Wild Hope Homestead

Oops, that sounds a bit morbid, but what I mean is, whilst I would like to spend masses of  my time on the Demo Project, life goes on, and there are still lots of other things to be done around here. Caring for the small child. Addressing the washing and dishes mountains. Harvesting the veges before they get eaten by the small child or something else. Preserving. Watering the garden. Treating chicken ailments. Cooking. Making more kombucha, because until I get my hands on some water kefir grains, we need some kind of probiotic drink and The Husband is suddenly obsessed with kombucha and I’m pretty darn stoked with it myself (aside from the fluoride thing…). Filling in the tire track rut out the front of our place with dirt. Decluttering. And trying to do at least a smidgen of weeding and fruit tree pruning.

I am sad to report the loss of one of my giant pumpkins. It was the one on the deck. Do you know what happened to it? The Little Fulla got his hands on it. Or in it, to be more precise. A plastic vehicle went trailblazing over the pumpkin, leaving holes in it. If that wasn’t bad enough, for his grand finale, The Little Fulla came back and gauged a large hole in it, rendering it utterly useless for the competition, or anything. And if that wasn’t bad enough, this hole then attracted swarms of flies to the deck. But wait, it gets worse… The Husband then dragged the doomed pumpkin over to the chicken pen and heaved it in there with no warning to the chickens. They were SO frightened that in the big kerfuffle two of them flew over the fence into the neighbours’ paddock and had to be rescued and then none of the chickens wanted to hang out in the orchard anymore because the orange ball of doom was lurking in there, rotting away. They have finally calmed down, like a week later, and re-inhabited some parts of the orchard since I moved the pumpkin further away and it is collapsing into a pile of mush.

The holes don’t look so bad here, but considering the size of the pumpkin, they were a death knell for entry into the competition and for the pumpkin itself.

Then a bigger hole came along, and now, here lies the pumpkin in it’s orchard grave, rotting away and scaring the chickens.

We recently had a storm. A cyclone was hurtling our way and although it was downgraded to an ex-tropical cyclone just before it reached NZ, some places received a lot of damage from wind, rain and sea. I was exceedingly grateful that we were not one of those places. In fact, the only damage that occurred was this:

And that wasn’t even caused by the wind. The Little Fulla apparently wanted the peach tree, that was sitting on the deck, to “fly off in wind”, and so he pulled it over, sending it crashing to the deck, breaking my nice brown pot on its way down. I was rather unimpressed, but somehow, the tree wasn’t damaged.

You may be starting to get the sense that the The Little Fulla is proving difficult to occupy. When he’s not playing in the work site dirt, that is. One thing we did was sowing some seeds together. They are the Little Garden sets that we collected from our New World supermarket. The Little Fulla enjoyed filling up the peat pots with the moist ‘dirt’ and placing the wee seedmats or seeds on top. We did 12 pots, all vegetables or herbs plus one sweet pea. Now we are watching them grow and have planted the zucchini and yellow beans in the Vege Garden so far. It’s probably too late for some of them to amount to much, but it’s good for The Little Fulla to learn about growing plants anyway and to distract him from destroying my things for a little bit.

The dehydrated ‘dirt’ gets rehydrated and stirred in water.

The little peat pots were put on the deck while we watched, waited and watered.

The Little Fulla curiously watched as all the different seedlings came up and grew.

We have continued to harvest tomatoes, which are slowing down now, capsicums (for eating and making paprika), gherkins, which we are just eating as cucumbers now since there haven’t been enough at a time for another decent batch of pickled gherkins, red noodle beans, dried beans (Kidney, Borlotto Firetongue and Cannellino), a few beetroot, parsnips and carrots, and some of the pumpkins. The outdoor table is turning orange as it amasses a collection of pumpkins. We went for ages without lettuce because I gave up trying to grow it in the intense heat, but we finally have some almost ready to harvest again. At least we’re able to use some baby beetroot leaves since I sowed a small forest of beetroot that needs thinning.

The outdoor table is turning a shade of orange. The bigger pumpkins are small Sugar and the little ones are Wee Bee Little.

I like harvesting things in so many different colours.

My first yellow capsicum.

A lot of produce needs to be preserved and preserving waits for no man. I have been freezing tomatoes, as they gather and ripen further in the dining room, putting dried herbs into jars, drying more cayenne chili peppers and grinding them and drying some banana slices too. The dehydrator is still sitting on the table waiting for me to dry the paprika capsicums and more cayenne chillies. Other excess capsicums for cooking need to be chopped and frozen. Also, I ordered 5kg of peaches, which arrived this morning. I want to freeze a bunch of peach slices before too many of these fresh, tasty fruits get eaten.

You may remember I’m supposed to be finishing knitting my Christmas stocking. Well, it ain’t finished yet. I have been getting a little bit of knitting time in, but I got sidetracked with knitting a hat for someone. Don’t worry, I’m back to the stocking now and it should be finished some time before Christmas…

And now back to the work site. I’m supposed to be removing a roof, but someone keeps turning the sky tap on and off…