Our family's life in New Zealand
The garden is at its peak of beauty right now, so I decided to do a video walk through it. I was especially thinking of you, Mom, and hoping you can watch it.
I had fun photographing some of our harvests lately. The first picture was my harvest the evening of Christmas Day; the rest were this past week (the 3rd-8th of January). I love bringing in gorgeous fresh vegetables!
Here are the last of the pictures we took in February! It seems like we haven’t been taking a lot of pictures since our trip, so I may end up getting caught up soon.
The Sunday afternoon right after Simon sprained his ankle on their tramp, we were relaxing after getting home from church when we heard the ice cream truck coming. It plays the traditional tune of ice cream trucks, and comes through randomly, several times a year, on Sunday afternoons. Simon decided that his little brothers needed practice making purchases, so he pulled $20 out of his wallet and sent them across the road to flag down the truck and buy ice creams for all the boys and Little Miss! While the truck was stopped there, several other neighbors came out to buy ice cream as well.
I have no idea what this was about!
I found this blossom one day when I was picking zucchini. I have never seen one so huge!
The garden was so beautiful in February! Picking green beans in this tunnel was so easy; I’m definitely doing that again. I planted two varieties of runner beans—Blue Lake and Cobra. The Cobra beans came on first, and produced bushels and bushels, then stopped; the Blue Lakes came on about that time. They, too, produced bushels and bushels. Meanwhile, the Cobra looked like they were dying; the leaves were even turning yellow. Then, when the Blue Lakes quit, the Cobras came on again, with new foliage and lots of nice beans—not nearly as many as the first round, but enough for several meals for the ten of us in a week’s time. I’m planning to plant both varieties again, but maybe more of the Cobra and fewer of the Blue Lake. That way, I can do the bulk of the canning at once with the Cobras, and have the Blue Lakes to fill in for eating on while the Cobras take a break. (A bit of trivia: It’s easy to tell the difference between the seeds—the Cobras have black seeds, and the Blue Lakes have white ones. This is significant because the labels I used to mark which kind was which got lost, so I wasn’t sure which I liked better till I saved seeds from both and compared with what was left in the seed packets!)
Little Miss wanted me to take a photo of this dill plant, since I had asked her to bring the camera out to get a photo of the beans. The garden doesn’t look this pretty anymore. Almost everything is dead now.
A week ago, the garden was about the most beautiful I have ever seen! Everything was in beautiful shape. Then, we had a week of rain. We got 185 mm (7 1/2 in) of rain in 5 days, and one of the days we had gale-force winds, as well. There was hail a couple of times, too. A lot of plants, especially lettuces, got badly bruised, and the peas got knocked partially off their trellis. The runner beans got broken off at the top of their trellis. Because of the rain, the stems of a lot of plants are very brittle, so when I try to straighten them out, for example to help a runner bean up its trellis, they snap off. It could have been a lot worse, though. In Motueka, on Christmas weekend, they had about five inches of hail! I’m thankful we didn’t get that.
Here are the tomatoes. The ones in front are the South Australian Dwarfs, which don’t do well with staking but put on a prolific crop.
Zucchini is in the row closest to us; the rest are pumpkins. We spread bird netting over the greenhouse for the pumpkins to climb up. 
Inside the greenhouse. The cucumbers are nearly done. The pepper plants just to the left in the middle lived over the winter. We put a small, plastic-covered box over them so they didn’t freeze. They are loaded with chilis already, and I’ve been picking bell peppers, too.
Beside the greenhouse is this bed. I have dwarf (or bush) beans, and then runner beans on the trellis. We’ve had enough runner beans for a couple of meals already.
The other side of the trellis has cucumbers, and at the far end are some climbing zucchinis.
The peas have this trellis. The peak of it is about five feet high, and before the storm the plants stood up at least a foot over that. I’m trying to get them to stand up again, but I’m not sure it’ll work.
Corn, lettuce, beet root, leeks and onions.
I planted lettuces where the corn didn’t come up in this bed.
Lettuce, carrots, and potatoes behind them. I have dill all over the garden. We just weed out the excess, and have plenty for pickles.
We found this giant in the garden when we came home from our big trip! Stuffed zucchini on the menu, for sure.
There were a couple of large cucumbers, too.
This was my harvest one evening. Yum! We eat well this time of year.
Today’s helpful tip: If you buy plastic for a greenhouse, make sure it is high quality. We bought greenhouse plastic twice, a few years apart. The first cover was used in Cheviot for a couple of years, and then we bought another cover for another greenhouse. It was never used over there, but we brought it here, and when we set up the greenhouse last year, we used both pieces to cover it. The newer piece shredded after just a year, and when we had a couple of storms in the last few weeks, with high winds, it blew off—in pieces! The older one is still in good shape. So, we bought a new piece of plastic to cover the entire house, so it won’t have to be pieced together. When I got on the website of a greenhouse supply company in the North Island, I found the end of a roll of plastic that was bigger than we needed, for less money than ordering the exact amount cut to size! That gives us enough to recover the miniature greenhouse I use for starting plants. On Saturday, the boys got the old cover off, and they and their dad put the new one on. At one point in the afternoon, I was urgently called outside—all hands were needed. They had unfolded the new cover and put it over the greenhouse—the wrong direction! I got out there to see this: 
After I took that picture, Simon said, “Wait! Let me pose!” So, he struck this pose of wondering what to do about the mess they were in.
A few hours later I went out to see how the project was progressing, and they were finishing fastening the plastic to the roll-ups on the sides. They had the plastic securely fastened down to the side of the house, but the bottom foot and a half or so on each side rolls up on pipes. 
This is what I have growing inside. Lots of salad stuff! I was out there today, and the lettuce to the left has about doubled in size in the last two days! 
When I dug potatoes one day, I found this funny duck-shaped one. Mr. Imagination loved it and took a picture of it.
A few days later when the boys harvested pumpkins, he brought this one in to weigh it. He was quite impressed with its size! (That’s 6.3 kilos, or around 13 pounds.)
As usual, we had a lot of green tomatoes at the end of the season. This lot was ripe and could be canned as whole tomatoes or juice: 
but we also had this to deal with: 
I went online to find recipes, and discovered that green tomatoes are as safe to can as ripe ones, or maybe more so, since they are more acidic. I decided to make green tomato salsa first. I didn’t follow the recipe exactly, but the changes I made would have made it safer, since I reduced the volume of peppers. This is the proportions I used; you can find the original recipe here:
1.5 kilos green tomatoes
400 gm onions
2 small HOT peppers plus several milder ones (recipe called for 250 gm; I used more like 50-100 gm)
2 cloves garlic
1/2 cup vinegar (called for lime juice, which I didn’t have)
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon black pepper
I coarsely chopped the tomatoes and onions, then put the peppers and garlic in the blender with the vinegar. After adding the vinegar mixture to the pot, I mixed in the salt and pepper, then brought the whole lot to a boil. I did 4-7 times this amount in each pot, using three pots at a time. And here’s a tip if you do something like this: weigh the tomatoes after chopping, then use a dry-erase marker to write the weights on the outside of the pot. It washes off easily when you’re done, and you don’t lose track of how many batches you’re making! I just discovered that this year. After the salsa has boiled for a little while, put in jars and seal. We don’t like this for eating as salsa, but it’s great in soups. I’m planning to use it through the year when I am making a soup that I want some spice in; I won’t have to chop onions for the soup, either!
Here are the jars of this salsa that we canned. A lot of the tomatoes were half ripe, which is why it looks fairly red. (I should mention that the reason we didn’t leave them to finish ripening was that the slugs were getting them and they would have rotted before ripening.)
I also experimented with pickling green tomatoes (results aren’t in yet), and made a few pots of half-ripe ones into juice. It’s not quite as tasty as juice from ripe tomatoes, but when I use it with ripe ones, we don’t mind it at all. Just a way to squeeze a little more production out of the garden!
All fruit and vege shops were shut down during lockdown, and we don’t have any on the Coast anyway. However, I have my own private one. One day I went out “shopping” and this was what I brought home for dinner. So much fun! I love walking out to the garden every afternoon to harvest what we need for that evening’s meal, and getting the rest from the freezer or jar room. We are rich, and I am thankful God has given us this place where we can grow so much food. (I think it’s good for my mental health as well as our physical health, too!)
We took quite a few pictures this week! Miss Joy has been quite busy, and she is so cute we can’t resist taking pictures of her. She learned to climb up on things, and one evening she was delighted to get up on a box and find another box within reach, with delicious peaches in it! Then, she sampled the zucchinis that were next to her.
We were given a lot of black boy peaches last week, and spent several days canning them. Isn’t canned fruit beautiful!
I came home from my trip to town this week and found these “zumpkins”. Now I know who picked them! We left the self-seeded pumpkin plants in the garden; obviously some of them were a cross between spaghetti squash and zucchini. They are good with meatloaf baked in them.
After we got home from town, I carried Miss Joy into the house in her carseat. The next day she was playing in the living room, and climbed into it. Somehow she tipped it over on top of herself. She wasn’t worried; she just crawled away, with the seat going with her! Someone called her a turtle.
Mr. Sweetie was washing the kitchen floor, so I told him to turn a bench over to keep Miss Joy out of the kitchen. She immediately crawled over to it, stood up, and put her leg over it. So much for that idea!
Storytime!
And game time!
While I was making lunch today, I went out to the garden to harvest veges for our stir-fry. I brought in this kale, silverbeet (Swiss Chard), basil, spring onions, and a rock melon. I told Gayle I had been to the shop. He said I’m the kind of woman who goes to the market every day. I replied that it’s sometimes several times a day! Sure enough, by the end of the day I had been out there three times, even though it was raining. This is my favorite kind of shop!
This is the stir-fry I made. Except for the chicken breast, it was all fresh from the garden. We’re eating well right now.
The garden is at its peak as far as beauty this week. It is so lush and green! We’ll probably get more of a harvest in another couple of weeks than we are now, but by then it won’t be as beautiful, so I took some pictures this week of what I get to enjoy.
This was my harvest on Wednesday afternoon: zucchini, cucumbers, spring onions, beetroot, radishes, lettuce, green and purple beans, basil, a cabbage, and a kohlrabi.
As you walk into the garden between the garage and the container, this is the first garden patch you come to. There are climbing sugar snap peas and runner beans along the side of the container, and beyond that is a tomato patch. The sunflower/cosmos “house” is just past them, and there are pansies planted in the top of the stump. Next is a bed of cabbage and broccoli, with some calendula in it. I also have a few tomatillos and ground cherries in that bed, but you can’t see them in this photo. The next bed has a few cucumbers at this end, then cauliflower, kohlrabi, silverbeet, and then kale. The second photo shows that bed better; past the kale is the old lettuce bed, which needs cleaned out, and then cabbage. On the other side of the path is a patch of cucumbers and corn, and there are self-seeded pumpkins here and there. The turkey run is on the other side of the fence, past the corn.
Turn around, and past the red currants, you’ll see this patch of tomatoes and green beans, with cucumbers at the far end. The greenhouse is beside them. The pink/lavender building is the back side of our garage; the building in the back middle of the picture is the neighbor’s workshop, where they maintain their fleet of tractors and other agricultural equipment. Our three youngest have been putting water in the yellow bathtub and playing in it.
Go into the greenhouse through the south door and this is what you see. To the left is a large, self-seeded South Australian Dwarf tomato plant, then a few okras, and then my peppers and chilis.
To the right are the cucumbers, which I’m training up on strings. 
Just past the cucumbers is a small patch of rockmelons, and then some tomatoes and basil.
Next, there are a few beetroots, and then more tomatoes and basil.
On the left, past the peppers, are eggplants. I’m not sure what the tall plant is. It masqueraded as an eggplant when it was tiny, but now it looks like a nightshade. I’m waiting to see what the fruits look like when ripe before deciding on its fate. 
Past the eggplants, there are a few cabbages, then this silverbeet left from last winter, and then a tomatillo, tomatoes, and basil. On the right are a few carrots, more tomatoes and basil, and then a patch I planted in carrots (although they aren’t coming up) and two or three borage plants that grew when I gave up on them germinating and dumped the pots!
Come out of the north door of the greenhouse, turn left, and this is what you see. The first bed is beetroot, then spring onions and leeks at the far end, with a cosmos or two and some dill. Next is a small patch of potatoes and the onion patch, with dill in it, too. Close at hand, on the far right, is a Daikon radish that went to seed. The bees love it!
There is a small patch of lettuce at the corner of the potato patch.
The next bed over is mostly potatoes, and then we have a patch of broccoli and lettuce, with a few corn plants separating them from more potatoes. The last bed in this part of the garden is the corn.
Looking back toward the greenhouse and the garage. The white building on the other side of the dill is the chook coop (or turkey coop, right now). The plants with white flowers, sprinkled through the potatoes and onions, are coriander (cilantro) that self-seeded and is now going to seed again. I’m going to try to save the seeds.
These green beans and lettuce are at the end of the third patch of potatoes.
This is the far corner of the garden; these are the pumpkin plants.
On the other side of the path, behind the magnolia tree, is the zucchini patch, and the rest of the tomatoes. The turkey run is that fence past the tomatoes.
Here are the turkeys! The white one is the tom; the others are hens. We also have a white hen. She’s sitting on eggs at the moment, at the other end of the run. There are two more nests, too; I was informed yesterday that another hen is setting now.
We’ve had a dozen turkeys hatch this year; five have survived the weather. They’re getting pretty big already.
I also have a couple of small garden spots by the house, just outside our bedroom. It’s sunny and sheltered here, and handy to the kitchen, so I have my herbs here. This one has celery, parsley, basil and rosemary, and some flowers. There’s also a tomato that snuck in with a basil!
On the other side is this patch, with more basil, some silverbeet, calendula, nasturtiums in the bathtub, and still more tomatoes! Little Miss is loving picking edible flowers for our salads. We’ve been using calendula, nasturtiums, pansies, and borage. So fun to dress up a salad that way! The boys are disgusted, though. They like plain lettuce.
I am thoroughly enjoying the garden right now. We were able to get so many grass clippings this spring that weeds have been minimal, and the boys weeded the rest of it. We’ve also had a nice amount of rain (since the monsoon came to an end in early December and allowed things to start growing!), and with all the mushroom compost we bought, everything is doing well. What a blessing!
I have some wonderful children! I really don’t care if I receive any gifts for my birthday or not. It’s lovely to know that I am appreciated and loved, but they make sure I know that anyway. However, now that they are reaching adulthood, they are doing some incredible things for my birthday. Last year, they installed lights in the food-storage room in the garage, so I don’t have to find a flashlight when I need to get something from that room. I am appreciative every time I flick on the lights and open that door. This year, they topped that—when I didn’t think they could come up with anything I would like better!
My birthday was yesterday, and no one had any gifts for me. It was just a normal day, until after family worship—just at bedtime, actually. We finished our evening prayers, and the two youngest boys took off out of the room. They returned with:
A very interesting lemon cake that they had made without a recipe! It tasted fairly good, to my surprise. I was quite pleased with their thoughtfulness and initiative.
This morning early, the two oldest boys and Mr. Sweetie took off to town. I didn’t think much of it, because Simon goes to town on a Saturday morning every so often. They returned a few hours later, and brought a bag of kumara (sweet potatoes) into the house. I was surprised, and they told me, “We have a secret informant!” Last evening, Gayle had asked me, at bedtime, if the meal I made last night was my favorite. I told him I like it—but I like most of what I make! I had thought, while I was making it, that kumara would be good with it, but we didn’t have any. Apparently, he told the boys that I was hungry for kumara before they left!
The next act was to forbid me to go to the other side of the garage. I had planned to work in the greenhouse today, and pretended to fuss about not being able to go out there. Before lunchtime, however, they came in and told me to go out with them. I got to the greenhouse, and the first thing I saw was that the brick path was finished. The next thing I saw was:
A hazelnut tree and a lime tree! I wanted a hazelnut for a pollinator for the four we already planted, and the lime tree someone gave us froze this winter, so they replaced it for me. We’ll take more care with this one! Then, as I was admiring the trees, I suddenly got wet. Someone had turned on the sprinklers they had just installed along the ridgepole of the greenhouse! There are enough sprinklers to water the entire area, by simply connecting a hose to our outside tap! They had also tilled everything that needed replanting, so I got to play out there this afternoon and get some things planted. Isn’t this a beautiful place?
Freshly-planted cabbage, cauliflower, and broccoli.
The last of the lettuces we set out in April, and some of the tomatoes I’m growing for this summer.
My baby plant nursery, out of reach of the slugs, and the silverbeet (Swiss Chard) plants the neighbor dug out of his greenhouse and gave us. We’ll get a few meals off it before it bolts.
One of the sprinklers.
I love that brick path!
The sprinklers are on—Mr. Imagination likes to get wet!
Esther shared some photos with me that she took while they were doing the work. I enjoyed seeing them all working together!
They pulled out some of the bricks that were already in place, compacted the soil and leveled it, then finished the path.
The last step was to till everything again so it looked perfect!
I have a lot of random photos this month! So many I’ll have to divide them into two posts, so watch for the next installment in a week.
One Sunday afternoon, around the beginning of the month, the mountains were covered in snow and so beautiful! All the children decided to go on a bike ride up the road and enjoy the beautiful winter sunshine. Esther took this picture.
Simon goes through a lot of mayonnaise. Every work morning, he fries two eggs for his breakfast, spreads mayo on two slices of bread and puts the eggs on top of that, then eats them with a large cup of creamy tea. Because he uses so much mayonnaise, he ends up making it for us quite often in the evening, to make sure he’ll have what he needs in the morning!
When I took the children to Hokitika for the homeschooler’s art day, we had another gorgeous, sunny day. I asked Mr. Diligence, who was in the back seat of the car, to take some pictures for me. This is the bridge going out of our town; it’s scheduled to be replace within a year and a half.
Looking downstream from the bridge, down the Ahaura River. Its confluence with the Grey River is just downstream—the Grey is under the line of fog. See the snow on top of the Paparoa Mountains? The Tasman Sea is just the other side of those mountains.
Going on down the road towards Greymouth!
Another view of the Paparoas, across a dairy farm. The Grey, again, is under that line of fog.
This is the bridge my sons built me over a ditch in the paddock our house cow is currently living in. They built it strong enough that a couple of big boys standing on it can’t make it sag! I requested the chicken wire to be stapled on so I don’t slip on wet or frosty mornings—and I’ve been very glad for it! During the summer, I milked at about the place the fence turns, just above the end of the bridge, but the cow didn’t like crossing the ditch after the rains started, so I knew I would have to cross it myself. The new milking shed is just behind you, if you were standing where this picture is taken. By the way, I plan to get a photo of the cow in the shed sometime, but I’m milking before sunrise and after sunset right now, because our days are so short, so there isn’t enough light! It’s working well, though. She has learned to walk right in and put her head in the proper place, and the morning it was pouring, I was very thankful for the roof.
Midwinter harvest! I got the cabbage, leeks and carrots from the garden, and everything else came from the greenhouse. We are enjoying this feast.
One evening while we had family worship, Mr. Imagination was acting up, so I told him to do 5 push-ups. Mr. Intellectual and Simon couldn’t resist; they had to join in. Simon did 20, I believe, before he had to give up. Mr. Intellectual saw his brother grabbing the camera, and jumped up on his chair before the picture was taken.
I took quite a few pictures of the children in March! Here, we were doing a science experiment about camouflage. I bought some M&Ms, and they crumpled colored papers in three of the colors of the candies. Then, we put equal amounts of each of seven or eight colors of candy in the basket with the paper, and they were to see how many of each they could easily find in a minute. After counting and recording their results, of course, came the best part—eating them!
Mr. Imagination and Little Miss were playing with the marbles one day and made pictures with them. I let Mr. Imagination take photos of their cats. The first is his, the second is hers, and they made the third together.
The little boys asked for a box that came in the mail, one day, and they cut it up to make swords and shields. Little Miss wanted her own set, and struck this “fierce” pose when she wanted her picture taken.
Little Miss badly wants her hair to be braided now. She hardly has enough, but she loves the results when I take the time for it! (She just saw me writing this and said, “That was when I had long hair.” Now she wants me to braid her hair again!)
Mr. Imagination was picking up leaves to “start a campfire” one day, with Little Miss and Mr. Sweetie watching him.
Last year, Simon gave Little Miss some cosmos plants for her birthday. This year, Esther bought her some seeds, so I started several plants. I couldn’t believe how huge they grew! She has loved having her own flowers to pick, although she can’t reach very many.
While I was in the garden with the camera, I grabbed this picture of our marigolds. I haven’t grown many flowers in the past, but have decided it’s fun to have a few scattered among the vegetables.
