Windfall

March 10, 2016 / Robinne Weiss / 3 Comments

Today.

Thirty degrees C.

120 kph wind.

Dust clouds so thick I couldn’t see the back fence 20 metres away.

So I knew there would be carnage by day’s end.

Picking yellow summer squash for dinner, I was having trouble finding them, because they were completely coated in dust.

I studiously avoided looking at the fruit trees—I couldn’t face what I knew I’d find while the wind still howled.

Later in the evening, my husband and kids went out and surveyed the damage. Remember back in November when I posted the picture of all those apple blossoms? I knew it was too good to be true.

Every fruit was stripped off of every tree. They collected them all, tossed the bad ones on the compost, and brought the rest inside.

None are quite ripe, but we’ll make the best of them—applesauce and pie this weekend, for sure!

The Midges!

March 9, 2016 / Robinne Weiss / 2 Comments

A male midge, with feathery antennae.

It was like a scene from an Alfred Hitchcock film. The sliding glass doors of my office were swarming with midges, commonly called lakeflies here (because they lay their eggs in nearby Te Waihora/Lake Ellesmere, and rise off the lake in huge swarms in summer). By their density (at least 1 per square centimetre), and the size of the doors, I estimated that there were at least 90,000 on the doors alone, not counting the ones swarming around looking for landing space.

I had been working late in the office, with the lights on, and they were attracted to the light. I turned off the light, took a deep breath (breathing in midges is horrible), and bolted out the door, slamming it closed behind me.

A female midge, with thread-like antennae.

There were about a hundred on my ceiling in the morning. I reckon that was pretty good, given how many were knocking on the door.

I actually don’t mind the midges much. They don’t bite, and their appearances are brief, if dramatic.

But the question is, what are they all doing in those great big swarms? Well, the swarms are great big mating displays called leks. Male midges (they are the ones with feathery antennae), fly around in large swarms trying to attract the eye of a female. The females drop by the lek, pick out their favourite male, and mate with him. The resulting eggs are laid in slow-moving bodies of water (or sometimes on wet car parks, where I imagine they don’t live long).

The larvae of our particular midges are called bloodworms. They are one of the few insects that have haemoglobin in their blood. That’s what gives our blood its red colour, and it does the same to the midge larvae. The haemoglobin allows the midge larvae to live in low-oxygen, stagnant water, because it can capture and store oxygen, just as it does in our blood.

Midge larvae are a critical part of the food chain in many terrestrial aquatic ecosystems, feeding fish and other insects. They also must be important food on land, too. The spiders and songbirds certainly enjoy them when they swarm.

Still, in spite of their harmlessness and their ecological importance, I think Hitchcock could have had made a great movie of them.

Summer Soup 2016

March 6, 2016 / Robinne Weiss / 2 Comments

Eight pm, and I feel like I’ve hardly stepped outdoors today.

I remember the air was still and warm early this morning. I milked by the light of the stars and a sliver of a crescent moon.

I remember the cool drips of water in the freshly watered vegetable garden just after breakfast.

But, aside from a hurried trip to the goat paddock with an armload of corn husks or carrot tops, I haven’t been outside since eight am.

Just after breakfast, the whole family got to work making the year’s Summer Soup (which I’ve blogged about before). We spent the morning chopping vegetables and making up the soup together, then I settled in alone for the long slog at the pressure canner.

It was a hot day to be in the kitchen canning soup. I thought it was just that I had four burners and the oven going much of the afternoon, but when my daughter walked through the kitchen looking wilted, I realised it was just a hot day.

That was the closest I got to knowing what it was like out there.

But I’ll appreciate this lovely summer day spent indoors—over and over again all winter. The final tally for the day was nineteen quarts of soup and six quarts of vegetable stock. That’s a lot of summer, stored up to cheer us on a cold winter evening.

Ballistic Plants

March 5, 2016 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

I only just harvested the black beans before they all exploded in the garden. It was the hot sun Thursday and Friday that did it. Friday afternoon, when I realised how dry the beans were, I raced to pick as many as I could, and was able to bring in the last of them this morning, with only a few losses.

Though it can be a pain for harvesting, I love plants with explosive seeds. As much as the explosion and shower of seeds, I like the empty pod afterwards. The tension that caused the explosion is gone, and the empty pod twists into attractive little corkscrews.

We have a weed in the yard with seeds so explosive, my daughter and I have dubbed it the seed-in-your-eye plant. It’s real name is bitter cress (Cardamine hirsuta). It’s common in the flower beds around the house, and has a habit of detonating just as a hapless weeder grabs hold of it (hence the seeds in the eye).

My favourite explosive plant is touch-me-not. Where I grew up, touch-me-nots sprang up in any moist hollow. As soon as they started flowering in summer, I’d start searching for ripe seed pods. I’d give each seed pod a gentle squeeze—if the pod was ready, it would burst under my fingers, sending yellow seeds scattering, and turning into a curly work of art. I loved the feel of the deforming fruit.

Sadly, my own children only have beans and bitter cress to detonate here. Now, if I can just convince them that shelling dry beans by detonating them is great fun…

Invasion of the Cabbage Whites

March 2, 2016 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

The small cabbage white butterfly (Pieris rapae) is the bane of gardeners’ existence all over the world. Native to Europe, Asia and North Africa, the butterfly is now found throughout most of North America, Hawaii, Australia and New Zealand.

In my little corner of New Zealand, the butterfly is especially common, presumably because of the huge numbers of commercial brassica crops grown here. In late summer, the roadsides shimmer with the butterflies, and their tattered wings flutter like flags in my car’s grille.

These butterflies are the reason broccoli is a seasonal crop for us. Broccoli can be grown year-round here, but mid- to late-summer broccoli becomes infested with caterpillars. For a few years, I dutifully treated my broccoli with Bt (an organic bacterial toxin that selectively kills caterpillars), but I eventually stopped bothering.

By mid-summer, there is so much other food coming out of the garden that, truth is, we don’t need the broccoli. And having a broccoli-free part of the year helps bring variety to our diets, and makes broccoli more special when it is available in winter and spring.

Sour grapes? Not at all! Just learning to work with the local wildlife instead of against it. Makes life easier for everyone!

The Beginning of the End

March 1, 2016 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

Pumpkins are filling out and beginning to harden off.

March 1—first day of autumn here. It is appropriately autumnal today, with a grey sky and brisk, cool wind.

But it didn’t take a cool day, or the calendar to tell me summer was coming to a close. I have been milking in the dark for weeks—a sure sign the equinox is coming. Last week, the first of the elm leaves crunched brown and crisp underfoot. The poplar trees are looking sparse. The dry beans have started to senesce—pods bleaching, yellow leaves plopping to the ground.

The coming weekend will be full of harvest activities—no time for the beach, regardless of how hot it is. Soy beans, dry beans, and corn will all need harvesting. We’ll make the year’s summer soup. I’ll make another batch of pesto for the freezer before the basil is finished. I’ll dry some tomatoes.

There will be plenty more hot days, and likely a few trips to the beach. There will be many more tomatoes, eggplants, beans, and melons. Summer’s not really over. But it’s beginning to pack its bags and get rid of whatever it can’t take with it when it leaves for the Northern Hemisphere.

The Season for Salsa

February 29, 2016February 29, 2016 / Robinne Weiss / 2 Comments

Nothing beats a good salsa. And there are limitless variations on the theme—tomato or tomatillo, cooked or raw, spicy or mild, cilantro or none…

If I’m using tomato, I prefer a raw salsa, but if I’m making salsa verde—based on tomatillos—I like it cooked.

I have a love/hate relationship with tomatillos. On the one hand, I quite enjoy them in salsa verde. On the other hand, we don’t tend to like them in any other form, so we’ve never been able to eat all the tomatillos produced by even one plant, and the rotting fruits in the garden are truly disgusting.

But salsa verde is a lovely alternative to ketchup on burgers and fries, is fantastic in burritos, and makes a great chip dip. I’ve seen many variations on salsa verde, but this is what I do.

500 g (1 lb) tomatillos, husked and rinsed

½ cup water

1 fresh chilli pepper or a pinch of cayenne

2 red sweet peppers, charred

1 onion

1 clove garlic

½ cup chopped fresh cilantro

2 Tbsp cream or half and half (optional)

salt to taste

To char the sweet peppers, spear a whole pepper on a fork and hold it over the flame of a gas burner, turning regularly, until the skin blackens. Drop the charred pepper into a bowl and cover with a plate for a few minutes to let the skin steam and loosen Peel off the blackened skin before using. Roughly chop tomatillos, chilli, sweet peppers, onion, and garlic. Place all ingredients except the cilantro and cream in a saucepan and cook 15-20 minutes until the vegetables are soft and the liquid is reduced by about a third.

Blend until smooth (I use my immersion blender). Stir in the cilantro and optional cream, and adjust the salt. Serve hot or chilled.

This sauce freezes well—I freeze it in small quantities and pull it out as we want it.

On the Beach

February 28, 2016 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

Today’s massive, whole-family sandcastle effort.

We spent the day at the beach today, doing what most parents do at the beach—building sand castles with the kids, throwing frisbee with the kids, jumping in the waves with the kids, flying kites with the kids, rock pool fossicking with the kids.

Do you sense a pattern?

Beach activities always seem to be “with the kids.” So, what do adults—without kids—do at the beach?

Today at Okains Bay, an elderly couple lay in the sun. Another older couple walked the beach together. A young gay couple swam in the waves, then made sand castles. Tourists photographed children playing.

Though my husband and I were married for ten years before having children, it’s sometimes hard to remember life before kids.

But now that the kids are both in high school, it’s time to start looking ahead to that light at the end of the tunnel—that glorious day when the kids leave home. It’s time to start figuring out what we want to do when we grow up.

Why not start my plans with the beach?

I, for one, still plan to jump in the waves. And I’ll always peer into the rock pools. And you might even catch me with a frisbee…