November 2011

November dawned and, as last year, with it came the dreaded bronze beetle! And not just one bronze beetle, masses of them, night after night after night. They collect on the fruit tree of their choice at dusk and can strip it of leaves over night. They are the adult form of the native grass grub and although we have never found grass grubs on our new section, they come in droves at dusk each night that is calm. Last year we had not realised what was going on until too late and woke to find our young trees completely eaten but this year we decided to fight them. This meant spraying with neem tree oil from dusk and took about 2 hours each night. And though this killed the visitors it did not seem to reduce the numbers on subsequent nights. Their favourite seemed to be apricot trees, but plums and pears and then feijoas all seemed to be popular. And they didn't even realise when December arrived and continued on till we went away on December 7th.


But on a more pleasant note, the flaxes flowered and attracted tuis into the garden for the first time.


Our soft fruit was growing well and we covered them with the old strawberry net which was white and makes it more or less impossible to see what is inside, but does keep the birds away.

And the new blueberries were all still alive if a bit hard to see. Still they now had a water supply so hopefully they will grow big and strong.

The greenhouse / poly tunnel was going well but getting far too hot so we added some wind netting / shade netting to keep it cool. But it had allowed us to grow all the plants for the first 4 beds in the veggie patch from seed this year.

The climbing plants on the pergola were at last starting to grow. I nearly gave up on them during the winter but decided to give them another year and they were all making progress up their supports.

And the cocktail kiwifruit and new grape vines were starting to make some impression on the new trellis.

The native border round the 'front lawn' continued to grow slowly but was fast becoming overtaken by the grass that could not be cut until the bulbs died back. The sand quarry has recently shifted to a new hill to the north ...

... so that we now look right over to the river to the north east.

And then we started to clear the beds in sequence. As expected / feared, we did have an abundance of broad beans along with carrots and leeks and strawberries. We froze 30kg of broad beans during the month with the last bed which was solely broad beans still to be harvested.

And we gained a new shoe rack! A visitor had admired our old pint sized rack that we brought from our old house and had promptly been given it so Dave could make his new rolls royce version and doesn't it look nice!