It Ain’t Over ‘Til the Magpie Sings

August 10, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / 1 Comment

Photo: Eric Weiss

We’ve had more than our fair share of beautiful warm winter days this year. Though we’ve had some very cold nights, the days have been sunny, and we’ve gotten only a fraction of the rain we normally do over winter.

So you could have been forgiven for thinking, back in July, that winter was over. In fact, my daughter argued that it was spring a month ago.

I knew better. Winter would assert itself again.

It did so this past weekend, with icy winds bringing sleet, snow and rain. We huddled by the fire, venturing outdoors only to take extra food to the animals and split more firewood.

But in between icy squalls, at 4:00 am two days ago, I heard it—the certain sign that winter is on its way out.

A magpie.

Magpies are noisy all year long, but when spring is almost upon us, their noise changes. They start their wardle-oodle-ardling at four in the morning, and carry on until the sun rises. They feel what we know only because of the calendar—spring is just around the corner.

When the magpies start calling, I get restless. I wake when they do, and their call urges me out of bed.

Wardle-oodle-ardle!

Get up! Get up! Get ready!

But it’s dark and raining!

Wardle-oodle-ardle!

Get up! Get up! Get ready!

But it’s cold! Can’t I stay in bed?

Wardle-oodle-ardle!

Get up! Get up! Get ready!

Wardle-oodle-ardle!

Get up! Get up! Get ready!

Spring is coming!

Rosemary

July 25, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

In Minnesota, I grew rosemary in pots and brought it indoors for the winter, lest it be killed by the cold. Here in New Zealand, I grow my rosemary in the garden, and have to hack it back twice a year to keep it from growing taller than I am.

Rosemary is one of my favourite herbs, whether in dinner, in the garden, or in a flower arrangement. It is decorative as well as delicious.

Rosemary was named by Pliny in the first century. Ros (foam) mare (sea)—meaning that it grew so close to the sea that the foam sprayed on it. The Greek gods supposedly valued a rosemary wreath more highly than one made of gold (think how much I could make selling my biennial rosemary trimmings to Zeus!).

Rosemary was first used medicinally and culturally. It entered the kitchen in the Middle ages as a way to disguise the saltiness of salt-preserved meat. I’m told it goes well with lamb, pork, and game. As a vegetarian, I like rosemary with potatoes, pumpkin, and in Italian tomato sauces. And I love to brush the bushes with my hands as I walk past, so I can bring that lovely smell with me wherever I go!

Ants!

July 23, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

For nine years, I was owner/operator of The Bugmobile, taking live arthropods into classrooms all over Canterbury in a vehicle festooned with giant pictures of insects. I was known everywhere as The Bug Lady.

Last summer, when I closed my business, I didn’t expect to continue to think of my car as The Bugmobile. But fate, or rather a colony of ants, has interceded. My car is infested with ants.

I wouldn’t notice the ants if they weren’t so fond of Mentos…or if I weren’t so fond of Mentos.

I started keeping a roll of Mentos in the car when I was running The Bugmobile—if I had a sore throat, or needed a pick-me-up between programmes, a mint kept me going.

Apparently, they keep the ants going, too. I collected a few and identified them as the Black House Ant, Ochetellus glaber, an Australian ant that originally hitched a ride to New Zealand tucked in people’s belongings and in plant material. Ordinarily, these ants nest under stones and in tree cavities, but this particular nest is tucked neatly into a hollow in one of my mud flaps.

I should probably evict them…but they’re cute little creatures. Just 2mm long, and shiny black. I rather like them tootling around the car, cleaning up the crumbs the kids leave when they finish off their lunches on the way home from school. Maybe I’ll just find an ant-proof container for my mints.

Once The Bug Lady, always The Bug Lady…

Food Security

July 17, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

A post-quake community garden in Christchurch

After the recent earthquake in Nepal, I wrote a blog post about food security in the face of natural disasters, but I never actually posted it.

But this piece about using vacant red-zoned land to produce food in Christchurch, in the news today, made me come back to that post and decide it was worth posting.

After the February 2011 quake in Christchurch, I saw firsthand how much more devastating natural disasters could be in the city verses in rural areas. Responding to a request for help on Trade Me, my husband and I, along with a couple of neighbours, loaded the car with shovels, wheelbarrows, tools and food, and ventured into the hard-hit eastern suburbs.

We spent a day clearing houses and yards of liquefaction, tearing out buckled and destroyed linoleum, and sharing out the vegetables, bread, and milk we brought from our farms. The people we met were amazingly strong in the face of the destruction around them—not one house in the neighbourhood was still straight and level, and the street was nearly impassable, buckled and cracked.

But they had no tools to tackle the devastation. The carload of tools we brought with us for the day was more than the entire neighbourhood could muster. City living doesn’t require heavy duty wheelbarrows and large shovels, and there were more willing hands than tools to go around.

Then there was the lack of gardens in the city. With stores closed and power out for many days, getting and preparing food was difficult. While meals were airlifted into the city, in the country we simply lived on food from the garden.

So, how do we build resilience and food security into our cities? How do we create cities that can feed themselves, at least for a short time, after a natural disaster? Part of the answer lies in community gardens that can provide food and positive community support, as they did in Christchurch after the 2011 quake. Part of the answer lies in taking a long-term approach to city planning—planting fruit trees in public parks, preserving green space with good soil within the city instead of covering it all with buildings and roads.

I would love to see Christchurch, and all cities, bring food production back within the city limits. No, a city cannot produce all its food, but having community gardens and food-producing commons makes a city a more humane place, even when there isn’t a natural disaster to weather.

Skiing

July 14, 2015July 15, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

I took the kids skiing today. When they came off the slopes, snowy and cold, we sat in the car drinking hot chocolate and tea from a thermos and admiring the view.

Not a bad place for a tea break.

Almond Conundrum

July 11, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / 1 Comment

Well, there they go—the last of the almonds. The last I will buy for a long time.

I absolutely love almonds. They’re one of my favourite nuts. But I had already replaced most of the almonds we eat (which come from California, producer of 80% of the world’s almonds) with locally grown walnuts, in my effort to eat closer to home. Now, however, they’ll be a very rare treat.

In my post last week about our relationship with bees, I talked about how North American bees are forced to forage in agricultural monocultures, leading to poor nutrition and exposure to pesticides. The largest of those monocultures is in California’s almond growing region, where the bees are “parked” every year during almond flowering in order to pollinate the trees.

Add to that the gallon of scarce California water that goes into producing each almond, and I find I can’t keep buying them. At least not the ones at the grocery store.

BUT, in deciding that, I’ve discovered that there are NZ almond growers as close to us as Marlborough, and that, with a little coddling, we might even be able to grow them ourselves!

So, with that, I have cheerfully sworn off California almonds. I’ll be checking out my local nurseries for almond trees, and tracking down those locally produced nuts!

Fresh Eyes

June 30, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

Endangered dolphins? Nothing unusual to see…

Travelling around this week with friends from the U.S., I am seeing things with fresh eyes. The strange pronunciations, the shockingly changeable weather, the casual acceptance of road closures, spotting endangered species from the roadside…all those things I now just accept as normal. I’m reminded of how foreign they were to me once.

Coming from the land of restaurant chains, they were surprised by the abundance and quality of local cafés. Coming from a place of certainty, they remarked on the number of times I said, “This has changed completely since I was last here.” Coming from a land of freezing winters, they marvelled at fresh vegetables from the garden at the winter solstice.

It has highlighted for me just how much I have ‘gone native’. How much I have accepted, adapted to, and embraced this place. It has become me, and I have become it. There are many times when I still feel foreign, even after ten years here, but having visitors here helps me realise just how much I have come to belong.

Westland

June 28, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

I’ve been on the West Coast with friends this weekend. The South Island’s west coast always reminds me of Panama. Though one is a temperate zone in a modern, developed country and the other is a tropical, developing country, there are striking similarities in the landscape.

Both are landscapes in which agriculture struggles to hold its own against encroaching rainforest (or the other way around, depending on your point of view).

Giant trees in the middle of paddocks clearly grew up in the middle of the forest and were left for stock shelter. Stumps dotting the farmland attest to the recent clearing of the forest. Drainage ditches rush with water, and the lush vegetation defies a climate harsh in its abundance.

Towns and villages cling precariously to the wet slopes. Lichens and moss encrust rotting weatherboards. Sheds are engulfed by vines. Human sounds are drowned out by a cacophony of raucous birds. Nature dominates the human world. One good storm, one bad decision, and nature will reclaim what people have temporarily usurped.

Of course, this is where the similarities end. Panama’s sweltering heat, its humped Brahman cattle, and volcanic clay soils are nothing like the West Coast, where glaciers reach the rainforest, and black and white Holstein-Friesians graze the paddocks.

I love visiting the West Coast, with its unkempt abundance. It is a sparsely populated frontier, where only the hardiest survive. Lush and lovely and harsh.

Truffles!

June 25, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / 2 Comments

One of my husband’s colleagues (Alexis Guerin-Laguette at Plant & Food Research) is working on the commercialisation of truffle production in New Zealand. They’ve just harvested this year’s crop, and as an ‘insider’ Ian got early access to the bounty.

“You don’t want to know what I paid for these,” he said of the five tiny mushrooms nestled carefully in a tissue-lined jar.

But, who cares—they were truffles! The real, if-you-have-to-ask-you-can’t-afford-it thing! They weren’t a food item, they were a life experience!

Of course, I will admit that they smelled odd. My son described it as, “sort of like petrol,” and my daughter declared the odour “weird”. I reserved judgement until the fungi were properly prepared and sitting on my tongue.

Ian described the flavour as “Sitting in my grandfather’s green leather chair in front of the fire on a crisp autumn night.” He obviously experienced it much more intensely than I did, because my description didn’t come close. I very much enjoyed the flavour—strong, rich and earthy, and unlike any other mushroom I’ve eaten. I also appreciated the crisp texture of the paper-thin slices on top of creamy risotto. Was it worth it? Yes. Worth every penny (even at $2500/kg)!

For those of you near Christchurch who want to try out some truffles yourself, check out the truffle festival July 11-18!