mice

There is one, possibly two, mice trapped in the wash-house cupboard. For the millionth time I think that I should buy a really decent torch and hide it from everyone else so I can properly investigate these things and deal to them late at night, without the assistance of my toddling daughter.

It is raining for the eighth time this week. It is only Tuesday. If I were to scientifically test the truth of this apparent hyperbole, it may turn out there have been more than seven periods of rainfall before now and since Sunday morning.

If my brain would function at a higher level than right now, then I would do a post rounding up the many blogs I have discovered in recent months written by New Zealand women that I enjoy. For the moment I'll just say how much I've enjoyed reading of other kiwi women gardening, crafting, thinking. The showcase will have to wait.

Onion weed. It is quite juicy. I think that it might not flourish in drought-prone areas.

Local shopping. I bought a piece of pork roast and a bag of soup bones from Jonesy the butcher. I told him (not for the first time nor for the last) that he is quite precious. We have lost our fish shop here in Smallwettown. I got the impression that many people are telling him this. No pressure Jonesy, only your butchery is on the market and we can't bear for you to go.

Nice piece of pork. Extravagant, even more so when I poured a 500ml bottle of cream into the pasta sacue pan and made silverbeet (home grown of COURSE) and pork pasta sauce. But we do have lots of pork left for dinner tomorrow night and lunches tomorrow.

Colloidal silver. I must read again how this works, or what the claims for it working explain. It does seem to be doing great things for my son's skin.

Holiday. We are going to visit my grandparents (how truly wonderful is that? I am 36 and I still have grandparents. Indeed I have grandparents who are still working and running their own lives.) next week for a few days. I'll be fitting in a visit to one of my aunts who is an ace gardener and poultry enthusiast extraordinaire. Last year when we visited, we drove up the drive to the farm they moved to the year before and saw on one side my uncle's vintage tractor collection and on the other many, probably hundreds, of chooks. Then in the house we watched the newest kittens beginning to explore. Enid Blyton, I've found your muse.

The pig

Last night I went to book group. I hadn't read the book and by the time I got there the short discussion of the book was finished and the real business, yakking about everything else, had begun. Talk turned to food eventually and some of the frustrations of attempting to buy local and I found out that Sarah has a contact for local beef, hogget and pork/bacon. I offered then and there that I would like to share a pig with her.

Back home Favourite Handyman blasted my ideas that it would fit in our 135 litre freezer part of the fridge freezer. That sounds like quite a bit for a fridge freezer and it is but perhaps not quite a bit for fitting half a pig in.

When we moved into our home in late 2006, I was keen on getting a freezer. Later on I changed my mind because we seemed to be managing fine as long as we ate through things within 2-3 months or less. After reading Barbara Kingsolver's Animal Vegetable Miracle and working ourselves through this winter being conscious of what we are eating from the garden and how dependent we are on the supermarkets (i.e. some place out there to furnish our food needs), I still thought I was in the no-more-appliance-spend category and would simply manage, even though I can't really fit much in there to last the year through after Autumn harvest.

But locally grown and butchered pig, with bacon that is apparently divine. ... Let's just say that I've had a wee look on trademe at the freezer section this morning (nothing around my part of the woods at the moment though). As bacon apparently lures many vegetarians back to the meat side, it's doing its work on me regarding freezers. Also I froze home made pasta sauce last year (much easier than attempting to bottle such a marginal fruit on the acidity/botulism front) but could only do about eight meals' worth because of storage constraints. Then there is Kingsolver's comments about freezing surplus zucchini for winter. With a bigger freezer....

I was buying my pig products from a local butcher. But after twice of not being able to get bacon bones from him I bypassed the nice lady at the counter and had a chat with the butcher. Turns out he gets his pork for curing into bacon boneless and the bones from the year before were bought in from Auckland. sigh.

Bought some local fish from the shop on the wharf yesterday and had a chat there about the challenges facing the local fishing industry. Ninety percent of the fish which is caught off our coast is sent elsewhere in the country (Napier and Christchurch) or to Russia for processing. That's a lot of jobs which I'd like to see here on the coast and it is a lot of fuel.

Blueberries and seaweed

After a week of thunder, lightning, hail and endless rain, it all stopped today. Very cold, but I own warm clothes and strode out into the garden this afternoon without any care for the state of the house. I planted the two blueberry plants I bought earlier this week. I bought two varieties: 'Blueberry Powder Blue' and 'Blueberry Rahi'. I had to buy two because these are rabbiteye types and require cross-pollination. The plentiful worm activity in the soil when I was planting the blueberries was very encouraging.

I then dug out the last of the tobacco plants and tipped the bags of seaweed I've been collecting over the last week over the vacated garden patch. Using loppers and scissors I chopped all the seaweed into pieces of about 10cm or less and left them scattered over the patch. Given the huge volume of rain we've received of late and will likely receive in coming weeks, I preferred to leave the seaweed to rot in like this rather than make a seaweed brew.

I've been reading that wood ash is very alkaline. Which particularly interests me because pine needles are quite acidic. So I'm thinking of collecting some more pine needles from the local rugby field sideline this week and layering them with the wood ash on my new compost spot. I will then top it with Raelene's discarded chook litter from her hen house.

Unless the weather improves and the roads to take Fionn to his grandparents' home open, tomorrow we will be killing, plucking and gutting two roosters. Other times I have put the feathers on the compost, turned the bones to stock (and eaten the meat obviously) and then placed the used bones in the rubbish bag alongside the various bits I gut from each bird. I am wondering whether we should toughen up a little more and bury those innards in the garden. They would probably do something good for the soil. The back garden is fenced off from local dogs and NZ doesn't have foxes, so there should be no risk of it all being dug up again. Wonder how deep I'd have to bury it...