rural life

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.

Inspiration for Dinner

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

2017-01-03-16-33-01“What’s for dinner?”

The daily question I ask my self, and am asked by my kids.

Sometimes I know the answer ahead of time.

Sometimes I have no idea. Maybe I’ve eaten an afternoon snack and am not hungry enough to think about dinner. Maybe I’ve been running around all day and haven’t had a chance to consider what I’m going to make. Maybe I simply don’t feel like cooking. The afternoon wears on, and still I don’t know what’s for dinner.

I don’t panic. At five o’clock, I take a colander and a knife to the garden. I stroll among the plants. What looks good? What needs to be picked? What’s newly ready to harvest?

By the time I return to the kitchen, the colander is stuffed with vegetables, and my mind is full of inspiration.

What’s for dinner?

I don’t know. Let’s cook up some fresh inspiration from the garden!

End of the Pickle Drought

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

2017-01-02-08-03-25-smI grow pickling cucumbers every other year, in order to avoid becoming the Pickle Lady. Last year’s crop, however, was killed by frost, and we’ve been out of pickles for some time.

This year, the stars have aligned, and I have a beautiful crop of cucumbers coming on. As a bonus, the dill didn’t get completely wiped out by aphids (as it often does), so it’s perfectly timed with the cucumbers. There will be plenty of dill seed heads to flavour the pickles this year.

So it was with joy that I picked the first cucumbers yesterday. There weren’t enough to make a proper batch of pickles—there’s no point in heating up the canner unless I can fill it at least once—but I was fine with that. In fact, I was quite pleased there weren’t more. It meant I could make a batch of fresh pickles to put in the fridge and eat right away. After a long pickle drought, they’re going to taste fabulous!

New Life for an Old Rug

/ Robinne Weiss / 2 Comments
img_2793

A new garden area with freshly laid rug weed-block. Disguised with wood chips, no one will ever know it’s there.

Nothing lasts forever. Even well-made items eventually come to the end of their useful life.

But that doesn’t mean they’re not useful…in a different way.

Rugs get hard use in our house—there’s an awful lot of traffic in a small space. Add a dose of wool moths and high UV radiation, and it’s no wonder our rugs eventually start falling apart.

But tatty wool rugs don’t need to end up in the landfill. They can serve as excellent weed-blocking mulch in the garden. They last for years and eventually simply rot away. So much nicer than the plastic weed-block that eventually breaks up and stops working, but still needs to be removed and disposed of.

And as an added bonus, out here where there is no rubbish collection, it means we don’t need to haul the old carpet to the tip.

When is a zucchini not a zucchini?

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

img_2757The zucchinis (courgettes) started producing over a week ago, so I’ve been spending more time among the plants. I noticed that one of the varieties was behaving in a very un-zucchini-like fashion—sending rambling vines out in all directions and forming round fruits. I checked the tag and noted the variety, then looked it up in the seed catalogue. Maybe it was a weird variety I was trying out—I’ve been known to buy some strange plants.

I didn’t find the variety among the zucchinis in the catalogue, and it didn’t take long to realise what I’d done. “Squash” can be winter or summer squash, and when it came time to planting out, “Squash—Jade” sounded like a summer squash. It’s actually a huge sprawling winter squash that replaced my favourite, Kurinishiki, in the seed catalogue this year.

I don’t know whether to be thrilled or annoyed. Winter squash germination was awful this spring, and then the plants got hit by frost. But the summer squash bed escaped the frost. So instead of having none of my favourite pumpkins, I have half a dozen healthy plants. And it also means I have six fewer zucchini plants, which is most definitely a bonus, because I always plant too many zucchinis.

The problem is, they’re growing in the middle of the zucchinis, and I’m going to be tripping over the vines all summer.

*sigh*

The only sensible thing to do is laugh at myself and make the best of it…and write a note on the seed packet, so I don’t make the same mistake next year.

When the pests are cute

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img_2765A month ago, I saw a perfect little bird nest in one of the fruit trees—incredibly tidy, and woven from grass and lichen. It was so pretty, I couldn’t bear to remove it, though I knew it must be the nest of a non-native bird (that’s about all we have here). Starling and house sparrow nests get the heave-ho as soon as I find them. This one…well, I couldn’t possibly disturb something so cute.

I forgot about the nest for several weeks, but today my husband noticed it was chock-full of chicks. Five grey fluffy European goldfinches (Carduelis carduelis)—so ugly they were adorable.

We don’t really need any more goldfinches, but since we don’t grow grain, they’re not much of a pest to us. These five chicks, though, will likely join the flock that descends on the neighbours’ fields in late summer. Sorry, guys. If you’d seen this cute nest of chicks, you’d understand.

The Christmas Calzone

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2016-12-24-19-21-34-smGrowing up, Christmas eating was strictly traditional stuff—lots of cookies, turkey, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, a token vegetable, and lots of gravy. I remember Christmas day as being a frenzy of cooking, starting with my mother putting the turkey in the oven in the wee hours of the morning, so that by 10 am the whole house smelled like turkey. It truly was glorious from a kid’s perspective.

At Crazy Corner Farm, Christmas eating is about as far from traditional as it gets. Except that it has become our Christmas tradition, and as such, it is traditional.

Our big holiday meal is on Christmas eve. With all the wonderful vegetables from the garden, we make calzones. We enjoy them with a fresh salad, or fruit from the garden.

In the evening, my husband makes up sticky buns and puts them in the refrigerator to rise overnight. I pop them into the oven in the morning before I go out to feed the animals, and they’re ready for breakfast by the time everyone else is awake.

We feast on sticky buns throughout the morning, then have leftover calzones for lunch. We hardly need an evening meal Christmas day, so our tradition is a big salad, broad beans, and the first of the season’s new potatoes.

All very low-key and relaxing, yet wonderfully decadent.

Christmas eve eve…

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

img_2742Surprisingly, a day of calm. It was overcast and rainy. The garden is reasonably well weeded. The berries and peas were picked yesterday.

Tomorrow I will clean the house (because Santa doesn’t visit dirty houses—I’m sure my mother taught me that one), and the peas and berries will need to be picked again, but today there was remarkably little on the to-do list. I’m not sure what happened, because usually the lead up to Christmas is a frenzy, just so I can feel free to take the whole of Christmas day off.

So, I gave myself an early gift—a day of sewing. I managed two new desperately needed t-shirts for myself, and did the finishing by hand while listening to a recording of my far-away family reading A Christmas Carol. Then I picked roses, and played a game with my daughter.

Such a lovely, relaxing day, I hardly need Christmas at all…

Fabulous Flax

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

2016-12-14-13-33-57-smAbout two weeks ago, a paddock we drive past nearly every day suddenly turned the unmistakable blue of flax. Not New Zealand flax, but linen flax.

At first, I thought it must be something else, because the plants were short—only about knee height. I’d never seen linen flax so short.

I also didn’t think linen flax was grown in New Zealand any more. During WWII, linen flax was introduced and promoted for wartime needs. The first planting was in 1939, and within several years, there were seventeen processing plants in the South Island. But by 1948, it was all over. As far as I can tell, there is no flax grown commercially for fibre anymore in New Zealand.

But flax seed and flax seed oil are a different matter. And, naturally, the varieties grown are shorter and bushier (with more flowers/seeds per plant) than the varieties grown for fibre production. The largest New Zealand processor of flax seeds is just down the road in Ashburton, so it makes sense that one of our neighbours might plant flax.

I hope they find it an economically viable crop—it’s one of the most beautiful crops I’ve ever seen. For the past two weeks, it has been a sea of blue on sunny days (the flowers close when it’s cool or wet). A wonderful addition to the colourful array of crops grown around us.

After Dinner Stroll

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

2016-12-19-19-04-24-smI am alone at home this evening. After dinner (eaten at the picnic table while reading a book), I went for a stroll around the property. Part of my path wound through the tall grass between the hedge and the vegetable garden.

Setting aside my normal reaction (This is so overgrown! I’ve got to get out here and cut this down), I did what my ten year-old self would have done, and lay down in the grass, holding still until I began to notice things.

I noticed that the ground was delightfully warm against my back.

I noticed that some of the grass was still in flower—anthers nodding in the wind—and other grass had already gone to seed and been stripped by the birds.

I noticed that the smaller flies meandered around among the grass stalks while the larger flies zipped overhead.

I saw a velvet mite gliding up and down a stalk of grass.

I noticed that a house sparrow nearby was chirping at just the right frequency to be irritating to my ears.

I noticed that the clouds weren’t moving across the sky as I thought, but rather were simply growing and coalescing in place.

…

Next thing I knew, I was starting awake, with the clouds, the grass, the birds, and the insects all still doing their thing around me.