Yearly Archives: 2011

In hindsight, I could have sowed half the amount of white cosmos as I did. I sprinkled 10 packets of the stuff around the lawn. It’s such a great gap filler, but I’ll be out there dead-heading for hours this weekend (nipping off the old flowers makes all the difference if you want your plants to keep producing new buds).

The other problem that’s just starting to show its head is mildew: because I’ve sown it so thick, and because I foolishly fed it at Christmas with Nitrophoska Blue to speed up its growth (it was so puny back then that I panicked), it’s now getting the floral equivalent of athlete’s foot. I’ll give it a blast with Yates Fungus Gun tonight and then just keep my fingers crossed that it hangs on for another week without all dying out in the middle. It’s rather lovely, even so.

(I especially like the contrast of the ferny foliage and delicate daisies in front of this barbed wire ball sculpture from Wire Art. I bought this as a gift for the Hunk back when we first met and it was sitting outside our garage, still wrapped in black plastic, when the garage burnt down last May. The plastic melted and stuck to the wire, so every time I walk past it I pick a few more bits off it. It’s quite a novel form of stress relief.)

At the end of 2009, I acquired six Pekin ducks (three boys and three girls) with the intention of serving crispy five-spice roast duck for Christmas dinner that year. But they were so darn cute that I immediately fell in love with them and couldn’t let a carving knife anywhere near them.

Last spring, they started laying eggs. We’d come home to find a duck egg sitting in the middle of the driveway, or in a flower bed, or under a fruit tree. Then the dog started eating the eggs as fast as they could lay them, so the ducks scarpered to the neighbour’s lifestyle block and parked themselves up on their lawn. We didn’t see them again for three months.

Having started with six ducks, by January, when they returned home, we were down to three. (The boys have abandoned their womenfolk; only the girls remain.) Every day they waddle up through the paddock from the swamp to wait patiently by the chicken run (I chuck them a few handfuls of grain while I’m feeding the chooks). If they’re not there, I only have to yell “quackers” from the house and they come running.

I think Pekin ducks are the most adorable birds. They’re such gossips – all day they yabber away to each other – and they’re best of mates. They’re also kitted out in such lovely white feathers that it seems a shame not to include them in the wedding ceremony somehow.

So, for the past week, I’ve been bird whispering… luring them slowly away from the chicken run to hang out on the lawn, where they can look cute in our photos. And – success! – this morning when I got up, they were already waiting for me under the floral bunting (Mum has sewed several hundred metres of these gorgeous green and white flags for me, bless her) on the deck outside our front door.

I may yet regret my decision to invite the ducks. They are notoriously pongy poopers. Here’s hoping I don’t end up dragging my veil through a ducky deposit or two…

I’ve been pondering what to tart up the trestle tables in the marquee with. I’d already decided on simple bowls of mixed dahlias (I’ll have enough to do on the big day without fluffing about endlessly arranging fiddly floral displays), but I didn’t want to use glass bowls. Originally I thought about using galvanised buckets, but they’re a tad too tall – and there’s nothing worse than sitting at a table with an arrangement in the middle that’s so big you can’t see over or around it. Today I found the ultimate vessel: white ceramic mixing bowls. I bought eight for $15 each on sale at Stevens. Plus they’ll come in handy on the day before the wedding, when I intend to knock out a couple of hundred cupcakes…

And here’s a nifty tip from Vida Flores. The easiest way to display large, heavy, short-stemmed flowers in shallow bowls like this is to grab a roll of Sellotape and run strips across the top of the bowl, from side to side, to make an invisible supporting grid. Then just drop the blooms through the grid until there are no gaps showing. It’s ingenious – it means you use fewer flowers and you don’t have to jam them all up tightly so they support each other.

I can’t quite believe how much my new garden has grown over the past six weeks or so. Just before Christmas, it looked like a barren wasteland. I’d sown the wildflowers, along with 5 packets of white cosmos, 2 packets of pink cosmos and 2 packets of giant green zinnias… but there was bugger all to show for it. So I started panicking and planted heaps and heaps and heaps (and that’s a conservative estimate) of potted colour between Christmas and New Year. Then, of course, we had a couple of torrential downpours and suddenly the wildflowers and cosmos rocketed off. The cosmos, especially, has pretty much overwhelmed all the other plants I’ve put in. So much so that I’m now pulling the jolly stuff out by the trailerload. 

If nothing else, this wedding garden palaver has taught me that (a) patience is a virtue; (b) a perfect lawn is worth every cent; (c) a lick of green paint can pimp up anything and (d) take lots of progress photos because otherwise you’ll never believe just how much you can achieve in a few short months of working-bee madness.

Three torrential storms in three weeks + warm nights and hot days = free mushrooms for dinner!

Dad popped over today to spray some thistles and came across a surprise crop of seasonally-confused fungi in one of of the back paddocks. We ended up picking half a bucket of baby buttons and meaty field mushrooms (though I have to confess to hopping over the fence to pinch a few from the neighbour’s hill paddock too). I guess it makes up for all the flooding last weekend, when our pump shed ended up half-submerged in the raging torrent. I’ll bake them tonight with new season’s garlic, breadcrumbs, thyme, parmesan and lashings of cream.

And for dessert?

Homemade wild blackberry and apple pie with (more) lashings of cream.

On the way back from ‘shrooming, I grabbed a basket of apples from our orchard and foraged for a small bowl of dark, delicious blackberries from the side of one of the cattle races. I could probably have picked half a bucket of blackberries too, except the only thing I had to collect them in was Dad’s sun hat… and he was worried about ending up with a sunburnt noggin so I had to cut my foraging short.

Nine weeks ago, I pruned all my repeat-flowering roses back so they’d flower on cue next weekend for our wedding. Then I had a panic attack about all the preparations… so we decided to change the date to give ourselves an extra fortnight to get everything done. I forgot to tell the roses not to rush though – and even then, some of them have shown up early. ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles’ is looking glorious today. She’s smothered in beautiful crimson-pink blooms that are dripping petals all over the rock wall at the end of the stables. My photo just doesn’t do the colour justice – it’s bright, but in no way garish, and the foliage (which hasn’t been sprayed at all) is perfect too. ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles’ is a fragrant David Austin English rose that can either be grown as a tall shrub or a short climber, though mine seems to be trying to be both. It has a compact shape at the front with a big spiky mohawk of tall canes at the back.

What’s the definition of a marriage made in heaven? When you’re a gardener, I think it’s having a partner who not only doesn’t mind your endless mad schemes – a new bed here, a rock wall there, a bonfire-sized brazier over there – but can jolly well build them too. So when I proposed we knock together a village fair-style drinks stand to serve the punch and homemade lemonade from at our wedding, the Hunk immediately drove off to the timber yard, bought some ply and posts… and, with help from his dad and my brother-in-law Alan, whipped up the cutest darn lemonade stand I’ve ever seen.

It took half a day to build (we used a recycled plastic plant pot as a template for the jigsaw-cut awning roof) and a week to paint (the colours are white, ‘Japanese Laurel’ (bright green) and ‘Feijoa’ (pale green) from Resene, which I’ve also used to paint everything from the chicken coop to wine barrel planters and obelisks for the big day).

The drinks stand is supposed to sit on the deck in front of our house, but I begged the boys to lift it out onto the formal lawn so I could snap a photo of it today. Bad move… because it looked so sweet sitting on the grass that now it seems a shame not to leave it there.

Which brings me back to that whole (impending) marriage made in heaven definition. “The lemonade stand looks so good on the lawn,” I sighed. “Why don’t we just build another one then?” replied the Hunk. He wasn’t even joking.

The only downside to a marriage made in heaven? It works both ways. This afternoon when I got home, the blokes were ripping around the old equestrian arena on motorbikes, having spent the day scraping it clean with a bulldozer. It’s the only flat spot on the farm for parking, but after the wedding my long term goal is to transform it into a posh, parterre-themed, pick-your-own berry and flower farm modelled on the famous potager at Villandry in France.

Or at least that’s what I was planning. “I’ve had a better idea,” said the Hunk this afternoon. “The boys and I have decided it would make a perfect go kart racing track…”

Some brides go for traditional bouquets of perfect white roses and frilly, feminine lisianthus and silken phalaenopsis orchids. I love those bouquets. They’re so elegant and classic and sophisticated and, well, manicured. But these are not adjectives that really apply to me. I’m a gumboots and dirt-under-the-nails sort of gal. So I’ve decided to give my bridesmaids graceful bouquets of green hydrangeas and white flowers, while I go for a crazy, colourful, convivial bouquet of dramatic dahlias. (This might help explain why my blog is suddenly dahlia-obsessed at the moment.)

Yesterday, for a bit of a practice run, I took three buckets of blooms from Dahlia Haven into the lovely Davina at Vida Flores to see what she could whip them up into. All I can say is: ooooooooh!  (And ahhh… I wish my arms were as thin and toned as Davina’s colleague in these photos).

Dahlias are just so darn gorgeous that they really don’t need too much fiddling about with. But just for fun, Davina’s also going to pimp up my bouquet with a swishy tail of flax or asparagus fern. And, as I’ve got a baby bump that’s getting bigger by the day, I figure the bigger my bouquet, the better. It will help me keep my balance as I waddle off down the lawn. Though I am a little concerned I might end up giving one of my single mates a serious case of concussion when I throw that bouquet in their direction on the big day…

Love is in the air. And in our paddocks too. I’m not the only one up the duff this summer: the bull has just had his wicked way with the yearlings.

Our ewes will be next, just as soon as I decide whether to run them with a black-faced Dorper or a spotty Arapawa ram. Or perhaps I’ll try to get my hands on a Middle Eastern Karakul – its high grade pelts were traditionally used to make Persian carpets – or a Dorset Horn. Described by the Rare Breeds Conservation Society of New Zealand (www.rarebreeds.co.nz/) as “an excellent doer”, the Dorset Horn boasts a “capacious stomach, fine fleece, hoofs of mother-of-pearl and a nose like a fresh raspberry”. Which all sounds fairly delicious.

And rather auspicious. After all, we are hosting a wedding next month. What could be more fitting than a rare breeds gift register? Instead of fronting up with Briscoes vouchers, sheet sets and half a dozen toasters, our friends and family could all chip in for a couple of kunekune pigs, shaggy highland cattle, Anglo-Nubian goats and a pair of miniature Mediterranean donkeys. (Donkeys, especially, make marvellous wedding gifts. They outlast the average modern marriage by a decade or three.)

But I digress. Before we get any more animals, we need a family planning strategy for the ones we’ve already got. Our border collie puppy has come of age. He’s taken to humping anything that moves, and quite a few things that don’t. I had hoped his teenage hormones might distract him from digging up my flower beds, but sadly no. So he’s booked in for the snip. 

Some holiday romances take you by surprise, but none more than the curious coupling of my purebred Silkie hens, Sage and Onion. Sometime between Christmas and New Year, Sage started stuffing Onion. She’d hop on, squawk like a strangled cat, then hop off again. Girls just want to have fun, I figured. But closer inspection revealed the suspicious beginnings of a wobbly comb and wattle under her coiffured top knot.

Sage must simply have been a late developer, for he’s now the silliest looking rooster I’ve ever seen. Think Liberace in a blow-dried feather boa. 

Onion, however, is smitten. She’s now sitting on a clutch of 11 wee eggs, each no bigger than a Cadbury Creme Egg. If they hatch in time, I’ll sack the flowergirls and have a cortege of fluffy white baby chicks trailing me up the aisle instead.

Self Sufficiently Lynda is published each week in Sunday magazine, in the Sunday Star-Times.

Every year I put in a main crop of ‘Agria’ spuds – they’re by far the best for winter roasts and hot chips – as well as an early crop of ‘Jersey Benne’ or ‘Cliff’s Kidney’ for Christmas Day, but this year my vege patch planning was thrown out of kilter by morning sickness. I put in a bag of ‘Agria’ seed spuds the week I found out I was pregnant in September, but I never quite got around to getting any ‘Cliff’s Kidneys’ in the ground. Not to worry, on Christmas Day we dug up half the ‘Agrias’ and ate them instead.

We dug the rest of my spuds early this week, as I need more space at the end of the asparagus bed to plant lettuces (we’re serving gourmet hamburgers at our wedding). We filled a 40-litre plastic trug with mighty fine tubers, which weighed in at 17.4kg. I’m proud as punch. That means my total yield was probably in the vicinity of 30kg. What a difference decent soil (and three bags of sheep pellets and two bags of blood and bone) makes.

The dog posing with the spuds is our Beagle/Jack Russell cross, Gypsy. (I kid you not: that’s what she was advertised as when the Hunk rescued her from a backyard in one of the meaner streets of South Auckland a few years back. I suspect her previous owners may have been stretching the truth somewhat…)

Gypsy is my favourite dog today, while Mr Puppy Doo-Hawg (our 11 month old border collie) is in my bad books. He digs holes when he’s bored, and he must have been very bored yesterday because the little sod uprooted half the white garden underneath our lounge window. Just when the impatiens had finally linked limbs and were looking lovely (especially in the moonlight), he destroyed about a dozen of them. And he also dug up (and appears to have actually eaten) one of my ‘Bridal Bouquet’ hydrangeas. We’d just mulched the bed with fresh compost so his blackened dirty paws were a dead giveaway.