November 2012

November usually brings with it our friend the brown beetle and this year was no different except that we decided to ignore them. And so the plum trees in particular lost some leaves but they all recovered eventually. Maybe there were fewer beetles this year as we had attacked them over the last two years or maybe there were fewer still evenings or maybe there was another cause but for whatever reason the damage was far less than previously, thank goodness.

And the fruit cage was finally finished! We had a few tricky corners to finish off ...

...and a gate with a catch to add and then didn't it look fine!

Alice returned for a post-exam rest was put to work digging up more comfrey from the fruit cage and then planting the new plants we had grown from the roots she had dug up on her last visit around the fruit trees in the orchard,

She also helped us with our massive broad bean harvest.

We also planted out our kumara bed - this year we managed to grow our own plants from kumara we had stored from last year and this seemed to work really well. It was amazing that even though most of the kumara got damaged when we dug them up last year, they stored really well. But even more surprising was that a few of them didn't sprout even though they were left in the bed in the greenhouse for several weeks and so we decided to eat them at that stage and they were still edible!

And then I rediscovered a local orchid shop that I had last visited maybe 15 years ago (and still have the plant I bought then) and so I took Alice along and we selected rather too many new plants.

Two were destined for the planter in the breezeway, where they looked quite stunning ...

... and rather outshone the other planter.

While the others brightened up the shelf inside . 

And finally we were introduced to loquats which taste quite like apricots and grow rampantly at a friend's house. We were given some self seeded seedlings and cleared a bit of the gorse away on the slope to give them a new home.