As usual, I love the way the garden looks right now. January is such a wonderful time in the garden! Everything is at its peak of beauty, and the weeds haven’t taken over yet. I took a few minutes the other day to make a video tour. It was interesting watching it this afternoon. The little lettuces in the last minute have doubled in size since I took the video two days ago! And, it’s raining today, with more predicted tomorrow, so things should grow even more. (I also noticed that two of the cats managed to get themselves into the last couple of minutes!)
Ahaura
Three Years Old
There are a few extra cameras floating around here right now. Several people have either upgraded or gotten phones that take good pictures, so the old cameras were up for grabs. One of the boys gave Miss Joy an old camera that still works, and she spent several days taking pictures of whatever caught her fancy. Some turned out fairly good, so here is a glimpse at life as seen by a three-year-old.
Little Girls
We got some good pictures of our little girls over the past couple of months! This was an evening we went to visit some friends. One of their children spread dish soap on the trampoline, and the children all had great fun! Later, we bathed Miss Joy and the youngest of the children of that family.
The little girls occasionally make soup. Here, they are stirring soup in “pots” over “stoves.”
James bought a new backpack, and put Miss Joy in it to test it out. She was delighted!
The girls were walking around one day eating sorrel leaves and checking the strawberries for ripe fruit.
One of her brothers gave Miss Joy a camera, and she had great fun playing with it for a few days.
Elijah arm-wrestled the little girls one day! I was too late to get him wrestling with Miss Joy; she needed some quality time with her thumb and blankie after losing.
Miss Joy put this cloth on her head one day, and then brought me the camera and asked me to take a picture of her.
Critters
Somehow, I ended up with a lot of pictures of animals this month.
One of the boys borrowed my camera to take pictures of the cattle to share with his cousin. This is the two milk cows. Bluebell is on the left, and her mother Poppy on the right.
The young stock were on top of the hill that day. The two biggest ones are steers, and the two smaller ones are heifers. The Jersey heifer is Poppy’s calf from this year, Rosie. The other is a beefy that Simon brought us from the farm on which he worked. We assumed it was a bull, and gave it a masculine name…until Gayle and Elijah went across the road to castrate it two months later. That’s when we realized that no one had ever looked to see what gender it was! We changed her name.
The calves. Rosie and Ramona are best friends.
These cats are not best friends, but they do end up sleeping in close proximity sometimes, when conditions are right! This is my miniature greenhouse. It was getting too hot to start plants in it, so I left it propped up. Now, I have a frame covered in shade cloth, in the same place, to start the summer’s crops.
This cheeky weka lives in our garden. It scratches the mulch away from the plants and eats the tomatoes.
The flax in front of the house are in bloom, and we often see a tui drinking from them.
I was hanging laundry one morning, and one of the tuis serenaded me from a nearby tree. It went on long enough that I was able to get a video of it!
One day, the boys took Mom on an adventure. At one farm, they saw this family of pigs.
At another farm, they saw these deer.
Someone was moving an old wool underlay one day, and discovered a bumblebee nest inside. We had never seen such a thing! Thankfully, no one got stung.
October 2022 Photos
As usual, I have a number of photos from October that didn’t fit into their own posts!
Gayle often walks somewhere with the little girls on Sunday afternoons. They like to go down to the bridge, and one time he took a picture of them on the sign for our little town.
One evening, Miss Joy requested that someone take a picture of her holding Princess!
One day, we saw helicopters flying over the river. The next day, they were flying over it again. We watched closely, and saw them following the riverbed exactly. We couldn’t figure out what was happening, but then we started hearing jet boats, as well. I searched online for awhile, and finally found information about a jet boat marathon that was happening. One leg of it was up the Grey River, and into the Ahaura! We went down to the riverbed to watch the boats go back downstream. They move fast!
Our heifer Bluebell had her calf in October. It was a little bull, so we decided not to keep him. We were glad that the farm Simon was working on wanted him for breeding!
Someone gave a battery-powered car to the family in whose home we meet for church. The little children love it! It can be operated with pedals and a steering wheel on it, or by a remote control. Here, Miss Joy and another baby were riding while one of the older children operated the remote.
I think these pictures are actually from September. The greenhouse was looking pretty lush! Since then, I have ripped out the old lettuce and planted peppers along the right-hand side.
I did an experiment with onions this year. The ones to the left were planted from seed directly in the ground in May. To the right, the top tray is ones of the same kind that I planted in that try in June, and the others were a different variety, planted in the tray in July or early August. We set them all out in the main garden at the same time, in September. I am hoping for larger onions than usual! So far, the ones I started earliest are doing best. The ones started in June mostly died, and the red ones, started last, are doing fairly well.
This is how I plant onions. I dig a shallow trench and lay the roots in it, then cover them with soil. After a few days the plants stand upright, and, theoretically, start growing!
Napoleon Hill 4WD Trip
Elijah bought a Surf a few weeks ago, and badly wanted to try it out on a four wheel drive trip. He organized one on Labour Day, and a lot of friends came along. I stayed home, but Gayle took all the younger children–neither of the girls wanted to be left behind! Gayle, Elijah and James all took photos and let me use them. In this first picture, they were approaching the farm through which you gain access to the track.
Off on the trail! James took most of the pictures; he rode in a friend’s Land Rover, between Elijah’s Surf and Simon’s Safari, which another friend was driving.
The line of vehicles, taking a break.
The cemetery at Napoleon. About 100-150 years ago, this was a thriving mining town–today there are hardly any traces of it!
They drove through a couple of tunnels.
One boy rode his family’s quad bike. Partway through, it started having trouble, and they discovered that the battery was about to burst into flame! One family was driving a ute, and they were able to push the bike onto it to get it home.
I patched together several video clips from Gayle’s and Elijah’s phones and James’s camera. The last two clips, of the Surf going through a creek, are from a one-vehicle trip a few days later. This is the creek where we stopped on Christmas Day, thinking a vehicle couldn’t get through.
Ducklings!
The last morning I walked down to the bottom paddock to milk the cow before we brought them up here for grazing for a few weeks, I noticed a pair of Paradise ducks with a new brood of ducklings. They were swimming out of our small creek into the big one. A few days later, when the boys went down to play, Mr. Imagination soon came up to get his camera because they were back in the small creek. He got these pictures. Aren’t they cute!
August/September 2022 Photos
It’s time to catch up with the pictures I have from August and September. When our blogs went down, I quit posting on the weekends like I had been, because I couldn’t for a week and then had to redo two months worth of posts. Then, because we changed hosts, we had to pay hundreds of dollars for the new hosting service. There was no way we were staying with a company that frequently had downtime and then completely lost everything for a week, and didn’t have it all backed up when they got it back! We realized that my blog is taking up most of the space we need, because I have so many pictures. Esther found a program that compresses them to a much smaller format, so I’m working my way through the archives, finding all the pictures I used in old posts and compressing them, removing them from the blog and uploading them again. It’s fun to see all those old pictures from when my now-10-year-old was tiny, but it’s a lot of work! I have made it through almost the first year of blogging so far. As you can imagine, that takes a lot of time, which means I haven’t been thinking so much about putting up new posts. At the same time, seeing what I did with my blog back then in 2011 and 2012 has inspired me to put up more frequent, shorter posts. What do you think? Would you rather that, or longer, more infrequent catch-up posts? Comment and let me know what you like.
One evening I went into Esther’s room to talk to her about something and looked out her window. The clouds were incredible! I tried taking pictures with a camera and my iPad, and this is the best one I got. The clouds were even more spectacular than that!
We did this craft when we studied Uganda. It’s supposed to be a lion with a mane! I didn’t have the right colors of paper, so we made do with what we had.
Poppy had her calf on the first of August–another cute, tiny heifer. We named the new baby Rosie.
This is Mr. Imagination, Miss Joy, and Little Miss going across the road to visit the new calf.
The magnolia tree bloomed. That’s always beautiful! Half the tree seems to have died, though, which we can’t figure out.
Miss Joy loved her puzzles! She has three or four that she knows how to do, and some days she has put them together half a dozen times in a row. I think she’s gotten bored with them, though, because she hasn’t asked for them for awhile.
Pork!
A few weeks ago, a friend called us to say that someone had a lot of wild pigs that had been killed in a competition, and they were available for anyone who came to get them. Elijah drove the 15 minutes to pick up three for us and two for another friend. We won’t turn down free meat! We got ours skinned that night.
The next day, Esther and I spent the morning boning them out. Wild pork has a rather gamy flavor, so I wanted to make most of the meat into sausage. We saved two legs for ham, and threw away one entire pig because it smelled so strong we couldn’t stand it. We ended up with 70 pounds of meat to make into sausage! She put it through the mincer, and then we weighed the meat and mixed in the seasonings. Then, she put it through the mincer again.
After Gayle and Elijah got home, we stuffed the sausage into casings.
Miss Joy had a great time helping to package the sausages!
Now, we’re enjoying (only slightly gamy) delicious pork sausages!
Tomatoes
It’s that time of year when we start all the tomato plants we need for the upcoming summer! This year, Esther wanted to help, so she could learn how I do it; most years, I do all of this project by myself. Late in August, we put the seeds into the soil.
We put the tray of seeds in the greenhouse under a second layer of plastic until they germinated. Esther cleaned out that corner of the greenhouse. There are several tomato plants there that she transplanted in there from the garden, where they started growing late in the summer. We had kept an extra layer of plastic over them all winter, and they lived, although, with low light levels for a few months, they didn’t thrive. One has a green tomato on it, though!
About a week or a week and a half later, the tiny seedlings were ready to prick out and transplant into individual punnets. It was a beautiful day, so we sat at the picnic table to do this job.
I took this picture on the 25th of September, about a month after we initially planted the seeds. The plants had been in our hothouse, a frame covered with greenhouse plastic on our back step, which faces the sun.
Today, the 29th of September, five weeks after starting the seeds, I decided it was time to transplant the little tomatoes into bigger pots. Little Miss helped with this job; she loves writing the labels! We didn’t get the entire job done, but did about a fourth of them, choosing the largest plants to start with. Now, they get to live and grow in the big greenhouse until time to plant them in the garden.
