A little bit of this and that on 20 April 2006

What? Another day in paradise? Well my back is better after the Bowen therapy but my right heel is still very sore and has been for a couple of months now. I walked too far in poor shoes when I got here and found myself dependent on the physio and underfoot strapping. The physio says she gets plenty of business from new “lifestyle block owners”.

Malcolm has just come home from biking to the gym. On the way he dropped off some feijoas to friends and they gave him a wonderful jar of honey as they have three hives. Great! Another friend gives us minced tuatuas as she lives at the beach.

Malcolm thinks the soil has improved in the vege garden. Today I discovered my granddaughter helper thought she had thinned the carrots but in fact it was all chickweed. So out it all came and I sowed some carrots. Probably the wrong day of the lunar calendar to do it but I needed something to help me procrastinate doing my taxes. Moreover the temperature is lovely in the autumn, and the ground is moist and warm. This place has little wind.

I want to grow kale because Malcolm loves it. The row I had in looks as if it has been eaten by white butterflies. So I weeded and hoed them, sprayed them with Organic 100, a seaweed/fish waste mix, limed them and then scattered some Neem pellets around.

Feijoas are everywhere. Last night I sliced some and put them in the dehydrator with some sliced apples and sliced figs. They taste delicious dried. I also froze some feijoa puree yesterday and even though we now have a second fridge/freezer, there Is hardly any room left in either freezer. My daughter helped my granddaughter set up to sell feijoas for $2.50 a kilo outside a Wellington house last weekend. They sell for $7-8 a kilo in the Wellington supermarkets there, so they went like hot cakes.

We have so many daily opportunities to sample food these days that we don’t get desperate for meals. While picking figs this morning, we ate both types – the Adriatic, which is green outside and pink inside, and the Brown Turkey which is brown inside and yellowy inside. For lunch today I put the following on a plate: whole chestnuts (I boiled yesterday’s split chestnuts and they peeled off beautifully), spring onions, ham, fresh celery tops, parsley and a small cheese sandwich. A drink of organic raw milk washed it down. Delicious. The combination of chestnut and spring onion was especially good.

This afternoon my friend Wendy arrived with a chestnut and pumpkin soup. What great timing, as she is turning out to be one of my chief garden advisors. She identified the borage I had planted in the vege garden (I couldn’t remember what I had planted in that seed box I planted out), told me to burn the kikyu grass we had taken out yesterday, told me to sow mustard in the glasshouse now to give it time to sterilise the soil before I plant out early tomatoes in the spring. I would have dug in compost but apparently that can wait till spring too. I would have dug a lot but she said not to. She approved of the broad bean and sweet pea I had planted together outside. So much to learn. I am a very late starter at this game.