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...