Three days of rain have drenched the land
forming rippling mirrors in the grass
and a flock of dishevelled, wet hens.
A river of caramel water
runs at the edge of the gravel road
then ducks beneath the concrete pipe
at the end of our driveway.
Bright green leaves are freshly washed.
A song thrush calls from high up in the silver poplar
and Molly is perched on a chunk of concrete,
keeping her paws dry.
This morning I stomped around in my gumboots
hoping to capture memories of the water
but the thirsty earth had already swallowed
most of them.
The land at South Head imitates a sponge.
Formed from ancient dunes
it doesn’t allow water to rest here for long.
It was foggy when I awoke this morning, and a rather chilly 7 degrees Celsius.
The paddock next door glowed a mellow brown against the leaden sky. It had been freshly-plowed a couple of days ago and the rich earth bristling with broken maize stalks reminded me of a rough slice of dark rye bread.
I walked a circuit of the property several times (my usual practice). This combines exercise with the chance to see the myriad changes in the garden from the previous day.
Spider Webs
What captured my attention today was the texture of the light through the mist and the way it picked out the delicacy of the tiny things it touched.
For example, I saw the work of countless orb-web spiders. Their intricate webs are strung from fence wires, dangling from branches and woven between the leaves of the harakeke and other native shrubs.
This morning, each web was heavily laden with tiny drops of water.
The Colours of a Misty Day
At first glance, the garden appeared to be clothed in muted greys and pastels.
Paradoxically, as I drew close to them, trees and shrubs seemed somehow fresher. They appeared to loom up out of the grey and stood out with greater clarity than I’d noticed on days where there is no mist.
All the while, the sun was trying to break through the moisture-laden air.
Tahou
Zosterops lateralis lateralis (Waxeye or Silvereye)
A tiny Tahou fed on small insects on the lichened branch of the old plum tree.
I was interested to read in Lynette Moon’s Know Your New Zealand Birds that this pretty little bird is protected.
Waxeyes are classified as native, which means they are either naturally found here, or self-introduced; large numbers migrated to New Zealand from Australia in the 1850s.
Who is the specimen here?
When I came back indoors, several of the hens were on the terrace, looking in at me through the living room window. Sometimes I have the distinct impression that I’m a specimen in a zoo.
Molly joined me. She looked at the hens, the hens looked back. Then they walked away. Slowly.
This always amuses me. Had she stared them down? What is the pecking order here?
On rainy days when the hens are sheltering near the window, Molly often looks out at them. Sometimes she goes right up to the window and just looks. I’d like to be able to read her mind.
Reference:
Moon, Lynette (2006) Know Your New Zealand Birds New Holland Publishers (NZ) Limited, Auckland.
The pomegranates we hoped to sample have burst.
Firmly secured to their bare branches,
they are still too high for us to reach.
Corpulent macadamia pods fatten ‘on the vine’.
Smooth brown nuts in moss green shells,
each day I gather them from the ground.
The last feijoas lie scattered, rotting away on the soggy earth.
More than one hundred have passed my lips this year.
They still taste sweet.
Across the road, black and white cows munch away on green grass;
One or two have lain down in the sun.
Beyond, the Kaipara is soft in shades of blue and grey.
Yesterday at dusk I heard the chirping of a cricket,
then a cold wind chased me indoors.
Surely June is too late for a cricket’s cry.
Perky chicken bare of feather Looks out at the murky weather Not for her the field next door Nor sunny nooks on forest floor
Perky looking out towards where the other hens are scratching.
Attempt 1: The Knitted Jumper
The idea of knitting a little outfit for Perky didn’t work out as we’d planned. And I suspect that Perky wasn’t impressed with the whole process, either.
Ben found a jumper pattern online, as well as comments indicating that dressing Perky in such an item would be a workable idea, and would help protect her and keep her warm until the feathers around her neck, chest and crop grow back. I duly knitted away and produced the outfit below: –
The completed hen tunic.
That night, we crept up to the hen house under the cover of darkness, grabbed Perky (who was sound asleep) and while Ben held her snugly, I put the tunic over her head, fastened the two buttons, freed her wings and adjusted it as best I could. Perky wasn’t that impressed but didn’t wriggle much.
Ben went out later on to see if she was still okay, and she was sleeping peacefully with the woolly jumper on. So far so good.
A disgruntled Perky, wearing her new ‘jumper’.
The next day I went out first thing to check and was dismayed to discover that Perky had become entangled in the little outfit. She’d somehow managed to lift one of her legs through the ‘armholes’, where usually only her wings would go. So part of the garment was now under her body and the bottom edge of the garment was wet and muddy and dragging on the ground – of course to make matters worse, it was raining.
Dismayed, I managed to corner Perky and pick her up. I stroked her for a bit to soothe her, and then re-adjusted the tunic, ensuring it was sitting correctly and that her wings and legs (and head, of course!) were free. I pulled it up so that it sat nicely below her neckline and set her back on the ground.
Even after adjusting the tunic, I could see that it was too loose.
Thirty minutes later when I went back to check, I could see that the tunic was actually too large for her – she’s such a tiny scrap of feathers. The hem was down to her ‘knees’ (not sure if hens have knees) and it was clearly annoying her – she kept trying to lift her legs to scratch it away with one or other of her feet.
Sadly I had to catch her again – Poor Perky, I hate chasing her to catch her when she’s not really tame enough. I gave her some cuddles and removed the offending item.
Attempt 2: Stockholm Tar
The other three saved hens were still pecking at her bare skin, so on Saturday we applied some Stockholm Tar to the exposed flesh, thinking this would be a good solution.
Wrong again. The other hens just pecked it off – we could see who the main culprit was (Crinkle) by the tar on her beak.
Attempt 3: Isolation
It doesn’t seem fair that Perky has to be the one kept away from the outside world.
Perky is now all by herself in the rescued hen section of our fenced off area. The other three saved hens have been integrated into our main flock and are doing fine.
One amusing thing though… while chasing Perky on Saturday to apply the Stockholm Tar, Ben found a pile of more than 30 eggs, all nicely piled up under some long grass.
The secret nest area. We’ve left a fake egg there so that Perky has something to lay her own egg beside.
We checked them all using the ‘will they float in water?’ test, and ended up only discarding about 10. We had visitors over the weekend so have eaten the remainder already. It would appear that all the rescued hens have been laying since we’ve had them. I think that’s ironic considering that the battery farms cull them for going off the lay.
The short poem to Perky at the top of the page is a quatrain.
It’s definitely Autumn. As I sit at my computer I can hear the rumble and whirr of the combined maize harvester driving along the paddock adjacent to our property. As it moves down the rows, capturing everything in its path and discarding all but the individual maize kernels, great clouds of dust rise around it.
The wind has picked up this afternoon and is blowing in from the north… It was supposed to rain, and perhaps it still will, but right now it’s a mixture of bright sunlight and racing clouds.
The Garden
This beautiful squash, ‘Burgess Buttercup’ weighed 3.189 kg.
Clean Up Tasks
It’s the time of year for clean-up and maintenance tasks in the garden. The squash and pumpkins are ready to be cut from their vines and stored in a dry and airy place.
The twisted brown tomato stalks need to be pulled out and burned, along with the remains of our former passion fruit vine.
I made the decision to remove the vine after it had finished cropping, due to it being afflicted with disease. It has been incredibly productive this year, and I’m sure we have eaten more than 200 individual passion fruit. So, it was with a heavy heart that I cut it away from the fence yesterday. All that is left is to dig the roots out of the soil.
Fruit
A scattering of fruit; Feijoa and Guava.
Plump feijoa and red and yellow guava are strewn on the grass outside our kitchen window; an array of yellow, green and red baubles.
While the guava are quite definitely edible, now that the feijoa are ready they won’t get a look in with me. Back in Spring when the blackbirds were stripping the petals from the flowers, I could not have imagined that the trees would be so heavily-laden.
A pair of kereru in the yellow guava.
For several days we’ve had two plump kereru camped out in the fruit trees. At night they seem to seek refuge in the golden totara, but by day they stay in the yellow guava, gorging on the fruit (they can swallow the guava whole!) or just sitting still in the sun.
Juicy pears.
We’ve also had many pears. The only problem is getting to them before the blackbirds! But if we go out early in the day we can usually rescue most of them.
Vegetables
Capsicum, Eggplant and Chillies.
For the first time, we’ve had eggplants that have grown to maturity and we’ve had an amazing crop of capsicum. I’m hoping that these will keep cropping until May or June. We also have abundant habanero and one other (unidentified) chilli pepper. This latter plant came from a packet of chilli ‘Caribbean Blend’ so I’m not really sure what it is. We sampled it (with trepidation), and although it was hot, it didn’t seem as hot as a habanero, nor did it have the beautiful floral flavour that a habanero has.
Our new seasons’ chilli peppers strung up in the barn.
As you can see from the photo above, I’m going to dry the chillies this year. We have such a huge chest freezer, that even with the baskets at the top, we tend to lose track of small things. It will be interesting to see if I’m successful or not. I thought it would be great to grind them up and use them with a pepper shaker.
This morning I took a bucket to the farm across the road and collected some field mushrooms. Yum!!! These are my favourite funghi. They have such a rich taste in comparison with button mushrooms purchased from the supermarket.
Field mushrooms, freshly-picked this morning.
They’ll be great sauteed in butter and stirred through some freshly made pasta.
After the Harvest
What’s left after the harvester has done its job.
The harvester has finished in the field. All that is left behind are the husks and a few dried leaves. It’ll be tough for the small shrubs we have on the fence-line, especially now that the wind is coming from the north. For a good six months they’ve been sheltered by the maize!
We are now the proud ‘parents’ of four former battery farm hens. We adopted these from The Animal Sanctuary and drove across to Dairy Flats last Wednesday to collect them.
They were part of a group of several hundred hens saved from being killed after reaching the end of their very first egg-laying cycle. This is usual practice for battery farms – they don’t wish to feed the hens when they go off the lay (the latter state being a natural part of a hen’s yearly cycle). Hens can’t keep laying eggs non-stop without a rest and usually go ‘off the lay’ for a few weeks when the days start to get a little shorter.
We’re waiting to get to know them a little better before we name them.
Our four new girls are in their own separate area, in their own house and sheltered amongst native vegetation.
For the very first time in their lives they can walk about freely, feeling the dirt under their feet and waking and sleeping by the natural day.
One of the hens enjoying a soothing dirt bath.
They don’t yet know how to perch, but have already figured out how to take a dust bath. We think this is pretty cool.
We’ll keep them apart from our other hens until their feathers have grown back some, and they are more confident in their surroundings. Then we’ll gradually introduce them to the flock and … in time, allow them to roam freely with their sisters.
I started this post over a month ago but recent circumstances got the better of me and I didn’t get it finished. Today I’ve made the commitment to at least get something posted – after all, the whole point of a blog is keeping up with it.
We’ve had a little rain – just enough to prevent it being declared a drought in our area, unlike some other parts of NZ – but it’s getting very dry now. As I write a large truck has come scuttling down the hill and along the gravel road beyond our gate. Huge clouds of dust drift and settle on our property.
I think of the solar panels and how they will most likely need to be cleaned manually if we don’t get a decent rainfall soon. You’d be surprised how much dust settles up there! Or perhaps you wouldn’t.
As I write it’s around 1.30 pm and 27 C outside in the shade. By the time the sun comes around it will get very hot where I’m sitting, even with all the windows open. It’s much too warm and humid for me outside at this time of day. The sun just bears down relentlessly – hence the garden is quite neglected. I’m hanging out for cooler mornings and evenings now that it’s Autumn.
Garden
Late summer vegetables
The garden has still been remarkably productive, considering that until last week (when I put in a row of broccoli and rocket) I hadn’t sowed anything new since December. We are still producing enough vegetables not to have to purchase anything other than the occasional bag of potatoes.
The basket above shows some of the vegetables we’ve been harvesting since I last wrote, but the green beans are finished now. As are the peas and we just didn’t eat any of the lettuces I diligently sowed in Spring and early Summer – they kept going to seed as we were eating other vegetables, so I stopped sowing them.
Vegetables
The vegetables we’ve been consuming the most of, lately, have been tomatoes, turnips and zucchinis.
The heirloom golden ball turnip is a delicious little vegetable and easy to prepare.
A simple recipe I use is to peel them, then cut them into cubes and blanch in boiling water. Drain the water off and saute the cubes in a little oil of your choice until they start to brown in patches, add 1 tbsp butter, 1 tsp brown sugar and 2 tsp apple cider vinegar. Stir through to form a light glaze. Season with salt and pepper and they are ready to eat.
Tomatoes (Left to Right): Bloody Butcher, Black Krim, Mortgage Lifter
The three varieties of tomato that I grew this year are ‘Black Krim’, ‘Mortgage Lifter’ and ‘Bloody Butcher’. Of the three, I definitely prefer Black Krim and Mortgage Lifter.
Tomatoes (Left to Right): Bloody Butcher, Black Krim, Mortgage Lifter
While Bloody Butcher has a nice flavour, I much prefer the texture and size of the other two. As a matter of interest, I collected one of each and cut them in half to show how different they are from each other, inside. (Hence, the images above.)
We’ve had enough cucumbers to keep us going, but not too many, and of course the usual carrots, rocket, basil… silver beet, beetroot, that we usually have on an ongoing basis.
Our harvest of Egyptian Walking Onions
I’ve lifted our almost all the garlic (yes, I know, it’s very late in the season not to have completed this task) and all the Egyptian Walking Onions. We had amazing crops of each of these. The onions are great and we have strung them up to dry out, and the garlic bulbs are very fat this year.
We do have a large section of our garden devoted to main crop potatoes but I have a bad feeling about them. We didn’t really realise how much water they require and should have been watering the plants as they developed. We poked around beneath the soil of a couple of plants a few weeks back and they really had nothing much under there, just some tiny, tiny potatoes.
Oh well, there’s always next year, I guess. At least we did have a decent amount of ‘earlies’ prior to Christmas.
Fruit
Passion fruit and Plums
Yummy Passion fruit, Passiflora edulis
Fruit-wise we’ve had a glut of Passion fruit and are making sure that we each consume several per day so that they don’t go to waste. They are lovely big Passion fruit and are extremely juicy and flavoursome. We still have pulp from last season that we froze a year ago as it was so precious (haha!). I’m definitely not going to freeze any this year.
Juicy, red plums
I did manage to process some of our plums in January. We had so many, all ready at the same time, so we halved and froze some for later, ate a great deal and used the rest for jam and plum wine.
Plum Wine
Plum wine: a new batch and the finished product.
The left-hand image above shows this year’s batch of plum wine directly after the first racking off. Prior to that I’d fast-fermented the must on the skins for the first few days, to bring through a little of the red colour – the plums themselves are yellow-fleshed.
We also opened a bottle of our plum wine from 2010 – we tend to forget that we have bottles of fruit wine in our cellar. It was actually not bad!
Fiery Plum and Habanero Jam
The jam was basically just plums, sugar and habanero pepper. I had to keep tasting the jam as I went along to ensure it was hot enough (but not too hot!); I added more habanero as it cooked. It turned out really well.
It’s very rich in flavour and ideal either just as jam, or added to casseroles or curries to give them an extra zing. It’s also good with cold meats and cheeses. Nice and spicy! I love the taste of habanero.
Molly
Well, there’s a sad tale to tell about Molly (it has a happy ending, though). I’ll have to write up what happened in a separate blog or I’ll never get this posted.
I’ll finish with a photo of a couple of my dahlias. They are very pretty… this photo was taken a week or two ago, they don’t look so perky today, due to the lack of rain.
Mushrooms and coconut cream simmering until sauce is reduced to the desired thickness
Method
Using a large pan, saute the onions in 2 tbs coconut oil until golden and transparent. Meanwhile, finely chop the marjoram with the garlic.
When the onion is ready, add the herbs & garlic to the mix and cook through. Remove from the pan and set aside.
Add the remaining 4 tbsp coconut oil to the pan. When hot, throw in the white mushrooms and stir to evenly mix the coconut oil through.
Keeping the heat medium-to-high, and stirring at intervals, cook the mushrooms until their juices are starting to ooze out, then a little more to dry some of them up.
Add the herb & garlic mixture and stir through.
Reduce the juices a little, then pour in the coconut cream. Stir through.
Reduce heat to medium. Stirring regularly, simmer the mushrooms until the coconut cream has reduced to the desire thickness. This would depend on personal taste, i.e. on how much sauce you wanted to serve up with your mushrooms.
Creamy Vegan Mushrooms is ideal for brunch, or as an addition to a main meal. It’s yummy served with lightly toasted Ciabatta.
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