August 2012

August arrived and somehow I managed to persuade Dave that the next main project should be a cage to protect the soft fruit and berries. We have always called this area the 'fruit cage' and now it was to become one. Doesn't look too impressive at the moment but I have great hopes for it. We did get a few raspberries last year but, as we just draped some netting over the canes, they were very difficult to pick. Then I removed the netting too soon and lost the autumn fruiting raspberries to the birds. But not again I hope!

Anyway, 'fruit cage' before, in mid-winter.

And by the end of the month, the framework was up and we had sourced a net which would cover it in one piece and was an offcut from a commercial job.

The main 'Dave versus nature' challenge was to keep the sparrows out of the chook run.  It seemed we were feeding the whole of the local sparrow population and while 1 sparrow cannot eat very much at a time, a constant stream of them can get through quite a lot. Anyway, after several attempts, and the compulsory white shoe laces, he came up with the winning solution. It even managed to keep out our neighbour, Paris, who comes each week with some very welcome scraps for the chooks!

Overall, winter had been very mild with the result that many of the plants were fooled and did their spring stuff far too early. The camellia hedge was not exactly thriving but it was still alive ...

...  and blooming.

You could actually see the newly planted natives on Brambly bank and only a few succumbed to the cold on the few nights we had a frost.

The magnolias bloomed again although this was rather hidden behind their wind netting cages. Maybe next year we will expose them to their full glory.

Around the house the star magnolia was awesome ...

...  as were the daffodils.

 

 And the daffodils down the drive were appearing - mainly classic yellow ones first but hopefully the double frilly ones will remember to flower too.

There was blossom in the orchard too, though I was a bit worried that just one plum tree was flowering there rather a long way away from the other one in flower in the vege patch. I was almost tempted to get out my paint brush but decided to leave it to the bees in the end. We will see if they were up to the job.

And finally, I was relieved that the two planters in the breezeway survived the winter and in fact were thriving. The orchids were blooming as never before and clearly preferred this to their previous pampered life indoors.

Wilson St

Just as an aside, as we didn't really have enough to do on our new section, we decided to redecorate the bathroom in Wilson St.

Before: (double click on them to get the full grungy details)

During:
We had thought the ceiling was sound, but it turned out it had paper on it which was loose in places, and when we pulled the loose bits off, it was completely gross underneath!

Yuk, the bleach.

And after:

The repainted kitchen windows

 

The replanted feijoa, moved as it wasn't getting enough sun under a huge tree.

The kowhai nearly to the top of the fence and lots of lovely flowers.

And after day 2, the finished product. Colour is a bit difficult to assess from the photos but basically a sort of creamy tinged white. The windows are pink frosted glass (which we hadn't realised) so in daylight it will no doubt be pink!

 

July 2012

Mid winter now though you wouldn't think so from the photos! And peak planting season we reckoned. So we turned our attention to the pony paddock. There was the drive ...

... for which we had lined up some flaxes (about 45), given to us by the very generous gardeners down by the lagoon, on one side ...

... and some natives (about 80) on the other.

These required lots of tree protectors which we managed to source on the internet. We also bought some fertiliser tablets from the same people but somehow ended up with 5 cartons (5,000 tablets) rather than the 5 packets (500 tablets) we thought we had ordered. We'd better keep planting!

And there was also the main part of the pony paddock, where we were going to plant some borders of tree lucerne.

Fortunately we had some help from Katie and ended up with about 65 planted at the far end and a further 40 near the drive. We hope all this planting will provide some shelter for the lambs when they arrive (or perhaps more realistically in the years ahead).

Then Dave got some more sawdust for the paths on the bramble slope ...

... and we struggled to lift up the pampas grass so we could mulch around them.

And on the bad days, we ticked off another indoor job from the not-so-urgent to-do list - making some bookends for our very aesthetically pleasing but not very practical bookshelves. This involved rather a lot of woodwork for Dave and rather a lot of varnishing for me. But at last the books at each end of each shelf are supported.

June 2012

June arrived and along with it, of course, winter. There were some nasty wet bits and some even nastier cold bits but also some nice sunny bits. In fact the nice sunny bits followed by the wet bits were just about perfect for planting up the bramble slope. We had begged, borrowed or stolen all the new natives over the last year and were able to plant over 200 plants on the slope. Some were so small you couldn't see them from a distance and a few got frosted and completely disappeared but on the whole most of them looked quite happy.

 

After all the plants had been planted, Dave had the enormous job of mulching them all. The mulch was delivered by the truck load over a few weeks and very soon the slope was looking very fine.

And when the weather wasn't so good, there was plenty of fun to be had indoors. I had been intending to learn to spin ever since I got the fleece of our pet lamb Jeff in the 1990s but never quite managed to master it. But then I discovered one of our neighbours was a wonderful spinner and knitter and she agreed to teach me. I had bought a spinning wheel but needed some new bobbins and tried to find some on trademe but instead found a new wheel. It was a bit old and tatty but Dave insisted he wanted to restore it and soon we had a rather lovely new spinning wheel.

Trouble was that it was slightly different from my old one that I wouldnt say that I had mastered but I had managed to produce some 'wool with character' that I managed to use for some rather warm gloves, that might also come in handy should you break your wrist!

And along with a wheel, you need all sorts of other accessories to make this magic wool - a niddy noddy, a swift and a wool winder. Dave leapt to the rescue with all of these and had great fun in the process. Wool winder mark 1 was a two person affair...

 ...while mark 2 was an improvement but didn't quite do the job.

 But mark 3 did pretty well.