October 2012

October arrived and with it some rain, at last, and a great horticultural disaster. All things on our new section are meant to be organic but this was relaxed to rid the pony paddock of its extensive gorse and blackberry content. And then this was extended to Brambly Bank, which I 'cleared' of blackberry last autumn. I had deliberately borrowed a sprayer for those 2 jobs but last time, the other sprayer was broken and so I had to use ours. I remember emptying and washing it out afterwards but somehow a residue remained and, when I came to spray a plum tree, a peach tree and a houseplant with some gentle Neem oil to remove hoards of black fly, all 3 of the plants were dead within a couple of days. O me miseram! The plum tree was the greatest loss as it had been very healthy (apart from the flies) and was a pollinator for the other plums. Any replacement will take 3 years to catch up. Ah well, such is life! But now we have a new organic sprayer so that hopefully this will not happen again.

Elsewhere, Dave built a new pond in the centre of the vege patch - this was always intended to be a feature of the vege patch but we had never got round to it. We used a deep plastic barrel which Dave carefully concreted in ...

... and so we could at last retrieve the fish we had brought with us (3 years ago) from their temporary home in the orchard which had doubled as our only water source when we had first arrived and was now well past its best.

As usual Dave did the structural part ...

... and I did the fun part, with a couple of helpers!

And our long planned lambs arrived. The wet weather meant that the grass drive was too slippery to get the trailer up on the first attempt ...

... and rolling it back for a second go was not too successful.

Anyway, we made it in the end

and then manhandled them into their pen.

Then came the tricky bit, naming them! The male with the white rimmed glasses had been partly bottle fed and already been named Mister Pip, so that was easy, but what about the 2 girls?

After much thought, and brilliant ideas from many sources, my favourites, Flopsy and Mopsy, were replaced by Lady Baaa Baaa, for the lighter one and suggested by Dave (many being amazed that he had actually heard of the pop star), and Mo, both the Twitter name of Michelle O-baaa-ma and what she's here to do (mow) and sort of derived separately by Joanna and friend Phillipa.

Aren't they sweet? Not so very tame yet though and clearly in need of drenching for worms. Ahhh, that means we have to catch them every 3-4 weeks for the first 8 months. Let the fun begin!

At last we obtained another net for the fruit cage, rectangular this time and plenty big enough, so we were able to finish that job.

The vege patch was looking rather good with the promise of another freezer full of broad beans. And we hadn't even finished last year's 30kg!

And the early flaxes flowered and immediately attracted our very own tui who was there constantly and didn't seem to mind us at all.

Isn't (s)he fine!

Neighbours had told us we had big black rabbits along with the normal little grey fluffy ones in the pony paddock but we had never seen them until one day one ventured up to our 'lawn'.

Finally most of the trees had survived the winter on Brambly Bank but they were being overtaken by new brambles ...

... and rather a lot of grass and other weeds.