June 2017

Yes it definitely feels like winter.  Frosty mornings (that I love) and crisp sunny days, logs burning on the fire, entire families of mice setting up home in the tunnel house and at various choice locations around the property.  Perhaps our rodent strategy isn’t working too well after all, even though we’re no longer storing any chook or pig food.   Winter benefits include bacon butties - the home-made bacon, infused with other home products, is totally delish.  We cooked one of the hams when Lucas was home for a few days.  Like Christmas turkey, it stretched to several meals and is still appearing in sandwiches from packs in the freezer.  When it’s finally down to just me and Peter at home, a ham will probably last us a fortnight. 

I defended my title of the queen of Onamalutu cider and again won a prize.  Unfortunately this time it was the booby prize – a wooden spoon saying ‘try again’!   Not even a bottle of wine with it to drown my sorrows.  In retrospect, I wish I’d entered the really explosive ‘Silke’s Rough Again’ – at least that would have provided some extra entertainment.  Oh well, there’s always next year.  Maybe then I’ll even have real cider apples to work with.

The vege garden is peacefully slumbering.  A little more tidying up has happened, and the task of sweeping up the fallen leaves (and also the peastraw that the birds like to flick off the beds) from the pathways is like painting the Forth Bridge.  They are providing lots of leaf mulch, which is being either added to compost or mixed with pea straw as surface mulch.  Garlic was planted according to the moon calendar last weekend, some in one of the keyhole beds, and the rest in the half-wine barrels.  Fingers crossed it grows into fat bulbs, not the spindly specimens I usually get.  On Karyn's advice, we lit a fire over the asparagus patch, burning the old dried asparagus shoots that had become wild and woolly.  Managed not to create any disasters in so doing, quite a miracle really.  The patch is now covered in a mound made of ashes, pea straw and heaps of horse poo.  I'll also start adding the ash from our woodburner too.  Is it possible that abundant asparagus treasure might grace our table in spring?  Ah the the eager anticipation that is part of the joy of gardening!

Vermicompost has been dug out from Worm Hollow, and another batch of vermiliquid has been diluted and applied to the olive trees.  There were still a few worms in the dug compost, so it’s been put into a couple of large tubs and stored in the Gin Palace to keep dry.  The remnants of the sheep wool have been generously applied as a duvet to the worm farm and on the top of both tubs to keep the worms toasty.

Plans are afoot to create a sanctuary for mushrooms – would that be known as a Fungery?  Next to the car port and behind Worm Hollow is a densely-planted area that is always shady and cool.  Peter’s done a bit of chain-sawing and opened up access to a space that is dark and damp – perfect for mushroom growing.  We’re awaiting the delivery of mushroom-spore dowels (Shii-take) that can be hammered into some birch logs.  Later they’ll be joined by some button mushrooms.

The lowest shelf on Gin Palace has been extended so that it can now be used as a potting shelf.  The bench in the Palace wasn’t central, and this addition still leaves enough space to get round.  It means that the previous potting shelf in Madame Cholet has been much reduced, freeing up more sunny, rather than shaded, planting space. At least it'll be free once I sort out the crap in there.  Among the crap are tea plant (Camellia Sinensis) cuttings that I took from two bought plants. 9 out of 10 are still alive, so that's pretty promising.  There's also a large tray of onion seed that should be germinating soon.

The cows and sheep still have enough pasture on which to munch, so we can hang onto winter stocks of hay for a little while longer.  There are no obvious signs of pregnancy in any of them, which is gutting.  Whilst we’re very much hoping to be wrong, it’s not looking good for Leggy – could it be his last leg as the flock ram?  Peter’s wondering if we should loan a bull for a while.  That wouldn’t give us Speckled Park calves, but maybe once both Hera and Athena have had a calf, they’ll be easier to inseminate for subsequent calves.  At least that’s what we read.

One of the beehives seem to be holding out against the cold.  The other colony in hive 2 – that liked to swarm repetitively – was no more when I put in varroa strips several weeks ago.  It’s sad, but a bit of a mixed blessing really.  I was planning to replace that queen anyway, ideally with one less prone to swarming.  Now I’ll be able to split my existing hive in spring and take it from there.   The remaining hive is strong and produces good honey volumes, so it's a good gene pool and hopefully will cope with a split.

Serious work has begun on the sleep out.  Now that there are less boys at home, we’re in with a chance of creating a decent-ish place to accommodate visitors.  The walls and ceiling are clean and freshly painted, and the wall that connects to the garage is papered in blue, using a textured paper that mostly disguises the rather uneven wall.  Unfortunately we managed to destroy our landline whilst wallpapering around a phone jack (I'm trying to live and learn and not just swear loudly).   We just need to get hold of a bed and a few bits of furniture.  There’s a thought that if it works out well, we could make a bob or two by letting it via Air B&B.  Then we could also get on with Lazy Mazy and add caravan accommodation to the package.  It could possibly happen one day, though it’s fair to say that I’m usually bigger on ideas than action.

The British and Irish Lions tour of New Zealand is underway and Peter is gripped.  The New Zealand Army band is the pre-match entertainment for the three All-Blacks test matches, and it will be Sam’s first big gig.  We’ll be keeping our eyes peeled in case his bit is televised.  He’s going to China twice in September, once with the Marlborough District Brass Band, and then also with the army.  In the meantime, our baby Billy celebrated his 17^th birthday (on June 17^th 2017).  He was a millennium baby, which has always been very handy because it allows us to calculate how old everyone else is by comparing their date of birth to his.  In moments of quiet reflection about the massive world terror events, I wonder what the world will be like for them when they're old and wrinkly.  Will there even be a world at all?  Martin Luther King has the best words:

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”