July 2011

We had long agreed that once the glass house was up, the next project would be to build the deck in the breezeway. However, just about this time, I saw a photo in the local newspaper of a willow ecohut made by the local college for a sustainability challenge. I had not seen one before and thought it was just what we needed.

So that is where we turned our attention. We searched the internet for a source of willow but then noticed the council was clearing all the non-native vegetation along the river which just happened to include masses of willow. So after a quick trip to select the best place ...

... we returned at dusk with some secateurs. We looked the other way while 2 dogs and their owners went past ...

... but met them again when we were sneaking home with our booty.

We had to leave the poles to soak in water for a couple of weeks which gave us time to clear the site. But then we had some bizarre weather with a tornado hitting the coast a few kilometers to the north of us while we had hail and torrential rain.




But eventually it cleared up and we could get on to clearing the bank for the hut. This sort of merged into another task of concealing the wood shed and washing line with a trellis fence. The land around them was a bit too high and we would need some extra soil to make a path along the slope to the ecohut. So he did the earthworks while I cleared the gorse, bracken and knee high grass.

The sticks marked the route ...

... and it had certainly become a bit of a jungle.

But soon it was cleared and was covered by a very heavy frost, which was a bit of a surprise as we had thought it would be very sheltered along there.

Then we had more weather dramas and ten days of very strong westerlies brought a wreck of prions to our shores and we helped many other locals to rescue hundreds (literally) of the surviving birds.

And we decided to install a heat transfer system to take the excess heat from our living room to the bedrooms and bathroom. The main living area of the house is so warm that we have rarely needed the fire to heat the room but have needed it to heat the water on non-sunny days. So this seemed the perfect answer ...

... and kept us entertained in the bad weather.

The weather cleared and we had some heavy frosts which did not seem to deter the first daffodils (and neither has the hare so far!) ...

... or upset the veggies too much.


So then it was back to the plot with turf to rearrange near the woodshed ...

... until we had another interlude for a severe southerly storm, the coldest day since records began, and snow where it almost never gets.


Of course this didn't stop Dave - his one concession to the temperature being to wear his new birthday hat!!

I opted for an indoor job - designing the hut itself. This was such fun and seemed to work ...

... so we then transferred it to the real thing ...

... which was also a lot of fun.

And though there were a few moments with lots of willow going in all directions it soon resembled the plan. Yay. If we remember to keep it watered it should sprout and be a great place to relax in summer (I should be so lucky!)

We then planted lots of exotic and mainly fragrant trees and shrubs in the new clearings on the bank between the remaining gorse shelters - lilac, syringa, persimmons, cherry, lemon and, at last, a magnolia. This was a gift from Julie and Ann, my former colleagues with whom I had spent many lunch hours over many years admiring the wonderful magnolias in the Botanic Gardens. This one is a new cultivar 'Brixton Belle', bred from the Magnolia Campbellii, which looks the much the same but should flower almost immediately rather than taking 8 - 10 years to bloom. I am much too impatient to wait for that!! It was lovely that they could both come to greet it.

Finally we had another wee bird interlude - when we found a green Indian ringneck parrot in the garden.

It seemed hungry and we didn't think it should be out in the wild ...

... so proceeded to persuade it under Dave's jumper which was not a very sensible place to put it as it had an enormous beak!

June 2011

Another new month and another new project! This time we turned our attention to a poly tunnel or greenhouse. Yet again we had trouble as we bought it online and the packaging was seriously damaged, by a forklift most likely, and so we lost several of the bits en route.

But eventually they were replaced and we could assemble it.

The brochure showed a young woman with her toddler assembling theirs but I was not fooled this time and knew Dave and probably concrete would be involved! Anyway, the site was all ready ...

... and it sort of sprang up very easily before our eyes.

We then had a public holiday weekend which coincided with some dreadful weather so we had a Great Queens Birthday Weekend Challenge, where he had to make the staging for the poly tunnel and put the soil inside it before I made the remaining three huge pairs of curtains for the living and dining rooms. Competition was very fierce but the conditions got changed several times and the prize was never specified so it was all a bit unsatisfactory but we did make enormous progress.

During the competition, Dave decided the fixings would not be secure enough in our strong winds so, once the weather improved, he proceeded to concrete in all the pegs.

We had saved all the topsoil removed from the site in a, by now, rather overgrown soil mountain at the edge of our 'front lawn' so it was very good to get rid of some of that. And even more exciting to at last find a use for the fishing net we had found on the beach on the other side of the world about 25 years earlier and carried up and down cliffs to try to win the day's 'most interesting object' competition with Uncle Tony!!!


Paul made a brief visit which was just long enough for him to lend a hand (but just the one) and shift the staging in.





And then we used the net again to sift some more of our free bark chips to add as a mulch.

We also planted a rather handsome magnolia grandiflora which we hope will like its new home and grow big and strong.

The very mild weather continued and at the end of the month, which was close to the middle of winter, we had flowers on several plants and bulbs, including our new camellia and even the strawberries.

We started to prune the fruit trees ...

... and I'm not sure if we improved them or not!


Indoors, the recipe holder got its crowing glory with the addition of a photo of our house from the top of the local hill and looked very fine ...

... and at last we got a clothes rack - in the garage this time but very welcome after weeks of wet weather and clothes drying in the lounge.

May 2011

May seems to have been the warmest and wettest May in living memory, which was good for us in many ways. It meant we no longer needed to water anything, it was good weather for planting and it was a good opportunity for Dave to do some of the inside jobs.

We started with the new cherry trees - I had found these on special on at an online nursery and it took several days to plant them along the length of the drive. There were 20 of mixed varieties so they should flower over a long period. Having got them all safely planted, the rain arrived and several of them spent their first few weeks in standing water, which probably wasn't the best start for them.

We were given some agapanthus plants which we planted along the drive at a particularly steep part of the bank where we would not be able to mow.

And I thought it would be nice to have some bulbs along the drive and the same online nursery then had a special on spring bulbs for naturalising. It said a banana box and I had previously bought 300 bulbs that came in a box about that size so I thought it would be ideal. But when it arrived, I was both delighted and horrified to discover it contained over 1,300 bulbs which all had to be planted. Fortunately Dave helped, along with Paul on a brief visit, and we managed to get them planted in about 4 days.

We also extended the bed of soft fruit with some very small blueberry cuttings and a row of Chilean guavas that had been looking for a home since the beginning of summer. No need to water them in either.

And we replanted the flax border around the back 4 sides of the veggie patch.

We had ordered a new ranchslider to block off one end of the breezeway as, in a southerly, the wind and rain seemed to blow through it from both directions - yes, everyone had told us it should be called a 'Wind tunnel' instead of a 'Breezeway'! Fortunately both the window and Neil the builder turned up before the start of winter. Neil was assuming Dave would help but Dave was not so sure as it was rather a large window with nothing easy to hold onto but they did manage it to get it into place ....

... and it blended in very well. Time will tell if it does the job.


And then it turned wet and we had to concentrate on inside jobs. At last, the material for the living room curtains arrived - this had been ordered last October and finally arrived in May, after a false start in February when some rolls the wrong colour had turned up. For some reason, I got 2 enormous rolls supposedly containing 56 metres although the lighter of the two seemed to have about 30 metres on it and I got a discount for having to wait so long! All good but rather a lot of curtains to make. Its a bit difficult to get the correct colour in a photo, its probably somewhere between the two.


Once the wet weather started, we made some big improvements indoors. The shelves in the living room were not quite right as they came too close to the fire. So, having said we would never dismantle the corner unit as it had been so difficult to get into place, we moved it out again and removed the end section...

... and converted it into an extra set of shelves for the dining room area - using the set of uprights that had been made the wrong size for the other shelves in the dining room. Yay, surely now we'll be able to keep the area tidy although I wouldn't bank on it!

And at last I got my recipe holder - a bit Heath-Robinson one might say, but a multi-purpose wall-mounted ...

... or freestanding stand that fits my largest cookbook just perfectly.

Dave also finished off the filling and varnishing of all the internal architraves and skirting boards, which was a great job done.

The supply of veggies just about dried up from the veggie patch by the end of the month - there was still some silverbeet, carrots and leeks and the end of the broccoli but we had 130 portions of sweetcorn and three boxes of broad beans in the freezer to tide us over until the new beds started producing.