Ahaura

Odds and Ends From February 2019

March 30, 2019 by NZ Filbruns 1 Comment

One evening, I took the camera down the hill to where I milk. We are deeply grateful to a local man for allowing us the use of this large paddock, and Poppy appreciates all the grass in it! Pansy has her own fenced-off corner to keep her from direct contact with her mother (for obvious reasons), but they can be fairly close. Notice the mountains across the river? I enjoy seeing them in all their different moods.

To get into the paddock, we cut across the fence near the top of the hill, using this stile that my boys built (on the suggestions of the property owner). Then, we scramble carefully down a very steep hill.

I wanted to make lasagna one day, so Mr. Imagination helped me make the noodles. Yum!

This was one of our first big pickings of tomatoes. Last week’s, about a month after this photo was taken, we got about twice as many as are in this picture! We’re very thankful for such a good harvest from our 104 plants. Today, I’m making the third enormous batch of salsa, since my big boys eat so much. We just happen to have very spicy peppers this year, which makes the flavor they enjoy, so the popular vote this week was to make salsa instead of bottling whole tomatoes and juice. We had about 110 pints from the first two batches; I think we’ll have 60-70 more after today. Hope that’s enough! Hard-working teenage boys eat a lot, and one of them was eating it by the cupful when I asked for taste-testers this morning. Notice the pink and black tomatoes? We had a bumper crop from our heirloom plants this year. We’re loving eating those super-tasty ones!

Little Miss is watching me write this. She wanted me to write down her story, too: The man was picking apples. Then he saw the big, bad wolf, and then he made a brick house quickly and then he went in it and the big, bad wolf said, “Let me come in, let me come in.” Then the guy said, “No,” and then the big, bad wolf said, “Well, then, I will huff and I will puff and I will blow your house in.” Then he huffed and he puffed and he couldn’t blow the man’s house in. He said, “There’s a farmer’s tree down the road. Will you get up at 6:00 in the morning and come with me to the farmer’s?” The end.

Boys and Their Projects

March 23, 2019 by NZ Filbruns 1 Comment

My boys have been coming up with some good projects lately, like usual. Mr. Intellectual has built this chair. It hasn’t been used yet, because he wants to treat it for wood borer before he finishes it.

Mr. Diligence was being a clown one day. His little sister had been given a sticker book for Christmas, and when she finished taking the stickers out, he took all the extra and made a hat for himself.

Simon made these hatchet handles while I was gone. The red one is rimu, the white one is willow, and the dark one is blue gum. He said that wood was so hard that it took twice as long to shape and sand as the others did. The rimu is a pretty hard wood, but brittle; it splintered when he was throwing the hatchets. In its defense, it was 80 years old; we tore it off the inside of the walls of Esther’s room last year. The blue gum is the strongest, and he likes it the best. He made the handle for the knife in the second photo from some redwood, when we lived at the last house.

Mr. Diligence built me this cupboard from some of those rimu boards. He spent several months on it, off and on, until he finally got the last coat of teak oil on it and the boys brought it into the house a few weeks ago. There are five shelves in it, and it is a perfect pantry for me. Now, the linen closet is much better organized, and the shelves are no longer in danger of collapsing from the weight of the cans stacked on them!

Mr. Diligence also got started on building the window seat we have been talking about ever since we bought this house. (Can you tell that he has to have a project to work on?) He built a bin into it for Little Miss’s toys. We’re planning to cover it with a cushion as soon as we get hold of a foam mattress to cut down to size. We bought the upholstery fabric for it—but our piece of leftover foam rubber wasn’t big enough. So, the seat is rather hard right now.

The little boys and Little Miss like to play in the sandbox. One day, they built this elaborate castle.

Simon occasionally spends some time working on his Austin. One day I found him polishing the chrome.

Another day he took it on a short test drive. Little Miss was getting ready to cry because I told her she couldn’t go along, so I asked if she wanted to take a picture. This is what she got as he was going out the street. Simon was excited that the car ran, but found out that he has to replace the gas lines. Also, he couldn’t get it started again after he got home.

January 2019 Photos

March 17, 2019 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Whew…I’ve been getting a bit behind. I really don’t recommend taking a three-week trip overseas in the middle of summer, then trying to jump right back into school and preserving the harvest when you get home, if you want to stay on top of things. And then, of course, pregnancy to add to the mix…and a three-day trip to the other side of the island last weekend…well, anyway, here are the last few photos from January. Sometime this week I hope to look through memory cards again so I can start catching up on everything that’s been happening since the middle of February!

The canoe got its last strips inserted, and Mr. Intellectual finished sanding the outside, before we left. They got the fibreglass they need to cover it, but haven’t started that process yet.

When we see an escort vehicle go past with an “Oversize Vehicle” sign on it, we usually watch to see what is coming. Usually, we see a large digger (excavator), but sometimes it’s something more exciting, like this bulldozer from a gold mine near Reefton. This machine is HUGE!

Here is a more common sight. I think a little boy was experimenting with my camera to see how he could best get pictures of vehicles going past.

This was one of our first harvests of zucchini. Isn’t it pretty? We’ve had many times more than this with subsequent harvests; I’m very happy with a number of the crops from the garden.

Here is a bellbird, as the flax blossoms were coming to an end.

One day, the boys picked a bunch of peas from a neighbor’s field, after he offered us what we wanted. The boys spent the morning building a pea sheller. It worked well—for a few minutes. Then, something stripped out and they finished the job by hand!

We sure enjoyed the kittens before they went to new homes!

Boats

January 16, 2019 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Mr. Intellectual continues to work on his strip canoe. He finally got all the strips glued together, and has been working on sanding it. It’s beautiful! Here it is nearly finished, and then with the last strip in place and part of the sanding done.

Meanwhile, the boys have been enjoying their barrel boat. Here it is after the first use, when they went down the Grey River.

This was the day they used it next, when we went down to the creek below our town with some friends to spend a Sunday afternoon in the water. They punted up and down the creek a number of times, but then that got boring, so they decided to sink it. The only way they could get it to sink was to take the plug out of the end and let it fill up with water—and even that took a long time!

Then, they used it on Christmas Day on a lake—I’ll publish a post in a few weeks about that. The most recent time they used it, Simon took Esther and one of her friends, and our two little boys, down the Grey River. They sunk it, and now they have to rebuild the motor—or dry it out, or something. It ended up quite dented, as you can see in this photo that Mr. Intellectual took to show someone.

December 2018 Photos

January 12, 2019 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

As usual, there are a lot of photos that don’t fit in any other post.

Mr. Sweetie was enamoured with this cicada that he found. It’s only an inch long.

We planted sunflowers in a square for a playhouse for the two youngest. They figured out what it was pretty quickly, and Mr. Imagination built a table for it. He took these next three pictures.

I planted zucchinis close to the sunflower house.

Little Miss loves helping me in the kitchen. She was actually quite helpful when I made Tomato-Cheese Pinwheels recently.

The canoe continues to take shape. Mr. Intellectual adds a strip or two every day.

The kittens are growing! Here they are at a month old.

This is Mr. Sweetie’s lego airplane.

Here is another example of the interesting vehicles we see driving past. This is an old Land Rover.

One afternoon, Little Miss helped Esther and I to make tortillas. She loves helping in the kitchen!

Another day, I sorted through a box of clothes set aside for her to grow into. She was thrilled to find that she could now wear this pretty dress!

Flax

January 1, 2019 by NZ Filbruns 4 Comments

We have a very large New Zealand flax plant outside our window. We have been enjoying watching the birds and bees pollinating it since it started blooming.

First, the flower stalks grew buds.

Then, the flowers opened.

Sometimes, this tui comes to call.

There are always bees around.

We also see a lot of starlings getting a drink of nectar. They end up with an orange cap on their head! I haven’t gotten a good picture of that, so here’s the best we could do.

Here’s another starling.

A bellbird has been coming, too, but it’s shy enough that if it sees the camera it is gone. This is the best I could get of it.

We are really enjoying the birds as they enjoy the flax flowers!

November 2018 photos Part 2

December 25, 2018 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Here are the rest of the random photos from November.

Princess tried out the bag of walnuts for a bed one evening. She soon decided it was too lumpy and hard, and moved to the laundry hamper.

We got home from town one evening, and immediately Little Miss got her school book and got started coloring pictures. She loves her preschool workbooks!

We enjoyed watching the tadpoles grow and develop legs.

The lemon tree outside our door was covered with blossoms for awhile. They smell so good! There are still some flowers, but also a lot of baby lemons.

Mr. Sweetie and Mr. Imagination in the garden. We left strips of sod between beds to make nice paths to walk on. Because it rains so much, I didn’t want to be walking in mud.

Our rhododendron bush.

Living on the main road, we see all sorts of interesting vehicles. Some of the motor homes/ house busses are fascinating! Usually I don’t have the chance to get a picture, but this one stopped for a minute. It’s just a shed on the back of a truck.

Mr. Sweetie brought this huge bug in one day. We concluded, after some searching, that it is a huhu beetle (correct me if you know what it really is). That’s a lid that fits on a standard large-mouth preserving jar, so you can see how big the beetle is.

November 2018 Photos Part 1

December 22, 2018 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

November was a busy month! I ended up with a lot of photos that don’t really work for their own posts, so I’ll divide them in half.

The strip canoe is coming along nicely. This was early November; by now most of the hull is finished. I’ll have to get another picture soon.

The boys were in a hurry to have a boat and couldn’t wait for the strip canoe to be finished, so they cut open four barrels and welded them into a boat.

After the boat was finished, they attached the motor that was given to Simon, which he fixed so it would work, and asked their dad to take them down to the river one Sunday afternoon. The three oldest boys boated down the Grey River to the next town, 10 km (6 miles) by road but I’m sure farther by river. It took twice as long as we estimated, because they often had to get out and push it over shallow areas, and they sheared a pin once and had to fix it. (They didn’t have a spare, but found an old fence with loose ends of wire hanging off, cut a piece of that and used it for a pin!) They came back soaked, both from pushing the boat through the rapids, and from the rain that fell for awhile, but excited and ready to do it again!

We had quite the rain storm the first week of November. Here, we got 127 mm (5 inches) of rain in two days; up in the mountains there was twice that much or more. The river was raging from bank to bank. The younger boys and I drove across the bridge and back in the van just to see what it looked like. A woman drowned in a tributary of this river the evening of the day we took these pictures, far upstream, when the bank gave way under her as she and her family were looking at the flooding.

We also drove down to the creek below our town. It was flooded, too, of course.

Mr. Sweetie succeeded in opening a mango seed. I had never seen what is inside!

When we were in Christchurch in November, we went to a bulk foods store, and one of the things I was excited to find was corn masa flour! It’s yellow, rather than the white I’m used to using, but to find it at all was special. I made tortillas out of it, and then decided to make them into chips.

Mr. Imagination and Little Miss enjoyed brushing the tortillas with melted coconut oil, and then I cut them into chips. We sprinkled them generously with salt, and baked them for about 15 minutes. They were delicious—but quite hard. I think next time I’ll bake them for a shorter time.

Orwell Creek

December 1, 2018 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

We are able to walk to a creek in about 5 minutes, and reach the spot where it empties into the river in 10 minutes. The boys found a spot that is deep and calm enough for swimming, so twice in the last several weeks we’ve walked down there on a Sunday afternoon. One of those days, they took Mr. Imagination’s boat along, and Simon floated in it down to the swimming hole. Then, they played with it and swam for awhile. It is a beautiful spot down there!

This time that we went down was two days after a torrential rain (we got 5 inches in two days; some places higher in the mountains got 2-3 times that much). The river obviously ran over this place—see how the grass is laid down!

Notice how the creek was still high. It had gone down about 6 inches since the day before, though.

When it was time to go back, Simon and Mr. Diligence twisted a grass rope with which to pull the boat up around a couple of bends, so they didn’t have to carry it so far.

These pictures were from the second time we walked down. Foxglove is in bloom everywhere now.

We crossed the creek just above its mouth. I liked this scene, with Gayle carrying Little Miss.

Mr. Diligence, Mr. Sweetie, and Mr. Imagination didn’t need help!

Simon gave Little Miss a ride home in his bike trailer, but going up the hill to get back to town was hard work. He stopped and had her push a little ways!

Here’s a video of the boat ride. Somehow, the quality turned out pretty poor; don’t try to full-screen it.

October 2018 Photos

November 10, 2018 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Little Miss taught herself to write her name the way it is on this picture. For a week or so, she spelled it MPI (or IPM or PMI). Then she added the A. Later that evening, Esther showed her how to properly spell her name, and she’s been doing it that way ever since. I’ve never had a 3-year-old who could write like this! She drew the picture, too, by the way, for her grandma when her daddy was going there.

We currently have three turkeys—two toms and a hen. They live in this pen. Mr. Diligence decided they need a proper run to live in, so he got started building one.

He enlisted the help of his brothers, and got started putting in posts, which are long pieces of wood that Gayle brought home from work for firewood.

Mr. Sweetie in the hole.

Mr. Imagination in the hole.

The run will go out from the chicken coop and around several bushes. Mr. Diligence is hoping that the bushes will provide enough cover for the turkeys to sit on eggs.

One of my gardens. By now, the plants are several times bigger! We’ve been harvesting kale leaves and lettuce and radishes from here.

The clothesline was supposed to go up and down, but the crank appeared to be broken when we moved here. For a birthday present, Mr. Diligence opened it up to see what was wrong. He discovered that it had simply slipped off the track because someone forced it down too far, so the boys easily fixed it for me. Now I can put my laundry up higher!

I bought these cups to start pumpkins in. Little Miss made stacks with them—Daddy, Mommy, and herself!

The doll sent to Little Miss by an aunt from America. She named it Susie, and I had the fun of sewing a couple of dresses for it.

One of her brothers made this daisy chain for her.

Mr. Intellectual moved the sheep across the road for more grazing. I was amused at the way he carried them.