Asparagus

On Sunday I was feeding the chooks fairly early in the morning and thought to check the asparagus for some early spears. I was delighted to see the first ones poking through their bed. What a great indicator of the arrival of spring. They were snapped off, given a quick boil, annointed with butter and a dash of home grown lemon and then served up within the hour for Chantelle's breakfast. I snuck one off the plate just to make sure it was edible ... and it was very nice. So the asparagus bed is on the daily circuit to see how the rest of the crop is coming on. Home gardening is in one sense very inefficient, as you put in a huge amount of "work" for often a very poor yield. There are so many threats and obstacles in the way of any one crop coming to fruition. For example, I can plant up a whole bed of raspberries, manure them, prune them, lime them, keep them weeded and watered all the year. If I fail to stick a net over them then I will lose 99% of the crop to song thrushes and blackbirds. Often your entire crop of one veggy fails for no obvious reason one year and then does really well the next. Hence my delight at getting some produce onto the plate in tip-top condition.

Bee inspection

The bee inspector came round this morning to see if my bees were healthy. I was a bit nervous about this because there is a serious bee affliction called American Foulbrood that is common in this area. It is a bacterial disease that attacks the baby bees before they hatch out. If you find AFB in your hive, you have to pour petrol into your hive at night to kill all the bees and then burn the whole hive in a pit in the ground. Fair enough as the bees apparently do not recover and will just spread AFB to other hives. So, faced with the potential prospect of losing my one hive, I felt a bit like you do when sat in the doctor's waiting room. Ian has 10 year's experience of bee-keeping and has a DECA certificate that shows that he can recognise AFB. He declared my hive to be healthy apart from having the less deadly varroa mite. I will need to get some insecticide strips in to treat the varroa, but that is preferable to losing the whole lot. It was great to watch someone who knew what was going on. He re-organised the frames to make the bees happier and showed me lots of useful tips for how to make my bee-keeping better. Thanks very much Ian! The pictures show the inspection, frames of pollen, nectar and brood (bee babies). If you look carefully you might also be able to see the queen. She has a longer body than the workers and so her wings look shorter.

Rain, rain go away, come back next year.

We need rain in the winter to re-charge the groundwater, our dam, fill up the water tank and generally see us through the dry, hot summer. Now, I think we have had enough rain. We are into our second week of daily grey and wet. We have had about 10mm every day on average for 2 weeks. So, that's enough thanks. The pictures show the effects of this moisture on the garden. Gloopy mud on all the paths, sodden beds and depressed looking grass. It remains warm enough for some plants to keep moving. In fact it has been remarkably mild the last week or so. The main crops I have in at the moment are the garlic, the broad beans and the mustard. The garlic will sit through this weather without any problems. I put it in a month earlier than I usually do in the hope that the bulbs will not split like they did last year. The broad beans are partly there for eating and partly as a seed crop for school. They also give the bees some forage and finally act as a soil improver: they add nitrogen and keep the soil structure more open than a bare bed would. The mustard is another over-wintering green manure. It has a yellow flower and I will have a go at saving some of its seed in due course. The chooks like eating the big plants and it makes a change for them from eating grass. The chooks are laying pretty well at present. They have a break just before the solstice as the days get really short. Just before the shortest day (June 21st) the first hens started laying again. We get about 5 - 8 eggs every day from 13 chooks. That means we can have a couple of egg dishes a week, never need to buy eggs and can even barter the surplus. One picture shows the view down the hill towards the middle field. We planted 6 more olives on the hill this winter. Along the pathway we have planted apples and other deciduous fruit trees. On the left a band of native trees is going in. I had tried growing forest trees out in the open in this area. Species such as kohekohe and taraire. After they kept dying I pondered on why this might be. I suspect that they do not like to grow straight into grass with no shade or shelter from the wind. The latest plan is to plant a mixture of karo, coprosma and guava for the first five years. As these establish, they will shade out the grass reducing the need to mow. The guava will hopefully attract pigeons in and these will crap out native seed in their shit. These will be able to grow into the bare soil and will do much better. That is the plan. Check back in 10 years time to see if it works!

Silly pictures

Not got a lot of exciting pictures at the moment, so I have added some borrowed from other people. Quirky and made me smile. A bit like the Olympic opening ceremony that we watched live last Saturday morning. Chantelle called me in just as the music sequence had started. We had missed the rapid move through English history. With MySky we were able to watch it later, and then again with an invited audience during the week. Not sure why they were showing all the history - Kenneth Branagh swanning about pretending to be Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Why? Never mind, it was a good summary of the incredible things that have come out of England. The Industrial Revolution, the internet (apparently), a diverse range of cultural innovations: the Beatles, Pink Floyd, Punk, Dance Music and on into the present day. Comedians such as Rowan Atkinson, the Pythons, Harry Enfield. It was 2 hours of pure nostalgia. A mixture of raw power mixed with funny bits. James Bond parachuting into the stadium with the Queen and Rowan Atkinson playing the Chariots of Fire - genius. It made me reflect on my roots. And on my status as an immigrant. I will always be English in my core, no matter how long I live in NZ or anywhere else. My children will eventually be more Kiwi as they stay here longer and their English experiences fade into the background. But I will always be English. There is a shared Englishness that marks me out as different from a 100% Kiwi. Defining what makes the 2 races is an interesting exercise. The English are at heart cynical complainers who none-the-less have a blitz spirit when faced with adversity. Kiwis don't like to complain out loud - or feel gulity when they do. A whinge is quickly followed by a "She'll be right" or "It's all good". POMs are labelled as "whinging POMs". The English regularly moan for extended periods without feeling a need to lighten things up. There are arguments both ways for which race has the better mental health. Another point was made by an Ozzy colleague at work. She said that when you emigrate you take with you a snapshot of the culture you are leaving as it was at the time of departure. That stays the same in your head while the culture left behind continues to change. You end up a decade later having a vision of the Motherland that bears no relation to the reality. She talked about Greek friends at school whose fathers were very restrictive and protective of their daughters because that was how Greek society worked when they left Greece a generation earlier. Modern Greece is different now. This maybe mean that after being an immigrant for a decade or more, you end up not fitting in anywhere. Immigrants are always different in their new homeland with their strange accents and ideas. But if they go "home" they are also different like time travellers. I do not regret emigrating from England when all things are considered. The quality of life of my family has improved on the whole. Nuff said. PS I apologise for any typos. I am off duty!