Infidelity

/ Robinne Weiss / 3 Comments

It’s time to come clean. This will be hard for some of you to hear, but it needs to be said. I never thought this would happen. I never thought I’d be saying this, but I can’t deny it anymore.

I’ve found a tomato as good as Brandywine.

I know, I know, you can’t believe I would do something like that. Can’t believe I’d be so unfaithful after decades of tomatoey bliss.

But there you have it. Indigo Apple is my new love. She’s a black tomato—a beautiful medium-sized fruit on an indeterminate plant. Her flavour is complex and rich, like Brandywine’s and, in contrast to Brandywine’s long maturation time, she ripens early. What can I say? I’m in love.

Hawksbeard: a Cheerful Weed

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We’ve had recent, much-appreciated rain, and the grass is unusually green for January. But even with the grass growth, summer is weed season in the lawn.

More specifically, summer is weed flowering season.

Some of the weed flowers are uninspiring, and merely annoying—the dull greenish flowers of plantain, for example.

Others bring a splash of colour to what is normally a bleak time in the lawn.

Hawksbeard (Crepis capillaris) is one of the more prolific colourful weeds in the lawn in summer. An annual or biennial member of the dandelion family, this plant bears small, cheery yellow blooms on tall, branched stems.

The NZ Plant Conservation Network shows hawksbeard as being naturalised in 1867 from Europe. Like its cousin dandelion, it was most likely brought to New Zealand on purpose as a food plant—it’s young leaves are edible. Like the dandelion, it is no longer valued as a food, but is considered a weed.

I will admit, the tall flower heads of hawskbeard can be annoying in the lawn. They seem to spring up overnight between mowings, and they slap against your legs as you walk through the yard. But I do appreciate their yellow blooms at a time of year when most other plants give up from the heat and drought. I have been known to use hawksbeard in flower arrangements, and their green rosettes are sometimes the only green to be found around the yard.

Rolling out the Welcome Mat

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When we first moved to our house, most of the landscaping, at our place and at the neighbour’s, was non-native. Gorse, photinia, oaks, birch, macrocarpa…plants of little interest to native wildlife. We’ve slowly been replacing much of the non-native vegetation with natives. When the property next door changed hands, the new owner replaced the gorse hedges with natives. Our plantings are all maturing, and I’ve got my fingers crossed we’ll soon attract some native residents.

Over the years, piwakawaka (fantails) have shown up occasionally, usually in autumn, and only for a week or so before moving on. But this year, one has arrived in summer. He’s been flitting around for over a week now, chattering and declaring ownership of the place. I’m crossing my fingers, hoping he’ll stay.

Piwakawaka don’t stay still for photos, but he was talking to me through the kitchen window yesterday and, with the window as a bird blind, I was able to snap a couple of photos that weren’t just a blur of feathers. He’s a cute wee guy. I hope our welcome mat is acceptable to him.

Good Mum, Bad Mum

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It rained all day today, as it did yesterday, and as it’s supposed to do tomorrow. The weather is fine by me–plenty of water for the garden, and I have lots of writing to do–but for the kids, three days of rain in the middle of the summer is hard to manage.

What can a mum do under these circumstances, but bake, and enlist the kids’ help? So we made soft pretzels and zucchini cupcakes (see previous blog post). It doesn’t take all day, now the kids are teens, but it gave them something to do for a little while, and treats to eat afterwards.

I felt like such a good mum…

Then I thought about the fact I let my kids eat soft pretzels, pickles and brie for lunch, with a big frosted cupcake afterwards (not to mention licking the bowl and beaters).

Such a bad mum!

All those times we’ve fed our children healthy, balanced meals…you know what they’re going to remember? Yep. Pretzels and pickles for lunch.

I know this, because the meals I most vividly remember my mother making when I was a kid were the naughty ones–hot apple pie with milk (for dinner–the whole meal!) and raspberry shortcake (again, the entirety of the meal). Those meals were legendary, precisely because they weren’t healthy and balanced. They were naughty and we knew it.

Such a bad mum!

Such a good mum!

A Zucchini Problem

/ Robinne Weiss / 2 Comments

Hi. My name is Robinne and I have a zucchini problem.

They say the first step is to acknowledge you have a problem. I did that years ago with my zucchini addiction, but it doesn’t seem to have helped. Every year, I say I’m going to plant fewer zucchini. But in early July, with icy rain lashing the windows, the pictures in the seed catalogue are so alluring…

When it comes to planting time in October, I find I have four or five varieties of zucchini seed—how did that happen? Well, since I have the seed…

I plant only six of each variety—I use those little six-pack seedling trays, so it’s really the minimum reasonable number of any one variety.

Let’s see…six times four or five…hmmm…

At plant-out, I swear I’ll cull some. I’ll only plant the best-looking individuals of each variety. Two of each kind, just in case one plant dies (which, by the way, has never happened to me, but it’s always a risk).

But I’ve earmarked an entire bed for zucchini on my garden plan. I couldn’t leave part of a bed empty. That would be a waste of space. And there are plenty of plants to fill the bed…

As I say, I have a zucchini problem.

Master Chef Sedgemere

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An every-day artful display of dinner ingredients.

My husband had just finished making pesto for our dinner pasta. He turned and surveyed the vegetables I’d chopped: yellow and green zucchini, three colours of green beans, baby carrots, fresh peas…

He laughed. “We live in a cooking show sometimes.”

“Yeah, like, every day around five o-clock,” I answered.

I exaggerated, of course, but only slightly. With a garden that produces beautiful vegetables year-round, how can we not end up with beautiful spreads of food in the kitchen every day?

So, hurray for the garden! All we need now is the camera crew…

Welcome 2018

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The new year is here, and I feel I should declare some resolution to go with it.

But the truth is, I don’t wait for the new year to make resolutions. If I feel a need to work harder, change my life, eat less chocolate (heaven forbid!), or whatever in order to be a better person, I just do it, as soon as I realise I need to. New year or old, it doesn’t matter. Why wait to improve your life or yourself?

And so I come to the new year with a list of to-dos that has little to do with it being 2018 instead of 2017. Oh, there are some big-ticket items there that might be construed as ‘resolutions’, but they’re really just the next step in a progression, and their appearance on my list has nothing to do with the change of year.

So, whether you’ve made resolutions or not, may your new year be full of growth and personal improvement. May you strive to spread love and happiness wherever you go and in whatever you do. If we all do that, think what a fabulous year it will be!

Volcanoes in the Mist

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Our pre-Christmas family adventure this year took the form of a week on the North Island. One of the many things we did was to hike the Tongariro Crossing. The track climbs the slopes of Mt. Tongariro passes between Tongariro and Mt. Ngauruhoe. The volcanoes are active–the last eruption was in 1975, and they have a history of erupting about every nine years before that–so the landscape near the top is stark and raw, with sulphurous steam rising from fissures and craters, tumbled rock, and dark lava flows.

The area is tapu, sacred, to the local Māori, and it’s no surprise. Power and violence are written on the landscape, the lush lower slopes of the mountain only accentuating the devastation near the top. The awesome forces that shape the face of the planet are on display there. It is a place for gods to live.

Unfortunately, it has also become an incredibly popular tourist destination. The day we hiked it, there was a constant stream of shuttle buses arriving at the start of the track. We spent the day hiking on others’ heels, with hikers on our own heels. When we stopped for lunch, we counted sixty-eight people pass us in just 15 minutes. A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation, and we estimated that there were 1600 people on the track at the time.

It seemed to me that most of the people were treating the excursion as nothing but a physical challenge–a race to be completed or 19.4 km to tick off their to-do list. A large group of twenty-somethings all but pushed us off the track in their effort to pass us as they chatted loudly to one another, oblivious to the beauty around them. A group of teens playing loud music sauntered past. A man sat beside a crater lake doing a business deal on his cell phone.

I wanted to stop, to soak in the alien landscape, to feel the immense power of lava beneath my feet, to examine the crusted sulphur on the rocks and the tenacious plant life that colonised the harsh landscape. But like sheep being herded onto a truck, we were pushed along the narrow track by the people behind us. Fifteen seconds, thirty seconds was all we could snatch at a time to appreciate the landscape.

Like our favourite beach, the Tongariro Crossing has been diminished by its popularity. The gods are still there, in the steam and the lava, the raw craters blasted in the earth, but no one is paying attention.

A-Z of Thankfulness–#3

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Here’s the final instalment, posted on Christmas day, I hope you all find much to be thankful for today and every day.

Sunshine—The counterpoint to rain, and just as necessary for the garden. It’s also critical for my mental health, and I try to make the most of our sunny days.

Teeth—Where would we be without them? I wish I had appreciated them earlier in life and taken better care of them when I was a teen.

Ukuleles—Who can resist smiling while listening to ukulele music?

Vision—Not just my eyesight, though I appreciate that a great deal, but also the ability to look ahead at what could be. I’ve relied on vision the past twelve years, building a business, and then closing it to become a writer. Many days, that vision has been the only thing getting me out of bed in the morning.

Water—I have not truly experienced a lack of water—not as many people in the world have—but after losing our well in the 2010 earthquake, and experiencing a few years of drought, I have an appreciation for the ease with which I obtain water. I am thankful to have access to clean, safe water.

Xenophilia—The love of the unknown. I love the fact we humans don’t understand everything. I love the fact that in my backyard, there may be insects that have yet to be described by science. I love the fact there are discoveries to be made every day. I love that our world is populated by weird and wonderful life.

Yellow admirals—These butterflies, and all the native insects and spiders in my yard are a source of great pleasure to me. They help me tolerate the weeds, because they rely upon many of them for food and shelter.

Zucchini—How many ways can you eat zucchini? I don’t know, but I love them all. I always plant too many zucchini, and I end up wondering what on earth I’m going to do with them, but they are a wonderful summer staple in our kitchen.