Home Builder Developer - Interior Renovation and Design

By Melinda Myers

You can see and feel the change of seasons. Fall color is starting to appear, pansies, mums and asters are in the garden center and your thoughts are turning to preparing your landscape for winter.

Those in warm climates are switching to winter annuals, while those in colder regions are fortifying their landscapes for the cold winter ahead. No matter where you live, invest some time in preparing your landscape for the change in seasons. Dedicating some time now will pay off with healthier more beautiful plants next spring.

Continue to mow the lawn high as long as it continues to grow. Theres no need to cut it short unless that is the look you prefer.

Fertilize the grass with a low nitrogen slow release fertilizer. Fall fertilization provides the greatest benefit to your lawn and gives you the best value for the time and money invested.

Those in cooler regions growing bluegrass, fescue and perennial ryegrass should make a final application between Halloween and Thanksgiving before the ground freezes.

Those in warmer climates growing centipede, Bermuda and zoysia should also fertilize around Labor Day. However, be sure to make the last fall application at least one month prior to the average first killing frost.

Shred leaves as they fall. Leave some on the lawn to add organic matter and nutrients to the soil. As long as you can see the grass blades through the shredded leaves your lawn will be fine.

Use the rest of the shredded leaves in your compost pile, as mulch on top of the soil or as a soil amendment. Just dig a two to three inch layer into the top 12 inches of annual or new planting beds. These leaves will break down and add organic matter. By spring the leaves will decompose and the garden bed will be ready to cultivate and plant.

Plant a few bulbs now for a colorful early spring display. Incorporate compost, aged manure or other organic matter into the planting area. Add a low nitrogen slow release fertilizer at the time of planting. In general, plant bulbs two to three times their vertical diameter deep. Follow specific planting and spacing directions on the package or tag.

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Important to get yard ready for winter

Sept. 20, 2014, 4 a.m.

THE man accused of murdering an environmental compliance officer has been ordered to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs after being convicted of illegal land clearing the very offence his alleged victim had investigated.

THE man accused of murdering an environmental compliance officer has been ordered to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs after being convicted of illegal land clearing the very offence his alleged victim had investigated.

Ian Robert Turnbull remains in jail, accused of murdering 51-year-old Office of Environment and Heritage (OEH) compliance officer Glen Turner, but will fight for his release, lodging abid for Supreme Court bail.

Yesterday, the issue at the heart of the alleged murder was back in the Land and Environment Court in Sydney, as the 79-year-old farmer was convicted of bulldozing more than 3000 trees on properties owned by his son, Grant, and grandson Cory at Croppa Creek, near Moree.

Justice Terry Sheahan said Turnbull had not shown any genuine contrition or remorse for his offending beyond pleading guilty.

The defendant flagrantly disregarded the consequences of his actions, by continuing clearing in the knowledge that he was likely to soon receive a stop-work order, Justice Sheahan said.

Turnbull was fined $140,000 for the land clearing, after receiving a small discount for pleading guilty, and was also ordered to pay the OEHs legal and investigation costs, estimated to be about $172,000.

In his judgement, Justice Sheahan said because Turnbull was a leader in his sector, specific and general deterrence was needed in his penalty.

It must be substantial enough to deter others, as well as himself, from clearing native vegetation, particularly in this area, where unlawful clearing appears to have been an ongoing concern for the community, the judgement read.

More here:
Murder accused cops $140k fine: Glen Turners alleged killer hit with huge penalties, legal costs over land clearing

"There is no denying that fashions among farmers have sometimes had calamitous results": Don Watson. Photo: Getty Images

The brutal reality of growing up on a farm invoked confusion in Don Watson. But he says there is a dignity to living on the land that city folk fail to appreciate.

In his novel Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn, Henry Kingsley said that free men in the Australian bush never touched their hats to anyone. My father never passed a woman in the street without touching his and he would do the same to any man he didn't know or believed worthy of respect. He was a smallholder of industrious, sober and gentle habits, modest ambition, a mortgage and little ready cash.

He split wood under the pine tree out the back. We could hear the blows: hear the blue gum cleave if the grain was even, tear but not surrender if knotted, the next blow just hard enough to force it apart, but not so hard that the axe jammed in the block or sent the pieces flying further than he could retrieve by bending where he stood. Every move was practised. Find the rhythm in it. Don't force it. In getting a cow in a bail, or drafting sheep in a pen, taking the harrows off the tractor or the horns off a cow, there is a rhythm to be found. As nature finds the easiest way to do things, find the way of nature. He was a Zen sort of farmer.

Meat market: A buyer checks out cattle in a saleyard before they're auctioned. Photo: Fairfaxsyndication.com

In the parable, the good soil speaks of a good heart. His heart was as good as he could make it: every wound of childhood sutured, every savage instinct denied satisfaction, but not always the indignation that thundered at the uncontained instincts of others, or signs of them in his children.

The ungodly folk on whom he visited his judgments were those whose baser natures were not contained: sloth, drunkenness, profanity, foul mouths, lasciviousness, cruelty, troublemaking and bluster, he could not bear. He tried to love his neighbour but, as a righteous man regardeth his beast, who could love the neighbour who mistreated his animals, or the bully who raged at man and beast alike? Or the man who never cut his thistles or pulled his ragwort so the seeds blew across the boundary fence?

He couldn't love such neighbours, but he internalised his disgruntlements, rendered them to the same inner authority that kept everything else in check. And as he ruled himself he would rule this bit of land: with hard work and obedience to the commandments, with irony and without anger, envy or cruelty.

We had dairy cows, but he always preferred crops and sheep. Then he began buying yearling heifers from "up north" where they were cheap as a rule. They would arrive on the train, skinny and half mad, but our good grass reformed them. He'd calve them down, which is to say, get them in calf ("pregnant" was an impolite word that we did not use in any context), and once they were delivered of their offspring, he'd break them into the routines of the milking shed and sell them to the local dairy farmers. He also bought springers, heifers already in calf.

The business involved a lot of bovine copulation, a lot of placenta and blood in the paddocks, a lot of bellowing and kicking and shitting in the cowshed, a lot of dead calves, veterinary bills and ingeniously polite denial of the brutal reality of our enterprise, and a lot of guilt, loathing and confusion in me.

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This land is our land

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