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A Weekend Alone
31 July 2009
Last weekend was our first weekend alone in a very long time. And oh what a weekend it was! The sun shone all weekend and we sat outside and soaked it up.
Of course sunshine and blue skies at this time of the year also equals cold, frosty mornings. A crispy -2°C at Saturday breakfast feedout left the hands aching and numb. Still, it made the bowl of steaming porridge and cup of hot, plunger coffee all the more enjoyable.
We’ve had a lot of frosts this winter. Our pukas and succulents have been hammered hard, their once luscious green leaves now black with frost bite. One of our aloes has been hit especially hard. It will be a long time before it recovers.
I’m sure I’ve read somewhere that frost can be good for fruit trees though so maybe this will mean we get a good set of fruit in our orchard this year.
Saturday our animals all sunbathed. Pigs, sheep and cows all stretched out in various sunny spots and soaked up rays instead of looking for food.
We moved the cows, caught up on 3 weeks compost, washed clothes, made up pig food and pottered around tidying up by the shed.
Mabel and her piglets spent much of the day in the close vicinity. The piglets do all the time of course but Mabel decided early in the week that she should also be allowed to join in their adventures.
Mabel Gets Her Own Way
Part way through the week I arrived home from work to find Mabel wandering down the drive. She’d forced one section of her fence until it broke and walked straight on out. We hastily repaired it as the dark closed in and told Mabel to behave herself. She gave us one of those looks though. I know that pig expression well. It was the famous “You think that’s going to stop me??” look. As soon as I see that look I know we have trouble. And I was right. The next day she lifted the gate off its gudgeons and walked out again. Aaron came home to find her saying hello to Joy.
Aaron hammered a piece of wood above the top gate gudgeon but Saturday morning she worked out quickly that if she applied a bit of force to the bottom hinge she could rip the gudgeon straight out of the wood and push the gate upwards like a cat flap.
“Mabel!” I said in exasperation. She looked at me with her “What??” expression. Adult pigs are sooo like teenagers, they know what they want and they just can’t see what your problem is when you tell them not do something.
“What the hell are we going to do?” I asked Aaron
“Not much we can do. We might as well let her have what she wants”
And that’s how the electric wire ended up running either side of the drive from house to shed. Mabel and piglets now have that entire section of driveway, plus the area in front of the shed all to themselves. Our cars now have to be parked down by the shed and we have to walk up to the house from there. But Mabel and piglets are very happy and that’s what counts.
Of course it wasn’t smooth sailing from there. We have four 3-year old trees planted down by the shed. They’re all incredibly healthy and lush, or at least they were. We wandered down to the shed Saturday evening only to discover that Mabel had decided to test out her pruning technique.
“Oh shit!” we stared in horror at the mass of pohutukawa, puriri and kauri prunings littering the driveway.
“That’s at least a year’s growth gone” I was gutted
“A year?! More like 2!” Aaron was just a little pissed off.
We shut the gate to the shed area so Mabel only had the drive. We needed to figure out how to protect the remains of the trees until we let her back in.
Burn Baby Burn
Sunday morning was another cold one and we decided to have a burn off down by the shed. Aaron has set up an incinerator and we set about burning all our boxes of junk mail, old telephone books and a large pile of old timber.
We kept the gate closed so the pigs couldn’t get near but the dogs hung around by the shed with us.
We stood close by in our swanndris, absorbing what heat we could until eventually the fire really got cranking and the drum started to radiate with heat. I grabbed an old chair from the shed and sat down while Aaron stoked the fire. And for the rest of the day we took turns sitting in the chair reading and occasionally stoking the fire while one of us went off and did some work. Aaron took his chainsaw to the other side of the stream and started chopping up next year’s firewood and I dug up and replanted an area by the front gate.
One of our HelpXers had very kindly planted a large number of native trees for us, which was fine except it never occurred to us she didn’t know anything about planting trees. What we ended up with was three very neat rows of trees. That in itself is not so bad, except, although I had showed our HelpXer what the trees looked like after only 5 years growth the gaps she’d left between each tree was roughly 30cm. All in all it was all very uniform and had we left them we would have ended up with a very strange looking hedge. I dug at least half of them up and spread them around a lot more. There was plenty of space for them to be planted but my instructions had clearly not been specific enough. I also discovered that our HelpXer had planted our seedlings very deep, burying not only the roots but a good 10cm of trunk as well.
It’s hard to remember that what’s obvious to me can be a completely foreign concept to someone who has no experience of gardening or farming.
We moved the cows, caught up on 3 weeks compost, washed clothes, made up pig food and pottered around tidying up by the shed.
Mabel and her piglets spent much of the day in the close vicinity. The piglets do all the time of course but Mabel decided early in the week that she should also be allowed to join in their adventures.
Mabel Gets Her Own Way
Part way through the week I arrived home from work to find Mabel wandering down the drive. She’d forced one section of her fence until it broke and walked straight on out. We hastily repaired it as the dark closed in and told Mabel to behave herself. She gave us one of those looks though. I know that pig expression well. It was the famous “You think that’s going to stop me??” look. As soon as I see that look I know we have trouble. And I was right. The next day she lifted the gate off its gudgeons and walked out again. Aaron came home to find her saying hello to Joy.
Aaron hammered a piece of wood above the top gate gudgeon but Saturday morning she worked out quickly that if she applied a bit of force to the bottom hinge she could rip the gudgeon straight out of the wood and push the gate upwards like a cat flap.
“Mabel!” I said in exasperation. She looked at me with her “What??” expression. Adult pigs are sooo like teenagers, they know what they want and they just can’t see what your problem is when you tell them not do something.
“What the hell are we going to do?” I asked Aaron
“Not much we can do. We might as well let her have what she wants”
And that’s how the electric wire ended up running either side of the drive from house to shed. Mabel and piglets now have that entire section of driveway, plus the area in front of the shed all to themselves. Our cars now have to be parked down by the shed and we have to walk up to the house from there. But Mabel and piglets are very happy and that’s what counts.
Of course it wasn’t smooth sailing from there. We have four 3-year old trees planted down by the shed. They’re all incredibly healthy and lush, or at least they were. We wandered down to the shed Saturday evening only to discover that Mabel had decided to test out her pruning technique.
“Oh shit!” we stared in horror at the mass of pohutukawa, puriri and kauri prunings littering the driveway.
“That’s at least a year’s growth gone” I was gutted
“A year?! More like 2!” Aaron was just a little pissed off.
We shut the gate to the shed area so Mabel only had the drive. We needed to figure out how to protect the remains of the trees until we let her back in.
Burn Baby Burn
Sunday morning was another cold one and we decided to have a burn off down by the shed. Aaron has set up an incinerator and we set about burning all our boxes of junk mail, old telephone books and a large pile of old timber.
We kept the gate closed so the pigs couldn’t get near but the dogs hung around by the shed with us.
We stood close by in our swanndris, absorbing what heat we could until eventually the fire really got cranking and the drum started to radiate with heat. I grabbed an old chair from the shed and sat down while Aaron stoked the fire. And for the rest of the day we took turns sitting in the chair reading and occasionally stoking the fire while one of us went off and did some work. Aaron took his chainsaw to the other side of the stream and started chopping up next year’s firewood and I dug up and replanted an area by the front gate.
One of our HelpXers had very kindly planted a large number of native trees for us, which was fine except it never occurred to us she didn’t know anything about planting trees. What we ended up with was three very neat rows of trees. That in itself is not so bad, except, although I had showed our HelpXer what the trees looked like after only 5 years growth the gaps she’d left between each tree was roughly 30cm. All in all it was all very uniform and had we left them we would have ended up with a very strange looking hedge. I dug at least half of them up and spread them around a lot more. There was plenty of space for them to be planted but my instructions had clearly not been specific enough. I also discovered that our HelpXer had planted our seedlings very deep, burying not only the roots but a good 10cm of trunk as well.
It’s hard to remember that what’s obvious to me can be a completely foreign concept to someone who has no experience of gardening or farming.
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