Monthly Archives: May 2010

Spent the morning researching wastewater treatment options for the cottage. In the afternoon Karola, Bicka and I went round the orchard and counted the lambs. This is not so strange as today the police were dealing with a local case where 14 lambs were stuffed into a car along with four human occupants – presumably rustled for food.

Weather:6°C—13°C; no rain [81.9]

Cold with a brisk wind and occasional weak sunshine. Sadly the littlest chick of the three is missing presumed ‘lunch’.
We went to Napier and walked with Bicka around the estuary then had brunch at Divine Cafe, otherwise kept in the warm.

Rodent Roll Of Honour 2007 – 2010
(well up to the end of May anyway)

2007

29 Feb: sighting
3 Mar: old trap with cheese
4 Mar: new trap with cheese
5 Mar: ditto
6 Mar: new plastic trap with blue cheese ✓
9 Mar: reset
May: Karola ✓
11 May: ditto ✓
18 May: ditto ✓
15 May: ✓
2 Jun: sighting in the evening
5 Jun: ✓
24 Jun: ✓
25 Jun: ✓
5 Jul: cheese bait eaten
7 Jul: ✓
9 Jul: ✓

2008

24 Feb: cheese taken
April: Ian caught a mouse
26 May: kitkat and hard cheese as bait ✓✓
12 Jun: “the shrimp” strikes again, eating:
1 cheese bait
4 pistachio nut baits
2 peanut butter baits
3 blue cheese baits
17 Jun: no luck overnight with six traps and old cheese
18 Jun: 9:00 pm Monday ✓✓
Overnight a small member of the mouse family, the cheese bait was very old
20 Jul: truce on the little people war to big people (mice, rats)
14 Dec: 1st possum by garage with apple
cat caught a rabbit
2nd possum with a joey

2009

5 Mar: ✓✓
10 Mar: loss of rat trap in green shed
11 Mar: in kitchen ✓
November: rats seen around area of green shed, put all grain/chookfood in metal box, rats poisoned

2010

January, February, March: sightings of large rats, cat caught some
May: several sightings including Slinky Sam (very small, very fast, very black mouse)
May: incident of the toaster #2 (Ian)
Bought 2 new plastic traps
27 May: Karola – cheese ✓
28 May: Karola – cheese ✓
29 May: Ian – peanut butter ✓✓
30 May: Karola – peanut butter ✓✓
31 May: Karola – peanut butter ✓
1 June: Karola – peanut butter ✓
2 June: Karola – peanut butter ✓
3 June: Karola set 4 traps in 4 different rooms with peanut butter but none caught

Weather:3°C—13°C; no rain [81.5]

Rained all day; followed Bicka’s example and slept most of the day; Karola went out at lunchtime for a Federation of Graduate Women’s meeting and said that rivers had risen quite a lot between her trip to Napier around 11:30 am and returning around 3:00 pm.

Two mice caught today, one yesterday, and there’s at least one more to catch.

Weather:9°C—14°C; 65.1 mm rain [81.9]

People came to measure up for “pink batts” glass wool underfloor insulation for the homestead thsi morning; government pays $1300 towards the $4000 cost – and we went into Hastings and paid for it this afternoon, followed by a bracing walk with Bicka along the Napier foreshore – huge waves and a gale blowing from the south-east.

Weather:9°C—13°C; 25.5 mm rain [82.2]

We went to Taradale to see the Hawkes Bay Diabetics Society’s organiser to borrow a book. We heard about how prevalent Diabetes is in New Zealand amongst older people and were given a free tester for sugar levels in the blood, a really useful little machine which helps you tell when what you’re eating is helping or hindering. Karola has decided to go on the same diet as me – non-gluten meals with low sugar, salt, fat, and most of all low on carbohydrate. All very interesting.

Later we took Bicka for a walk in Frimley Park and do a bit of shopping in Hastings. A cold day threatening to rain most of the time – but not actually raining.

Weather:8°C—14°C; 2.5 mm rain [82.3]

Bit of a sleepless night and around 5:00 am I went downstairs for a cup of tea and slice of (gluten-free) toast. Imagine my delight (NOT) when I popped the bread in the toaster only to smell a horrid acrid smell and see some glowing inside the toaster. Not again! Oh yes, another mouse caught in the act of cleaning crumbs from the toaster is no more – but I deferred my toast till another day.

Weather:9°C—17°C; 0.3 mm rain [82.6]

Rain stopped around 1:00 am; sunny day and remarkably little ponding after the three inches of rain last night.

Sheep on the lawn again for a nibble. Lambs in the orchard very white after their prolonged bath in the rain, but Karola says that they’re otherwise in good spirits.

We went to Napier, Karola to shop, Bicka and I for our usual walk along the foreshore and then a latte-to-go (me, not Bicka).

Weather:7°C—19°C; 4.3 mm rain [82.6]

Rain, rain and more rain. And so it should be, although unlike much of the rest of New Zealand we’re not getting the storms, just the rain.

Weather:7°C—16°C; 72.7 mm rain [82.3]

Quiet Sunday. Karola spent the afternoon tending trees in the north-west corner of the Homestead block. I spent the morning on administrivia and the afternoon beginning to do a bit more research on what we’ll need for the cottage refurbishment.

Weather:7°C—14°C; 5.5 mm rain [82.9]

In the morning Karola and I went to the Better Home and Living fair on the outskirts of Napier. We browsed the stalls on eco-this and eco-that, insulation, solar heating, solar power, water filtering, flooring, roofing, and so on. It was a much smaller show than last year but we got a couple of useful names and addresses.

Weather:3°C—17°C; 0.1 mm rain [82.9]

Strange day. First some good news; the lease of Karola’s orchard ran out yesterday and today we signed for another three years at a price both we and the orchardist were happy with (although it’s much less than the dollar value of the orchard would earn per year in a savings account). Then more good news, a trip to Napier for me and Karola and Bicka to sort of celebrate – at least we didn’t have the messy and stressful process of trying to find alternative tenants for the orchard. We lunched at the Divine Cafe and the food was good. We dipped into Dymocks bookshop and the books were good.We shopped at the health food shop next door to Divine’s and the food was good. We got a parking fine for overstaying our two hours by ten minutes, that was bad – but the fine was only $10, that was good. Then Bicka and I went for a 20 minute walk in the mist and light drizzle along the foreshore and that too was good.

A couple of weeks ago I got a strange call from a woman representing Pitline Pty Ltd in New South Wales, Australia offering to find some “unclaimed funds” held in our joint names in Australia. This seemed very suspicious and then we realised that the only money in Australia linked to both our names was a little nest egg in a CBA bank account in Melbourne, surely they couldn’t mean that, we’d been getting regular statements from CBA every few months since we opened the account in 2002. So I rang the CBA and enquired. Oh yes, didn’t I know, after seven years an inactive account is closed and the funds become “unclaimed” and go into a fund held by the state. Anyway, I located the missing funds, without employing Pitline Pty Ltd who would no doubt have taken a large finders fee, and maybe we’ll retrieve the money in a few weeks time.

Weather:10°C—15°C; 8.7 mm rain [83.0]

Sunshine quickly led to overcast skies and dropping temperatures. Inside work until lunch time and then I took Bicka in to get some bits of plumbing and a guillotine, the latter for cutting up photos printed four-at-a-time on A4 glossy paper. The plumbing is to try and fix the upstairs bathroom basin which has started leaking again.

Sheep on the lawn for 3 – 4 hours. Karola invited Rowena over for afternoon tea and to pick some apples. I cut down two apple trees in the far north-west corner where she wants some railings put across the corner and a planting behind them so that you don’t see a neighbour’s house when looking up the orchard drive. A man is expected next week to pull out some rows of peaches on Craig’s orchard next door and we’re hoping he will also pull out the stumps of the two trees I cut down today.

No word about the lease yet and it comes to an end tonight.

Weather:9°C—18°C; 5.8 mm rain [83.1]

Hastings late morning to drop off chainsaw for fitting new chains, to OfficeMax to pick up more printer ink and folders, and to Vet Services for Bicka’s annual health check. Bicka was 15.1kg last year and is now 15.6kg so we may try using a Nutrients “lite” dog food so she eats as much but maybe keeps a little more trim.

Karola put up electric fence round the lawn and let her ladies graze there for a few hours while she continued raking up leaves.

Weather:3°C—19°C; 0.1 mm rain [83.1]

Morning in Hastings; brunch at Omahu road Bay Expresso; afternoon changing water filters and tap washers.

The water pump that sends water from the rainwater tanks up into the holding tank in the attic has been running for long spells each time the holding tank becomes empty and this is usually a sign of empty rainwater tanks or clogged filters. Our tanks are half full so this morning we bought replacement filters and this afternoon we fitted them. As we had to turn off the pump to do this Karola seazed the opportunity to mend some leaking taps. We unscrewed eight taps and fitted five new washers. One odd experience was that when the cold tap in the kitchen was draining the holding tank in the attic at one point it became hot water, obviously some strange linkage with the hot water piping. Anyway it all seems to be working as expected again; we’ll have to check for leaks tomorrow.

Weather:5°C—19°C; 0.2 mm rain [?]

More work on the map of the orchard, including a little more counting in the orchard itself. Meanwhile Karola, having spent the morning in Hastings, continued her leaf raking operations.

Weather:7°C—19°C; 0.1 mm rain [82.7]

Karola raked leaves on the lawn in case sheep need to graze there. This was after counting her lambs in the back of the orchard. There are still 28 lambs.

I did some more measuring and solved the puzzle as to where the missing row went; the rows on either side of the middle gravel track are balanced at the ends but one side has an extra row somewhere. It’s a matter of gradually getting out of kilter and then a gap nearly big enough for two rows only having one. The computer map of the orchard using Google SketchUp is coming on quite well.

Weather:5°C—20°C; 1.4 mm rain [83.0]

Strange day weatherwise – beginning with light rain, then a cloudy period, then more rain, then around midday sunny and warm but later back to showers and a marked drop in temperature.

In the morning, including the rain, I counted the rest of the orchard trees and made more measurements. Mid afternoon I went to Napier and picked up Karola from the airport. She was delayed an hour due in part to a 30 minute closure of Wellington airport because an engine caught fire on a flight from Dunedin.

Weather:9°C—19°C; 6.4 mm rain [82.7]

Took Karola to the airport for her 9:35 am flight to Wellington – her birthday day with the granddaughters and a meal with an old school friend.

More struggling with the map of the orchard using Google SketchUp, a very powerful and easy-to-use program but still quite a steep learning curve.

I spent the afternoon counting trees, thousands of trees, and found that some rows had many more trees than anticipated, 70 odd instead of 50 odd. It depends on who planted them I suppose; the row spacing of 5 metres is pretty standard but the spacing along the rows is anywhere between two and three metres.

Weather:9°C—22°C; no rain [82.9]

Lots more rain overnight; excellent.

For lunch we drove over to the Clifton Cafe with Bicka and from there back to Napier for another bracing walk along the foreshore. Ulterior motive was to help grandson Barney in London with a school project involving photographing a cut-out figure called “Flat Stanley” (coloured in by Barney and sent to us with a nice letter from Barney) against a backdrop of ourselves, Bicka, and some obviously New Zealand buildings and signs. The day just disappeared.

Much struggling with a new computer sketching program called SketchUp.

Weather:9°C—20°C; 0.2 mm rain [83.9]

Delightful showers of rain, even wetting under the tree canopy – partly because the rain went on for many hours, partly because leaves have fallen from many of the trees.

The afternoon cleared up for a few hours and I spent that time measuring things in the orchard in preparation for mapping them on a new computer map of the orchard.

Weather:14°C—17°C; 11.4 mm rain [83.6]

Still three chicks scratching around in the leaves. Still 28 lambs in the back of the orchard. Freckles hasn’t stuck her head through the wires again, yet. All is well.

I spent most of the day trying to learn how to drive Google SketchUp – a program which should enable me to sketch the orchard with its blocks of different varieties of apple and peach, and then do a site plan for the cottage – electrical, water, drains and so on.

We went into Napier and Bicka and I walked for 20 mins along the foreshore while Karola did some grocery shopping. Overcast sky but big waves crashing on the beach, very bracing.

Weather:9°C—19°C; 1.1 mm rain [83.1]

So, I have the popular “type 2 diabetes” as well as “coeliac” – both top of the least worst ailments afflicting the over 60s and both mainly a matter of diet to mitigate. Not much else on today.

Karola and then I talked to William Thow today; he came to have a look at the orchard we’re hoping he will sublease from our orchardist, Alan Ladbrook.

Weather:3°C—17°C; 0.1 mm rain [82.7]

It took us another five hours to put up the electric fence that separates the back 1/3 of the orchard (which is all apple trees) from the front 2/3 which is a mix of apples and peaches. Fence is up, electricity is on, and the lambs are luxuriating in their sudden bonus of space, shelter, and grass, not to mention more apples than they could throw a spoon at.

Weather:7°C—20°C; no rain [83.1]

Another cold dark day. We set up the water trough in the orchard preparing for the lambs to go in in next day or two. Meanwhile the lambs have been put in the Island paddock for a bit more grass; they’ve done a good job in cleaning up the Orchard paddock.

Karola has been planting some of the trees she’s bought recently up in the north west corner.

Weather:5°C—15°C; no rain [83.9]

Cold night and sunny but cold day. Two bantams minding two chicks and one bantam minding another chick are all still prospering for now. Couple of Monarch butterflies have emerged despite the frosts but I’m not expecting any more.

Alan Ladbrook came round and proposed a solution to the leasing crisis which is as good as we could expect and the lease amount is within the range we were hoping for. Unlike Alan’s clear assertions yesterday – that he didn’t want to be the primary leasee – he’s now suggested that he would be happy to continue the lease for another three years as long as he could sublease the apples to William Thow – a packhouse owner along the road.

Karola’s GST for Feb/March is at last completed.

Weather:-1°C—17°C; 0.1 mm rain [82.7]

Glucose blood test in the morning – it takes over two hours. Then we had breakfast at the Stortford Lodge Coffee Club. Now that I know hash browns contain gluten I’ve switched to ordinary fried potato chips – but I did have some hash browns at the Coffee Club on 3rd May so I probably have reset my recovery to begin again from 3rd May.

Freckles (ewe #714) had her head caught in the fence again, this time not even netting, just ordinary 7-wire fence. She was easily extracted by turning her head sideways.

Alan Ladbrook came over in the evening, as planned, to discuss the lease renewal. He dropped rather a bombshell by saying he only wanted to lease the peaches, about a quarter of the orchard, and not the rest. The spectre of chasing round for someone to do the apples interspersed with him doing his peaches rose – it was all rather unsettling.

Weather:-2°C—16°C; 0.1 mm rain [83.1]

Lunch with Margery and Brian Cobbe in Taradale. Bitterly cold and overcast day. Karola let the lambs enjoy all of the orchard paddock now they’ve done a good job of cleaning it up in three chunks.

Weather:-2°C—16°C; 0.1 mm rain [82.9]

Another morning in Hastings:

• I had a haircut
• I had a blood test – regular three-monthly test
• We had brunch at Bay Expresso in Omahu Road

After we got back we did some serious pruning of a very old citrus tree behind the rimu on the top of the ha-ha and then Karola mulched up the proceeds along with the maple that I cut down for her a few days ago. Noisy and exhausting work.

Still two chicks. We’re experimenting with having the cat in the cottage kitchen overnight – she’s getting old and it’s cold and maybe we can get her inside with Bicka at night so she has somewhere to go when we move the cottage. Her traditional hiding hole is under the cottage.

Weather:1°C—19°C; no rain [82.7]

In to Hastings to:

• Reestablish our pin numbers on our reissued Visa credit cards; reissued because someone in USA tried to order $8000 of goods on my card and then someone in UK ordered $8000 then $5000 of goods on my card – fraudulent transactions made without them having the card or pin.
• shopping
• an hour with Lloyd Gross of Logan Stone about our orchard lease and what we should expect for the next 3 years – the current lease ends on 20th May 1020
• brunch at The Coffee Club in Stortford Lodge – how the morning just flies

Mulling over when it’ll be time to put sheep in the orchard I glanced back at earlier farm journal entries and I see that they’ve grazed the orchard for up to 3 months beginning:

• 8 May 2005
• 25 May 2006
• 16 May 2007
• 27 May 2008
• 2 May 2009

Weather:4°C—20°C; no rain [82.5]

Seems as if winter is here – cold even when the sun is out. After much digging I was able to pull out the mailbox post (with the tractor) and then, after lunch, dig a hole for it at its new site and, with help from Karola, cement it in.

Karola changed the electric fence so that the lambs have a fresh slice of the orchard paddock to chew on.

It’s the first Sunday in the month so the computer backups are due to be done today.

Weather:-2°C—15°C; no rain [82.5]

Quiet day – Freckles (ewe #714E) got herself caught in a netting fence but probably only overnight. Still two chicks. I started on moving the mailbox yet again. A little rain in the evening.

Weather:3°C—21°C; 5.7 mm rain [83.1]