A Garden Tour and Spring Rain

What with today in town and last Sunday, we've been off the farm quite a bit. This Sunday we spent the day on a Garden Tour around the Motueka area, a chance to be inspired (or disheartened) by the extraordinary efforts of other gardeners. I took lots of photos, but instead of boring everyone with them here, they're on my new Flickr account if you would like to check them out (I tried to pick the best ones, but even with my mother's fancy camera I'm just not that great at taking photos - my apologies!).
There are some truly lovely gardens out there, featuring succulents, water features, and gorgeous flowers. The ones that I admired most, though, had to be the ones that incorporate vegetables tastefully into their layouts. While I understand the love of flowers, I can't seem to wrap my head around a garden that doesn't supply food.
Still, many of the gardens had beautiful structure and were impeccably maintained; not quite how I would describe our own garden. In order to not get too disheartened, I had to remind myself that many of the gardens featured on the tour have advantages over our own. For one thing, none of them were situated in the middle of what is essentially a paddock, with invasive weeds just waiting to creep in from all sides. Also, we've done some fantastic work weeding. In the week and a half that I have been around we've cleared just about most of the major beds, and have started in on the edges of the garden, including the sea of strawberries that are pouring in from the Eastern side. Strawberries are so hard to grow in Texas that I assumed they were hard to grow anywhere; on the contrary, on the farm they are quickly expanding to the point where we might have to cut them back! What luxury. But to help prove my previous point, two pictures a week apart for comparison:

I think that counts as progress!


Today was a very, very rainy day. We went to Motueka ('into town') for some errands and lunch, and by the time we got back it had really started, going steadily from the early afternoon until night. Its not like Texas rain, which pours down thunderously then quickly stops; instead its more of an insistent presence, lightening then thickening again but extremely constant. So constant, in fact, that it turned our driveway into a little stream and puddles formed in every available concave surface. The sounds outside were lovely, the steady syncopated rhythm of the rain punctuated by occasional birdsong. Altogether, it was a pleasant afternoon to stay inside, and take a break from garden work to do some interior decoration and a spot of music. So that is what I did. As night fell mist formed in the valleys around us, combining with the smoke from hearthfires to slowly envelope the surrounding landscape, leaving us on what felt like our own green island, the other hills only vague shapes in the distance. Sometimes its really nice to live out in the country. Like the morning that I captured this sunrise.

Carpentry and Composting

This week, the weather decided to take a turn back towards winter instead of forward towards summer (don't you love how spring can do that?). Tuesday was lovely and warm, but then wednesday struck and with it came the rain. In fact, a whole day of rain, complete with cold southerlies. 'Ah ha,' I thought, 'the perfect day for an inside project', so I turned my attention to building a bookshelf.
Its all part of an attempt to help my parents make their house feel like home. Their 'living room' is currently rarely - if ever - used, and some furniture re-arrangement might just fix the problem. So, a bookshelf. Apparently furniture and wood are both quite expensive in NZ, so I thought I would make it out of wood we already have around, which sent me scrounging around in the garage. I sourced some wood, measured, planned, re-measured, cut, planned, re-cut, re-planned, got outside input, cut a bit more, planed some wood, began screwing it together... apparently, buildings things takes some work. In the process, I was taught a few useful things by my father, such as how to use the table saw and how to plane wood, something I am not very good at. Yet. I must say, I didn't expect to be improving my woodworking skills out here, although it is fun. Two days and quite a bit of work later, the bookshelf is nearly finished and painted quite a vibrant shade of orange. Perhaps I'll include a picture here soon.
Ah yes, and the composting. Our compost bins have been in a bit of trouble. Back when the weather was sunny, I dug out the bottom layer of our three section compost bin and attempted to dry out the very anearobic mush that had formed in an attempt to get it to turn into real, nice compost for the garden. Of course, then it decided to rain. Two days later, I've finally managed to put together a respectable compost heap from a combination of all three compost bins, from fresh to mature (but soggy). Having identified the main problems of my parents' heap as 1) lack of carbon and 2) lack of drainage, I made a bamboo screen at the bottom to allow water to leave the pile, and sourced carbon from anywhere I could thing of to feed it. This included my mom very kindly shredding paper in our pathetic over-heating paper shredder, gathering sawdust from my bookshelf-building, and gathering dry things from around the house and garden. Dry grass? Couldn't hurt. Eggshells? Why not. Old corn stalks? Perfect.Now we have what I hope will be a very successful and warm compost heap. I even found some useable dirt in the middle bin, so we're off and away and adding to the garden all the time!
Oh, and the radish sprouts came up today, after only five days in the ground! Luckily they seem to like rain and cold weather. I also just love the capacity of radishes to make any gardener feel accomplished. The always come up, they sprout fast, and they are just generally delightful to have in the garden. To radishes! Hurrah.

Humble (re)Beginnings

Its time for a new chapter in the life of Adventures Not So Far North. Instead of traveling and having adventures, its now time to have adventures in agriculture! I hope it won't be as boring as that sounds...

So, an introduction.

The Place: my parents' farm, and hopefully a few other farms in New Zealand and abroad.

The People: me and my family, plus other colorful (or colourful, as they spell it here) characters from time to time.

The Reason: I want to learn more about agriculture, and now is the perfect time. Besides, and you'll believe me when you see the pictures, my parents can use all the help they can get!

The Blog....

Its now my fifth day on the farm, but it feels much longer. Time seems to go much more slowly here – the pace of life is incredibly unhurried, aided in large part by the isolation of the Farm; going anywhere means really going somewhere, so often there isn't enough of a reason to leave. There's so much to do here, anyway, that leaving is both unnecessary and uninteresting.

At this time of year its late spring in New Zealand, so its planting time (last weekend, Labor/Labour Day weekend, is traditionally when Kiwis put in their gardens for summer, after all danger of frost is past). In our garden, where my parents were away for three months, its weeding and then planting time. So far we've cleared and planted four beds, and today we'll plant the greenhouse. We've put in cucumbers, radishes, carrots, lettuce and peas from seed, and butternut squash and sweet potato transplants. The beds we've planted so far, however, are the easy ones. Next up are the vegetable beds that are nearly indistinguishable from the paths that run by them since everything is covered in weeds, weeds and more weeds. Including the dreaded Sheep Sorrel, the Scourge of our garden. The Scourge is actually quite charming looking, with little red seeds pods on the top of talk stalks, but one can't let oneself be fooled! Even the smallest root left in the ground will multiply. Most of the other weeds aren't nearly as bad, and some - like the gorgeous orange poppies, are even pleasant. Sometimes we even discover edible plants that we didn't know still existed, like the occasional onion or chard. Some 'weeds' are edible as well, like dandelion greens. You never know what you'll find in our sea of weeds, but the results are sometimes pleasant!

Enough about weeds. In addition to garden work we have actually left the farm (proving that my prior claims about never leaving false). This sunday was the Ngatimoti School Fair, the school that my sister and I briefly attended when we were eleven. My dad spent the Fair volunteering at the White Bait Fritters (a Kiwi specialty) booth, flipping fritters (and snacking on them) with our family friends Aamon and Wendy. Mum and I went with a few of her friends and puttered around in the beautiful spring weather, browsing books, chatting with neighbors and buying a few plants for the garden, most notably a dozen soybean transplants. Maybe we'll get to make our own tofu, who knows!

We also went to Nelson yesterday to catch the end of their Arts Festival, most importantly an Urban Art exhibit featuring - among others - the UK artist Banksy and US art collective Faile. The exhibit included work by Kiwi artists as well, including a mysterious individual who anonymously submitted his paintings re-working Kiwi classic images. The exhibition was excellent, ending while we were there with an auction for the art pieces displayed. It was an entertainingly ironic ending to an exhibition with a decidingly anti-consumerist message. The exhibit took place at Nelson's Foundry Park, which is a kind of recreation of Nelson's past using old buildings that have been brought to the site. An interesting place for an urban art exhibition, especially since there was quite a bit of yarn tagging around the property - my favorite was a lawnmower completely covered, although wagon wheels were also quite excellent (unfortunately we forgot the camera, or there would be pictures here).

Finally, here are some everyday-type adventures that I have had so far. On Friday, a swarm (I keep wanting to say flock) of bees flew up the hill and over me as I was gardening. Apparently this is a pretty special and sometimes much-desired event, since its the prime opportunity to capture the Queen and start a hive on your property. Going for a run, I saw the first trees in bloom, as well as lambs, calves and even baby alpacas! So cute (and growing more popular as farm animals around here, it seems). We cracked open a four-month old batch of sauerkraut yesterday, finding it entirely edible under the thin layer of pink scum on top - apparently scum is okay, mold is not.

Stay tuned for more adventures! Cheese-making, weed wacking, cardoon harvesting... its all in a days' work on the farm.