Apple blossom

Tiny horses

There are lots of miniature horses round here but our new neighbours must be particularly ambitious expecting their tiny horses to jump those gates!

Peacocks on the prowl

It didn't take long for next door's peacocks to find (and foul) our new deck. I was amazed to find a peahen looking at me through the kitchen window and wondered if she'd flown up to the second storey. I soon discovered that she'd climbed up - along the handrail on the stairs!

Pine cone in production

Strawberry bowls forever

The latest addition to J's collection of pottery that looks like fruit and vegetables...

Two birds in the bush

Dust bath

I wouldn't have thought a border with a rose bush would make the ideal dust bath but our chickens seem to think differently.

A Sad Story

A little while ago, at the end of winter, one of our hens went missing. I'd stolen the eggs that she'd been trying to hatch and so I suspected that she'd disappeared into the bush to lay another clutch. Almost exactly three weeks later, my suspicions proved correct as she emerged with four little chicks.

Sadly there was only time to snap a few quick shots as the next night there was a late frost and we didn't see the chicks again. Better luck next time!

Cheese please!

I've spent the last year learning to bake. I'm inclined to spend the next year learning to make cheese. I started off with the easiest recipe possible - take one batch of home-made (cheat's Easiyo) yoghurt, a damp muslin cloth, a sieve and a bowl then let the yoghurt sit for 8 hours. At the end of that time, the whey will have dripped down through the damp muslin into the bowl beneath and a soft cheese will be left behind in the sieve.

I made the first batch of yoghurt cheese into balls and rolled them in dukkah and seeds. The second batch formed an almost perfect circle in the sieve so I just flopped it onto a plate and scattered the same mix over the top. I want to try a coating of chopped fresh herbs next time.

The resulting cheese was smooth and tangy and reminded me of the bucketful of goat's cheese that our hosts at the estancia in Argentina made each day. Our stay on the estancia near Cordoba was one of the experiences which led to us moving to New Zealand and finding a lifestyle block so I feel like we've come full circle now. Or at least we will have done when we finally acquire a herd of goats!

Delightfully Doughy

One challenge I didn't meet in my year of beginner baking was making scones. There was something about dough that intimidated me. I finally took the plunge last weekend when I made vintage cheddar cheese scones and caraway dumplings in the same day.

Of course, it wasn't nearly as hard as I'd feared and both the scones and the dumplings turned out well. I used buttermilk for the scones and then for a batch of pikelets but couldn't really taste the difference in the latter. This Guardian article about baking the perfect scone wasn't too impressed with buttermilk either so I might stick to the common or garden variety in future. 
 

Green fern

Red fern

Stuck in the mud

The day the tractor came to mow was always going to be exciting for our resident tractor fanatics.

We didn't expect it to get even more exciting but then he got stuck in the creek when he finished. We had the excitement of two tractors the next day as the farmer who grazes his sheep on our paddock had to pull out the mowing tractor.

Disasters notwithstanding, he did a lovely job of topping the paddock and now we just need to wait for the next flock of sheep to appear.

Upstream

Here's our stream, 100 metres or so above the creek that I posted about a couple of days ago.

 

It rises just above the next block, on the ridge of the hill, and runs after heavy rainfall but dries up in summer. 

Kenneth William Vickers 1919-2012

A crabapple tree and an oak tree.
Chocolate biscuits and a cup of tea,
By the bed, at six in the morning
Just as the new day is dawning.

Bacon sandwiches on white bread.
Wild birds always well fed.
A round of rummy and a turned wood bowl.
An open fire piled high with coal.

A garden buzzing with honey bees.
Christmas cake with icing please.
Rabbits burrow under the summer house.
A drill now home to a sleepy mouse.

A herd of sheep and a deer in the field.
A pear for dessert, carefully peeled.
A crossword puzzle and a good thick book.
Electric blankets and a view of the Nook.

A walk to the river every day.
A mint for the horse along the way.
Hydrangeas blooming by the path.
James Bond and an afternoon bath.

And always,
A workshop full of fresh sawdust.

Knee high and full of grasshoppers

Continuing the tour of our paddock, here's a photo which shows why we needed the paddock topped by one of the local agricultural contractors. The green grass at the top of the hill is the area where the sheep prefer to graze. There are few weeds and the grass is going well because the sheep keep it cropped - and fertilise it as they go.

The area in the foreground is tussocky and filled with coarse grasses that don't tempt the sheep. The coarse grass smothers the better quality grass and the sheep can't get to it.

As the coarse grass grows up, other weeds appear too - like reeds, brambles and the gorse that you can see below.

In some places though the native trees seed and grow like the manuka that are emerging at the base of one of the pine trees.

We were lucky that we managed to go almost four years without getting the paddock mulch-mowed. I think that the farmer who grazes it has managed it well, maintaining the optimum stock levels. The weeds were beginning to take over though so it's all been cut back now just in time for the spring flush to emerge.

Trespassing

Lots of bloggers do house tours and I enjoy nosying around other people's homes remotely. I posted lots of photos of our place at the end of our renovations a few months ago so I thought the next logical thing to post was a tour of our paddock and its surroundings.

I had a few hours to myself one sunny Sunday morning a few weeks ago and went roaming around the land to see what was going on. I was looking for our missing chicken - that was my excuse for nipping over the fence into next door's bush block anyway.

I was pleased to find the creek flowing well on the other side of the fence - it mostly flows underground across our land then drops about six feet on the boundary. I was surprised to see how much water it held below our land. Still not enough for a hydroelectric power supply but I wonder if it's home to any fish or frogs. Or eels! 

First Fire

After experimenting with different kinds of kindling on our fire over winter, we realised that there wasn't much point chopping up the fallen branches from the coral tree and the cherry trees that James pulled down. They didn't burn well enough to make it worthwhile bringing them indoors - far better to burn them outside and let J have the pleasure of building a bonfire.

Unfortunately I'd been reading about the dangers of fires on lifestyle blocks so I insisted on J building it up gradually but I think he still had fun. He's eyeing up another pile of fallen branches on the other side of the paddock for his next fire but it'll have to stop raining before he can light it.

Green leaves, green fingers

These geranium leaves might not look like much to you but to me they signify great success. Several years ago, I was given these cuttings my a member of our local gardening club and she told me how to propagate them. I duly dipped the cut stems in hormone solution and planted them in a mix of pumice and potting mix.

They survived and grew a little so I planted them out at the shady end of the house, close to a couple of hydrangeas - what might become my English border. Nothing much happened though I could see that one or two of the plants were fighting through the weeds. And then suddenly they've burst into life this spring and I have at least four different varieties of geraniums starting to flower. My favourite is the one with the half-star-shaped leaf in the bottom right corner.

Now I'm going to start looking around to see what else I can pinch and propagate...