Low-hanging fruit

Here are our fruit trees in situ... They're all several years old already so we should have a harvest within the next two years.

• A blackboy peach. This is what J remembers eating stewed with ice cream when he stayed at his grandmother’s house right down south in Invercargill.

• A sultan plum – juicy and big, perfect for eating from the tree and also for bottling. They should be right for wine too. Sadly there was no Victoria plum available so I couldn’t recreate a corner of my parents’ garden.

• An apple with three different varieties grafted on – Splendour, Royal Gala (the best NZ eating apple) and Braeburn, not too bad for cooking. Hopefully we’ll work out how to make or where to source a cider press soon so that we can make juice and cider from the excess fruit. Otherwise we’ll be eating a lot of crumble.

• And finally a Meyer lemon which already had four or five fruit on it. Just waiting for them to ripen now... We've planted it next to our lime tree as the start of our citrus grove.

Estate Management - Mechanised

We recently picked out four near-mature fruit trees to start our orchard (thank you Allan!). But the last owner of the property had planted some decorative trees just where we wanted to put the fruit trees - in one of the best-drained and most fertile parts of our land. So sadly those trees had to go.

Luckily J had a bright idea - to use the Hi-Lux and the tow-rope to remove three small trees in just half an hour.



And then we cleared away the corpses using our giant diesel-powered wheel barrow. The trees are now drying in the shed in the hope that we can use some of the wood for our wood-burner once it's installed.



For some other perspectives on using a bit of mechanical help around the block, you can check out Rural Idiocy enjoying his neighbour's tractor and plough and Real Men Sow who loves his mini-tiller.

Nesting Instinct

This alternative way of displaying flowers was one of the competition entries at Kumeu Show.

Temptation

I was sorely tempted by the miniature highland cattle that were for sale at the Kumeu A&P Show last week. But at $7500 they cost ten times as much as the standard size beasts. And their horns look just as lethal. So we might have to go with a common or garden house cow instead when the time comes.

Kumeu Show 2011

Swan plant - chapter 4

Our swan plant has done well over the summer. It survived the hungry caterpillars and thrived in the border and we saw heaps of monarch butterflies floating about. Now it's gone to seed with amazingly freaky pods of fluffy seeds. I've let some of the pods burst so that they'll self-seed but I've rescued some of them for propagation - watch this space...

Running Wild

And here are the chicks a week or so later, strutting about...

Beady Eyes

Here are our chicks looking as serious as could be as we switched them over to the adult coop before free-ranging them...

Gardening Club

We had a working bee at the community club this afternoon so no photos but we had a lovely trip to a local garden last month where I picked up some ideas for our garden - a trellis/fence from fallen, lichen-covered branches and a new use for the concrete sinks which will sadly need to be evicted from our laundry when we renovate.

Prayer Time

Christmas Continues

I used to struggle to keep a poinsettia alive until Epiphany in London but this year my potted plant has gone on and on. I might just try to plant it in the garden next week though it does sound rather complicated...

I might even need to cover it for 14 hours each night next spring in order to persuade it to flower. Or maybe those are just the instructions for the northern hemisphere... I think there'll be some guesswork involved.

Books Galore!

I went mad again buying second hand books at the school fairs last weekend. This selection has some fantastically useful volumes - from home canning and finger foods (more morning teas) to crochet. And two copies of the same gardening book. Told you I went mad!



Can't wait to make some of these special seventies creations from the crochet book...

Cupboard Love

One of the side effects of giving up the weekly supermarket trip is that I've become more creative with leftovers and store cupboard staples. Last weekend, I made these pikelets with strawberry sauce.

The pikelets had been frozen after I made a double batch of mix when making blinis for a work morning tea. The eggs for the pikelets had come from our hens, of course, and the remaining ingredients from the pantry, including UHT milk.

The strawberries had been leftover from another work morning tea so I froze them. Once they'd defrosted, I mashed them with a fork and then warmed them gently with a half-tub of cream cheese (the other half had been used with the blinis at the second morning tea).

All topped off with a bit of basil-mint from the window sill, a gift from gardening club. A delicious, novel breakfast in ten minutes with time to unload and load the dishwasher too!

Supermarket Sweep

I've given up going to the supermarket. Not in a concerted, Guardian eco-columnist kind of way but I'd grown tired of the weekend obligation of making a special trip to the supermarket. Instead, we now stock up once every few months and make a quick dash for urgent things during the week in between. That's why our pantry looks like it is ready for Auckland's first ever snowstorm.



Instead, I now shop at one of several local fruit and veg outlets within a ten minute drive of our house. Some of the shops abut a market garden or orchard whilst others are connected with a plot a short distance away.



Most of the produce is seasonal with the occasional import clearly marked. And you get some lovely traditional treats like these manky looking blackboy peaches.

Catching up on the garden

After a few months of morning sickness and a hot and humid summer, the garden had become rather neglected. Until, that is, J's father decided that his new hobby was tidying up our block. Which shamed me into getting out there and doing a few jobs yesterday.

First up was checking on the weed tea. Interestingly, the two brews had developed quite differently. One had turned quite brown whilst the other, full of convolvulus, had sprouted. Both needed topping up with water. I was disappointed not to have any extra space to put in more weeds but I was pleased to see a brown liquid emerge from the tap when I turned it on.



Next, I fertilised both of our citrus trees, the old grapefruit which is promising a reasonable harvest, and the new lime tree (thank you Katie!) which has grown to more than three times its size this time last year.



And last but not least, I planted the native plants that I picked out at two school fairs last weekend, including a couple of hebes (top and bottom left), some coprosmas (?) (right) and a puka (centre).