage (the dog’s old wire crate), with the brooder put on most nights but not if it had been a hot day); brooder plate taken out altogether; crate moved up to the block but kept inside ; crate moved outside for the day brought back in at night; crate moved outside under the verandah not brought back in at night; crate moved up to be under the tree where the bigs sleep at night; one keet let out at a time then put back in at the end of the day; and now all of the keets allowed out together.
The final step is to somehow teach them to roost high up in the trees so that they are safe from the nighttime predators. The keets have probably met the nighttime predators–my guess is that foxes come and look in at them, hoping to work out how to get in. After their first day out, they put themselves back into the crate at the end of the day, so I shut the door and that was fine, but I won’t be here every night and they’ll soon be grown out of the crate.
It’s baking hot today. I keep thinking to myself, ‘It’s one of those old-fashioned summer days.’ By which I mean, it makes me think of hot high school days. But it’s not like the days stopped feeling like this, it’s just that I stopped living in the places where the summer days felt like this.
Sometime before Christmas, I ordered two avocado trees from Diggers. It was one of those purchases I sometimes make when my gardening ambition and my gardening belief in myself outstrips my gardening truth. By some miracle I’ve kept them alive (mostly by keeping them in the laundry sink where I guess they get just enough light and are just enough in plain sight that they haven’t been forgotten), and today they have been planted. They’re down in the space with caper bush and the fig tree. The place where we saw the snake. But when we (by ‘we’ I, of course, mean ‘the mister’) got the weeds down, we realised the irrigation was already all set up and there were four spaces for trees, with two of the trees still alive, and two of them not. Two trees, two holes. I’m not really convinced it’s the best conditions for avocado trees, but we don’t have any other tree-ready spaces and we have two trees that really need to go in the ground. They’ve got more chance in those holes than they have in the laundry sink.
And meanwhile, I’m still tapping away at my new show, feeling it bit by bit coming together but still with a long way to go.
