April, May, June

Winter is now in full swing, having had several frosts around here and snow on the Tararua Ranges. Some trees started losing their leaves in early April and were bare by the end of April. Others still have red and yellow leaves on their branches now.

It has been very wet for the last several months so I haven't done a lot of anything in the garden. I finally sprayed the weeds all around the property about a month ago. Went through 15 litres of weedspray all up. They are slowly dying.

The zucchini finally stopped fruiting at the beginning of May and we ate the last one last week. Still have heaps of frozen, pickled and dehydrated fruit to use so don't think we'll need to buy any for the rest of the year. The cherry tomatoes still continue to bear fruit, although the other tomato plants haven't produced much at all. I picked so many cherry tomatoes we couldn't eat them all and a lot of them went off. I tried pickling some. Not sure how it turned out as it is still maturing. The six broccoli I planted in March never really grew very big. I picked two of them last week for one meal. The ones I grew over summer were several meals in each plant.

We have had a lot of feijoas off the tree this year although not sure if it was as much as last year. I made a batch of feijoa jelly as we'd run out of last year's apple jelly. It is alright but not as good as apple jelly.

We have had about half a dozen passionfruit grow this year and none of them have ripened. We had another pumpkin plant grow wild out of the compost. But no pumpkins grew on it. I think it was too cold.

The celery is growing well. The orange and mandarin trees are fruiting again.

Have spent a lot of time over the last few months shifting logs from fallen trees. The bottom paddock is still full of debris from the big storm two years ago. I've been shifting and tidying as much as I can but it's a lot of work and the big stuff is going to need a chainsaw before I can shift it. Also a few months back some contractors from the power company came and topped our trees as they were growing too close to the power lines. They conveniently cut the branches up into small sizes but left them all lying in the paddocks, so I've been slowly shifting them too.

We have been using the fire a lot lately. It has been working better than it did last winter. Discovered a large part of the problem last year was bringing the firewood directly in from outside and putting in on the fire. It was too cold / damp to burn very hot. This year we've cleared a large space near the fireplace and are bringing in about a weeks worth of firewood at a time. We're going through it very quickly though which worries me.

We got a new dog a couple of months ago. Another Border Collie, a girlfriend for Tim. Now we have two dogs, two cats and two kids. A full house.

Other than that the main activity around here has just been one of maintenance. Keeping the grass and weeds down as much as possible, which is difficult when it is so damp and too cold to dry out. And for now my main priority is just keeping warm.

-M