As part of our Strategic Partnerships Program with the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development I attend several informative sessions with all the SPP participants. We were recently introduced to Act4Nature and am posting their link so you can start pledging each month to help improve our environment. http://www.act4nature.org.au/

The Nursery would like to thank  the Grand Hotel in Mornington for their kind donation made possible through Radio 3MP's Community Chest. The funds will enable us to purchase new equipment to help the Volunteers in the wonderful work they do at the Nursery.

Carrum Indigenous Nursery joins the Mornington Community Garden for their Open Garden Day....and we are going to do it all again this year in 2010!

What a fantastic weekend we had on 3rd & 4th October 2009 at the Gardens ... great weather, the vegies were growing before our very eyes and we had lots of people marvelling at the garden.  CIN gave away 500 plants to people who visited over the weekend and look forward to having them visit us at Learmonth Reserve, on the Cnr. Learmonth and Thompson Roads, Patterson Lakes. 

For more information about the Mornington Community Gardens..... visit..... 

 www.dig-itcomgarden.org/

There are lots of animals and insects that live at the nursery 

During the wetter months of the year when our wetlands are holding water the frogs start calling to attract a mate. This year we are going to submit the calls of our frogs to the Melbourne Water  Frog Census and find out exactly which species are living at the nursery. If you would like to know what frogs are living in your area, simply jump onto the Melbourne Water Website and find out how you can send in your frog calls to be identified.

In June and July the Black Shouldered Kites have been courting and trying to kick last year's baby out of their territory in readiness for nesting. The Kites can often be seen hovering above the vacant paddocks next door or sitting on the power lines at the back of the nursery.  Adults are black and white and difficult to tell male and females apart, but the juveniles have a bit of brown on their head and shoulders.  

There are heaps of insects around the nursery. We often find caterpillars in amongst the leaves of our plants. Unless they are eating more than they should we generally leave them alone. We found some unusual caterpillers on our dodonaea plants, so we kept some on the kitchen table to see what they turned into. Here is the caterpiller and the moth that hatched out.  

The difference between moths and butterflies is that normally butterflies when they are resting fold their wings up together and moths wings are spread flat against their body or the surface they are sitting on.