Pond Weed

Echeveria

Koru

Lobelia

Sleepers

My garden visits have also given me lots of photos to play with using Picasa's new editing tools. So please indulge me whilst I post my latest photoshopping efforts.

Mass Plantings

Of course, what I didn't really mention in yesterday's post was the quality of the planting at the gardens that we've visited.

The Heroic Garden that we toured was mainly evergreen but still managed to look autumnal with splashes of red here and there. It was overwhelmingly lush and verdant. And it had hidden depths - a garden that benefited from a long hard look rather than one that gave up all its secrets at first glance.

Heroic Efforts

We've been visiting more gardens recently with our local gardening club. One of the gardens was part of the Heroic Gardens Festival this year - a series of private gardens opened to the public to raise money for the Mercy Hospice.

The owners of these gardens have often gone to heroic lengths to establish their little piece of paradise and the part of the garden visits that I enjoy most is listening to the stories of how the gardens were created.

This garden was originally a six acre block covered in gorse and scrub with a dam filled with household waste. Many years of hard labour went into creating the stunning landscape that we admired. Dozens of pine trees have been felled, hundreds of possums have been shot and thousands of plants put in.

One of the owners' habits is to visit garden centres and nurseries and ask for a bulk lot of whatever they want to get rid of. That's certainly a tactic I'll be trying as I develop our garden. During our visits, I've also picked up a number of other tips and recommendations for how to develop a garden on this scale...

1. Any animals on the property must be easy care, decorative and, above all, not destructive.



2. A water feature is essential, preferably on a grand scale.



3. A second water feature is optional but desirable and there must be some sculpture scattered about.

This is a two metre deep plunge pool - just what every gardener needs.

4. The garden must be a pleasurable experience. A quirky path will amuse visitors. The potting shed must be characterful, even if that means that it is drastically under-sized. (The real work happens behind the scenes.) There should also be somewhere for the gardener to sit at the end of the day to admire his hard work and drink a glass of wine.



5. And finally, there must be a cute display of succulents somewhere in the garden...

Lawn Shrimp

One of the things that I love about living in the kiwi countryside is all the weird creatures that I find - wetas, frogs, skinks...

And one of the things that I hate about living in the kiwi countryside is all the weird creatures that I find in the house - book lice, ants, pantry moths...

Luckily this little fella was in the chickens' water trough and not in the kitchen. Although I found him in water, this lawn shrimp is actually a landlubber. An Australian native, this creature is a crustacean but drowns in water and turns pink when dead.

Whatever next?

Flat Rainbow

It's not the best photo but look carefully and you should see a flat rainbow in the middle of the picture. I spotted it just after midday when the mist and rain had rolled into the valley below.

I don't think it's a circumhorizontal arc because the clouds were low-lying and thick rather than high cirrus clouds. It's not a fogbow either because it doesn't arch and it's coloured. I shall have to keep searching to find out what the name is for this optical phenomenon.

House Spider

These spiders are really quite small but I find them very sinister and avoid them wherever possible. Recently one followed me round the bathroom for days. Argh!

The final piece...

Leaving aside the decks, the only piece of the renovations jigsaw that remains is the bannister. Who would have thought that a bannister could be so tricky or so expensive?

We think we've finally decided now - a stainless steel and rimu bannister. Let's hope it's built before we have a crawler in residence.

Beginner Baking 15

Slices are a classic kiwi option for morning tea and I particularly like a chocolate caramel or a ginger slice. But I knew if I made those, they'd all disappear by lunchtime.

Instead I opted to bake a date delight slice from a thrifted Family Circle recipe book.



The slice includes dates, nuts and oats so I could even pretend to myself that they were a healthy option! I do need to try making caramel at some point soon though...

A Little Library

Over the last few weeks, I've been busy unpacking all our books after they've been in storage for the last three years. It's been great fun discovering old favourites and forgotten volumes. And the only mouse-nibbled book was a dictionary, oddly enough.

The sci-fi/fantasy collection has now been housed on the bookshelves on the stairs but my modern classics need a home. We have some flat-packed shelves to put together and then I'll be able to alphabetise them all and get them in place. I really hope we'll have room for them all. I don't want to have brought them all this way just to have to give them away!



Even though I'm concerned about space, I couldn't resist snapping up a few bargains at a school fair and a garage sale over Easter weekend. I picked up some classics that I remembered fondly from childhood - The cow who fell in the canal (now out of print), Milly Molly Mandy (or Milicent Margaret Amanda to her angry mother), What Katy Did (in honour of my sister) and Myths and Legends of Many Lands (including my favourites the boy and the dike and King Canute).



I was tempted by this crafting book too. Dyeing and printing sounded rather intimidating, even though I'm the daughter of a printer, but when I realised that the patterns were all made with household objects like string and punched card, I couldn't resist. I'll look forward to attempting some of these projects soon.

Hibiscus Heaven

We might have just endured the worst summer in living memory (for us young folks, anyway) but our hibiscus is thriving. We'll be entering our fourth year on the property soon and this is the most flowers I've ever seen on the bush.

Squatters

When we cleared the old site of the chicken coops, I was interested to see what was left behind. Luckily we didn't find a whole warren of rats' nests - just one hole and one little nest which was rather cute, even if it was occupied by a slug.



In the coops themselves, we found lots of wood lice and ants. I guess that neither are appetising to chickens. Either that or they're both too quick for our dozy birds. The ants were certainly zipping about, rehoming all their eggs, after we disturbed them.

Homing Chickens

The only thing left to worry about once we had the coops set up again was whether the chickens would find their new home. We weren't too concerned about this as they seem to have stopped roosting in the coop when the last clutch of chicks was hatched. However, we did want them to find their food and water relatively quickly.

I had ideas of putting out a trail of scraps for them to follow but it wasn't necessary. One adventurous little hen found the new set-up the very next morning and the others soon followed.

Ready and waiting...

Checking out the site of the old chicken citadel

Ooh! This looks familiar!

Getting stuck in

Chickens on the move

We put the chickens at the bottom of the hill when we settled them in. It was a nice shady spot, under the trees so that they could shelter from the hawk. They were away from the house so that the crowing of the roosters wouldn't disturb us and so that they wouldn't hang around the house.

After two years, we have decided that the chickens will be better off closer to the house. It'll be easier to top up their food and water and collect the eggs (when they deign to lay any) and they like to sit on the front doorstep anyway. And we have double-glazing now so the crowing isn't such a problem.

But we knew it wasn't going to be easy shifting their accommodation so we enlisted the help of the Hilux.

The first job was to disconnect the runs from the coops...



...which took a bit of heaving and hoing.



Then we connected up the coop to the towbar (fortunately it has built-in runners) and the fun began!



We couldn't believe our luck when the coop just glided up the hill behind the truck.



We used the ride-on mower to get the final position right...



...and then started putting it all back together again once we'd shifted the lighter hutches and runs up the hill on the back of the truck and in the mower's trailer.



The only question remaining was whether the chickens would follow...

Weather Forecast 2

Weather Forecast 1

Windmills on Brick Bay Sculpture Trail

After a stunning Easter weekend, the weather has turned a bit more autumnal. Warm still but wetter and windier.

Good enough to eat

I had a disappointing thrifting experience last week. I visited one of the new-style Hospice Shops in a smart-ish mall. The shop was clean and fresh but that only made the merchandise look shabby and overpriced by comparison. So this week I visited an older, more rundown Hospice Shop and re-discovered the thrill of the hunt for thrifted treasure.

And I found some treasure. An apple sauce pot that looks like an apple. To add to our growing collection of fruit- and vegetable-themed pottery. Here it is with some of the apples off our tree. Can you tell which one it is?