Raise your Face and Smile

January 13, 2016 / Robinne Weiss / 1 Comment

Do you hunch over against the rain or raise your face to it?

What I do depends on my mood, and on whether I’m wearing my glasses or not.

Sometimes I find myself hunching for no reason. I automatically try to shield myself from the elements, whether I really need to or not. The act of hunching makes me feel I’m fighting the weather, the wind, the world.

If I find myself this way, I make the effort to change. I raise my shoulders and throw my head back to feel the rain on my face.

Try it sometime. I guarantee it will make you smile.

Colours in the Garden

January 12, 2016 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

January can be a pretty brown month, and it is especially brown this year, with the El Niño induced drought. So I’ve been appreciating the flowers in the garden even more than usual.

When I wandered through the garden this morning and saw this view, I had to capture it.

But why do I enjoy these bright colours? Why not appreciate the brown?

There is a great deal of speculation about our colour preferences. Some people believe that our colour preferences are evolutionarily based. The most popular colours are blue and green. These would have been important colours for our ancestors to focus on—the blue of clean water and clear skies, the green of plants.

But as far as I can tell, there’s no good data to support that theory.

And many of us like colours other than blue and green, too.

A research paper published in 2010 by psychologists Stephen Palmer and Karen Schloss at UC Berkeley found that people’s attitudes toward colours were based on their experiences with objects that were normally associated with those colours. Basically, if you like sunny days, you’ll like the colour blue. If you like tomatoes, you’ll like the colour red. (But if you like sunny days, you won’t necessarily like blue tomatoes, because you don’t expect blue to be associated with tomatoes.)

And, as you would expect, they also found that those preferences were culturally influenced, and people from different cultures had different colour preferences.

So there’s probably no evolutionary advantage to me loving this garish juxtaposition of pink, green, red and blue. I just love it because I love the garden.

Look for the Good

January 11, 2016 / Robinne Weiss / 2 Comments

I’m not always successful at it, but I do try to find pleasure and beauty in everything, even the day-to-day chores.

It’s not necessarily easy. The laundry doesn’t present a perfect rainbow every day.

But knowing that it can…well, that goes a long way.

In the garden, there is a weed (okay, there are many hundreds of weeds, but there’s one in particular…). I know I need to pull it—it will soon set seed and cause me grief. But it is a lovely English daisy—a perfect mound of spoon-shaped leaves with dainty white and yellow flowers dancing above it. I smile as I carefully weed around it. I will get rid of it…eventually.

The drag of getting up at 5am to milk is a small payment for the peace and silence of a sunrise.

The ache in my back in the morning reminds me that I did something yesterday.

The brown film I scrub off the bathtub means we all spent the week outdoors.

The failed project teaches me.

I still grumble sometimes.

I still sometimes wish for a day off.

But it helps, to look for the good. It’s usually there, if only I look.

When the cat is away, the mice will…

January 10, 2016 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

Kids or no, I’ll be here…

The kids are at summer camp. An entire week with just my husband and me in the house. No children lingering at my office door with the “Mum, I’m bored” look. No teenager hiding in his cave with his earphones on, to be prodded into activity.

We’re free to do whatever we want!

So, um, I’m cleaning the house, my husband is making the week’s bread. Later I’ll milk the goats and do some weeding…

We tried to go out for lunch and a stroll on the beach after dropping them off at camp, but…well…there was work to be done at home, and the weather wasn’t great, and we weren’t really hungry for lunch…

I reckon it’s a sign we’ve managed parenthood reasonably well so far that when we’re free of the children, we don’t rush out and party. We pretty much carry on as usual, because we pretty much do what we want when the kids are here, too.

Oh, we’ll do a few things differently. Tonight’s dinner will be bread and cheese with a glass of wine on the porch instead of some healthy cooked affair. But we’re unlikely to go out at all, and the week will proceed pretty much the same as if the kids were here.

Perhaps we’ve been selfish parents—the kids have always known that mum and dad need their space. Bedtime has always been strictly enforced, so that the adults have ‘their’ time at the end of the day. And from the beginning, the kids have gone to art museums, historic sites, etc, with us. We’ve included them in our adult lives, and they’ve happily come along for the ride.

Yes, we spent many hours bored, watching them at playgrounds when they were younger, but we made sure that they also spent time bored at ‘adult’ things, too.

It wasn’t long before they became interested in those adult outings—the art museums, the historic sites, the tramping trips. Just as we learned to appreciate the subtleties of playground design, they learned to appreciate the play of light on a sculpture, or the patterns of wear on an artefact.

And so, when the kids are away, we feel no need to get our fill of ‘adult’ things or to make up for lost ‘us’ time. We will certainly enjoy our week of relative quiet, and fewer articles of clothing to pick up off the floor. But we enjoy spending time with the kids, doing the things we all like to do.

In Praise of Thistles

January 9, 2016 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

I hate thistles.

California thistles infest my garden. Their underground runners are impossible to remove, and every time I pull one, two spring up in its place.

Leave them laying on the ground once you’ve pulled them and they either re-root and have to be pulled again, or they dry into vicious prickly brown masses, ready to stab any exposed flesh in the garden.

But thistles have another side.

Artichokes (a thistle) provide us delicious food in early spring, when little else is available in the garden.

Cardoons (the artichoke’s poor wild cousin) produce stunning fist-sized purple blooms. Even the @!#!*&$*!%# California thistles have beautiful flowers if I don’t manage to pull them quickly enough. Those flowers attract bees by the dozen, and I love to watch the bees tumbling around in the giant flowers.

At this time of year, I’ve usually managed to get on top of the California thistles and prevented them from flowering, but the cardoon—a centrepiece of the flower garden—puts on a gorgeous display. Standing two metres tall and topped with dozens of giant purple flowers, you can be forgiven for forgetting that the plant is a thistle.

Just don’t make me try to pull that thing out…

The Evil of Summer Vacation

January 8, 2016 / Robinne Weiss / 1 Comment

Who can resist when summer calls?

I know that many of my readers are in the Northern Hemisphere, and they’ll play their little finger-violins for me as they muddle through another dreary January day, but I’m facing the problem I face every year during summer vacation—I can’t go inside.

There is so much to do outdoors—weeding, unending DIY on this wreck of a house, mowing, animal care, harvesting—that I neglect indoor things. The weather doesn’t help—blue skies and warm breezes—because I think I need to take advantage of the good weather while it lasts.

And if by some miracle I feel like I’ve caught up on the outdoor tasks, well, that’s just an excuse to go to the beach!

So the house gets messier, the bathroom remains uncleaned, I forget to pay the bills, I ignore the shopping.

I blog mostly after dark (which is difficult, because the days are so long), and only read the news or check social media at times when I have no choice but to be indoors (like when I’m pasteurizing the day’s milk).

I actually look forward to days when the weather is poor so I can catch up on the indoor chores.

And so I was secretly pleased when the wind shifted this afternoon, and the hot sun turned to chilly drizzle. I retreated to my office to deal with paperwork, get the day’s blog finished, check my e-mail, and maybe (if the clouds remain) eve do a little sewing.

The house cleaning?

Well, I doubt I’ll get to that…it is still summer vacation, after all!

These Are a Few of My Favourite Things: Preying Mantids

January 7, 2016 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

NZ mantis laying eggs

There’s no question why I’ve been known as The Bug Lady most of my life. I have a weakness for anything with more than four legs.

Preying mantids are some of my favourites. Not just because they eat pests in the garden, but because they are simply fun to watch.

How often can you watch a cheetah bring down an antelope in real life? Um…never. But it’s easy to watch a mantis snatch a fly—all the drama of the Discovery Channel, right in your back yard.

Sometimes the drama is a little too close for comfort.

When we lived in Panama, a beautiful 10 cm long green mantid with bright pink hind wings often came to our light at night. It would sit on our table and snatch moths attracted to the oil lamp. It was a cheeky insect, and had no compunctions about perching on our faces or arms to get a better vantage point for its nightly hunting. We laughed that it would follow us to bed some night.

We weren’t quite right, but one morning I slipped on my jeans, only to feel something enormous crawling up my thigh. With a yelp of surprise (and visions of scorpions, which were common in our house) I tore the jeans back off and peered down the leg to find our cheeky mantid scrambling out. It looked distinctly ruffled by the experience, but that didn’t stop it from returning to our light.

But from then on, we trapped it in a jar every night before we went to bed.

We are blessed with a healthy population of New Zealand mantids here at Crazy Corner Farm. Like most mantids, they enjoy hanging out on flowering plants, particularly herbs which attract huge numbers of flies and bees. Sometimes, I sit in the middle of the herb garden with my morning coffee, just to watch the mantids. I’m always surprised and impressed by the size of prey they can take down. I’ve even seen them snatch more than one fly at a time—one in each “hand”. Indeed, they will keep snatching prey as long as it keeps coming—even once they are fully sated and can’t possibly eat any more—their predatory instinct is so strong, they can’t stop themselves.

Of course, everyone has heard that female preying mantids eat their mates, and in species in which the female is much larger than the male, I’m sure it happens. But male preying mantids are just as fierce as the females, and they don’t go without a fight. The female New Zealand mantid is only slightly larger than the male, and I have kept males and females together in captivity. Only once did I see a female try to eat her mate. It was an epic struggle, worthy of the best wildlife documentary. It went on for at least fifteen minutes, and in the end, the male got away.

So turn off the TV. Get outside and watch the drama unfold!

Margaret Mahy Playground

January 6, 2016 / Robinne Weiss / 2 Comments

For those unfamiliar with Down the Back of the Chair, The Great White Man-Eating Shark, and The Man Whose Mother Was a Pirate, Margaret Mahy was a prolific author of children’s books and young adult novels. She lived just over the hill from Christchurch, in Governor’s Bay from the late 1970s until her death in 2012.

Her books are quirky, adventuresome, and often wildly creative.

The recently opened Margaret Mahy Playground is also quirky, adventuresome, and creative.

We don’t frequent playgrounds anymore—our kids are mostly past the age where they insist on playground stops—but when we were in town the other day to visit the (finally) reopened art museum, we decided to check out the new playground.

Water, sand, a flying fox, climbing structures, the “fastest slide ever” (according to my daughter who flew off the end of it like a champagne cork), and a hill marked with contour lines…Horrakapotchkin! The playground was awesome. Even my too-cool-for-playgrounds teenage son went down the slide (twice), sent water through the sluice system, and delighted to find the sensors that turned on sprays of water.

Best of all, there is a path out the back of the playground down to a dock on the river.

The only downside to the playground is that all the surfaces are concrete or rubber mat. A necessary choice of materials, I’m sure—even on the chilly, rainy day we visited, the playground was crowded. Grass would be trampled to death in a day.

One of the best playgrounds I’ve ever seen, and a great tribute to Margaret Mahy.

Sandcastles

January 5, 2016 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

My kids inherited their father’s obsession with making sandcastles. No beach trip is complete without a major construction project. We take a full-size garden shovel when we go to the beach—that’s how serious they are about it.

Their creations can reach well over a metre tall and cover twenty square metres of beach.

Last week, there were some families with preschoolers on the beach with us. When castle construction halted for lunch, the kids came over to investigate. They splashed in the pools and admired the turrets and bridges. They spent ages enjoying my family’s creations.

Later, as people walked past, many stopped, or walked around the castle complex to get a better look. Some stopped to chat or comment. All of them smiled.

This is what art does.

Not that sandcastles on the beach are Art with a capital A, but they are a form of creative expression like all art. And art is meant to be appreciated and enjoyed.

Art can make people smile. It can encourage strangers to talk to one another. At its best, it encourages interaction—with the art, with each other. It inspires. It provokes.

Too often, we step out our doors and put on our uniform—our “normal” face and behaviour. This is good, to an extent (norms of behaviour are generally there to help us all live together without excess friction). But all that uniformity is cold and sterile. Uniformity doesn’t encourage us to smile and talk to one another. I think that if more people expressed their creativity openly in public for everyone to enjoy, the world would be a better place.

Daddy long-legs

January 4, 2016 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

The name Daddy long-legs conjures images of swift, leggy creatures, but depending on where you live, the image you see in your mind may not be the creature pictured here. The name can refer to a particularly common house spider, a crane fly, or this delightful animal—a harvestman.

Harvestmen are arachnids, and are often confused with spiders—eight legs, roundish body, move quickly—but they are in a separate order from the spiders, and have important differences.

The most obvious distinction is the body shape. Spider bodies are divided into two sections, but harvestman bodies are just one section.

Most people are familiar with the European harvestman (pictured), but most harvestmen are much more fierce-looking than the European ones. They sport vicious-looking spines, oversized pincers, and bizarre body shapes and colours. Perhaps this is where they get their reputation as “the most poisonous spider on the planet”. The truth is that, unlike spiders, none of the harvestmen have poison glands.

Harvestmen are primarily scavengers—eating dead insects, and the occasional tiny, slow-moving live insect (the European ones are said to like aphids). They have no need for poison except in defence, and here they are well-endowed. Most harvestmen have small pores on their backs that exude a smelly substance that repels most predators.

So the worst a harvestman can do is smell bad.

Of course, every kid who’s ever tried to catch a harvestman knows they have another defence mechanism—legs that break off easily. A harvestman’s legs act as a quick get-away mechanism if it is snatched by a predator—the leg snaps off easily in the predator’s mouth, allowing the harvestman to escape. Harvestmen seem to get along quite well with seven, six, even as few as four legs (look closely and you’ll notice the one I photographed has only seven legs).

These shy, gangly creatures are some of my favourites in the garden and in the forest, where hundreds of species abound, many of which are still undescribed by science.