outdoors

Supreme Spring Salad

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

2016-10-21-17-49-45-smWe had occasional salads all winter, from the fall planting of lettuces and spinach. We’ve also had several salads from this spring’s lettuce planting. But all these salads have been small, and have required me to scrounge every available leaf to glean even a modest quantity.

Today’s salad was the first of the Supreme Spring Salads—salads for which I have so much lettuce, I can choose to pick only the best, most perfect leaves, and can adjust the proportions of each variety to perfectly suit the meal. I also had a few lovely radishes from my daughter’s garden to add to the salad, making it even more perfect.

And this was just the first. With luck (and a fair bit of weeding), we’ll have many more Supreme Salads to look forward to in the coming months.

 

Moody Skies

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Looking up the Waiau River bed toward Franz Josef Glacier

Looking up the Waiau River bed toward Franz Josef Glacier

I’ve been to Westland in brilliant weather—when the sky is clear, the sun is shining, and every snowy peak is visible. It is spectacular when that happens.

But the rainfall on the West Coast is measured in metres. Temperate rainforest covers the lower slopes, and the rivers churn, gushing down the steep mountainsides. Sun is not the normal state of affairs. Clear skies are not what make the West Coast what it is.

More often than not, it’s raining on the West Coast. And if it’s not raining, it’s threatening to rain. So, while blue skies are gorgeous, they’re like a false smile, put on for special occasions. The real skies are brooding, veiling the higher peaks in clouds and the lower ones in misty rain (or pounding rain).

And those moody skies are every bit as spectacular as the blue ones, in my book, and more honest. Just as I appreciate when a friend shows their true colours, I appreciate when the West Coast does, too.

Provided I have a good rain coat, that is…

Heating the Greenhouse DIY

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greenhouse-waterjugs2-smI wish I had a heated greenhouse. I start my seeds in my office, which has decent light and can be heated at night to help heat-loving seeds germinate and keep tender seedlings from freezing.

But at some point, the plants have to go to the greenhouse or they’ll get hopelessly leggy. Besides, there’s not enough room in the office for all my seedlings, once I really get going in spring.

The greenhouse is great for raising daytime temperatures for the plants and for protecting them from harsh wind. It also protects the plants from light frosts, but sometimes the temperature dips below zero at night, and then the unheated greenhouse can’t protect my plants enough.

If I know the temperature will dive, I can haul all the plants back to my office just for the night, but it’s quite a job—several trips with the wheelbarrow—and always results in some plants getting damaged.

So I’ve gone for passive solar heating in the greenhouse. I had my daughter paint empty 3-litre juice bottles black, and I filled them with water and placed them around the greenhouse. During the day, the water in the bottles heats up, and at night, the bottles slowly release their heat.

Having only one greenhouse, I haven’t been able to scientifically test whether my hot water bottles help, but last year—the first year I deployed the bottles—I was impressed by how well the plants weathered cold nights in the greenhouse. I intend to expand the number of bottles this year, and would love to ring the entire outer edge of the greenhouse with water bottles. If all goes well, I’ll end up with my heated greenhouse, without actually heating my greenhouse.

Here we go again…

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2016-10-16-16-04-30It’s a sight to strike fear in my heart.

October 16th and the temperature hit 30°C (86°F) and humidity is 33%.

Thirty degrees is supposed to be a height –of-summer oddity. It’s the day you drop everything and head to the beach, because there are only a handful of days this warm in a summer.

Except that it’s the middle of spring.

And this happened last year.

And the year before.

And it heralds a third year of drought for us.

A third year of deciding which plants will be watered (and survive), and which ones will not (and probably die).

It will be a third year of expensive hay that has to be brought in for the goats, because the grass will brown off in November.

A third year in which the vegetable seedlings grow too fast too early, then struggle to set fruit in the dry heat.

Just thinking about it makes me grim.

But I suppose it also means a summer of incredible hot days at the beach. A summer in which I don’t need a wetsuit to enjoy the ocean. A summer of ice cream and swimming.

I enjoy these things. I really do. It’s a good thing they come along with drought. If I go to the beach, I can ignore the shrivelling garden at home…sort of.

 

All Hail the Bucket

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2016-10-14-10-44-19-hdrsmWhere would civilisation be without the 20-litre (5-gallon) bucket? We own seven of them, and it’s common for all of them to be in use simultaneously.

I can’t look at a 20-litre bucket without seeing a…

  • Washing machine—In Panama, we washed our clothes in a 20-litre bucket.
  • laundry-smShower—The bucket was also our shower in Panama. We would fill it with water and haul it out to our “shower” enclosure. Half a coconut shell made a scoop for pouring out the water for washing.
  • Brewery—Panamanians brewed and served the local corn alcohol in 20-litre buckets, and my husband brews beer in one.
  • Punch bowl—We used a bucket as a large punch bowl for parties in Panama.
  • Diaper pail—With tight-fitting lids, 20-litre buckets make great diaper pails for cloth nappies. They were an essential part of our baby gear when our kids were that age.
  • Watering can—Several of our current buckets have holes drilled in the bottom, and we use them to provide drip irrigation for the fruit trees.
  • Wheelbarrow—We use buckets to haul everything from rocks to weeds in spaces where the wheelbarrow can’t go.
  • Measuring cup—The 20-litre bucket is a handy unit of measure when mixing concrete.
  • Rubbish bin—A 20-litre bucket is the perfect size for a rubbish bin in the shop or shed, and it’s tough enough to handle the rough treatment a shop bin gets.
  • Grain bin—Tough plastic and a tight lid keep mice and rats out of the grain.
  • Stool—I regularly turn our buckets upside down to use as stools for reaching items on high shelves in the shed. I suppose you could also sit on them, if you were inclined to rest.

I could lose a lot of tools and get by easily without them, but I’d be hard-pressed to do without my buckets.

At the Penguin Spa

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2016-10-11-14-40-35-cropIt was a week of endangered species for me. After being bitten by a kea on Monday, I was lucky enough on Tuesday to have a chance to see a Fiordland crested penguin / tawaki at Haast School, where I’d spent the morning teaching.

After lunch that day, a trio of Department of Conservation rangers arrived with a juvenile female tawaki that had been rescued off a nearby beach where she had been found emaciated. She was being nursed back to health in preparation for re-release, and the rangers took the opportunity to share her with the local school.

Tawaki are not quite as rare as kea, but they’re shy and tend not to frequent tourist areas like the kea do. This was the first one I had ever seen. There are about 2500 to 3000 breeding pairs remaining, and they’re one of only three penguin species that nest on mainland New Zealand.

Like many of our native birds, they are threatened by stoats, which eat eggs and chicks, and dogs, which can wipe out entire breeding colonies.

The children at Haast School named this particular penguin Ellen, and they had great fun watching Ellen take a warm saltwater bath. The water needed to be warm because Ellen wasn’t preening and waterproofing her feathers properly (because she was too weak to do so). Without waterproof feathers, she got waterlogged in the bath, rather than staying nice and dry as penguins usually do underwater. After her bath, the DOC ranger wrapped her in a fluffy pink towel to dry off, and put a hot water bottle underneath her.

A full spa experience, I would say.

It wasn’t quite the same as seeing a tawaki in the wild would have been, but it was closer than I’m ever likely to get to one of these birds in the wild.

Ellen will spend about four weeks eating and taking spa baths before she’s ready to fend for herself again. I wish her luck.

Time for Thyme

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2016-10-10-09-15-06Thyme is one of my favourite herbs. In spring, its lush new growth encourages me to put it in almost everything. Nearly everything is better with thyme, but it is especially good with braised carrots, eggs, pumpkin, and mushrooms. Mixed with good olive oil, also makes an excellent marinade for bocconcini—little mozzarella balls.

It’s one of those herbs that we plant more of than we need for culinary use, because it’s so pretty in the garden. There are around 400 varieties of thyme. Some are more culinary, others are more ornamental. Some grow into 30 cm tall shrubs, others creep low to the ground.

Thyme is a tough little plant. It puts up with hot dry conditions, and recovers from even the most aggressive pruning. The low-growing varieties can even be used as a fragrant lawn (though at our house, there’s no stopping the couch grass coming up through it).

Its white, pink or purple flowers are attractive to a wide range of insects. On ours, we regularly have honey bees bumble bees, flower flies, and butterflies—and the preying mantids that eat them.

Truly, you can never have too much thyme.

Cheeky Parrots

/ Robinne Weiss / 1 Comment

2016-10-10-13-11-37-smIt’s not every day you’re bitten on the bottom by an endangered species.

Yesterday was one of those auspicious days, however. I was travelling through Arthurs Pass, headed to Haast with two colleagues to do a programme at the school there. We stopped to pick up lunch at the Arthurs Pass store, and three kea descended on us.

For those who don’t know, kea are large alpine parrots. Though there are only 2,000 of them left, they are bold and curious animals, unafraid of people. And they’re smart. They understand tourists—how they get so absorbed in taking photos of the parrots that they forget to shut their car doors, or leave a sandwich lying beside them.

They work in gangs—one bird coming in close to pose for pictures, while the others circle in from behind to ransack the vehicle.

We knew this, and had taken appropriate precautions. There were three of us and three of them. We should have been safe.

But, of course, we wanted pictures—you simply can’t not take pictures of them, no matter how many times you’ve seen them. We all crouched down beside the van to snap our photos. That’s when it happened. I was focused on one kea, and another came up behind me and bit me on the bottom. Cheeky bastard!

But I got a photo.

Spring Roller Coaster

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rollercoaster_expedition_geforce_holiday_park_germany

Photo: Boris23; Wikimedia, public domain

The kids are back at school today after two weeks of school holidays. It’s the last term of the school year, and the start of what I always think of as a roller coaster ride.

For the past two weeks we’ve been slowly climbing the first hill. I could hear the tik-tik-tik of the chain winching us up, to perch at the top of the slope. Today we begin the descent to the end of the year. It will start slowly—I’ll be lulled into thinking I have plenty of time to do the gardening, get all the nagging spring DIY done, think about Christmas gifts, plan summer’s vacations. But before I know it, we’ll be hurtling along toward the end of the year, much faster than I anticipated. The garden will take longer that I’d hoped. The end-of-the-year school activities will start piling up. I’ll put off worrying about Christmas gifts until I’m frantic about it. Three DIY projects will balloon into ten. Late frost will keep me scrambling to protect plants. Livestock will get sick and require extra care. School will end much sooner than I’d like it to.

Time will compress. A month will be over in a week. A week will last a day. A day will be over in a blink of the eye.

Before I know it, we’ll be heading into the week before Christmas, and my Spring to-do list will be every bit as long as it is today.

I’ve learned to accept this state. I’ve almost learned to enjoy the frenetic insanity of the combination of the end of the school year, holidays, and spring gardening all at once.

But every year I sit here at the top of the roller coaster wondering if I really should have gotten on in the first place.

Spindle vs Garden

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2016-10-09-11-01-27My husband presented me with this beautiful drop spindle that he turned for me this week. It’s practically a work of art—beautifully weighted and smooth as glass.

As if the pressure wasn’t already on.

At this time of year, crafts have to take a back seat to the garden, but with the goats newly shorn, I’m dying to actually work with the mohair sitting in my office. I picked up a pair of carders last week and have been slowly learning to use them. I have enough carded fibre to start spinning.

But the garden beckons—weeds grow rampant, seeds need to be planted, seedlings need potting up. And worse still, my hands are garden-rough; every time I touch the mohair, I end up with tufts of it stuck to the dry cracks in my hands.

So I may have to be content to just admire my new spindle for a while, until the spring garden rush is over.