Wednesday 29th June

Sunday Morning 8.30am.

It’s been a busy fortnight, kiwi fruit pruning started last week, and I’ve basically been leaving at 6.30, getting home at 5.30 – 6 pm, eating, and sleeping. Unfortunately, I can’t see it lasting.

We finally got our contract rate on paper today, $115 per row, pruned and tied down, less $1.50 for every metre without canes. The rows are 120 metres long, it’s taken me till today to get up to speed and finish pruning a row in a day, I managed 1 ½ rows, still to tie down though, so there goes another day in tying the leaders to the wires. For $115.

I’m driving 96km each day, watching the petrol gauge instead of the speedometer, the gauge moves faster the speedometer. Luckily we have been on hourly rate till today, so whenever that comes through I may cover my travel costs.

Even the usual pruners, from the last few years aren’t happy, due to the mess some of the contract pruners from last year left. They pulled canes from one side of the trellis to the other, tied down late season growth, pruned out the good wood, or didn’t leave leaders for this year. So it makes for a slow process getting the orchard back into shape. As an indication of the poor pruning last year, the yield from picking this year was 40% down on last year, due to the lack of fruiting canes.

Heres a few pics I took this morning, showing what we are doing, from the unpruned rows, to what we prune back to.

I’m still working on the 2 private gardens, Sundays at the moment, but after I finish at the orchard tomorrow, I’ll do more fulltime there until milking starts in August.

Other than the above, there hasn’t been a lot happening, well, not that I’ve had time to notice, apart from the white herons over wintering at the estuary near Onekaka and along the coast here.

Saturday 11th June

It’s been a week of patchy weather, Wednesday was the only really clear day, so I spent more time pruning roses, and digging over at Hickmott Road, I’m nearly on top of it all there, still some minor pruning to do, but the bulk is just about done finally.

I’ve got another job, closer to Collingwood, similar. A huge amount of roses to prune, a lot of other shrubs to clean up. Plus dig over the beds, they were covered by the flood in January, so there is now a hard pan of silt over everything. Absolute pain to get rid of.

We’re still waiting for some frosts here, Patrick rang last night, it will be close to the end of the month before we can start pruning the kiwifruit, we need 3 really good frosts a few days apart to drop the leaves, hopefully the cold snap that is meant to arrive next week will help things along.

It’s been a year now since Mum died, I ordered two standard rose bushes back in April, to plant out here. Both Blackberry Nip standards, about 3’ high. Mum had one at home, it flowered the whole month before she died, and she loved having the blooms in her room. One of the few good roses with a really good aroma. It almost smells like blackberry, about as much as like tea made by the Sirius Corporation that is almost exactly not like tea.

I’ve got another workshop to run at SeniorNet at the next meeting, just a continuation of the first one from the other month, but with more details about internet scams, and the ones I think the SeniorNet members need to be aware of mostly.

Took the camera out last Monday in the gloom and intermittent sunshine, well, low level light anyway, calling it sunshine is slightly exaggerating things. Here are a few pics from near Collingwood, looking over the Aorere River.

Friday 3rd June

Good lord, a week and a half, time may go slowly but it still vanishes quickly here.

We spent last weekend drying off the herd, all 1250 of them, about 300 per day from Friday onwards, and finished the last of them Monday morning. It took us 5 hours each time, starting at 5am, finishing at 10am. Get the milking cows through, then the drafted ones for drying off, milk them out, give them a shot of Drychlor in each quarter, and finish washing the shed and yard down.

I ended up running a cold/flu/fever by Wednesday, with the last lot on Monday, it was put 80 cows into the bails, then stop, go round them all with the drychlor, then draft them out, then the next 80, etc, It was the stop/go/stop/go and being cold to start with, by Wednesday I was not fit for anything.

I’m still slowly working my way through the garden clean up job. All the roses are pruned back, the gardens have been dug over, etc, now it is the bigger trees and shrubs to look at. One of the Camellias has a bad infestation of scale, so as soon as I know we have 2 – 3 days of dry weather I’ll spray for them. It’s only one tree affected, despite it being in the middle of the rest the scale haven’t spread, so I think it is just the variety that is susceptible to scale. It needs doing soon, all the leaves are literally covered in scale, and starting to yellow and look wilted.

I’ve mentioned about my fireplace, trying to get parts for it etc. Went to Nelson today, which I really hate, 3 hours drive, and by the time I get there and in amongst the traffic, I feel like turning around and coming home. The fireplace shop had some of the parts, but not the back panel, which is now obsolete, so there goes any hope of repairing the one I have. I was thinking it is going to be a long cold winter, but then the guy said he had a second hand one, only a few years old that didn’t meet the new regulations for Nelson, but was ok for out here. I could have it for $100, was I interested? Hell yes was the answer, so for less than the parts for the old one, I ended up with a fairly new, slightly smaller, fireplace.

Old one

New one, well second hand new

It’s a heavy little beast, I backed the Pajero up to the back porch, slid it out of the Pajero, manhandled it into the lounge, then dismantled the old one, dropped the flue, had to get up onto the roof and release the holding wires, then shove the new one into place, lift the flue, settle it in, back onto the roof, retie everything down.

Then got a fire going again!! So far I haven’t smoked myself out, or noticed any fires in the roof, which is always a good start.

It’s slowly getting colder, but no real frosts yet, which is holding back the kiwifruit pruning. We can’t start until the leaves drop, which needs 2 or 3 really good frosts to cause the die back. The La Nina this year has caused a run of warmer weather for the last month, despite the rain and westerly winds, it has been warmer than usual, with most of the winds coming down from the tropics, rather than up from Antarctica. But that is changing. Still no snow on the top of the ranges as yet.

Here is our local Community Hall, out in the paddocks, it is used quite a lot for various functions, birthdays/weddings/general meetings.

Milking starts back about August, it looks like I’ll be doing morning and evening milking, so that suits me. More hours, more pay. And the middle of the day for my stuff.