Coffeehouse.co.nz

Well as you might have been able to tell from the lack of any posts there hasn’t been that much happening around here lately. What’s mainly been happening is “no cows” in the back paddock. We’ve been telling the kids for some time that it won’t be long before the cows are back to eat all the nice oats that have been growing since the last post.

But it looks like the cows won’t be coming after all. We arrived home to find the paddock looking like this:

When there is something happening around here we miss it. Bugger! There’s a little boy here who would have just loved seeing the “tak-tah” go round and round for a while. Also means that we weren’t able to catch the before shot showing all the lovely green oats that were there this morning. And I suspect we’ll be explaining that the cows are not going to be coming now for about as long as we were telling them the cows were coming soon…

It has been a decent prod to take a few “before” pictures of the areas where there just might be something planned to happen soon, just in case something happens sooner than we think. Maybe you’ll hear about them…

A bit more catching up on recent events is required. Two weeks ago it started. A new chapter in the life of the back paddock.

First stage will have to go unrecorded, but was apparently just a bit of general cultivation with a ripping and rolling to both chop it up and even it all up slightly. We were trying to guess at the time if it had been drilled again at that stage, but the neighbour helpfully confirmed that it hadn’t been.

We were around when we got to stage 2 of this round though. The actual drilling late the day after next (Sunday). Oats again, apparently. I didn’t manage to get a photo of the real action though. As soon as the tractor arrived our nice neighbour jumped in the digger he’d been using and walked it over to flatten out the big piles of dirt that have been cluttering up the paddock for a while now so the drilling could be full paddock, rather than having to go around the piles. So the area previously known as “The Pit” is no more. We’re not sorry to see it gone though. Good riddance! (He also did us the favour of ripping out our annoying gorse bushes too on the digger walk back. reminder to self: More beer required to pass over the fence!)

Getting back to the main story, it’s actually more correct to say the farmer partly drilled the paddock. There was a bit of a pause in proceedings when the wheels fell off a bit. Literally!

Apparently he knew before he started that they were munted, but just kept going until they were not going to go any further!

A couple of days later, armed with a couple of new tyres, the final bit got drilled.

Then a day later there was a rumbling and a rolling, and the paddock got a bit of a flatten out.

So here it is. The final result. The best it’s ever looked, I think. We’ll see what it looks like after it all sprouts again, and then what it looks like after the cattle have been back!

But for now it’s just nice to a) have something interesting going on, and b) having someone else look after it!

Yesterday morning we had two chickens. By lunchtime that had exploded to a total of six! Kaboom!

They look quite similar to the old ones even though they’re a different breed. Which is just as well as apparently chickens can be a bit racist, but there was about a 5 second sorting out about who was going to be the boss and then everyone seemed to play nicely for the rest of the day. We’d originally been intending to have them in their own run, but as that’s not arrived yet they had to just join the oldies.

And even better than having them finally arrive was having them arrive just as they’ve started to lay. Three eggs from the new girls yesterday of various sizes and shapes. We know they’re from the new girls as the colour is different.

I hope there’s a market for spare eggs at work still!

Yes, that’s right. We’ve finally been visited by a herd of cows, and boy doesn’t the paddock know it! Even with huge feeds of hay as well they’ve demoed just about everything that looks even vaugely green in the strips they’ve been confined to. Including a fair few pine branches that have been accessible.

The kids have been really enjoying watching them and the daily routine of feed, move fence, see cows run for grass/oats/whatever is there, re-install fence a bit further back, repeat tomorrow.

By the looks of it the paddock is getting a fair old dose of fertiliser, which is good! Just might need a bit of a roll and re-seed before I’d want to take the mower over it though!

If it would just stop raining I’ll show you how it looks now…

I have to appologise. I knew it had been a while since I’d bothered to post anything, but here you are, still here after having to endure almost two months of silence! Sorry!

But that’s the slide into winter for you. Not much going on, especially with all the rain that’s been around earlier. One side effect of all that rain is that the ground is currently still very damp, and digging holes in it is almost an enjoyable experience for a change. You still end up with a bucketful of stones every time you dig a hole, but at least they seem to wriggle around a bit as the spade blade goes in, rather than just sitting there like an immovable object as they do in the dry.

So for the last 2 weekends we’ve taken a trip to one of the little local nurseries around the neighbourhood and crammed the boot full of various natives and plonked them up in the “native corner” in semi-random fashion. I say semi-random as I do try to think about just how we’re going to manage to get the mower around them when the grass starts growing again.

It’s a bit hard to see them all in a photo of green trees against green grass so I’ve not bothered to try to get them all in shot (though the pic is clicky for a bigger version if you want to try to see them a bit more clearly), but I think there must currently be about fifty trees up in the wider corner now, with a few more hiding out by the veg patch just needing to grow up a bit more before they’re going to be risked up in the corner with the hares and rabbits around. I suspect we’ll lose a few of the ones we’ve just installed too unless we get some tree guards quick, but they’re cheap enough that we don’t mind a couple going. But only a couple. Are you listening local wildlife?!

We also almost completed one of the many hedge rows that we’re gradually settling on. This row of pittos will hopefully assist the fruit trees from the northerly, and the vege garden from the southerly.

Yesterday was a bit of a sad day. The frosts and shorter days finally started to take a toll on the last tomato plant remaining in the tunnel house, so it was time to say goodbye.

This plant has been an oddity from first I saw it growing up though the weed-mat and gravel in the tunnel house having (presumably) self seeded from another plant last year. But none of those plants have reached anything like the size or productivity levels that is one did!

At least six feet tall, and it’s provided a constant crop of eating and cooking toms, as well as batches of chilli jam and pasta sauces.

And as a last parting gift it assisted in the production of about 2 litres of green tomato chutney today.

Pulling it up from the gravel it appeared to have about 3 roots creeping though the weed-mat that have somehow sustained it though the season. If this is what you get from that sort of arrangement then I’m very tempted to just cut a few holes in the weed-mat and plant the toms in the soil rather than pots next season…

Bye bye, supertom! We’ll all miss you!

I hear that true orchardists are fairly dismissive of the toy plantations that us lifestyle blockers call orchards, but I’m going to keep using the term. And as always about this time of year we take stock a bit and try to work out what we’re missing. And this was it this season. (We actually planted them a while ago – Just clearing the camera of all the doings. Expect a few more catch up blogs to come!)

A trio of cider apples! All the better to make some cider with. But it’ll take a few more years before they’re producing enough to make a brew. And expect to be subjected to a glass if you visit after that!

A better year than last year!

And still room on the paper for another year or two. Unless they’re bumper years!

Although I suspect today’s visit was by the same tractor, just with a different agricultural implement on the tow-bar. Or should that be horticultural? Whatever.

So up and down and round and round went the tractor and attachment. We still have no idea just what’s been deposited in there, but I guess we’ll find out when it starts to show its colour, shape, and general demeanour.

But it kept someone entertained for a long while! Big boy’s toys, aye?!