Amid the chaos and pace of gearing up for Spring with plenty of gardening activities, doing repairs, maintenance and renovations on our house and beginning our homeschool journey with Phoebe, we have managed to grab two small breaks away this month so far.
Our first trip was to Levin and involved a lovely stay at
Annandale Manor (a cracker of a charming B+B, where Phoebe asked if we could bring Luke "next time we come") on the way there and a night catching up with Unca Ray and Auntie Raema on the way home in Napier. Very cool - we even managed to collect our (reasonably large - as in the car was completely full!!) order of bare-rooted fruit trees from the Edible Garden Nursery in Palmerston North on the way back home.
Our second journey was this week and we got up through the Waioeka Gorge to Whakatane, via Opotiki - compulsory stop at
Rostcards Cafe, of course! I love the powder room - oh, and the coffee's really good - oh, yeah - and service with spark!
We stayed at the Thornton Beach Holiday Park in a cabin and enjoyed walking the windswept beach and just relaxing a little.
Pretty grainy shot - Phoebe LOVES jumping/trampolines/circus-influenced play, etc - so this massive jumping pillow was right up her alley!
After meeting a wonderful couple on a biodynamic and organic farmlet in Whakatane we fitted in a dip at the
Awakeri Hot Springs before driving back home.
This cute guy is a beautiful native owl, our Morepork, perched high up in a Mamaku in the fernery area of the farmlet we visited - we were very surprised to see such a rare daytime sight! Again, not the greatest pic - am learning how to drive the camera....
We've been rather busy over the last few weeks with lots of planting in our orchard, filling in the gaps and hoping to create an edible forest - a Permaculture Food Forest is our aim. There is still far too much grass for our likeing and we will soon be fixing that. As well as another bunch of beautiful heirloom varieties, we have been adding in Kowhai, a native with a very attractive yellow flower and the very useful attribute of being a nitrogen-fixing, slender, lacy tree (will still let in lots of light) and are about to add small tagasaste(tree lucerne) plants, which also fix nitrogen from the air into the soil. Even more amazingly as we found out this effect is increased as we 'chop and drop' the trimmings/prunings where they fall as mulch, as the plants then release nitrogen from their root systems to compensate for being pruned! Cool! Clever Mother Nature - we love her! For our lower layer we've ordered loads of kumara plants, which will grow as a thick ground cover and we have an excess of tiny strawberry plants - they may like to ramble around under the trees?
there's something so happy and honest about simple colours singing out. And living in the countryside echoes of barns and hardworking farm buildings feels like a comfortable colour fit.
With an overflowing box of yarns and lots of small balls of different pinks I have had a lot of fun this Winter putting together this cardi for Phoebe from all the bits and pieces I already had, rather than buying new. Phoebe seemed to really like giving me instructions about which colour to knit next and what the pockets needed to have on them, etc. Next time, however, I would buy a pattern!
I don't seem to be able to escape the fact that nearly every photo lately has a very cool 'bloom' to it - we really do see the change of season here. Hoping our strawberries are still happy to be getting so chilled and well watered as well.
It becomes a dash outside on frosty mornings in Midwinter to race out and water all the tender plants like lettuces and our teeny things like newly planted seedlings before Father Sun raises his big bald head up over the mountain and defrosts them so quickly their cells would explode and DIE! Maybe a little dramatic.... I think Phoebe was checking the depth of the ice on the pond - and probably poking a hole or two so the fish are ok - there are still fish in there - very hardy ones, I guess!
Not really sure (how could one, ever?!) what Luke was thinking here... one of our zero degrees mornings early last week...I mean, he had a room temperature bowl of filtered rain water right by his dog bed all night and still here he is trying to lick a frozen trough with sediment of goodness knows what, bugs and pine pollen...go figure! Luckily, he did NOT get stuck.
