Monthly Archives: March 2013

I accompanied Karola to St Andrews church in Bulls for Easter Sunday service followed by a family meeting in the Clifton Bulls cemetery.

We saw James & Barbie Wilson’s motor home, $114,000 for a demonstrator model and I wondered if Karola might like something similar if we were to take a long holiday around New Zealand at some point. Inside however, despite being quite well equipped and with lots of cupboards and storage spaces, it does feel rather like a motel room on wheels – rather utilitarian and characterless. I imagined something more like a small yacht – very restricted space used brilliantly and with beautiful wood surfaces and gleaming chrome handles etc.

The cemetery meeting was about making some improvements to the “family wall” – a simple brick wall gathering plaques of the departed. After the quite amiable meeting we all adjourned for morning coffee to Lethanty.

Then Karola and I set off for Karamu with a detour back to Yvonne’s because she’d remembered some problems with her printer she thought I might fix. And, not without much Windows-induced frustration – I did. Well it was all working as expected when I left, but one can never be sure with Windows. Bramble had another round of friendly tussles with Magic.

Uneventful ride back to Hastings. No more speeding tickets – in fact very few police cars on the return trip.

Oak Avenue Weather:11℃—29℃ no rain [?]

We set off, after Karola had had her hair done in Hastings, around 10:15 and got to Mungatapu – one of the old Wilson homesteads in the Bulls/Sanson area – in plenty of time for the “do”. Karola drove briskly most of the way, that is until she attracted the attention of a very young and amiable traffic cop who insisted on giving her a short testimonial to her driving. The testimonial cost $120 but, he said, could very easily have been $350.

There were at least 70 people there and Karola knew the majority of them as family and from school (Woodford). The family was the family but the catered food was excellent. In fact the three speeches were neither too long nor too boring.

We stayed the night at Yvonne’s (Kaz widow) on the road to Fielding.Yvonne has a fairly new “Windows 8” laptop and I was able to help set up her e-mail and security software for free. That is, she’d been advised that she needed to buy various bits of software quite unnecessarily. I must say that Windows 8 is so different from what’s gone before that it was difficult – for me as an Apple Mac user who stopped following Microsoft Windows many years ago – to find out how to do things. Made me very grateful for my Apple devices that mostly “just work” when you start them up or plug things into them.

Bramble had a lot of sitting around to do, even though I took her for her evening walk in the morning, before we left. I also fed out a bale of pea straw to Karola’s well-fed sheep as they will not be let into the orchard while we’re away but have to subsist on the meagre pickings of the Middle and Totara paddocks.

At Yvonne’s Bramble met Magic – Yvonne’s fox terrier – and they had a whale of a time rushing round playing together.

Oak Avenue Weather:13℃—23℃ no rain [?]

No SwimGym today.

I mended the holes I’d made in Henare’s water sprinkler by supergluing two metal screws into them – I’d cut the ends off so they were only a few mm long. This seems to have worked however I did at the same time superglue a few of my fingers together which took several hours to unstick. Also I gave the lawn-to-be another good soaking and put Derris Dust on the vegetables.

Mike Halliday and his son (a vet) came and we all joined in to put two heavy logs onto his trailer – two pieces of the Liquid Amber trunk. I used the tractor to move the logs into position and then nudge them up onto the trailer.

Midday I spent an hour chainsawing some of the larger stems of Ngaios where Shane had cut them higher up with a pruning saw. And then half an hour battling with a clump of blackberry in the planting area along the orchard drive. only 3 – 4 metres across but rather prickly and I couldn’t pull out all the roots so they’ll be back.

Quiet afternoon with computer. Karola let her sheep into the orchard again until dusk. She also gave them a bale of pea straw – they are spoiled these sheep.

Oak Avenue Weather:12℃—23℃ no rain [82.8]

Bramble is funny. On her evening walk we went through the Front paddock where the ram is parked until he meets his ladies in a couple of weeks time. The ram spends his time butting heads with the more aggressive wether lambs through the bars of the stout gate separating them – boom, boom, boom. So Bramble decides to play chase with the ram who stamps his foot – leg rigidly out in front of him, not as you visualise a horse stamping. Then off goes the ram, veering slightly to avoid colliding with me (thankfully) and 100 metres down the paddock with Bramble hot in pursuit. Now the amusing bit. Seconds later I’m surprised to see them coming back, flat out, the ram chasing Bramble!

We continued on up the orchard drive and into the apples and peaches. Bramble runs hither and yon and suddenly stumbles over a rabbit, frozen in the grass. Bramble is in shock; the rabbit accelerates away and is almost out of sight by the time Brambles chasing instincts cut in.

As we amble back towards the cottage, still in the orchard, I’m eating a huge, crisp, ripe Royal Gala, Bramble trots around in ever increasing circles until I can no longer see her, casting for the rabbit I presume. I finish the apple and call her. No dog. I call again, and again, lying down to see under the trees in the direction she was last seen, calling a little more crossly each time. Where is the dratted dog. I sense a rustle behind me. Oh yes, there she is two meters away, quietly sitting, waiting for me to come to my senses. What was all that about, she seems to say.

Karola was in town midday but returned to talk to Mike Halliday, a man who is very interested in wood and may be able to help mill her larger lengths of Liquid Amber trunk. I went in mid afternoon to sign our tax returns. It being the last business day in March we have to get our returns in to the Inland Revenue for the tax year ended 31st March 2012 by 5:00pm today. Good news in a way – our financial investments such as they are lost so much value in the 2011/2012 financial year that we got a whacking great tax rebate. But, as Karola said, we should probably not spend it all but hope subsequent years are so profitable that we have to pay it all back then.

While out I bought three seedling thyme plants and one pyrethrum – Karola likes thyme and pyrethrum is, allegedly, a good companion plant for cabbages and the like as the flowers harbour a natural insecticide. They’re now added to the raised beds and I’ve watered all the veges for a couple of hours.

No rain for a few days yet so I’ve watered 2/3rds of the newly sown parts of the cottage lawn; unless the grass seed gets cracking we’ll just have large patches of fat hen and other weeds, the seeds of which infest all our topsoil and they seem to cope well with drought.

Oak Avenue Weather:9℃—23℃ 0.1mm rain [82.4]

SwimGym

Quiet day, needed after the mulching last evening. Karola tended her sheep and I spent the day on computer. In the afternoon Karola popped into Hastings.

This evening we had dog training class – the last of the current series. Bramble alternated between being a bit hyperactive and a bit bored. Probably a good time to have a break for a few weeks. It restarts in May.

Oh. and Anna, as in “Director of Trade Marks” at Olswang in London, played the four letter word JAPE last night, (We’re talking iPhone “Words With Friends” here – addictive), for 108 points. 108 points. 108 points! Obviously it was my fault for setting it up for her, unknowingly. A triple-letter and triple-word square within easy reach. But, 108 points!

Oak Avenue Weather:9℃—24℃ 0.1mm rain [82.8]

Still a bit distray [sic] after the weekend exertions but we pottered around quite nicely on a day when the weather was mainly cool, mainly sunny. Bramble excavated the new lawn area still searching for the source of the elusive blood & bone.

Gill sent us a picture of her garlic bulb which had grown roots quite vigorously despite our scepticism. (see below).

Shane Hay called and came round after lunch for a spot (two hours) of Ngaio hedge pruning along the orchard drive. He’s nearly half way along now. Later Henare dropped by for a chat and offered to help us mulch up today’s Ngaio prunings – so we did. Only ninety minutes but we’re even more exhausted now. Good to have it cut and mulched while green.

Tsk, Tsk Bramble!

…. and now – The Garlic Surprise

Look what Gill achieved with the strange single-clove mild garlic bulb we gave her from the New World packet I bought a couple of weeks ago. The clove roots had been hacked off as is typical of garlic from China so we were sceptical that it would actually grow.

There’s root hormone, there’s Photoshop, and there’s suspension of disbelief when it’s your sister displaying the magic, ho, ho.

Oak Avenue Weather:9℃—26℃ no rain [82.7]

SwimGym. Karola got a bit too much sun yesterday and was accordingly a bit wonky this morning but seemed to come right after her swim. We both did a bit too much yesterday so today was spent relaxing.

Later I took back the roller to Mitre-10, bought a little more grass seed and some food.

Karola worked outside – it was mainly cloudy and warm but not hot today. I stayed inside with my programming.

Bramble had a vexing day because she could not locate the source of the nice smell in the cottage garden – it was everywhere but nowhere. She doesn’t understand about blood & bone fertilizer.

Oak Avenue Weather:8℃—23℃ no rain [83.5]

A busy day – in addition to weekend chores we did two major tasks:

• We rounded up the sheep into the yards and I poured Magnum anti-flystrike and anti-lice mixture on their backs and bottoms while yelling out their tag numbers to Karola who made a tally. Right on target: 26 ewes and 36 lambs. All the tag numbers matched up except for two wether lambs who have lost their tags, and we know what their two tag numbers are – just not which is which. (Required legal note: Magnum has a withholding period for meat of zero days).
• Mid morning we began the task of sowing grass seed on parts of the cottage lawn. Having had Baywide Dingo rotavate the area near the septic tank and along the south side of the cottage, and the area near the kitchen (pictured below), we had a fairly smooth and level base to begin with. First we raked the areas to be sown removing bits of debris and large lumps and stones. Then I rolled with the Mitre-10 roller we’d hired for the weekend. On went the grass seed mixed 40% grass and 60% blood & bone. A breeze blew up and I got covered in blood & bone to Brambles delight – I was all edible now. Then another more gentle raking followed by another roll. It was now evening and cool so the seeded area was given a short soaking with the hose on fine mist delivery. Whew; finished; I didn’t think we’d get it done today.

Photo below shows the to-be-grassed area near the cottage kitchen, and along the line of the stormwater drain (the depression filled), and a low patch on the lawn where an apple tree grew for a few decades. Extra earth is also bridging the levels of the lawn and the top of the concrete aprons. On the far right you can see a piece of the area to be sown comprising the entire south side of the cottage garden.

Oak Avenue Weather:8℃—22℃ no rain [83.8]

Cool sunny start to a nice day. Karola got her sheep ready for shearing this afternoon and also did some sterling digging, removing much of th iris growing in clumps out in the Middle paddock.

The shearer today was “Pura” or perhaps “Pora” from Wairou, working on behalf of Bruce Richardson, our long-time Mobile Shearing man.

Karola helped get the sheep in and sweep the dags away. There were 26 ewes crutched and 36 lambs shorn. Started after 4:00pm and all done by 6:30pm.

Oak Avenue Weather:7℃—21℃ no rain [83.9]

SwimGym then for me the morning spent just doing the weekend shopping. How time flies. It was a gorgeous morning though – sunny and cool. I’ve rented a garden roller again, for $25 a day but they (Mitre-10) kindly gave me $25 off as I was having it for the weekend. It does mean I’ve got an incentive to get the recently churned-up areas of the cottage lawn into shape for rolling and then grass seed. I re-mowed the cottage lawn today as yesterday’s mowing choked a bit on the lush growth,

Henare dropped by for a chat and afternoon tea on his way home from picking late afternoon.

Oak Avenue Weather:6℃—21℃ no rain [83.5]

Only a few days ago it seems and here’s the first fruits of our $1000 raised bed vege garden. It’ll be paid off in no time. Yes, yes, I can count. I gave Karola one pod before the photo, testing out the flavour. Another couple of days and they’d have been woody – just like the ones in the cheap frozen pea packets. But these – all now consumed raw, reminded me of childhood times picking peas after the main crop had been harvested in Mr Quinney’s fields up back behind the vicarage in Nelson. They were fresh and sweet too.

Karola’s cousin Arthur Ormond and one of his sons, Chris, came as planned to cut up some of the old apple trunks for firewood. They cut up one load for us and one for themselves and we both benefit. They did two trips so cut four loads today and Arthur wants to come back again in a few weeks time. Karola and I stacked a load each under the Sequoia gigantica (Wellingtonian) behind the homestead garage – off the ground on some old fence posts.

Karola cut her little lawn in front of the homestead garage yesterday – so soon after the rain but it dries quickly. I mowed the cottage lawn today.

Karola spent the middle of the day in Hastings – medical appointments, food gathering, and getting her Subaru annual tyre rotation and check done.

Oh and the Logitech Pure-Fi Express Plus (model #S-00067) arrived today – 2nd hand from TradeMe, a year old and half price. It works as advertised with my new iPhone but there are few wrinkles with my old iPhone and the prototype audio-book-player app I’m working on.

Oak Avenue Weather:6℃—21℃ no rain [83.0]

SwimGym

A nice letter today from Hastings District Council forgiving the large penalty payment for sending last quarter’s rates to the Regional council by mistake. Whew.

Karola exhausted herself with more sheep and electric fencing work. I stayed inside – it was quite chilly – and did a bit of programming.

Bramble was quite good at Dog Training this evening.

It’s dark when we get up and dark when we go to Dog Training; all of a sudden it seems the nights are closing in.

Oak Avenue Weather:8℃—19℃ no rain [82.9]

Gentle intermittent showers overnight and during the day, some quite heavy. Raining now. Bliss.

Cloud on the horizon is no cloud on the horizon after tomorrow, according to TV forecast.

Karola had hair cut in Hastings and returned with the Big News of the day – haircuts are to go up by $1 next month. Shock, horror. I blame the government.

After Gill and Ben left mid morning, Karola enlisted my help with a few hours mulching of some old shelter-belt clippings from last year. Hard work but the showers and cooler wind were welcome.

The vegetables enjoyed the earlier waterings and this rain. After only a couple of weeks here we have pea pods already, see below.

Oak Avenue Weather:11℃—19℃ 14.1mm rain [83.5]

SwimGym

A VERY hot day with a few ultra-light showers in the morning and again after dark. Hottest day of the year in fact. Gill and Ben went off exploring again and we had the rest of Gill’s beef stew with green beans kindly donated by Peter and Charlotte.

Basically it was good to just relax and sit in the relative cool most of the day.

Oak Avenue Weather:16℃—33℃ 5.9mm rain [83.8]

A little light rainfall at dawn and again mid day – it didn’t wet the ground under the big oak and by late afternoon the ground surface had pretty much dried out again.

Karola and her friend Rowena went off to the Hawkes Bay “Horse of the Year” show mid morning – I ferried them there and picked them up again around 4:30pm. It was all a bit slow – interruptions for marketing from the sponsors and the usual ceaseless pressure to buy food and drink you didn’t need – but Karola and Rowena had seats in the stands so the light drizzle didn’t affect them. Famed NZ rider Mark Todd made an appearance.

Meanwhile, after a hearty breakfast (I made Ben and me a large potato/bacon/egg pancake) Ben and Gill went into Hastings to window shop and have an ice-cream.

Bramble and I rounded up the sheep and got them out of the orchard for the night.

In the evening we met Peter and Charlotte as planned and had a superb meal at “The Mission” in Taradale.

Oak Avenue Weather:15℃—24℃ 2.0mm rain [83.3]

Hearty breakfasts; I made mushrooms on toast for the men.

Karola continues with her sheep in the orchard, fencing off new arreas for them almost daily. They certainly look in the pink despite the drought.

Peter and Diane Arthur came this morning. Peter was hoping to pick up some Hickory nuts but it’s still too early.

Small tasks completed today: The cottage fence removable railings, taken down for Baywide Dingo’s work last week, have been put back and screwed up. Mulcher blades replaced and mulcher reassembled and tested. Vege beds watered. A big leak in the flax leaky pipe mended.

Gill cooked a delicious beef stew dinner for us all tonight.

Oak Avenue Weather:16℃—26℃ 0.3mm rain [82.5]

SwimGym

I went into town to pick up the sharpened mulcher blades, pruning saws and chainsaw chains. Also the weekly bread and other food for the weekend.

Karola put up electric fence around a different block of peaches and let her sheep in for the day.

Karola then went off to a committee meeting of the local chapter of Federation of Graduate Women – a dwindling group of very aged graduates, and Karola. While she was away I got a call from Frank Haywood (027-247-8942), father of the woman next door. Frank offered that Karola could put her sheep on their orchard for a couple of weeks if she liked – they could see how dry our paddocks were. And, I suspect, they saw a savings in fuel if they didn’t have to mow the orchard for a month.

Not having heard from the parent company of Caravaggi, concerning any local agent for their products, that is, our Bio190 mulcher serial number 50293, I searched online for the number of an Australian agent and called them. David, sales1@vinrowe.com.au, is now seeing if they can supply the needed parts – I emailed him photos of the broken ones. Vin Rowe Farm Machinery in Melbourne, 61-3-5623-1362.

Then, a knock at the door at 2:30pm and it was Henare’s son Scott, by himself, wondering if he could loiter until 4:00pm when he was meeting a friend from Unison, the local electric cable services company with offices at the end of Oak Avenue. He went and played the piano in the homestead until time for his mate to pick him up.

Late afternoon Ben and Gill arrive, in good condition considering the length of the drive from Wellington and the heat. In fact it was cooler here than in most of the places on the way. We had a long and enjoyable venison stew dinner.

Oak Avenue Weather:13℃—27℃ no rain [82.8]

Well, it seems that everyone we expected would come here in the last fortnight have all converged on today.

Steve and his two ace arborists, James Kilpatrick and Nicky spent two days with us – but yesterday was relatively unobtrusive as they were concentrating on the high, dead oak branches overhanging the boundaries and 121 driveway. Today James and Nicky finished those oaks while Steve mulched a large pile of old tree rubbish, much of it too big and hard for our mulcher to handle. Steve then cut down the Liquid Amber by himself, and he pruned the Chinese Hawthorne, Chinese Photinia, and Flowering Cherry trees – removing dead wood and giving them a better shape, James and Nicky meanwhile did a major job on the large oak out in the Totara paddock – not the “big oak” we see from the cottage kitchen sink, but the one we see from the cottage sun porch and verandahs.

Just after the tree surgeons arrived, Peter Gordon (Dave Gordon’s dad) arrived and rotavated the areas of the cottage lawn where hard clay pans had formed on the surface. He also rotavated along the stormwater drain line and the waste water drip lines from the cottage – they had developed pronounced troughs since being dug over a year ago. So that’s all much flatter now, and various heaps of topsoil have been cleaned up. What’s left of the topsoil after adding to the various leveling activities is stored in a pile by Karola’s little concrete pond by the old plum tree.

Mid morning Arthur and Nick Ormond (Marcus’ dad and racing horse owner/trailer before he passed the farm on to Marcus) arrived to see the cottage and Karola gave them morning tea and guided tours.

I got a call from Ross, Willie Thow’s orchard manager saying they needed access to the orchard to do spraying so could we take the sheep and fencing out for tomorrow. No problem. Karola went off to the dentist and to shop for provisions; when she came back after lunch she noticed a black van negotiating the gates and electric fence up into the orchard. I went to investigate and found a bunch of Willie’s pickers laughing and lolling around in the shade. Unbeknownst to Ross they’d come to roll up the “extenders”, white sheets laid out between the apple tree rows to reflect sunlight onto the undersides. So I quickly got the sheep out and opened the gates and then spent a strenuous couple of hours rolling up the electric fence. Well at least I don’t have to do that at the weekend now.

As dusk fell, Henare’s sister, Aira came with some of her extended family to pick some of the left-behind peaches. What’s left of the peaches are mostly overripe now and many are rotting but these visitors are still going away with two or three shopping bags of fruit to bottle.

The Liquid Amber – see the diseased trunk a few metres above Steve

Spot The “Squirrel” Arborists, James and Nicky, High In The Oaks Above The Drive

Lumps Of Topsoil Crushed and Spread

The Clay Pan Chewed Up And Levelled

Steve Tackles The Chinese Hawthorne

Oak Avenue Weather:10℃—23℃ no rain [83.0]

SwimGym and then rush back to direct the tree surgeons who are spending a couple of days here mostly up high, removing dead oak branches that overhang paths and driveways and smartening up a big oak tree ou in the Totara paddock and felling a Liquid Amber that seems very diseased about 4 metres up and that might fall on the cottage.

Henare and his son Scott called in briefly – Scott on a visit down from Hamilton to play badminton and see his mum.

Dog training this evening – and Bramble was pretty good. This was the sixth installment out of eight and the next course begins on May 1st. No peace for a small white and brown corgi then.

Oak Avenue Weather:8℃—22℃ no rain [83.0]

The day began differently, without running water. Late last night I went out to turn the irrigation onto the vegetables and found that the water pump had stopped working. This morning I called Harris Pumps and Filtration who provided and installed the pump over ten years ago, and they said they were pretty busy but would try to get to us before the end of the day.

Karola somewhat revelled in the adversity – no water – and set about doing clothes washing in the Homestead, which still had water. Given half a chance and she’d move back in.

Late morning we had a meeting with Dean Sewell from our insurance brokers, Hurford Parker of Hastings. Last time he came out, over a year ago, we discussed contents insurance for here and for the Days Bay flat. This time we went over the buildings and capital assets, mostly part of Karola’s orcharding and sheep empire although of course the Homestead is by far the biggest insurable item on the agenda. The Days Bay flat will stay unchanged but we will need to re-evaluate how we insure the buildings here. We’ll probably need specialist valuation advice.

Henare Ormond dropped in briefly just before Dean arrived, had a cup of coffee and went off to pick some of the post-harvest remaining peaches in the orchard. Karola suggested in a telephone conversation with Henare’s wife Denise that there would be plenty for bottling if Henare would pick them.

After lunch I addressd the problem of the mulcher’s seized-up machine screw that stopped me taking off the blades for resharpening. After comprehensively destroying the allen key socket in the screw I resorted to drilling a small hole near the periphery of the screw head and whacking it with a nail punch – that worked.

I took the three hardened steel mulcher blades – blunted and chipped by our recent mulching – to be sharpened. I also took two of our three seriously dangerous pruning saws and a slightly damaged and blunt chainsaw chain. One pruning saw has been sharpened to death so it’ll get a replacement blade. One of the mulcher blades is broken – useable but missing 10mm off one end so I’ve emailed the Italian manufacturer to find out where our nearest agent is, for a replacement. On the trip to the Saw Doctors I also called in at B&H and got a replacement mulcher machine screw for the seized-up one.

Rowena called in and Karola took her up to the orchard for peaches.

Late afternoon the pump technician came and replaced the main electric switch that turns the pump on and off based on the pressure sensed within the pressure chamber. Our water is kept at about 2/3 Hastings mains pressure. It was a relief to have water flowing in the cottage again and I also turned on the vegetable garden irrigation.

Grundfos pump, not made any more: CH4-60 AWACU8E (F91340644 P10321) with pressure tank 144CE165 PT75 0-10.

Then Karola went to a talk about the Hawkes Bay Horse of the Year annual show – she hopes to see some of it which is being held this weekend at the Hastings Show Grounds.

Overlaying all this we got an email from Bridget in USA saying she’d left her wallet and iPad on their flight from Washington to Los Angeles. Later her iPad was returned but not the wallet with credit cards and driving license all of which had to be cancelled forthwith. What with Alex breaking her left wrist on the last ski of their skiing holiday and now the lost wallet, their holiday has had its ups and downs.

Gwen Rashbrooke has had another daughter, sister to a bemused Miriam. Tessa Wier, Harry’s daughter, is expecting another child in September, sibling to Ashleigh. What does all this fecundity forbode?

Here’s a photo of two of the mulcher blades – the longer one on the left, with the smaller holes, has the tip of one end broken off.

Oak Avenue Weather:8℃—20℃ no rain [82.9]

SwimGym

Charlotte and Peter came over mid morning to pick peaches. We all went to lunch at Pernel’s Fruit World on Pakowhai Road. Mid afternoon Cynthia Chalmers came to see Karola and pick peaches.

Karola put the sheep back into the same block of peaches again today for a couple of hours.

Oak Avenue Weather:13℃—23℃ no rain [82.9]

Karola and I spent the morning setting up electric fence round one of the three blocks of peaches and we let the sheep in until late afternoon. First real feed apart from acorns they’ve had in weeks.

Rest of the day was usual Sunday chores until the sheep were brought back to their usual paddocks. Some of the fencing had to be taken down again in case a horde of apple pickers descend on us tomorrow – so that tractors, trucks, or ladders are unobstructed. Rubbish is out; cottage lawn is mown. Ready for another week.

Oak Avenue Weather:9℃—23℃ no rain [83.1]

Karola decided she wanted to get more pea hay today so we set off just 15 minutes before Nimmon Baling was due to close on Saturday morning. We got there in time and bought 20 more bales – plus a tiddler thrown in which was nice. Karola plans to give the freebie to Charlotte Jackman for her garden.

Karola stacked the bales in the purpose-built hay shed I constructed ten years ago and barricaded it with spare netting gates from marauding hungry sheep.

The Pea Hay Shed

Oak Avenue Weather:14℃—24℃ no rain [83.5]

SwimGym – a little sluggishly today – and Jonathan, the owner, will keep popping out of his cubicle for a chat.

Afterwards I dashed into town for some Derris Dust (anti-Cabbage-White) and the bread and the weekend main meals.

After that Karola and I mulched up some more Ngaio from our cutting yesterday – and then it was time for a late lunch. We relaxed all afternoon.

From the cottage kitchen Karola spotted a Californian quail family under the big oak. Three adults and four youngsters, fully feathered but still quite small. Assuming they’re the remaining members of the 12-strong brood we saw some weeks ago then at least the local cats haven’t got them all.

Oak Avenue Weather:13℃—23℃ no rain [83.2]

White cabbage butterflies have visited my nascent brassicas and eaten quite a lot of the leaves just as they were beginning to bounce back from being planted out. No sign of caterpillars so maybe they were eaten by birds once they’d fattened up on my cabbage / brussel sprout leaves. Spinach leaves were also eaten into. Action must be taken.

The two Ngaio trees on the orchard drive flanking the double gate into the Front paddock have been hewn to the ground on the orders of Lady Brackenbury. Additional limbs of Ngaios in and near the corner native tree planting – the north-east corner by the road which was the first to be planted with natives by Bridget and Karola maybe 20 years ago – have been hewn asunder also. The above-head stuff was done by climbing and balancing and using one of Karola’s wickedly sharp Silky pruning saws. The lower stuff and cutting branches into easily handled lengths was chainsaw work.

The trees bordering the double gate were reduced to stumps to improve the right-angled vehicular access into the Front paddock and to free a Mulberry tree overshadowed and not thriving because of the Ngaio.

The main Ngaios in the corner planting area – the oldest Ngaios here by several years – are interfering with many of the underlying flax, cabbage trees, tetoke, and others. Their sprawling 4 metre high canopy is now reduced to two relatively straight trunks and their branches above two metres.

As the day drew to a close I attacked the large fallen branch of a douglas fir that fell a few months ago and remained propped against the parent tree and crushing an understory titoke. I tried to free up some of the titoke branches and in the process released one branch too many and the whole douglas fir branch came crashing down. Happily I was not underneath it or in its path.

This is all very energetic stuff so again I retire stiff and tired.

Oak Avenue Weather:10℃—26℃ no rain [83.2]

SwimGym

Shane Hay returned to carry on pruning the inside of the Ngaio hedge along the orchard drive. He did a decent stretch in the two hours he could spare this morning. Karola cut the prunings, most of them substantial branches 2 – 3 metres long and up to 120mm (5 inches) thick, into manageable pieces which greatly helped putting stuff into the mulcher. I mulched the lot in less than two hours but got thoroughly exhausted in the process.

Cynthia Chalmers dropped by and Karola took her up to the orchard to gather some of the remaining peaches – the crop has been harvested but there are still the odd peaches to be scavenged. At the same time I noticed a Chinese or Korean young man, dressed for office work, not for manual labour in the sun. He wandered in and stood around under the big oak twirling his glasses. I went out to find out what he wanted – no, we didn’t have any work I said but he could try the pack houses down the road. I suspect he’d been there and was probably “let go” because he wasn’t up to the hard labour and skill of fruit picking, especially in the searing hot sun.

I slept 2:00pm until 5:00pm.

Later we took Bramble to this week’s Dog Training and she behaved much better than last week – best behaved of the trio that is our particular class. Lets hope we can keep it up.

Watered the vegetables for a couple of hours and retired to relax.

Oak Avenue Weather:11℃—29℃ no rain [82.8]

Karola started off the morning by picking up fallen peaches for her sheep – she collected several bushels of them.

I started the morning responding to a hefty 10% penalty for not paying my last instalment of annual rates to the Hastings District Council (HDC). It transpired that I’d paid someone; unfortunately the Hawkes Bay Regional Council by mistake. After a chat with the HDC they recommended I send a letter asking to be forgiven this indiscretion. It was just the next menu item below “HDC”, so easy to make a mistake with online banking, one must be so careful.

It’s “Census Day” today so I entered our forms online. The only mistake I realised I’d made, too late to change, is I had Karola down as being a sometime cigarette smoker. Otherwise it was quick and painless.

It was a cloudy, cooler day, ideal for working outside. There had been a smidgen of rain in the night. Enough to put a puddle in the wheel barrow but not enough to even reach the ground under the orchard trees.

Karola did more sheep work today. Lambs #247 and #253 had fly strike powder applied: meat withholding period of 21 days. I meanwhile did a spot of cottage lawn maintenance – cutting the grass and weeds that had encroached onto the Bay Tree planting area.

Laurie called to see how we were getting on and thank Karola for the peaches she’d left earlier while Laurie and Enid were out. Henare called after dark on his way home to give us an update on his son Scott’s progress up north in Hamilton, and the tricky politics of the world of badminton.

Oak Avenue Weather:5℃—21℃ 0.1mm rain [83.5]

SwimGym

Then Karola decided today was the day to take her cull ewes to market. She’d spent yesterday afternoon mulling over who was for the chop.

My suggestion for her “objective” is to have 18 breeding ewes and 8 hogget ewes as her steady state; 26 ewes in all:

• 6 x older than 3 years, aka “MA ewes” (Mixed Age – euphemism)
• 6 x 3-year old ewes, aka “six-tooth”s
• 6 x 2-year old ewes, aka “four-tooth”s
• 8 x the best of two seasons ago’s ewe lambs, aka “two-tooth”s
• lots of ewe lambs less than a year old who will not see the ram this season

The 6+2 two-tooths allows for a couple of mishaps during the next year.

An “objective” implies less than the rigorous adherence of a “standard”, but culling each year should try to move back towards it.

The picture now is:

• 1 x MA ewe (matriarch #604) and 4 x #900s – leaving our “MA ewes” slot one short
• 6 x #900s – our “6-tooth” slot
• 6 x #000s – our “4-tooth” slot
• 9 x #100s – our “2-tooth” slot with an extra for the missing MA Ewe

We took 10 ewes to the Stortford Lodge sale yards at 11:15am for the weekly Monday ewe sale that begins at 11:30am. We remembered to take their travel documents.

We said goodbye to: #613, #616, #699 (Kaz’ old ewe), #704, #705, #717, #933, #111, #130, #160.

I was fairly exhausted by the sheep work, man handling these huge, heavy ewes up into the trailer, that when I returned I slept until 2:00pm. However Karola is made of sterner stuff. Late afternoon she decided to do something about a dirty-bottomed lamb that maybe had fly strike. So we got the sheep into the yards yet again and grabbed the offending lamb. Sure enough it had fly strike – and there’s maybe another one with the same condition. Lamb #247 – Zenith spray administered. Withholding for meat – 7 days.

Bramble and I had had enough of sheep for the day so we went inside and left Karola to it. Apparently the treatment continues tomorrow; “Such Fun”.

Oak Avenue Weather:13℃—28℃ 1.8mm rain [83.8]

Karola began the day by feeding her sheep another bale of pea hay. I began the usual Sunday chores.
Karola and I moved a large pile of grass and weeds onto her “bund” under the oaks. Karola then put up yet more electric fence and her ewes grazed for a few hours under the big oak tree. They didn’t eat all the acorns or graze the grass down to the roots so I think they’re getting enough to eat from the paddocks, dry though these look.

I’ve turned off the leaky pipe irrigation for a week – the flax, bay trees, and karamu hedge have had it running for over a week and so I’ll give them a break for a week.

Late afternoon we put the sheep back in their paddock and took down the temporary electric fence. I then put up a piece of fence to allow Baywide Dingo to work on the cottage garden – fence to cordon off the removable railings into the cottage garden. I then unscrewed the supports so that taking down the railings will be a matter of a moment – we’re not sure when Baywide Dingo is coming, sometime this week though.

Oak Avenue Weather:12℃—27℃ no rain [83.5]

A good day – not too hot. I’ve begun spring-cleaning the homestead garage – after all it is the second day of autumn. Karola had her sheep on the lawn again for the afternoon.

This evening we had a most pleasant meal with Charlotte Jackman and Peter Offenberger in Havelock North and saw round their house and garden.

Oak Avenue Weather:16℃—23℃ no rain [83.0]

SwimGym

Another warm day. No rain. Karola fenced the lawn and put the sheep on there for the afternoon. Despite the heat she worked in the garden all afternoon while I read in the coolest place I could find.

In the morning I went shopping and, apart from the usual food from Cornucopia Organics and New World, I went to a couple of shoe shops and was finally steered to Rebel Sport – a huge range of footware for sports and outdoor activities, far larger than the range in the Shoe Clinic in Wellington. I found and bought Teva sandals replacing the decade-old ones that Bridget bought me and are falling apart. I also bought some very comfortable walking shoes with velcro quick fastenings to replace my Warehouse $30 2-year old ones that were too tight. Two pairs of shoes, $250 – but then I expect these to last more than two years.

Karola and I planted more seedlings in the raised beds.

• Bed 1: French Beans and Silver Beet
• Bed 2: Brussell Sprouts and Peas
• Bed 3: Butter Beans and Leeks
• Bed 4: Broccoli and Carrots
• Bed 5: Spinach and Beetroot
• Bed 6 (half used): Lettuce, Fennel, Bee Balm, Hyssop

After a bit of fiddling with connectors and taps and lengths of hose the permanent watering arrangement is set up for the raised beds. Overnight I set sprinklers going on those beds and on the cottage lawn and the little lawn outside the homestead garage – to provide two little oases of green in an expanse of dry grass yellow/brown.

Oak Avenue Weather:17℃—28℃ no rain [83.1]