Monthly Archives: January 2008

Ticket To Ryde – Well Priory Bay Hotel Actually

Beautiful morning, hot afternoon. I spent too much of last night and this morning writing a program that took my fancy; it’s like jigsaws to a jigsaw enthusiast I suppose, this programming thing. Anyway it’s been a while since I’ve been up till 3:00am, excepting international flights of course.

Karola decided it was time to book our UK trip tickets – well they have increased in price by $2000 since last year. Karola is going to UK for 3 weeks to help Anna and the grandsons at Easter and we both plan to go on a summer holiday in France with Anna sometime in July/August.

The dead router won’t even be checked over until tomorrow so, to avoid delay, I bought another one at a different branch of Mitre 10 and continued with my holes. A dozen more done today. If my dead router is replaced I shall just return it unopened to the other branch; if it is repaired I guess I’ll have to live with having two cheap Black & Decker routers.

Hawkes Bay Weather: 12°C—23°C; no rain [80.6]

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50 More To Rout

More railings work interrupted by breaking a couple of router blades and then the router itself amid much sparking and some acrid smoke. Will find out tomorrow whether Mitre-10 believe the router was faulty or the user was at fault. Elm is a hard wood, everyone says. Still, only 10 holes per post (5 per end-post of course) and only 50 more to rout.

Hawkes Bay Weather: 12°C—25°C; no rain [80.3]

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Mary To Wellington

Mary went off back to Wellington at lunchtime. A rest day for us all. Karola took Bicka for a run round the orchard, she on her mountain bike.

Hawkes Bay Weather: 12°C—27°C; 0.3mm rain [79.7]

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Mrs Strange Is No More

Mary and I moved some water troughs around, wound up the electric fence along the lawn-Triangle boundary, and did various other tidying up tasks. I dug a hole to hold the old, sick Romney ewe “Mrs Strange” (as Karola calls her) when she dies and I enlisted Adam Ladbrooke to come and shoot her; she’d been immobile on her side for 2 days and recovery looked a forlorn hope. In the event it was Alan Ladbrooke, Adam’s dad, who came by later afternoon with his gun, only to find Mrs Strange had beaten us to it by a couple of hours. I buried Mrs Strange. In the meantime we’d trimmed a number of tree branches broken and hanging in the gales of last week and Karola cut down more of the Tasmanian Blackwood trees in the vicinity of the new railings. I chainsawed them into firewood. I continued the railings work, completing holes for the two end posts and beginning to get them level with the gate posts using the laser level. Karola and I also moved some heaps of weeds and leaves, levelling the ground around her new “bund” compost heap.

The bullied goose was reunited briefly with the bully and his mate; that didn’t work so they were separated again. The two bantam hens with young chicks have gone AWOL this evening, they haven’t grasped the value yet of going up the plank into the Mandarin Chook House. Mended a water trough hose that slipped off the brass tap connector.

Hawkes Bay Weather: 10°C—24°C; no rain [80.3]

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Railing Again

Bought more router bits and took Mary to Havelock North in search of local jam.

More railing preparation and completion of concreting-in the ‘slam post’. A few holes initiated using the tractor-mounted post hole digger. Karola cleared vast amounts of weed from the vicinity clearing the ground all around where the new railings will go.

Sheep flocks moved to fresh pasture. Main mob of ewes and lambs are now in the Middle paddock (from the Triangle). Nelson, rams and Romneys are in the Front and North paddocks. Ben has been put with Nelson et al. Mrs Strange, a poorly Romney, has been lying down for over a day and is probably going to die soon, but we thought that before. I gave her 250mm of Ketol “pick-me-up” and we’ll see what tomorrow brings.

Hawkes Bay Weather: 11°C—20°C; no rain [80.6]

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Goose Is Cooked? Apparently Not.

Just after waking around 6:30 am a goose started squawking out on the lawn. It’s the loner goose that was being bullied by the other two and which I’d given the run of the lawn. Yesterday he did a similar thing, apparently saying it was time he was fed. But this time the squawking went on for several minutes and seemed a little more frenetic than last time. I finally took a look out of the bedroom window and there was the goose wrapped up in the electric fence and flapping and plunging. I sped downstairs in bare feet, across the dew-wet lawn, tried to grab the goose to unwrap it and got a healthy blasting shock for my pains. Common sense seeping into the brain I sprinted over and shut off the current. Spent the next five minutes untangling the goose; it’d jerked the top wire (well, polywire, more like string) off its posts and got it wrapped around and under its wings and around its neck. It was a very cross goose and pecked me savagely, leaving instant bruises and abrasions each time it made contact. Finally I got it unwrapped and then it charged me; from about 3 metres away it came at me, neck extended, wings beating. I was so relieved and interested to see that it could be so aggressive; none of the geese have been anything like as angry as this before. Far from damaging the goose – I expect goose down is a pretty good insulator and the wire was in contact with the ground so maybe he wasn’t getting strong electric shocks, just tangled and cross – the goose ate a hearty maize breakfast and if anything looked livelier today than in the past week.

Later in the morning I went with Mary to Goldpine and bought 17 x 25Kg bags of ready-mixed quick-setting concrete for the railing posts plus another 10 steel standard posts and 100 more 2.5mm crimps for Karola’s tree guards. I also bought 2 lock-through gudgeons for an experiment I intended to do on the gate we hung yesterday. The problem with the gate is that it sags and the catch end is almost dragging on the ground; the gudgeons are vertical and in the right place but the strap hinges on the gate are a sloppy fit and the gate itself sags. So I experimented with bending one of the gudgeons and using that for the bottom hinge; the first experiment bent the gudgeon but wasn’t a success, and trying to unbend it just bent it more. However the 2nd gudgeon, bent using the experience of the 1st, actually raised the catch end of the gate by about 50mm and it is a success.

In the afternoon we dug the hole and positioned the “slam post” for the gate. We put one 25Kg bag of concrete around the bottom of the post and, tomorrow, will fill on top of the concrete with clay and gravel, leaving enough space for a 2nd 25Kg bag just below ground level. We used the laser level to get the two gate posts exactly the same height out of the ground. Karola took her pruning saw to a small Tasmanian Blackwood tree about 4 metres high and in the way of the new railings; felled it to the ground.

Hawkes Bay Weather: 14°C—22°C; 2.7mm rain [?]

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More On The New Gateway Railings

Got the main gatepost comcreted in and the gate hung.

Kirsty and Bruce arrived late afternoon and have provided entertainment throughout the evening.

Hawkes Bay Weather: 10°C—23°C; no rain [80.3]

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A Rout, A Rout

Gateposts routed and a start made on the hole for the gatepost to hold the gate. Overcast much of the day but mild and quite pleasant. Karola is forging ahead with another 5 tree guards.

Muff’s Kate had a baby girl yesterday evening.

Anna rang, her childhood friend Jo is moving to a hospice today, the end of the journey. Karola and Bridget have also been in contact with Jo’s family over the last several months during Jo’s treatment. Anna is 39 today; Jo is about the same age.

Hawkes Bay Weather:16°C—23°C; 0.2mm rain [81.2]

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Silly Lamb Ben And The Briar Patch

GST is well overdue but I finished it around 2:30am and it went off today.

Sunny and warm with gentle breeze; a much more pleasant day today. Mary and I did more on the Front Entrance Railings project; the router is a success. Ben got caught in brambles this morning but wasn’t the least bit thankful when released, silly lamb.

Janet Scott came to lunch; Brien Mahoney (our financial advisor) came to see Karola in the afternoon; we mused about the world economic meltdown.

Hawkes Bay Weather: 15°C—26°C; no rain [80.7]

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Hot, Humid, and Blowing a Gale.

Mary and I began work on the elmwood railing for the front entrance. That meant I experimented with the new router for making the mortise holes to hold the rails in the posts. Long discussion with Gill as we tracked down a solution to some missing stuff on her MacBook. Similar long discussions with Bridget as she moved her programs and data onto her new web space. Muff Milne and mokapuna Juno came for a while in the afternoon, waiting for Muff’s daughter Kate to have a baby in Hastings hospital. They left before dinner and we await news.

Hawkes Bay Weather: 18°C—32°C; no rain [80.8]

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Summer Camp

A damp start with low cloud that closed Napier/Hastings airport until after 11:00am. Improved through the day. Mary arrived only 20 minutes later than scheduled, the airport in Napier was chock full of people because ofthe cancelled flights, an unusual occurrence.

Bridget and I decided that her business website deserved its own web hosting account; that’d stop me fretting that any time I changed anything I would be disturbing her paying clients. So we signed her up for the Cheap Web Hosting at the same vendor, AceWebHosting (servers in New Jersey).

Karola made another 3 of her tall tree guards, under the big oak in the shade as the temperature rose and the humidity remained very high.

Hawkes Bay Weather: 19°C—24°C; 0.1mm rain [80.9]

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Much Mowing To And Fro

A Light drizzle set in but mid-morning I went out and mowed the Front paddock nevertheless. Also the orchard drive and along the edges of the new drive.

Caroline and Rob Knott (Knott from Maine, retired, they know the Sharp family well – connection is through Karola’s American Field Service scholarship back in 19602) dropped in on their way from Auckland and Rotorua to Wellington. Karola spent an uncharacteristic amount of time tidying and cleaning and clearing, both for these American visitors and Mary who arrives tomorrow afternoon.

The rain is a little heavier now, which is good. We need the grass to grow after mowing and the lambs to put on lots of weight.

One of the geese is still off colour; I think it was badly attacked by one of its fellows last week; it has been given short shrift ever since the 4th goose died but this time it is totally depressed and demoralised so I’ve taken it out of the goose enclosure and give it separate rations.

Hawkes Bay Weather: 17°C—20°C; 6.0mm rain [80.7]

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Another Day, Another Post

Reinstalled one of the strainer posts. Mowed the North paddock but in the process I got the tractor and (heavy) orchard mower stuck against the fence at the bottom of the ha-ha. Karola thought it mildly amusing that even with the flattest of properties and lots of space I still managed to get stuck. She helped dismantle fence so I could drive the tractor out.

Incident with chick and rat. Black chick and mother hen were scratching around inside their coup – one of those moveable arc coups triangular in cross-section. Mother hen wanders outside (all hens are free range during the day) but chick stays inside and gets frantic trying to get through the netting. I arrived on scene to see the chick up one end of the run, the mother hen just through the wire looking perturbed, and a big grey rat no more than 2 feet from the chick, inside the run. Well the rat saw me and ran off back to a pile of logs, climbing up onto a high branch and peering at me with a quizzical expression. Lucky escape for the chick I say.

Hawkes Bay Weather: 15°C—20°C; no rain [81.5]

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One Woman Mows The Barley Grass

Eye specialist for checkup in the morning; I can never see properly afterwards so it ties up both of us getting there and back. In the afternoon Karola did a lot of mowing of the barley grass around the Canary Island pine and the Oak in the Triangle paddock; using a catcher there’s less seed to generate more barley grass.

I completed excavation of the two mis-positioned strainers so now I’m back to where I was a month or so ago with two strainers to put in.

Graham Harvey and Tracey called round on their way for two weeks at Lake Rotoiti, returning a laptop and cables – he still hasn’t got his Internet working, there’s still a problem in getting the ethernet network to go the full 250 metres, even though it’s in several hops.

Hawkes Bay Weather: 15°C—21°C; 0.1mm rain [80.5]

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Tree Guards the High Point of the Day

Karola finished and erected her 8 tall tree guards for the 8 Totaras round the Canary Island pine – they’re the best tree guards she’s ever done and no sign of sheep attacking them yet.

I dug a bit more, still trying to extract 2 strainers and reposition them to line up more precisely with the Homestead. I also spent a lot of time computing, setting something called a ‘wiki’ up for an old ex-IBM friend in the UK. Kaz rang and we sent him a key to the Pitoitoi garage – his daughter Amy needs urgently somewhere to stash a washing machine and double bed until her new lodgings are available. Kaz will go down from Fielding to Wellington to help with this as soon as he gets our garage key.

Hawkes Bay Weather: 13°C—25°C; no rain [80.5]

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Miksalignmentarianismistically Speaking

Hot day. Karola continued making high tree guards – 5 today making 8 in all, that’s 55 wire crimps crimped (and, she says, the bruises to show it). You may deduce that there’s 11 horizontal wires in the deer netting so there’s a crimp per wire to join the netting in a circle.

Karola went out for afternoon tea with Muff Milne (aka Muff White) up from Wellington for a few days.

Stray teenager whose car broke down at our new drive front gate asked for petrol (but that didn’t help) then a jump-start (but that didn’t help), then a tow back to Flaxmere but this last request I politely declined. Steve Ireland from Flaxmere; polite and grateful but unaware how lucky he was to be given the help – oh and did he have a phone to call for help, yes but it had run out of credit so I lent him mine and he talked with his dad for several minutes.

In the morning I did a lot of measurements and confirmed my suspicion that the new totara batten fence-to-be between the North and Side paddocks (Side aka Triangle, enlarged) was mis-aligned. It is supposed to be aligned with the Homestead and therefore with the ha-ha and at right angles to the existing totara batten fence between the Front and North paddocks. I extracted and repositioned the slam post for the two gate complex at the corner of Front, North and Side paddocks. Leaving two large strainer posts to extract and reposition later this week.

Sent Bridget some photos, as requested, Natalie is making a story book. In the process I installed ImageMagick on the MacBook Pro and found it very easy to use it to convert the very large photo files into something friendlier, 800×600 dots and 1/4 megabyte instead of 2.5 megabytes.

Hawkes Bay Weather: 13°C—25°C; no rain [81.0]

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Rest Day

Nice warm sunny day. Animals all accounted for. One goose may be ill, it either hides in the weeds or sits in the goose bath while the others are out foraging.

Electric fence along the lawn perimeter; the mains energiser certainly packs more punch than the battery ones ever did, even with fresh batteries.

Romneys and rams moved from Island and Above Island paddocks into Goose Enclosure for a couple of days. The seven ewes, wether, and Nelson look quite fat, as do the five lambs.

Rest of the flock moved from the Front and North paddocks into the Triangle and Island paddocks in the evening.

I had short dentist visit in the morning; we also went shopping and went to Farmlands to return a sack of Zinc Sulphate crystals and pick up a salt lick for the sheep. Further research says that Zinc Sulphate, applied externally, may be good for preventing sheep foot rot but if taken in large doses internally may poison them. It’s Zinc Oxide that they can be given internally to help prevent Facial Eczema. But our sheep are bred for resistance to Facial Eczema so we really shouldn’t worry anyway. Oh, and the salt lick is fine for our Romneys but potentially lethal to Texel strains of sheep because of their inordinate sensitivity to copper. Most of our breeding ewes are at least half Texel.

Karola did 2nd high tree guard using deer netting and windcloth; she has a dozen to make and they’re each about 3.5 metres round.

Hawkes Bay Weather:14°C—28°C; no rain [81.7]

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Return To Karamu

A leisurely return up through the Wairarapa, stopping to buy shoes, as one does, in Masterton. My first pair of Reiker shoes. We also stopped somewhere between Masterton and Woodville to buy limes (tiny orange-coloured citrus fruit, I thought limes were green but he said no, these were Mexican limes, last bag, been snapped up, … Hmmmm).

Hawkes Bay Weather: 13°C—30°C; no rain [?]

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Day 3 In Wellington

Karola did lots of weeding at Pitoitoi and I was glued to my computer, as I have been for several days, installing and configuring a computer discussion group system for an old IBM friend in the UK, Geoff Robinson.

Hawkes Bay Weather: 12°C—28°C; no rain [?]

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Day 2 In Wellington

We had lunch at the newly refurbished and remodelled (ie the swamp was drained) Karori Cricket Club with Bridget and daughters and Mary. Later Karola made dinner for Geoff and Felicity Rashbrooke and we swapped information about our children split between the UK and New Zealand.

Hawkes Bay Weather: 10°C—25°C; no rain [?]

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Day 1 In Wellington

Bridget came out to Pitoitoi and not only lent us her weed sprayer and mixture but actually did the spraying as well. We babysat for Bridget and Chris in the evening, it is a great honour to be allowed to babysit Bridget’s two daughters.

Hawkes Bay Weather: 7°C—21°C; no rain [?]

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Off To Wellington

Lunch at Abbott’s Tearooms – a very traditional buffet and certainly high GI – not for slimmers, especially the pavlova.

Dinner at Bridget’s.

Hawkes Bay Weather: 6°C—22°C; no rain [?]

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Muggy Day

Mostly inside today even though the weather was good. Some preparing for going to Wellington tomorrow for the weekend; lots of computer work. Meanwhile Karola mulched the Titoke trees and started making her new tree guards out of a 100m roll of deer fence netting. Each guard is almost exactly as tall as she is. Our sheep will not climb into or onto these.

Hawkes Bay Weather:16°C—25°C; 0.1mm rain [80.9]

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A Tenth of the Price Too

Very light drizzle all day. Molar extracted in the morning; got the tractor back in the afternoon.

Hawkes Bay Weather:16°C—25°C; 4.9mm rain [81.1]

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Titoke Releasing Complete

Bantams with young chicks fighting so we separated them. Later one of black chicks died but otherwise all is much more peaceful in ranks of hens. A black hen who has been broody for a while and sitting on no eggs at all in the green shed was a bit miffed to find I’d put an icecream carton of water where she wanted to nest. Did she push it out of the way? Did she snuggle down next to it? No, she just flopped down in it and carried on with her imaginary incubating of fictitious eggs. I eventually pulled her out, soaking wet, and shut her in the Mandarin Chook House with the others for the night; maybe she’ll come to her senses.

Took Topper to auto-electrical shop and they replaced the battery without charge; it was still under (their) guarantee. Minor problem was that the current version of that battery has increased in size by a millimetre or two and it wouldn’t fit so they had to do some metalwork to make room for it. All’s done now.

Undercoat is now on the top rail of the stock crate; we painted the crate upside down so the only piece that didn’t get painted was the top rail.

Titoke trees down the drive are now all released and the Robinia saplings that have sprouted vigorously in the twilight zone at the edge of the oaks, shading several of the Titoke, are all now cut down and carted away for the sheep to browse and then to be mulched.

Maize and cat food bought at Farmlands but I forgot to inquire about zinc to add to the sheep drinking water to guard against the dreaded FE – Facial Eczema.

Very hot day and high humidity too. Karola, who’d already released about half the 25 Titoke trees a week or so ago, has gone into a binge of clearing/sorting in the cottage. Possibly this is precursor to us deciding exactly where the cottage is to move to and getting started on the moving plan.

Hawkes Bay Weather:20°C—32°C; 0.9mm rain [81.3]

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Better Day By Far

Well a much better day today. Beautiful morning sun. On the offchance I tried starting the topper one more time and, to my amazement, with a little coaxing, it started. Karola was so pleased that she herself drove the Landrover round and round the Front paddock, getting the long stalks and seed heads off so that growth, such as it is in the height of summer, concentrates on edible leaves.

And also to my surprise and delight, having spent an hour or so last night after we got back from Graham and Tracey’s in documenting very carefully the problems I was having with accessing parts of my web site, I got an e-mail this morning saying the problem must be somewhere over here as they could access my web site with exactly the results I said I expected and needed. I tried again and suddenly it was working properly. A less suspicious soul might not wonder out loud whether they actually had made a configuration mistake in New Jersey and found the quickest way to fix it was correct the mistake and claim innocence. Anyway it is all working properly and, better still, another major problem that I’d spent hours yesterday trying to pin down (almost to the point of deleting it and starting again) suddenly went away – a weeks evening work recovered, Smiles all round.

In celebration I went out and rammed in a strainer post. It’s Sunday night here, still communicating with UK friends via e-mail and working on web site stuff.

Hawkes Bay Weather:18°C—27°C; no rain [81.5]

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It’s All In The Hops

Not an auspicious start. From yesterday: Tractor broken, Topper flat tyre and flat battery and won’t even jump start. Today horrible things going on on my website too so protracted discussions over e-mail with my technical support in New Jersey (well probably in New Delhi – but they’re very good and patient and quick).

Anyway, I began process of rebuilding a weeks work on the web site, not getting very far before we set off 45 minutes up the Taihape road to have a barbeque dinner with Graham Harvey and Tracey Craig – Bicka’s friends at Touchwood Books. Highlight of that was we got an ethernet connection working through about 100 metres of the cable I bought Graham, attaching a little ethernet hub I’ve had for ages and connecting one of my laptops to that. So despite the distance limitation it looks like Graham will be able to piggyback on the Touchwood Books broadband as long as they cable it up in two hops of under 100 metres; Peter and Diane Arthur, the proprietors of Touchwood Books, conveniently have a house halfway between the business office and Graham’s house.

Hawkes Bay Weather:14°C—23°C; no rain [81.3]

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Chick Antics

Called Kerry of Hawkes Bay Tractor Dismantlers and he must have been somewhat at a loose end – or curious to see where we lived – because he volunteered to come this morning and see what was wrong with the Fergie. He came, he did stuff, he went, he came back and took the Fergie off on a trailer for more thorough repair.

So we decided to try and top the paddock with the tow-behind self-powered topper. Pumped up the flat tyre (again) and put the battery in. Tried jump starting with the Subaru; no joy. Tried with the Landrover (heavier duty battery etc), still no joy. Went out to buy a replacement battery; shop closed for the Christmas and New Year break. Gave up.

One of the brown hens took ill and died and was buried today.

Chicks now number 6. Two from a couple of weeks back that are now returning each night with their white bantam mother to nest in the Mandarin Chook House. Four from a brown hen nesting on top of hay bales in the green shed; a metre off the ground. That brown hen has a mate/pest/auntie hen who insisted on joint brooding for the last week and then seemed to steal one of the four chicks. She paraded round with a yellow chick while half a day later the original owner was sitting on another yellow and two black chicks.

Today Karola retrieved the old chook run I made last year from the Ladbrookes – Crystal had been keeping Pukeko chicks in it – and also retrieved our large plastic dog carrying box; I’d forgotten they had it. We installed both the brown bantam mothers and their 4 chicks in the run, somewhat safer from cats, stoats, rats and the like. I noticed tonight that the ‘auntie’ bantam had swapped her yellow chick for a single black chick. As long as they’re happy . . .

Meanwhile Karola has put top coat Karaka green paint on the stock crate; quite a fiddly job with all the wire mesh.

Hawkes Bay Weather:12°C—20°C; 0.2mm rain [?]

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Tractor Woosh Bang

I mowed the clear spaces in the Island paddock; it’s about half grass and weeds, half the fleshy iris plant. Mowed several gateways to make the gates easier to open. Began to mow the Front paddock and SCREECH and smoke and I turned off the Fergie pretty quickly. Noticing the smoke coming out from the engine just underneath the fuel tank I retired to consider my options for an hour or so. When I returned the tractor was still there. I started it and was stunned by a series of loud explosions, like backfires just a couple of feet away, under the fuel tank again. I decided to call it a day.

Karola did another stint of weeding and tidying vegetation; a never-ending task.

Bantams nesting on hay bales in green shed are hatching their eggs but I don’t plan to disturb them until tomorrow..

Hawkes Bay Weather:12°C—30°C; no rain [80.3]

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One Man Went To Mow

Karola and I cut off a large branch of the Lemonwood near the big oak tree; this branch splintered off and hung down long ago last autumn and finally we’ve dealt with it. I also moved some compost for Karola with the Fergie front-end loader; the two things came togther because we used the Fergie bucket to hoist me up into the Lemonwood to saw it off at the break.

Late afternoon I did a spot, several hours, of mowing with the Fergie. The goose enclosure and the Middle paddock are now mown as is some of the undergrowth and bamboo shoots near the big oak and in the Triangle paddock near the fence where the bamboo attempts to make inroads.

Hawkes Bay Weather:9°C—23°C; no rain [?]

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New Year’s Day

A day of chores completed; the quarterly “turning of the mattress”; the monthly “emptying of the rain gauge; a leaking alkathene pipe to a sheep trough mended.

Karola and I drafted the sheep today in accordance with our new strategy. We fed the one lamb that was a bit daggy with some drench.

Later I hung the two gates closing the wide end of the entrance “V” from the orchard drive towards the Homestead. Amazing how, despite repeated measuring and testing, you end up needing to put a hole right where there’s a fence wire wrapped round the post. All went well however and tonight the two gates are swinging and roughly level. While I was doing this Karola weeded in the adjacent planting areas – releasing the young trees from the more vigorous weeds near each tree.

Hawkes Bay Weather:7°C—21°C; no rain [81.3]

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