Monthly Archives: February 2006

Charles and I moved the sheep into the Triangle paddock to give the Top/Middle/Back paddocks a spell though they were not completely bare. It gave Charles a chance to try some of Harry’s electric temporary fencing gear.

Charles and Bryony left for Taupo after lunch.

I continued working on the retaining wall across the meander/depression.

Becca and colleague from “Surveying The Bay” came to begin surveying the title boundary change – after some experimentation I decided to have the new boundary be 210m from and parallel to the back boundary – the boundary that runs along the big agricultural stormwater ditch and includes the McNab Rd entrance.

Rang Alan Ladbrooke tonight and confirmed that we want him to order trees (canning peaches for Watties/Heinz – the Golden Queen derived Tatura Star variety) for planting in the autumn in the Top paddock and also replacing the oldest Royal Gala apple block.

Hawkes Bay Weather: 13°C—23°C; southwesterly wind; no rain. [78.3]

Karola, Briony, Charles, and I visited Harry Wier’s farm and factory in Bulls; Hilary Haylock and Murray Wilson in Lethanty; and Mary Wilson who has just about completed extensive renovations at in Mungatapu. Laura Wier gave us lunch and howed us round the farm – she and Harry run the calf-rearing and beef farm according to Harry’s TechnoSystems principles and using Harry’s technology. Tessa Wier showed me her latest database design for the factory information management system.

Hawkes Bay Weather: 10°C—26°C; northerly breeze in the afternoon; no rain. [78.0]

Sunday – Farmers Market at the Hastings Showground – lots of people, lots of produce. Charles and Bryony Carey joined us in a leisurely trawl through the stalls and then on to Clifton for lunch.

In the early evening Charles and I worked on the depression/meander inner retaining wall, moving earth around with shovels and the Fergie’s front end loader.

Hawkes Bay Weather: 13°C—23°C; northerly breeze in the afternoon; no rain. [77.3]

Bought another 4 x 3m and 4 x 2.4m edged half-round retaining wall timbers for retaining the roadside edge of the culvert from the depression/meander, and 12 x 1.8m of the same together with 35 batten stakes for experimenting on edging the ha-ha.

Constructed the roadside retaining wall across the depression/meander.

Bryony and Charles Carey arrived from Wellington, British dairy farmers on holiday touring round New Zealand; relations of Karola’s – he is nephew of 90+ years old Margaret Wilson.

Hawkes Bay Weather: 7°C—27°C; southerly wind veering to northerly in the afternoon; no rain. [77.4]

John Pollock came around 3:00pm and had finished the last bit of ha-ha excavation before 5:00pm including filling up the grass bridge and uprooting a very securely anchored old concrete strainer post. The latter had his giant machine pulling so hard that its back wheels came well off the ground and, at first, it still wouldn’t budge.

I bought another 14 of the edged half-round retaining wall boards – 4 of them 3 metres long, the rest 2.4 metres long – and a couple of long half-round posts to act as fence posts and retaining wall supports. This is for the retaining wall along the road boundary fence – there is to be a retaining wall across the depression/meander each side of the fenced tree planting area along the roadside boundary; a culvert is already in place and earth piled up waiting to fill the retained space.

Gill and Ben left after lunch which we had at Parnells Fruit World on Pakowhai Rd, a kilometer away. This evening we had unexpected arrival of Kirsty Faulkner and Bruce Utting – on their way from Wellington to the Mahia peninsula for vacation.

Hawkes Bay Weather: 6°C—23°C; southerly wind veering to northerly in the afternoon; no rain. [76.8]

More on grass bridge construction. With some help from Karola I completed the central and northern pieces of the bridge supports; it now awaits filling up with earth. At John Pollock’s suggestion we added a pair of twitched #8 wires linking left and right side centre posts, pulling them together to counteract the natural tendency to splay outwards under the load of the contained earth.

John Pollock arrived around 8:30am and left at 5:00pm having almost completed the ha-ha digging. When he was picked up we found out that just 30 minutes prior the Elm’s workshop had caught fire and burned down – all inside got out safely – sparks from a welding operation were likely cause.

Chooks did not like being banished to the geese enclosure so we moved the coops back under the plum tree – hens and chicks were highly relieved.

Hawkes Bay Weather: 10°C—23°C; southerly wind; no rain. [78.0]

Mike Croucher came and mowed the lawns late morning. I put the hen coops in with the geese to get them off the lawn, resulting in later high jinks trying to get the two hens and their chicks to go back into their coop for the night.

I did a little more on the grass bridge in the morning and again in the early evening – another post put in, some chainsaw sculpting of retaining timbers to fit over the culvert pipe, and a re-doing of 2 posts on one side because they were 1/2 rounds that had twisted and were unpleasingly at an angle to the retaining timbers.

Gill and Ben arrived for two days on their vacation return leg from Tolaga Bay to Wellington.

No sign of John Pollock today.

Hawkes Bay Weather: 14°C—29°C; southerly wind in the evening; no rain. [?]

All 36 box bushes now planted – they are in a semicircle round the lawn in front of the garage and are in compacted gravel so the holes were each chizelled out with a crowbar – not easy digging. Karola then put topsoil and slow-release fertilizer with each tree – they’re about 500mm tall – and then cut a bit of old carpet as a weed mat round each one and gave them all a good soaking.

I did a quick inspection of the sheep – they are all in better shape – apart from limping lamb 504 – and careened around the place – mothers and lambs – doing little pig jumps and generally exhibiting high spirits. There seems to be plenty of grass still in the Top / Middle / Back and Island paddocks so they can stay there for this week at least.

John Pollack came after lunch – put in another 4 hours today 1:00pm – 5:00pm, spending quite a bit of time on moving various shrubs and bushes for Karola. I did a little bit more on Karola’s grass bridge once it cooled down around 5:30pm.

Hawkes Bay Weather: 13°C—27°C; southerly wind; no rain. [77.6]

Returned from Wellington. Gill and Ben left Karamu for Gisborne. Just before we left Wellington Karola, Bridget and I dug up 35 or so small box plants and put them in plastic bags in the landrover. When we got back to Karamu at 6:10pm, 4hrs and 10mins after leaving Johnsonville, Karola and I planted half of the box trees round half of the semicircular lawn in front of the garage – we’ll do the rest tomorrow. It was dark and we used halogen work lamps to light up the lawn as we dug.

All animals seem OK. In fact Gill and Ben fed the chicks on Sunday and Monday (today) and it’s impossible to tell if the rest of the animals have been fed or not since we left – they act as if they’re starving regardless.

Hawkes Bay Weather: 16°C—27°C; northerly breeze in the afternoon; no rain. [?]

Major part of the day spent visiting Bridget and Chris – lugging wood and stuff around with Chris – then taking Mary over to Gill’s place in Seatoun to water the garden – we had a picnic dinner while we were there.

Hawkes Bay Weather: 15°C—24°C; no rain. [?]

We drove down to Wellington in the afternoon, taking a trailer-load of wood for the fire at Pitoitoi. Very warm and tiring trip but we got to the Rashbrooke hoolie alright around 7:30pm. We stopped for lunch in Waipawa at the Abbottslea Tearooms – and Gill and Ben met us there on their way up from Wellington to Gisborne. We convinced them to stay at Karamu Homestead for a day or two on the way up, and we’ll see them again as they return in about a week’s time.

Hawkes Bay Weather: 16°C—24°C; southerly turning to northerly breeze in the afternoon; no rain. [77.4]

Karola and I did some measuring and envisioning around the homestead lawn and planned ha-ha. We also spent some time in the cool of the evening working on the grass bridge.

A little black chick died today so the 6 chick family is down to 5.

The sheep had hay and a run of some of the new grass until late afternoon when they were released into the Top paddock. There they’ll stay until we come back from Wellington on Monday, freely roaming in the Back, Middle and Top paddocks. Hartley Curry is going to look after the animals while we’re away on Sunday and Monday; we’re taking the Landrover and trailer down with us, hoping to bring back a few plants from Bridget’s place in Khandalah – plants that are surplus. The Wellington attraction is a party on Saturday night celebrating recent birthdays: Geoff Rashbrooke’s 60th birthday and his daughter Madeline’s 30th.

Hawkes Bay Weather: 14°C—24°C; northerly breeze in the afternoon; no rain. [76.5]

Attended to the front foot problems in 3 lambs: 504, 513, and 528. Only 528 had anything specific, others might have old traces of footrot but not a major infection – their affected feet were warm however which normally indicates infection.

Bought a 2.5m 225mm diameter concrete pipe (reduced price as it’s slightly damaged) to extend the old clay 12″ stormwater pipe through the shrubbery out to the edge of the ha-ha. Installed both this extension pipe and two old 2m 9″ culvert pipes for Karola’s grass bridge. John Pollock came after lunch and continued digging out the ha-ha. He worked for 4 hours today; 1:00pm – 5:00pm.

Hawkes Bay Weather: 16°C—23°C; northerly ; no rain. [76.5]

John Pollock did not appear today but promises to come tomorrow. His large mechanical digger is parked here so I have high hopes.

Karola came back from Wellington this afternoon and got a surprise that:

• The 2nd half of the tree protection fence was done, stay posts in and nettting up
• The depression/meander project extending and converting it into a ha-ha was well underway – the first 30m from the road ihas been dug out
• The old fence between the new grass and the roadside paddock where the big eucalypts are has been dismantled
• The new grass area (1ha, over 2 acres) has been topped along with some of the roadside paddock – it looks more like a park now

Before Karola arrived I pulled up the remaining posts of the old fence (see above) and temporarily fixed the wires to another fence, out of the way. I also gave the transplanted ancient lemon tree another long soak. And I topped about 1/2 the new grass area. In the evening I finished off the topping.

Hawkes Bay Weather: 15°C—26°C; southerly wind changing to northerly breezes in the afternoon; no rain. [76.3]

About midday there was a great clucking as if the hens had laid eggs. I went out to investigate and found the two brown hens walking around noisily but not in a frightened way – and there were no chicks to be seen anywhere. I searched for them and still no sign. What predator could have polished off all 16 chicks without a trace?

Some time later I checked again and all 16 had reappeared – I guess the hens parked them somewhere and they just stayed put till the hens went and collected them.

In the morning I prepared for the arrival of John Pollock, the driver of the large earthmoving scoop. He came after lunch and spent the afternoon beginning the ha-ha work.

He moved the lemon tree from its position near the English Beech tree to near the old disused well head. He scooped up a lot of earth and roots but I still doubt it’ll survive. I watered it profusely in the evening.

John called in a helper with a theodolite and they took readings to determine how deep he should go. We could not go deeper than the bottom of the roadside big ditch – but the bottom of an old stormwater drain 50 metres from the road was 1.5 inches lower than the bottom of the roadside ditch – and the high spot amongst tree roots that I’d hoped would be a base point for the ha-ha was 20 inches above the bottom of the stormwater drain. Hmmm. Well we ended up creating a flat ditch from the roadside ditch up to the start of the ha-ha, next to the English Beech. By moving the bottom of the ditch away from the more precious trees we avoided cutting any of their major roots although we did hit a few quite big ones belonging to eucalypts.

We put in the two culverts I bought a few months ago and covered them with earth – so the first 4 metres of the meander is now underground in a culvert and the ground will be level inside the tree protection fence.

Where the ha-ha begins, on the edge of what will become Karola’s grass bridge, the ha-ha bottom is only 23 inches below ground level so we’ll need to have a bit of a bank there to build it up to 36 inches. Where the ha-ha becomes visible from the homestead verandah the depth below ground level is 36 – 39 inches so no bank needed there, in fact there’ll be a lot of earth to dispose of – possibly by making a noise-reducing berm parallel to the road between the road and the homestead.

I took down the old fence between the new grass and the Tall Trees paddock – what Karola calls “Craig’s fence” – well the wires are off and half the posts are out. The new grass paddock now extends to the new tree protection netting fence, 4 metres from the roadside boundary fence.

John Pollock works for Elms – located in Orchard St, near the Hastings hospital. He worked for 4 hours today; 1:00pm – 5:00pm.

Hawkes Bay Weather: 14°C—26°C; northerly breezes in the afternoon; no rain. [77.1]

A large branch of one of the oaks in the Back paddock has broken. It’s a larger branch next to where a large branch broke off last year. Like the branch last year, it’s still hanging although torn and the end is resting on the ground. It’s a mass of leaves and green acorns – wonder if it was the weight of acorns that was the last straw.

While I was fitting the bottom strap hinge to Karola’s old wooden gate I heard sounds of earth moving equipment from Craig Vernon’s place. Bicka and I went to investigate – upshot is that I’ve engaged them (Elms) to come and start on the ha-ha along parallel to the front of the homestead. I had to quickly mark out the path it is to take – far enough away from the old English Beech tree to avoid damaging its roots. The ha-ha is to run from the edge of Karola’s planned grass bridge across the depression/meander – which is 10 metres or so closer to the road than the English Beech – running along the depression and out into the new grass paddock until it intersects the path of the diagonal fenceline behind the big shed. Eventually I expect the ha-ha to run up to the big shed, replacing the fence currently there. I also expect to have a branch of the ha-ha turn across towards the bamboo, running parallel with the west side of the homestead, stopping just behind the homestead well and in front of the Canary Island Pine. They said they’d start tomorrow. There’ll be a lot of soil to dispose of which may be useful for Karola’s noise-reducing berm running just inside the roadside fence to the south-east.

The oldest brown hen, the one with 10 chicks, gets let out each morning and is free range until I shut them up for the night. The chicks are very active and can flutter-run very quickly when startled. The younger brown hen and her 6 chicks are in the disused larger Bicka dog travelling box and today she showed signs of wanting to go exploring – so I let her out and she went off with her troupe, returning to the box as the sun set. I shut them in for the night too.

No hay this morning for the sheep – I wanted them to do a good cleanup job on the orchard drive, which they’ve done. They got their hay this evening. I also relaid the electric fence to give the sheep the last strip of new grass and to avoid the ha-ha development.

I chopped thistles in the new grass for a couple of hours – in addition chopping over 200 Bathurst Burr plants – nasty, prickly weeds.

Hawkes Bay Weather: 14°C—25°C; northerly breezes; no rain. [77.0]

Overflow openings on the two new rainwater tanks have been plugged to stop mosquitos and other insects using the tanks as ponds.

Sheep let into the orchard drive as an extension to their current strip of the new grass. Again tonight they went back to the Island paddock of their own accord as darkness fell.

Netting up on the 2nd piece of the tree protection inner fence.

Too much sudoku. Hot day.

Hawkes Bay Weather: 14°C—29°C; no rain. [76.9]

Treated lamb 504 for front left foot – footrot but mainly scald I think. Used latex gloves for the first time and so didn’t get footrot spray on my hands – wish I started using them earlier.

A fortnight ago a medium sized branch has fallen off a eucalypt into the tree planting area along the road fence, just missing my precious fences by a whisker. Another one fell last week from an elm in the Back paddock. I chainsawed them up into mulch and firewood. Of course the real work of actually clearing it away, not just making lots of noise with a dangerous prosthetic, is to come.

Continued with fencing. Put in some stay posts but then had to redo them because I put them on the wrong side of the wires. Hmm. I am trying to avoid the trap met last time where the middle wire suppporting the netting needs to wrap behind an angle post with the netting between it and the post – last time I’d stapled up the wires and then realised that I couldn’t get the netting between the wire and the back of the angle post. Another solution is to use only 2 wires just above and below the netting and then the netting can switch sides. You have to stay awake for this stuff. I also replaced the broken post, an unnecessary 30 minutes work.

Altogether too much time spent on Sudoku – one I’d been trying again and again for a couple of evenings just fell out today. Of course Bridget finds them easy – the ones I try.

Hawkes Bay Weather: 17°C—31°C; northerly wind; 9mm rain. [77.7]

Haircut and shopping this morning then ‘sudoku’ over lunch – which extended for a couple of hours – it is devilish addictive. Did a bit more on the fence until rain made the ground too wet. Fed hay to sheep and let them out a couple of hours later as usual; to my surprise they took themselves back to the Island paddock as dusk fell. They’re also getting better at going through the foot bath in single file without fuss.

Looking in Hastings shops I was surprised to see DVDs for sale for the TV series of Peanuts, The Prisoner, and Blake’s 7.

Gloria, the white white goose, flew out of her enclosure and in the evening I saw her trying hard to get back in – I let her in through the gate and she was mightily relieved. Someday we’ll let the geese roam the Back paddock; they know where ‘home’ is now.

Hawkes Bay Weather: 18°C—25°C; northerly wind; 13mm rain. [77.7]

Karola went to Wellington for the week. I did a little work on the netting fence along the roadside – the tree protection fence. Two steps forward . . . I backed into a fence post and broke it – I have a spare but that’s 30 mins of unnecessary digging. Am in process of adding stay posts to three strainers, then I can put the wires on, then the netting.

About A Chook: The black and brown hens had offspring in early summer. The final result was one live chick with white plumage. It got a fright, or mites, or was somehow stressed because some weeks back it lost all feathers from its head and neck (like a small white luncheon vulture). That set me to dusting all the chooks with anti-mite powder. Well the feathers are all growing back now and in a couple of weeks it’ll be back to looking normal. One other thing I noticed was that its upper beak was much longer than the lower one – adding to the raptorish vulture look. It was probably making feeding difficult so I trimmed it with a pair of wire cutters – the chook didn’t seem to mind.

Hawkes Bay Weather: 9°C—28°C; westerly turning to northerly breeze in the afternoon; 1mm rain. [?]

Fed sheep 2 bales of hay in the Island paddock; moved the electric fence to give them a new strip of the new grass; Karola let them out into the new grass a couple of hours later.

The younger brown bantam hen has 6 live chicks. On a hunch I went up into the hay bales and checked out the nest – the chicks had hatched an hour or so earlier. I moved the family into the larger dog box and gave them food and water. The older brown hen’s 10 chicks are growing fast and if startled can fly several yards. I have dispensed with the run and just let them out to roam during the day.

Before lunch I chopped over 500 thistles from the Top, Island and Middle paddocks.

Alan Ladbrooke, our orchardist, came over after lunch and we talked about the peach tree variety that’d best suit the planting to be done this coming winter – he needs to order the trees now. We have to decide where and how many trees to plant:

• Just the 2 acres being the bulk of the Top paddock, beyond the realigned boundary line
• Just the 2.2 acres replacing all 8 rows of old and uneven Royal Galas in the top left orchard block – block C.
• Both the above areas

At $10 a tree that’d cost around $3500 for the first two options and $7000 for the combined one.

I gave Alan a padlock for the orchard pump shed – the little combination lock has been lost.

As we were talking I noticed Bicka playing with something round and red on the doormat by the front door. It turned out to be a tomato. Bicka had eaten my lunch off the dining room table – the sandwiches I’d been preparing when Alan called in. Bicka ate the roast pork slices, the two pieces of buttered bread, 200 grams of butter, some lettuce, and part of the tomato. Hmmmm. She was spectacularly sick, thankfully outside, but, as she does regularly, she retried digesting the large amount of butter and as far as we know it’s stayed down.

This evening we had dinner with Liz and Patrick Cooney and Patrick’s sister Catherine O…. (Greek sounding name) and her partner South African Tony Hughes. Patrick cooked one of the geese we provided at Christmas – it really was tiny but not tough – Patrick said it was the smaller of the two geese we got for him.

Hawkes Bay Weather: 11°C—29°C; westerly turning to northerly breeze in the afternoon; 10mm rain in the afternoon. [78.5]

Landrover serviced (100k) and WOF. Also bought pipe fittings to seal off the water tank overflows on the two new tanks – the proper overflow is on the 3rd old tank and the exposed stub overflows allow mosquitos into the tanks. 2 bales of hay for the sheep and then they had another day on their strip of the new grass.

Hawkes Bay Weather: 12°C—31°C; northerly breeze in the afternoon; no rain. [77.6]

Last week I purchased a 12′ galvanised gate, netting covered, to terminate the planting area protected by a netting fence parallel to the road. I’ve now painted it Karaka Green – just like most of our other metal gates – and it no longer stands out all shiny and new. The gate is hung, it has a hasp, and I’ve earth-filled the gap under the gate so that it’s at least as secure as the rest of the netting fence.

Karola and I used the Fergie to straighten up one of the angle posts on the netting fence that had taken rather a lean once the fence was strained – I pushed with the tractor bucket while Karola banged in a wedge between the breastplate and the post.

This morning Anne drove the tractor to take 2 bales of hay out to the sheep in the Island – the idea being to give them some dry roughage before letting them loose on a fresh strip of the new grass.

Hawkes Bay Weather: 12°C—18°C; southerly wind; no rain. [78.1]

Sheep moved to and from their slice of the new grass; I let them out; Karola got them back into the Island late afternoon. They’re learning to go though a wooden race and footrot trough on the way to and from the new grass without much fuss. We’ve put daggy wool soaked in magnesium sulphate in the trough in the hope that it’ll help reduce incidence of footrot.

Hawkes Bay Weather: 15°C—23°C; southerly wind in the afternoon; no rain. [78.5]

Nasty thing happened to Karola – similar to but worse than my problem with maggots I thought were coming out of my ears last year – that turned out to be falling from a dead rat in the ceiling. A small cockroach ran up her nose and was stuck there all night. Of course she didn’t know it was a cockroach until she got it out in the morning, but a rather unsettling experience to say the least.

In the morning we and our visitors Kathy and Fred penned up the sheep and I sprayed all the lambs with Magnum, which we hope will protect them from fly strike and lice for the rest of the summer.

Roger and Anne Hughes are staying with us for a couple of days – they arrived around 5:00pm from Auckland.

We went into town before lunch and got wasp killing chemical – applied it this evening and Roger got stung.

Hawkes Bay Weather: 16°C—23°C; southerly wind turning to northerly in the afternoon; no rain. [78.0]

Mobile Shearing’s Bruce Richardson came at 8:30am as expected and by 10:30am the 28 ewes had been shorn and 43 lambs crutched. All the sheep then went off to the new grass for the afternoon, being returned to the Island paddock in the evening.

Three lambs have fly strike – the Australian green blowfly being the likely culprit. The worst afflicted was the one I’d treated (527) and it’s slowly on the mend; no fresh infestation. Number 509 had a new infestation in quite a different spot and we treated that this evening – the original strike is beginning to heal. There’s another lamb, unidentified, that had the beginnings of a strike and I hope we find it tomorrow when we plan to give all the lambs a squirt of Magnum ‘pour-on’ anti-flystrike, anti-lice liquid.

I tried to flood out the wasp nest (see yesterday) but there’s still plenty of wasp activity so we’ll probably have to get a nasty chemical to close the nest down properly.

Fred Tydeman and Kathy Bohrer, USA friends from my time with IBM and Java, arrived this afternoon for the night, as planned. They are on a comprehensive sight-seeing trip around New Zealand.

Hawkes Bay Weather: 15°C—28°C; northerly wind; no rain. [77.4]

Rained in the morning; mowed Bicka’s pen and checked the flystruck lambs and completed electric fence setup for break-grazing the new grass. Quiet day really; very humid.

In the evening unprovoked I was attacked by a wasp, stung several times on the right forearm. Karola said she’d seen a stream of insects going to and from a hole in the ground nearby, next to the water tank stand on the end of the wash house. I will be revenged, but first, where’s the antihistamine – in Wellington – that’s not particularly helpful. Aaarrggg.

Hawkes Bay Weather: 16°C—20°C; northerly wind; 5mm rain. [77.1]

Major rework of the temporary electric fencing today – so that the new grass can be break-fed during the day and the sheep can be put back in the Island paddock at night – to avoid overgrazing of the new grass. Meanwhile we checked lamb 509 and found it had fly strike, as suspected.

In the morning I went into town and got 25Kg of maize for the geese and 2.5 litres of Magnum pour-on spray for the sheep – to control blowfly and lice. While I was checking the old Magnum information – to see how much I would need and to check that it covered blowfly as well as lice (unlike the previous mixture called WipeOut) – I reread that the witholding period before a treated sheep can be shorn is 2 months. That would take us into April and as the wool on all ewes is an inch or so long and they’re getting very hot on sunny days, we decided to see if we could get them shorn now and then apply the Magnum in a week or so. Bruce Richardson (Mobile Shearing Hawkes bay) is coming 8:30am on Friday expecting to shear 28 ewes and crutch 42 or so lambs. Well, with two having fly strike already that’s down to 41. Bruce says there’s a lot of flystrike about.

The geese now have names. Gloria is pure white; Charity is all white – if you are being charitable; Hope has several brown feathers, hoping to be white, and Faith has quite mixed plumage – we have faith that underneath her heart is white as driven snow. Faith, Hope, Charity, and Gloria. They may all be ganders, we don’t know.

Hawkes Bay Weather: 17°C—24°C; no rain. [77.4]