Winter

It has been a while!
Life has gotten pretty busy with one thing and another. Plus the weather has turned all wet and wintry so not getting out to take piccies as much.
This is the season for planting trees. Paddy is pictured below next to a newly planted kauri. These are a totemic tree of this area. They used to form huge forests of long-lived massive trees. The Europeans cut most of them for timber in the last couple of hundred years and now there are only small ones or a few that were left alone in inaccessible places. So we are doing our small bit to add a few Kauri back to the land.
The veggies are a selection of what we are getting over the winter. carrots did well. We have even got a few mutant white coloured ones! They have been grown from seed collected on our own land. The carrots flower in their second year of growth (they are biennial) I suspect that some of the flowers pick up some wild carrot pollen as they are flowering at the same time. The white carrots are thinner than the orange ones and are a bit woody like an old parsnip, so not a particularly useful cross.
The capsicum are off our perennial plants! I did not know that peppers could carry on growing through the winter, but these plants survived and have fruited again this summer. they are showing no signs of dying out over the winter so I shall leave them again. It is one of the pleasures of having less pressure of space in that I can leave veggies for longer than I would have done on an allotment where the peer pressure was to be "tidy".

The other picture shows the veggy plot in winter mode. it looks pretty sodden and dormant right now. The heavy clay soil is saturated. i am resisting the urge to constantly weed because a cover of weed helps to dry the soil and preserves its structure better than having nothing. It will be a small job to turn it in the spring ( he says optimistically!).

Family are all doing well here.
Best wishes to UK family and Dad over the weekend.