Back into our blogging today. While hating to seem keen on this writing idea, Zara has subtley inquired each day during the weekend whether we would be doing our blog that day. For a formerly reluctant writer she has come a long way.

After a couple of days not observing the garden closely it was inspiring to go out and see how much bigger everything was. Unfortunately the weeds were keeping pace with the planted plants so a bout of weeding very small weeds out of very small germinating seedlings ensued. Not my favourite job, but I plodded through it while imagining luscious harvests of greens when the plants are fully grown. The spinach is germinating, minutina growing rapidly and miners lettuce doing well. The mesclun mix I’m a bit stumped on though. I’m not familiar enough with it to know for certain which seedlings are there as part of the mix and which are weeds. We will be eating both when I harvest it as microgreens and small leaf stage I think. Weeds are not only delicious but good for you I’m told. I’m not sure what the kids would choose out of weeding the weeds out or eating them…..

Easter gifts from the land.

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I also managed to sneak some beautiful handmade eggs from an organic online shop we use into the house to surprise the kids and Garth. We also harvested the worlds smallest rockmelon. Better late than never?????

Anika: Today is sharing some writing she did on a topic that she feels strongly about ( We haven’t covered how to reference web site pages etc yet so please excuse her unspecified claims!)

I reckon there should be acres and acres of chook runs for free range chooks. This would mean people wouldn’t have to buy caged chicken eggs. It would also mean there wouldn’t be as many chooks locked up in cages being practically forced to lay eggs.

Research suggests that the sort of conditions that cage hens are kept in are often poor. There can be 6-8 hens in a cage. They cannot do many of their natural activities like scratching, flapping their wings, dust bathing and more. They also cannot go outside and probably don’t know what grass, dirt, or sky looks like, as they are kept in big, dark sheds with controlled temperatures. There are rows and rows of cages, which are quite often stacked on top of each other. The sheds stink of chook manure and rotting chooks that have died unnoticed.

Some people think that there may be a difference in the caged hen eggs taste and colour relative to free range eggs. Apparently the yolk may be lighter and they may have a different taste, but I don’t really know.

There are several arguments suggesting that caged eggs are necessary. Vegetarians eat lots of eggs to get protein and some think that eggs need to be affordable for this reason. I think that if vegetarians are avoiding eating animals as it is cruel to kill them, then surely they should not want to eat eggs from hens living a horrible life.

Some chicken farmers like to have caged hens to provide lots of cheap eggs for people to buy. The buyers probably don’t know what the poor chooks have gone through to give them eggs (or they can’t afford to buy anything but the cheapest product). Someone needs to raise their awareness of this.

Other species of animals are also farmed very intensively, pigs and cows especially. Beef feedlots overseas are an example of this. I feel very sorry for the animals.

In NZ there are about 165 caged egg farms. Organic eggs make up about 1% of the eggs we eat. That is really quite shocking. I wish there were more free range eggs being produced.

If I were a chicken I would feel absolutely terrible. It would be worse than death. I really don’t think there is a word or words bad enough to describe it. I can’t imagine living in a A4 sized cage laying eggs and doing nothing else. I wouldn’t know about all the happy chooks getting food scraps while I got the same diet day in and day out. My life would be nothing to me or to anyone else.

If there were more free range chickens and eggs the prices might go down. People might start buying free range eggs instead of caged hen eggs. This would mean more chickens could be free and happy, rather than locked up and poorly treated.

NB if we had more time I would have got Anika to research what the welfare issues are with ‘free range chickens’ to give a more balanced viewpoint but we will have a discussion around that instead. This was really just a writing exercise rather than a research project.

And on a lighter note:

I got to make Sticky Coconut and Feijoa Muffins which was fun. This shows me laughing after photo bombing mums shots of the muffins. The muffins were fairly easy to make but I need to make more next time because they are yummy and they disappeared too fast!

Jamie:

In the weekend I rotary hoed the bottom garden that is down by the river. The white stuff you can see in the photo is fertilizer. We were preparing it for sowing a cover crop to draw up more nutrients for next years potato and kumara crops. We grow all sorts of kumara including purple ones that are purple all through the middle and a whole lot of other varieties. We grow Maori potatoes, Agrias. The pumpkins we grow are Cupola, Queensland Blue (and some others). I personally like the Cupola the most. They are very long, half skinny pumpkins that are very deep orange inside and are very tasty.

We have had another night in our new room. It was fantastic except I couldn’t get to sleep.

My pea seeds are growing like stink but my bean seeds are being interestingly slow.

I keep finding praying mantises everywhere.

Zara:

Life continued as normal over the weekend. I did get an Easter egg on Sunday morning, but didn’t get to eat it for breakfast. We have been getting lots of riding in which has been awesome. We haven’t done too much gardening, just enough to keep on top of things.

It has been extremely windy here for the last few days. The wind is just strong enough so that when you are sitting inside and the wind is whipping through the trees, you have to listen closely to tell whether it is wind or rain.

I am loving my new room and not having to share it, although I can still hear them snoring through the wall.

Today I planted out some more lupins into some different cover crop beds. We germinate them in a container so that they have a higher germination rate. The seeds germinated in the garden bed have the weather, mice, slugs, snails and birds to fight against. I also planted the flaxseed/linseed seedlings out into Bed 0, otherwise known as the overflow bed. This bed has had so many things self seed in it that it looks like a miniature herb and flower forest. At this stage in the seedlings growth it is hard to tell the different seedlings apart.

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A beautiful morning today with the sun glistening and every leaf looking freshly polished.

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Not only did we get a small amount of garden work done but also later in the day we moved nearly all the furniture in the house around. Our house renovations have involved a lot of furniture shifting. Most of it in the evening when Garth is home. But not always. One day Garth came home to find every chest of draws shifted to a new room and stacked on top of each other. Amazing what you can achieve with three children on one end, and one not very strong me on the other. And a handcart, that part’s crucial for shifting heavy stuff. Our builders must have felt a bit bemused a few times when they walked into the house. Magically all the furniture was moved round rooms overnight, ready for their attention to the next area.

So now we have the next iteration of furniture shuffle. I think its going to work well. Until lockdown is over. We will be able to paint with dustsheets over the furniture but sanding and sealing the floor is going to necessitate a whole new furniture shuffle.

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Anika:

No entry from Anika today. She wasn’t feeling well but has been working on piece of writing for next week. She did manage to do some schooling on her pony. She took Bridie over to say hello to the miniture pony next door. Milo lives with Jack the donkey and they are full of beans at the moment They play chase and rear up and pretend fight with each other. Its very entertaining and great to see Jack having fun as he is a typical sombre looking donkey.

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Jamie:

Today I trimmed our humungous basil plants to take the dead seed heads off so they keep producing leaves for longer. It was quite time consuming but luckily I love pruning things. I filled a whole wheelbarrow up with the seed heads and took them to the compost pile.

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We were trying to identify what sort of bumblebees were in our garden. Apparently there are 4 different sorts of bumblebees in NZ. These bumblebees always seemed to have their buts tucked under their tums which made identification tricky as it is all about the markings on their back end. I came up with the idea of using the selfie mode on the camera to try and get a good photo but it still didn’t work.

Garth has been painting like fury. Tonight we have working hard shifting furniture and now we can sleep in our new rooms. Anika is sharing my room at the moment, its going to be great. All sorts of mischief can be made overnight.

Zara:

Today Leena was extremely excited and forward. She just wanted to run, so we worked on halts again. She kept breaking into a trot at the least excuse so eventually we let her trot for a bit to assess her soundness. She has a hoof healing up after an abscess and now seems to be sound at the trot so that is great.

In the garden today I was planting out the edible lupins into the cover crop beds. It’s astounding how long their roots were. It made planting them very hard.

Tonight we moved into our new unfinished bedrooms. We spent hours shifting furniture around. It was getting tiresome having all our beds out in the lounge together.

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We also made some Easter ‘buns’. Cooked like muffins but were delicious. Most of them did not survive long enough to get decorated with the traditional cross.

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Today we indulged in an afternoon nap. This is now leading to evening bursts of piano practice, writing and seed sowing. I’m super pleased to have finished the last significant planting/sowing in the garden this evening. There are only a few inches of ground left that I have immediate plans for, so I consider that close enough to being finished. Just waiting for all the dwarf beans and pea plants to get big enough to plant. I think I’ve left enough room for them….. just.

Anika took a very nice photo of Nana on her bike with George her very cute dog. I won’t add it to this post though, as she was frowning at having her photo taken. She hates having her photo taken! And she would hate for anyone to see her with her longer than usual hair. Not being able to have her regular haircut is the entirely most inconvenient thing about this whole lockdown for her. I am missing my own hairdresser appointment I will admit. But only a bit.

Actually not all of us were napping. Garth was hard at work painting. The sealing coat over the gib board was not going on very smoothly. He claimed that he better not give up his day job.

Anika:

I mulched my garden bed with seagrass this morning. Argh. It’s rather boring and can be sore if you cuts on your hands because the salts stings.

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We had homemade garlic bread with our soup for lunch. Yum.

I’m so glad that the feijoas are starting to get ripe. All of us kids love them. At the moment things are very colourful with all the autumn fruits and leaves. The cool mornings have been nice and I’m quite liking the warm days.

My pony Bridie is still improving but still tries to help with the morning and afternoon feeds. However she hasn’t been getting out which means she doesn’t have too much extra boisterousness when I ride her which is helpful.

Jamie:

I have been trimming my herb garden. That consists of getting the grubber and chopping the oregano plant back, then peeling it back like peeling the skin off a ham before glazing it. I noticed that the oregano can take over large areas, and put out new roots very easily. It took over about three square metres. It is a good groundcover to stop the weeds growing and it also smells nice when you trim it. I trimmed back a big bush of catmint and realised that it was actually about 10 plants all growing together. They were so interlocked together that it was hard to tell they weren’t one plant.

We double dug my other garden bed in the morning. Double digging is very time consuming. You dig a trench and put fertiliser in with the soil. Then you add the soil back into the trench and smooth it all out. It leaves the soil more aerated. At approximately 5 o’clock we watered it again and planted carrots in it (three varieties of carrots, salsify, scorzonia and parsnips actually and it was a wee bit later than 5pm as Jamie’s nap lasted all afternoon).

We also started doing an undercoat on the walls in our house that need painting. Dad said it was like watching paint dry, but I didn’t agree. I thought it was mesmerising. I watched Dad very closely to pick up on all his painting tricks.

Zara:

This morning we got up at what felt like dawn. It was actually only seven o’clock. This was so we could help our grandparents shift their cows down to the neighbors yards so they could get the bull back out of the herd.

We have a lot of deciduous trees around our house. Because of this we really notice when autumn gets here. There are leaves everywhere at this time of year. It hasn’t quite got to the point where you can make the big piles to jump in yet though. The oak tree is my favorite as it has the most colourful leaves. It turns the lawn into a patchwork blanket of red, orange, gold, and yellows. Autumn is definitely my favorite time of year. I love walking in the leaves. Hearing them quietly crackle, and feeling the soft crunch of them under my feet.

Long awaited rain arrived this morning. I’m really hoping it is arriving for those still under drought conditions around us. Its great for our soil, but we have plenty of green grass so we are thoroughly out of the drought. In our household the 3 ‘exhausted’ garden slaves have been scanning the sky looking wistfully for rain clouds for the last week. They figured that once it started raining they would be spared the garden tasks. Hahaha haven’t they heard of rain coats?

Actually the threat of imminent rain always accelerates the gardening rate round here as there is usually grass to be mown, seeds to be sown, seedlings to be planted, etc, etc. Then once it arrives we hope to be able to be inside, looking out at the nicely mown lawn and organised garden.

I remembered to harvest the pineapple yesterday. Unfortunately it wasn’t very sweet. I’m not sure if we should have left it for longer or whether the lack of full sun affected its taste. I must consult with the masters of red pineapple growing Chrissie and Max.

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Yesterday afternoon when I went to check whether the lettuce/greens bed needed watering again I got a surprise. My first thought was that the weeds had grown very fast. Then I realised that all the mesclun mix and minutina had germinated. I always find seeing that first fuzz of green or smattering of tiny leaves exciting. After so many sowing of things that have failed to germinate its always great to see the seedlings appear. Like a spark of new life.

Strangely the rocket that usually germinates quicker than anything else has failed to appear at all. I think I used some old seed. Never mind, I think I will try some spinach in that space as I forgot to sow that with the first round. I’ve found spinach has a germination quirk. The seed likes to be moved around once its been in the ground for a while. Very strange. I’ve often struggled to germinate it and one day accidentally found that if I disturb the soil (looking to see if any seeds have sprouted!) it then shoots up.

I felt very grateful today to have such competent children as I watched Zara put away yet another batch of baking into a container. Paleo shortbread this time, made with coconut and arrowroot flour. Zara in particular has a wide repertoire of recipes that she enjoys making, and if provided with appropriate ingredients will follow most recipes quite accurately. There has been the odd incident when the recipe has not been followed quite correctly, such as the infamous lemon slice episode which involved missing out the sweetener and a double dose of salt. Anika likes to prepare vast platters of intricately arranged food and is our star muffin maker. Jamie is all enthusiasm and very good on taste testing and making appreciative comments about the baking results.

Anika:

Bridie deciding she would help herself to a pre-breakfast snack. She attempts this quite often.

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Jamie:

Photo by Jamie of a cricket being eaten by a praying mantis. There are praying mantis’s everywhere at the moment. We are wondering if they are the exotic variety that are spreading round NZ. They seem to be voracious hunters and have a larger body than the endemic ones apparently.

Sowing more pea seeds.

” Our seedy crackers are delicious, especially with a bit of cheese and feijoa chutney” (this is a great recipe given to us by our good friend Leanne that we make all the time)

Zara:

Today while out riding I went to get on off a bank. I didn’t realise there was a giant under-ground wasp nest in the bank. I did wonder why the horses were swishing their tails and shaking their heads irritably. I then moved away in a bit of a hurry. I won’t be getting on there again. Then to top it all off it started raining on us. The horses had their rugs on today because of the heavy showers that kept appearing. They also all managed to get completely filthy before I managed to get down and clean them up and put their rugs on. So now I will have not only partly dirty horses to deal with in the morning but three dirty rugs as well.

Other than getting the horses done this morning we have had a very slow day. As a result I am writing this at 8 o’clock whilst pudding finishes cooking.

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Zara is also in charge of cleaning out the gutters when it starts raining. We love our oak tree but the leaves do fill up our gutters constantly.

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It has been a busy day today sorting our organic bulk food co-op order that arrived yesterday. Although we buy little fruit and vegetables compared with many households, we do go through a lot of nuts and coconut products. Due to the lockdown it has proved to be a mission to get our monthly order done this month. We are also depending heavily on the greens delivery from my parents who live next door. Mum is always timely with her planting so has a steady supply of most veges. I tend to get waylaid by our busy family life and always end up with a gap in supply during early Autumn. I’ve learnt that with our soil in a dry summer it is not worth trying to get brassica seedlings established at the traditional time. The soil is just too dry no matter how much I water it. We are lucky to have a green- fingered mum next door!

Yesterday I went out to check on the weeding progress in the ‘mandarin tree garden’. Pleasingly half the weeds had disappeared but strangely the area was deserted. I took a photo of the only evidence left as to who did the weeding. See below:

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I wondered whether the Easter Bunny had come early and was helping itself to my nice row of well grown carrots in the garden? If it wants to come everyday and do that much weeding I’m happy to pay in carrots I guess….

Today I found the even more unusual sight of a garden slave, working industriously and in silence, without any complaints. Most odd, but very pleasant.

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Anika:

This morning I weeded my garden. I weeded under the Mandarin tree, and around the nasturtiums. I also weeded in amongst the lemon balm, which has taken off in growth and is a lush bright green. Mum said that its a good companion plant for all plants in general, and she loves the smell of it. I think its OK.

Jamie:

Today I went out early in the morning and took a photo of my bean seeds. They haven’t yet put out their roots or leaves. I’m looking forward to seeing leaves shoot up. At this point we had to have a wee break in Jamie dictating to me as the fantail in the tree was chirping so loudly that I couldn’t really hear what he was saying. Its very friendly!

I did some weed-burning down by the shed and grubbed out some weeds. The kikuyu was very thick, but easy to peel off the metal. Nana came along and dropped off some vegies.

When I came back to the house Mum was unpacking our Ceres order. I basically almost fainted….. when I saw the biggest bag of coconut sugar in the world! It weighed 25 kg. I would have liked to make the worlds largest sweetest hot drink with it if I was allowed.

Zara:

Today is the fifth day I’ve been hogtied, gagged, and then forced to write this entry. Just joking! I do write it of my own free will. Well, most of the time.

I was back on watering the garden today. HOORAY! That was sarcasm, not enthusiasm, by the way. I did however enjoy snacking on the few ripe tomatoes left, along with a few too many guavas. Pretty much all of the cover crops are now up and growing. Because we planted a mix of different seeds, the little plants show a range of leaf size, shape, and colour. This makes the beds very artistic looking.

The zucchinis are still making good progress in their growth but today we did notice they are starting to get some mildew on their leaves.

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Later in the day I was doing some school work. Anika was baking. Once it came out of the oven she proceeded to waft it right under our noses and then told us, “Not yet,” as she whipped then back out to the kitchen to decorate. The little tease. However, it was delicious when I finally got to eat it.

Cool and overcast day today. The perfect day for …… more seed sowing and planting out seedlings. However, first there were room fulls of gib-stopping dust to clean out from our renovations. Lucky there is so much to do in the garden that it is taking our minds of the totally stalled nature of our renovations. Its cozy sleeping with all our beds in the lounge right? And all our clothes drawers lumped in together under dust sheets in a different room. Garth has managed to insulate over the holes in the ceiling that we created so at least we are warm and dry. Moving back into bedrooms once they are finished will just be a bonus. It’s all about anticipation.

Something we have been anticipating for several years is the prospect of eating our own red pineapples. We received some shoots several years ago from a friends garden, and found a suitable spot to plant them. ‘Suitable’ for pineapples I figured involved the essentials of well drained soil, sunlight, and potential to shelter from frost. However the ability to not have to brush past their thorny leaves was important, and being able to put down black plastic round them to warm the soil and deter weeds was also high on the list. Well several years down the track now, the pineapple plants are well out of the way and surrounded by black plastic. They have grown large, but have been shy to fruit. This is most likely due to the fact that I sandwhiched them into a spot between a peach tree and the hedgerow; both of which have now grown enormous. Out of the way… tick. Sunlight……. cross. Despite this mismanagement two fruit have formed this year and are just about to be harvested. Hope we haven’t left it to late. I’ve been admiring them on the plant and forgetting to harvest them for some time. I’ve also been eyeing up the exuberant growth of oxalis round the base of the pineapple plants but can’t bring myself to even attempt to weed it out. The spines on the pineapple plant are just too vicious to want to get any where near it. Other than to harvest the fruit of course.

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Anika:

This morning I watered half the garden. I noticed that my mandarins are now almost full size on the mandarin tree in my garden. There was a friendly fantail and I took some photos of it. I also took some photos of a cabbage butterfly before I squashed it.

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This morning after I did the watering I got revenge on Zara for tattle tailing on me. I got a syringe and filled it with water. Zara had Jamie spying on me from up a bushy Jacaranda tree. They made it quite hard to go places without being seen. After a while I lured Jamie down a steep bank in front of the garden where he was hiding. I sat on the rough metal gate where I had run to. Zara told him to be squirted so I had an empty syringe. I had thought of this plan of attack, so I squirted him (the water was trough water I must add), vaulted the gate, and sprinted to a trough that was close by. SAFE! I danced round the trough squirting him while Zara yelled at the top of her voice, “Yes Jamie, go Jamie, you can do it Jamie.” In the end Jamie turned traitor and I squirted Zara at last. We then did some weeding and she squirted me in the face. Damn! And Yuck! I guess she was always going to get me back eventually.

Jamie:

Today I helped Dad pick up windfalls from a huge Nashi pear tree. We climbed up and started shaking a branch. I climbed up first and got about 5 metres off the ground. My way to shake the branch was to hold on tight and start stomping. It looked like bombs being dropped from a plane at a high distribution! One hit me on the head. One second I felt it, the next second I saw pieces all around me. The Nashi’s were big and juicy. The bees were loving them and getting into them.

We are going to take them to our pigs next door. I think the pigs will love them. We got some beautiful eating apples as well.

Zara:

Today while hacking the horses out, we passed a paddock of the most adorable little calves. I expected Leena to find them very scary as she did with the sheep yesterday, but no, she stayed as close to the fence as possible. She didn’t even mind the calves following us up and down the fence as we passed.

Once all the horse stuff was done for the morning it was was back to the house for morning tea. This consisted mainly of feijoas which Nana brings over daily along with apples and excess veggies. Then it was time to head out into the garden. Since the veggie part of the garden is now mostly under control it was back to weeding the Kikuyu filled hedgerows. A constant battle that I seem to do most of the fighting of. Today I had to weed around the Mutabilis rose in the front hedgerow. A job I swear mum saves especially for me. She doesn’t seem to notice my lack of appreciation.

One of the things I do enjoy about weeding is watching all the insects and bugs that live in the leaf litter and foliage. I’m always amazed at how many different spiders I see. I always feel a bit sorry for the poor insects who lose their homes just because the picky humans can’t stand the sight of a hedge row filled with weeds. I mean who cares what it looks like, I certainly don’t. Mum says that the point of a hedge row is to provide a varied range of habitat for the insects and birds etc. Our hedge rows have a range of different plants in them already with out needing the weeds to add to the diversity apparently.

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The cool thing about the Mutabilis rose is that the flowers show such a wide range of colours. When the bush is flowering it is covered in a multitude of pinky, peachy, and apricotty coloured flowers. It even flowers almost all year round.

Managed to ‘publish’ our first two posts last night and even share the post via Facebook. Feeling accomplished and happy to be entertaining family and friends with our antics. Exciting news from yesterday……. the cat caught not one but TWO mice. With the ‘acres’ of cover crop seed in the ground currently (perfect mouse food at ground level) any mouse hunting action is a great thing. The family cat has been spending a lot of time sleeping in a particularly nicely sized box by the fire. She is a fan of boxes. I tried to get a photo of her looking majestic and hunterlike.

Anika:

This morning I rode my pony Bridie in the paddock. She was quite well behaved and didn’t do anything too naughty. That was until I got about 100 meters away from the horse grazing. I started riding backwards bareback and was almost wiped out by a branch. When I got off she looked round, and I swear she was laughing at me. I can always tell when she is laughing at me. She pulls back her lips a bit and you can see some of her teeth. She also has a mischievous look in her eye.

I got up from the horses grazing and had to water the garden. Talk about boring. I did take quite a few photos and selfies though. You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to take a selfie with a hose providing a watery background. I got myself wet a dozen times, and the photos still didn’t turn out great.

A watery day awaits me

Youch! is that a bee

Beautiful abundant flowers everywhere

To lunch my answer was” Yeah”

Jamie:

Today I was foliar feeding. It’s like a spray but instead of killing things it makes them grow better. You can get all sorts of foliar feed. Ones for leaf production or fruit production. I foliar fed the tomatoes, my lettuce, and some of my herb bed, and lots of the other beds including the rhubarb. I noticed that most of the plants in our garden at the moment are very small. All the cover crops have sprouted up quite high within a couple of days. When I’m foliar feeding I am tempted to spray my sisters and mum.

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I planted bean seed this morning. I know by tomorrow they will be growing roots already. Over the next couple of days I’ll take photos of how quickly they grow.

This afternoon I painted some window sills and then I continued with my writing. I’ve had a message that someone is going to rescue me from the garden slavery and take me diving when this lockdown is over. I’m looking forward to that!

Zara:

Today my garden job consisted of helping Jamie plant some bean and pea seeds. The truth is that he sat on the tractor telling me where the brake pedal is and what it does. He had obviously forgotten I already know how to drive it (under supervision, on a flat paddock). Meanwhile, he left me to prepare the seed trays and the labels, but turned up as soon as it was time to do the planting. Why did that not surprise me?

This morning we rode the horses up in the house paddocks. It was very amusing seeing Leena’s antics every time we passed the sheep in the next paddock. She was acting as thought they were some sort of exotic boogey monsters.

Anika took Bridie down the road back to the grazing first. When I was leading Bella and Leena back down the road. I got to about half way down when all of a sudden Bridie appeared around the corner. She was moving at speed and almost collided with me and the horses. It was lucky I had a lead rope with me to catch her and then lead her back down the road with the others. The gate was wide open. Either the last person through hadn’t shut it properly, or she has now figured out how to open the gate. We have had a lot of trouble with Bridie escaping out of areas where she is meant to be. Opening the gate was one of the last things she had left to conquer. I have a feeling we will now have to put a different latch on it.

Day 9 of lockdown. The kids are going crazy taking pictures on the spare cell phone. They have figured out how to access all sorts of different settings to produce some very strange looking photos and are now trying to insist on teaching me how to use them. Child number 3 is now criticizing my grammar as I type… (bit of a run on sentence there mum). Grammar is new to me, I seemed to have missed that section at school, opting for plenty of reading and maths. Luckily we have a great grammar curriculum that I can learn from at the same time as taking the kids through it. Apparently my maths is at fault also. She points out that she is actually child number 2. Whoops. These posts will likely be full of grammatical, spelling and composition errors, but the intent is to provide some entertaining (perhaps informative?) content for our housebound friends and family.

Anika:

This morning I was taking off the dead heads of the flowers. I decided to made a flower bunch. I ambushed mum’s phone and took one or two….OK a million photos, with different light settings and filters.

This afternoon I ate oodles of guavas. Our Guavas come in a range of sizes and colours (red or yellow when they are ripe). We also have Giant Red Guavas which are almost the size of a golf ball. The red guavas look like small, round, smooth, red Christmas decorations. But they taste a lot better.

This morning I started playing with different photos settings and filters on the way up the road from the horses. It was fun and interesting.

Jamie:

Today I went and trimmed my herb garden which consists of thyme, rosemary, chives, oreganum, clary sage and catmint. It was fun trimming with the new hedge trimmers. The air smelt lovely with the herb scents.

I did some weeding in my SCL bed. The silverbeet has quiet a few leaves dieing off. The soil is very nice, moist and not too lumpy.

I rode my sister’s pony. I didn’t get far up Fern Flat road once the others turned around. Bridie is a stubborn beast. She is a small, sturdy, palomino pony who is very motivated by food. Basically as soon as we turned around she was almost trotting. She is also very plump and hard to get your legs around. I walked up the road, carrying my helmet, talking to mum. I loved it.

Zara:

Sometimes our pony Bridie gets feed stuck in her oesophagus (commonly described as ‘choke’). Last night she had an episode of this and we had to bring her up to the house, walk her around and get her to swallow water from a syringe carefully. We are lucky to have two vets in the family to help us with wee problems like this.

Today I was put in charge of watering the whole garden. This means waving a hose around for about 2 hours and having plenty of time for either aimless dreaming, or thinking. Today, I did notice the Zucchini plants have at least doubled their size since I planted them out a week ago.

After that I was back on cover crop duty. I’m praying that it’s the last of that task to get done. Unfortunately I think I’m probably wrong.

I did get to do some baking today which I always enjoy. Just after I got the cookies in the oven Nana turned up (she rides over on her bike several times a day and chats at a distance). She said, “I know what you’ve been doing”. At that stage I didn’t realise that I had chocolate cookie mixture all over my face. It didn’t take Nana long to figure out that I had been licking the bowl. I never have been very sneaky I’m told.

Welcome to the Riddle family blog during this Covid -19 lockdown period here in NZ. I (Josi) started this garden blog last year but ran out of time to sustain writing regular (well…. any) new posts. Having the whole country confined to their homes with minimal outside travel is a highly unusual situation. It is a situation which is unprecedented in Garth and I’s lives, and will be an enduring memory for us all. It is providing us with more time to do time consuming activities. So here we go. Attempt number two to post regularly and involve the kids as part of their literacy work. Our focus this last week has been on getting the Autumn garden up and planted after a summer dry spell. Also we have been plagued by wild pigs descending on our horse grazing paddocks. They have rooted up big areas of grass and the waterlines which has resulted in draining the water tanks multiple times. The kids were all offered the pig hunting activity option but the girls chose to watch a movie instead!

Anika: We have been at home for a week now due to the Covid 19 lock down. At least there’s things to do; even if it means a month of garden work and cleaning. Out of the worst things that could happen it’s not too bad, but it’s pretty high up there. I must admit life is a little bit less exciting without all our different ‘after school’ activities.

While there hasn’t been much amusement; there has been the odd incident. Jamie was hung up by his pants on barbed wire after a pig hunt. I didn’t see it, but when I got back from the horses I got the full story. Jamie said that he was coming back and climbing over a barbed wire fence when he slipped. Just as he was hung up by the seat of his pants Brockie (who’s our hard case neighbour ) came out, he didn’t see Jamie, but Jamie saw him alright (and kept very quiet to avoid being mocked). It was about three painful minutes before he rescued himself. The story ended. I could barely stop laughing.

In the garden I’m looking after the S.C.L bed ( Silver beet, Cabbage, Leek bed ). The seedlings are growing fast. I water the bed every morning. Keeping the soil moist really helps them grow faster.

I’m waiting not very patiently for this lockdown due to Covid 19 to end. I hope the number of cases decrease, including overseas ones. With all this hard work on the garden I hope it looks better and produces lots.

Jamie:

We’ve been in lockdown now for 8 days. We weren’t going out much before the lockdown anyway but now I’m really missing my friends and family. I’m loving that Nana is bringing us over baskets of fruit from her trees next door. I think Jacinda Ardern has made some good calls about trying to control COVID-19. I basically think “Yeah, whatever” about having to stay home.

In the first 8 days of lockdown we have been late night hunting for pigs and possums. We shot our first pig. It was a good size spotty one and it was very tasty. I’m annoyed that we have run out of bullets now.

When I’ve been in the garden I’ve been looking at my herb garden quite a lot and seeing the progress. My other garden bed I foliar fed the lettuce seedlings without telling mum. She was surprised to see how big they had grown all of a sudden.

I hope that in a months time everything gradually opens again. I hope that the months lockdown will give the virus a good enough doing over.

Zara:

A week of lockdown is now up. Having spent pretty much all of it slaving in the garden we are ready to do something else. Even if it means doing school work. I didn’t however envisage writing a blog. As we all know, writing is not something I enjoy doing, and generally only do as a last resort. In this case if it means being allowed to come in from the garden…… I’ll do it. In the week of ‘ slavery ‘ I did however manage to dig, prepare, plant, and then cover what seemed like acres worth of cover crop beds, along with various other jobs. All of which were done to mum’s standards; which we all know are exceedingly high. I never realized it was so hard to get the surface of a garden bed round (to mum’s standards).

While others seem to be complaining of having nothing to do, we seem to be holed up in garden pandemonium. Well that’s a slight exaggeration, but you get the point. We are all longing for it to rain so we can move onto some different activities.

I’m hoping the lockdown won’t last too long, but not be raised before it’s safe. I am seriously missing taking the horses to the beach.

The phases of the moon are marching on. It is now a full moon but unfortunately moon rise is late at night so there is no moon visible in the evening. The moonlight was making watering at night a breeze with everything clearly illuminated in the pearly light. Its quite peaceful and the stars are the high light out there now but not so easy to see anything. Ha funnily enough writing that I just remembered that I had left the hose running to give the hedgerow a soak. Went out to turn it off, and mistakenly stood on the cat which enjoys lying out on the cool grass all hours of the day and night. I had been thinking that my eyes were very well adjusted to being out in the dark but now there has been no moon it turns out that, no, it was just really light.

Its 11.30pm and the moon has just risen. Thankfully most nights I am well inside by this time. Our cat likes to follow me around in the garden and the other night I kept nearly watering her. I would turn around to give various bits of the garden a last spray of water and see a blur of fur moving out of the way with sometimes an audible mieow of surprise and dismay.

Feeling very grateful to Zara for helping out with watering over the last couple of nights. The hours involved lately have been hard work and leaving my body stiff and sore. I’ve adopted a policy of trying to keep my body moving while watering so as to not stiffen up in my joints as I move slowly around the garden beds. Otherwise known as ‘Dancing in the Moonlight’. The other day I was watering early enough to have the stereo blasting out from the house to provide a soundtrack to my shenanigans. It was a pleasant change from having to provide my own sound track.

So hot, gardening not much fun in this weather. Back to our favourite spot.

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Zara picked this lovely bunch of flowers from the garden yesterday. She came up with the idea of picking some of everything flowering in the garden. There are probably a few things out there that she missed but I thought she did a pretty awesome arrangement and included a good range of things. I think she can name them all as well.