Rural life

Mysteries of the Pond

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

2017-02-11-15-04-42My daughter was hanging out at our little pond the other day and found the egg mass of some aquatic creature. At first I assumed it was a mass of snail eggs, because it had that look. But when we put it under the microscope, the eggs were arranged in perfect rings around the mass. I spent most of my childhood raising aquatic snails in little fishbowls on my windowsill (sorry, Mom!) and never saw an egg mass so orderly.

What could it be?

Neither of us had any idea.

But we have fish tanks…

The egg mass is currently in a small tank, and we’re checking daily. One of these days our mystery will be solved.

Bittersweet Sweet Corn

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

2017-01-24-15-16-41-smYou wait for it all summer. You watch it grow taller and taller. You marvel when it overtops your head. You cheer when it starts to flower, and you impatiently poke the ears as they grow and fatten.

Then one day–finally–the first ears of sweet corn are ready to pick. Always eaten as corn-on-the-cob, the first ears are celebrated and savoured. They cry out Summer!

They are the beginning of the end, of course.

Once the sweet corn is coming on, the green beans will start to slow down. The peas, already on their last hurrah, will give up. February’s heat and dry will begin to take its toll on all the plants.

There is still plenty of time to enjoy summer’s bounty–the deluge of vegetables won’t be over until mid-April. There is still ketchup to make, and summer soup to bottle. And lots and lots of corn-on-the-cob to eat.

But once the corn is ripe, the clock is ticking. From here on out, the garden will look a little worse each day. I’ll start pulling plants out, clearing beds, harvesting storage crops.

And in a shady corner of the yard are two trays of seedlings, sheltering from the heat and harsh sun. Waiting for the end of the sweet corn. Winter crops.

Because every season’s end is another’s beginning.

Thirsty Bees

/ Robinne Weiss / 1 Comment

img_3051When my husband created a pond in the yard, I expected the damselflies, mayflies, midges, diving beetles, and other aquatic insects to show up. I even expected the heron who occasionally drops by to sample the goldfish.

I didn’t necessarily expect the honey bees.

I wasn’t surprised when they showed up, though. What surprised me was the sheer numbers that have shown up this summer. The edge of the pond has been humming for weeks as hundreds of bees jostle for space on the best perches.

Honey bees, like all animals, need water–at least a litre a day per hive. The bees don’t just drink the water; they also use it to dissolve honey that has crystallised, dilute honey for larval food, and to cool the hive on hot days.

When scout bees find a good water source, they mark it with pheromones that tell the other bees it’s a good spot. I reckon by now, the edge of our pond is sticky with pheromones (or at least stinky with them), because there’s always a crowd there.

And after yesterday’s 31°C (88°F) temperatures and 130 kph (81 mph) wind, the pond was extra crowded today.

I’m happy to oblige the bees. I need them to pollinate my vegetables, and they’re not aggressive when they’re foraging away from the hive, in spite of the potentially frightening crowds. The arrangement is a win-win situation for all of us.

Greengages

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

2017-01-25-14-58-09-smWe don’t often get many greengage plums. Our tree is small, and it sits in a windy location, so many fruits blow down before they are anywhere close to ripe. This year wasn’t too bad–we harvested about three kilos of fruit. Plenty to enjoy.

One of my favourite things to do with summer stone fruits is to make upside down cake. Indeed, I’ve blogged about it three times in the past two years. So today I’ll ignore the cake, and mention the plum, instead.

I didn’t know a lot about greengages before coming to New Zealand, where I found a fair number of people had them growing in their yards.

Greengages are named after Sir William Gage, who imported them to England from France in 1724. The cultivar he imported had another name, but apparently the tag was lost in transit (These were the days before anyone considered biosecurity…Importing a strange plant? Whatever). They were popular in America in the 1700s, but fell out of favour in the 1800s.

According to a 2004 article in the New York Times, there’s good reason greengages fell out of favour. The trees take longer to mature than other plums, they fruit erratically (I thought it was just our tree), the ripe fruit is fragile, and they’re prone to cracking and rotting on the tree. Not exactly an easy plum for commercial production.

But the greengage is considered one of the finest plums for flavour. Grown commercially, it fetches a high price. According to the New York Times article, in 2004 fewer than 100 greengage trees were harvested commercially in the United States. They are more common in Europe and New Zealand. New Zealand exports a small quantity of greengages to the US each year, where they are sold in specialty markets.

So I feel much better about my 3 kilo harvest of greengages. They are wonderful, and if they’re a bit finicky to grow? Well, that just makes them all the more special when we have a good year.

Failure

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

2017-01-21-09-23-03smI’ve been in a veritable frenzy of pickling the past couple of weeks. Before that, there was a good stint of jam-making. I’ve had a brilliant run. I’ve been able to run a full canner-load almost every time, every jar has sealed, and the jam has been the perfect consistency.

Until two days ago, when a jar of dill pickles exploded when it was lowered into the canner. Then yesterday, I ran fifteen jars through the canner, and FIVE of them didn’t seal. What? FIVE? I never have that sort of failure rate. I did what I always do though, upon reflection, maybe my lids or jars weren’t quite as hot as they should have been, because I was doing two batches at once, and my attention was divided.

Today I reran the five unsealed jars, making sure they were nice and hot, and they all dutifully sealed.

But it made me think about failure and my response to it.

I fail a lot. I have hundreds of rejections of my writing from agents and publishers. I’ve thrown away entire rounds of cheese that just didn’t work properly. I’ve made loaves of bread that could be deadly projectiles. I’ve made birthday cakes that didn’t look anything like what they were meant to be. I’ve taught lessons that have flopped completely. I’ve made clothes that have gone immediately into the rubbish upon completion. The list of my failures goes on and on.

When we fail, we have a number of options.

Option 1: We can pout, blaming our failure on the weather, the phase of the moon, the person next to us, the wrong tools, millions of illegal immigrants, or whatever. This might make us feel good, because it allows us to pretend our failure was not our own fault. But it doesn’t make us likely to succeed next time.

Option 2: We can get angry, blaming our failure on our own stupidity, clumsiness, incompetence, or lack of innate ability. We can believe that, because we failed, we are a failure. This is an easy response, because it allows us to justify not trying again. “I’ve tried that, and I can’t do it.”

Option 3: We can critically analyse what went wrong. Maybe it was poor tools–I’ve had cheese fail when a thermometer was inaccurate. Maybe we got sloppy–I’ve ruined garments by rushing to finish them. Maybe we didn’t understand enough about what we were doing–the first time I taught preschoolers, they chewed me up and spit me out, because I had no idea how they related to the world. Analysing our failures takes time. It requires a willingness to critique ourselves in an honest and constructive manner. It requires us learn new things. It requires us to get back on that bicycle and try again.

It’s hard.

But it’s the only option that leads to success.

Celebrate January

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

2017-01-24-15-13-32-smThe golden month is nearly over. January is the sweet spot of the year.

The Christmas frenzy is over. The kids are o vacation. much of the rest of the population goes on holiday too.

Even I get a break. By January, the plants in the garden are large enough to suppress weeds, so there’s little weeding to be done. Te early crops are winding down and the summer crops are ramping up. Full-scale bottling (canning) and dehydrating will come later. January is mostly a time to enjoy the garden’s summer bounty.

There is work to do, of course. Peas, pickling cucumbers, and green beans all peak in January, and they need to be processed. But they are relatively quick and easy crops to preserve.

Along with the garden respite usually comes sunny summer weather. We can go camping and backpacking, and take trips to the beach. January is a month of sand, sun and effortless meals.

February will come, with school, work, and a mountain of vegetables to process. The nationwide party mindset will end, and we’ll all settle in for another year at the grindstone.

But there’s still a week left. Enough time for a bit more fun…

Noddy’s Flycap

/ Robinne Weiss / 3 Comments

img_2955-cropI was working in the garden this morning, and came across this stunning mushroom in the middle of the broad beans.

My first reaction was, “Oh, my! Fairies must have visited the garden.” I wondered if nature was trying to tell me I needed a little whimsy among the vegetables. I began to consider the possibilities. A few fanciful carvings on my trellises? Gargoyles atop the fence posts?

My next reaction was, “I’ve got to show this to my husband.” (He researches mycorrhizal fungi, and this looked to me a bit like an Amanita, which are usually mycorrhizal). He saw it, and said, “Oh!…Oh!…that’s a…no, wait…I won’t say anything until I’m sure…this could be important.”

He did some research and confirmed the mushroom as Noddy’s flycap–Amanita sp. 2–an unusual fungus recorded only from New Zealand, but thought to be introduced, as it is generally found among non-native vegetation. It has never been recorded this far south, and we’ve never seen it on our property before.

Geoff Ridley has written a nice blog post about this fungus and its odd distribution and mysterious origin.

And so, perhaps nature was, instead, telling me to keep my eyes open for scientific wonders, even in my own back yard.

And then, I learned that Noddy’s flycap is named for the Enid Blyton character, Noddy (and his pointy hat).

And at this point, the symbolism of this strange fungus in my garden got really weird. A whimsical-looking fungus of unknown origin, and not known to be present here, named after a character in a middle grade novel?

The message was loud and clear–this fungus has to show up in my next book. Excuse me while I go scribble down some ideas…

Get Outside—See Cool Stuff

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment
The swarm--apologies for the image quality; I'm allergic to bee stings.

The swarm–apologies for the image quality; I’m allergic to bee stings.

I’m trying to make myself go out for a walk at lunchtime every day. I’ll admit that I can be a bit of a slave driver when I’m working, and I don’t always manage it. I have a tendency to simply work through lunch, and then suddenly discover it’s late afternoon.

In truth, the walks available to me from my front door aren’t necessarily all that inspiring—endless agricultural fields in every direction.

But you can’t experience anything if you don’t first go out. Yesterday, I took the most boring of the boring walks from my house—the one that doesn’t offer so much as a mailbox for the first kilometre. Don’t ask why I chose that way—maybe I wanted to clear my mind, as I’d been doing intense editing all morning.

On this most boring of walks, I happened to see something awesome—a honey bee swarm.

We are blessed with many nearby apiaries, and I always have a plentiful supply of bees to pollinate my garden vegetables, but even so, it’s unusual to spot a swarm. This one was hanging in a drooping mass off the neighbour’s fence.

Bees swarm to create a new colony. It’s usually the old queen who leaves her hive with a large portion of the workers. A new queen will hatch in her absence and take over the old hive.

The swarming bees leave the hive and gather nearby while scout bees search for a new hive location. This is what I saw—the resting swarm. It likely flew away to a new home within a few hours. Where those bees are now, I don’t know, but I hope they found a nice place nearby from which to visit my garden.

So, my most boring walk was amazing. That reminds me, I still haven’t gotten out for a walk today. Time to step away from the desk and get outside. Who knows what I might see?

The View from the Compost

/ Robinne Weiss / 3 Comments

img_2929-smI finished turning the compost today—a back-breaking, exhausting job I don’t particularly enjoy. After I added each layer, I climbed on top of the pile to even it out and water it. From my two-metre high perch, I had a lovely view. I admired the neighbour’s seed radishes—wide stripes of white and pink flowers marking the two varieties he is crossing this year. It looked more like a curtain than an agricultural field.

Then I turned to admire my own garden. Well, actually I just turned. I’ll admit that I was a little surprised I found the view so nice.

The early January vegetable garden is always gorgeous—everything is at its peak lushness. I expected to find that attractive. But surveying the entire “production” side of the property from my perch, I was pleased to note that the whole place looked surprisingly lush. The berry beds are dense and tidy. The extra vegetables planted in my “overflow beds” (because 300 m2 (3230 ft2) of vegetables naturally wasn’t enough) are growing well, too. The artichokes look a little sad, and the grass paths are brown, but that is to be expected in the heat of summer.

The overall effect was one of lush productivity. I spent a little extra time on top of the compost pile to enjoy the view. It made today’s brutal job a little bit nicer.