Council Response

Well, Kevin Deacon of the Special Projects And Parking Management department of the Hastings District Council has replied to my email regarding the hospital staff parking invasion.

He says - and I quote: 

"... we are looking to mark the individual carparks on the street to ensure that vehicles are kept well clear of driveways.

Tradespeople are able to obtain cones to reserve a parking space, when undertaking planned maintenance or repair work, should they not be able to park on the property.

We hope that the road marking and advice for tradespeople will go some way towards helping residents cope with this change that has occurred on your street"

Wow! The Council seems to think that marking the parking spaces so people can see better where to park, and providing cones for tradespeople, is going to solve our problem. Really?! I mean... really?! Like marking parks so people can park in the lines, and providing cones for tradespeople goes in ANY way to deal with the issue? IT DOESN'T!

The cones for tradespeople are only of use IF the tradie knows at least a day in advance that they will be working on the property AND if they go there BEFORE 8am to place the cones - even though they may not be working on the property until the afternoon.
Our visitors STILL have nowhere to park. The disabled taxi, and the community services vehicle, who pick up the lovely guys in the wheelchairs, STILL have nowhere to park up. The careworkers who come every day to feed and shower the gentleman with dementia, STILL have nowhere to park. My neighbour in the middle flat, who has two small children, STILL has to park his car several streets over, because he has nowhere else to park.

With the streets becoming a parking lot, it makes it extremely difficult for those who collect the rubbish, recycling, and the bins, and now takes them much longer to do it.

As the duly elected council, it is their responsibility to see that residential areas ARE residential and NOT industrial sites or parking lots. We pay rates to live in a suburban area, NOT to live in a parking lot. The hospital staff HAVE a parking lot, and the fee charged is very reasonable - the price of a cup of coffee a week. They should be using their parking lot, not turning quiet suburbs into parking lots and disadvantaging others. It really is not acceptable.

Natural Pest Control In The Garden

One of the most common questions I get from people who visit my garden is "If you don't spray, why aren't your plants all eaten up by bugs? Are you sure you don't spray?" (yes, many do actually ask that).
When you spray, you tend to kill ALL the bugs - both good and bad. Yup, most people realize that. What they don't realize is how long it takes for the good bugs to come back.
The bugs that eat your plants are like the rabbits of the bug world - they live short lives, and reproduce fast and in large numbers. Take for example the aphid. According to entomologist Stephen A. Marshall: in optimal environmental conditions and lacking any predators, parasites, or disease, a single aphid could produce 600 billion descendants in one season. That's a lot of aphids!

The bugs that feed on them, on the other hand - the predatory bugs - are like the wolves and lions of the bug world. Longer lived, slower to reproduce, and they don't reproduce in the same kind of numbers. Each praying mantis will only reproduce once in its life time, the male being cannibalized during mating, and the female dying after laying eggs. The egg cases hold around 200 eggs each, and many of those won't hatch due to exposure and predation.  

So when you spray, the destructive bugs come back quite quickly, but the predatory ones don't, which leaves your garden very vulnerable. It can take a few years (and patience and frustration) of not spraying to establish a bug-based pest control system.


Meanwhile, it is important to ensure there are food supplies for the good bugs in early spring and late autumn. Wild fennel is a fantastic plant to have tucked away in a corner of your garden. It flowers early in spring, and late in autumn, and provides nectar, when little else is available, for the lady bug (eater of aphids), and the parasitic wasp (killer of white butterfly caterpillars). This will ensure they are in your garden before the aphids and white butterflies are.
It is also important to provide shelter for over-wintering - someplace that isn't going to be disturbed by your yard and garden activities - to keep them there, so they are in your garden before the pests arrive. Pinterest and the internet in general are full of ideas and instructions for building 'bug hotels', from the very simple to the very elaborate.




Of course, it doesn't mean the good bugs will do all the work - although they are more efficient than spraying (my neighbour sprays profusely, and still complain bitterly about the bug problem). You still need to do your morning rounds - picking the stink bugs out and dropping them in a bucket of soapy water, collecting the snail and slugs you find and putting them out on the pavement or drive for the thrushes to eat, wiping off any white butterfly eggs you find and killing any of the caterpillars you see, and pulling out anything too heavily infested with aphids.

Frimley Ave has been Invaded.

This post is a little bit different from my normal, But I really feel something needs to be said on this issue

Frimley Ave was a nice, quiet little suburban street - until we got invaded. We got invaded by the little black beetle from Aussie, which was a bit of nuisance, but we dealt with. Far more insidious was the invasion of hospital workers.
Since the hospital instigated a $1 a day parking fee for its staff, these people have emptied out of the carpark, and into the surrounding streets. Now our residential street parking is crammed full of hospital staff too cheap to pay $1 a day for parking. Really? Have these people not been to Auckland... or Wellington?
Suddenly the residentials have no residential parking. Our visitors have nowhere to park. Our tradies are parking in communal driveways -a big no-no, but where else is there? Everytime someone wants to come or go from one of the flats on that driveway, the tradie has to stop work, move his vehicle out to let the people in or out, then park back up in the driveway.
The disabled taxi, and the community services vehicle, who pick up the lovely guys in the wheelchairs, have nowhere to park up. The careworkers who come every day to feed and shower the gentleman with dementia, have nowhere to park. My neighbour in the middle flat, who has two small children, has to park his car several streets over, because he has nowhere else to park.
For the sake of $5 or $6 a week, for the price of one cup of coffee every week, hospital staff with good paying jobs are more than happy to disadvantage the elderly, the sick, the disabled, the people on benefits and pensions, and the struggling families with small children. Shame on them!

This photo was taken at 9.26 am this morning. Not ONE SINGLE CAR in this picture belongs to a resident, a resident's visitor, a tradesperson working on a resident's property, or a careworking visiting any of the elderly or disabled people on the street.

ALL of these cars belong to hospital staff that park here ALL DAY. The spaces you see between some of the cars are driveways, and a little hint here - there are actually more driveways than spaces, hmm...

I have contacted the local council, the district health board, and the local paper. So lets see if anything gets done.

This OUR street, and we want it back!

Magic Beans

Hi all. I bet you think this post is going to be about beans... nope. I recently joined a local FB community for swapping produce, preserves, seedlings and plants, etc - foodstuffs that have been foraged, grown, produced, or preserved by the individual, no purchased foods, and no money to change hands. It is called Magic Beans.
Although, as my regular readers will know, I have a good garden, it seldom produces excess - with the exception of rhubarb and herbs. So I offer my preserving skills instead - people can give me their excess produce, and I will return some of it as some kind of preserve - e.g plums can be returned as plum sauce, plum chutney, pickled plums, or plum jam; pumpkins I will process into a sweet puree which can be used for pie fillings, puddings, and pumpkin bread, or a savory puree for soup. The puree is packed into snaplock bags, you pop it in the freezer, then take out what you need as you need it.
The lovely lady who set it all up, Anneliese, dropped some jars off for me yesterday, and really liked my small-space garden, so asked if I would share pics and a little info. I thought rather than put a big post on the FB page, I would post a few pics and some basic info there, but do a full size blog post here for those interested in more info. So here we are.

I live in the front flat of a set of three connected flats, and have a small front yard that goes with it (middle flat has no yard, back flat has a back yard). When I first moved here, the yard was surrounded by large, untrimmed ornamental trees, which spread over most of the yard, and shaded the rest. The soil was so barren that not even grass grew, and there were no earthworms to the 3 feet down that I dug in various places. I cut down the trees on the sunward side, and trimmed back the trees on the other side, and slowly started establishing the gardens.

The first gardens I put in were the tire gardens. Six tires put side by side in two rows of three each for one tire garden. I put in three of these, which I brought with me from my last place of residence. 
There is a lot of controversy and conspiracy theory, based on anecdotal evidence only, surrounding the use of tires for growing food. But actual peer-reviewed scientific studies show that the rubber in tires is inert. It does not absorb toxins, and it does not leach toxins into the soil or plants.
Originally these were used to grow veggies in, but now I use them to grow my biennial and perennial herbs and veggies.
The first set of six tires has: wild Greek oregano (so much more fragrant and flavorful than the standard variety), Mexican marigold mint (something new I'm doing this year), Italian flat leaf parsley, mitsuba (Japanese parsley, another new one), Shiso green (another Japanese herb and another new one), and garlic chives.
The second set has: Asparagus (I grew these from seeds), anise hyssop (in theory - I'm not having a lot of luck with germination, this is also a new herb for my garden this year), French tarragon, pizza thyme and golden marjoram share a tire, winter savory (a must for anyone who cooks a lot of beans), and arugula (yes, this is a perennial, although it is usually treated as an annual).
The third set has: knotted marjoram (also known as sweet marjoram), French thyme, Texas tarragon, horseradish, sorrel, and lemongrass.
I also have a set of four tires that I put in two years ago, which I use to grow odds and ends veggies that I hadn't planned for, or ran out of space for in the main plots. This year I have sunflowers and komokomos in them.

They look a little bare at the moment, as some of them are newly planted.

Next I put in four main beds, for my annual crops. These beds are slightly raised, and are 4ft by 7ft (I had originally planned for 8ft, but when I went to get the wood for it, they had 7ft planks at a really good price - substantially cheaper than it would have cost to get 8ft ones, or two 4ft ones, so I went with those). These size beds are great - the middle can be reached from either side, and the dimensions allow for square foot gardening, short rows (in the 4ft direction), or long rows (the 7ft direction). Which ever way you prefer doing it. You can also put stakes in at the corners to drape bird netting or frost cloth over them.

You can grow a LOT of variety in these.
This year's autumn crops (I have already started planting out seed in the back two beds) will be: 
BED 1: peas, brussels sprouts - red, daikon radish,onions - red cipollini , radish - purple plum, miner's lettuce (not actually a lettuce), spinach - bloomsdale, beans - dwarf yellow, onion - borettana, radish - watermelon, salsify
BED 2: spinach -santana, shallots, rocket, chichory - sugarloaf, cauliflower - yellow, onions - red brunswick, brussels sprouts - green, komatsuna, endive, Dutch cornsalad, silderbeet - yellow stemmed
BED 3: broad beans, mustard streaks (salad green), rocket, mustard - purple wave (cooking veg), mibuna, radish - easter egg, radicchio, beans - dwarf green, tat soi, spring onions, chervil, cutting celery (different from standard celery)
BED 4: dill, onion - purplette, kale, carrot - pusta (a sweet, deep purple variety), spinach - santana, pak choi, radicchio, coriander, leeks, beetroot, radish - fire candle, carrots - nutri red, lettuce

There is a Mayer lemon tree in one corner of the yard, and Old English mint and apple mint growing under it, with self-sown borage doing its thing in a little area I leave kind of wild, by the overflow compost heap - I have a compost bin but at certain times of the year there is more than it can handle.



In the border gardens, along the edges of the yard, I grow a variety of flowers for the bees, and a few fruit bushes and trees - a blueberry bush, a blackboy peach - which should start producing in a year or two, a Seville orange and a blood orange - both of which are still a few years off from producing, a pomegranate tree, and a redcurrant bush and a blackcurrant bush - both of which are only starting to produce. Also lemonbalm, pinapple sage, chocolate mint, and comfrey (that's new this year).

In a small area by the flat I set up a little sitting area, and have put a trellis up with passionfruit planted on it, to eventually give a privacy screen from the neighbors. Underneath the passionfruits are some strawberry plants, and behind the seating are a couple of pepinos. In an old bathtub, I have Chinese water chestnuts growing.

There is also a small garden under the kitchen window which has lavender, rhubarb, Purple sage, green sage, rosemary, and a key lime that I just planted this year (so it is a few years off from producing).

I had wanted to include a beehive or two, but sadly I am highly allergic to bees, and while there would be no problem having them on the property (bees only sting if provoked or stepped on), I wouldn't be able to manage them or harvest the honey because of the sting risk.

As you can see, you can get a LOT of variety in a very small area. Not a lot of any one thing, or enough for preserving (for most things), but enough to keep you in fresh food.
So if you have only a small space, go ahead and give it a go. And remember, it doesn't all have to be done at once. I have done all this across an 8 year span, as money, health and energy has allowed.

Butter Me Up

Here we are, heading into the home stretch of January. While the days are hurringly hot, already the nights are cold enough for an extra duvet, and the early mornings are so cold that I can see my breath, and my feet go numb (that's what I get for wandering around the garden barefoot at 6.30 in the morning). 
Tomatoes, summer beans, and zucchini did very poorly this year and are already on their way out. I will be starting planting for the autumn garden this week - a month early, but already the self-sown seeds from last year's autumn plants are sprouting. The wind has picked up again this evening, but it was the first day for months that we didn't have roaring winds - which really ripped the spring/summer garden apart - and I was able to spend some quiet time just sitting out enjoying the garden.
The 3 year old self-sown peach tree - an heirloom variety (Blackboy), so it has bred true - has its very first peaches. This year I planted a Seville orange, for marmalade, a Blood orange, and a Key lime. A few years, and I should start getting some good citrus.

Heirloom variety of Aqualegia - First year to flower

The sock class got put on hold shortly after my last post, in favour of The Shetland Hap Shawl class, when the yarn for the shawl arrived. I finished the knitting on the weekend, and now only have the ends to weave in, the lace end-seam to sew, and the blocking to do. 
I ordered a set of blocking mats back at the beginning of December, and they are supposed to arrive on Thursday, so I will hopefully block it on the weekend. Once it is blocked, I will post photos, and give a review of the class. Meanwhile, I have started a pair of knee-high stirrup socks (no toe or heel) which are knitted flat, as my project for the next class - Knit Faster With Portuguese Knitting.

I've also been getting back into the kitchen. It is still way too hot in the day to do any bread baking - I'll wait until late autumn to get back into that full time. But I am doing butter again.
Our local 4 Square (small "corner store" grocery), often over orders on cream, and when the cream passes its printed "use by" date, they put it in the 99c area. There is nothing wrong with it. If you keep cream at around 2C (35.6F), it will keep for months (yes, really). It will eventually start to separate though (after about 6-8 weeks), then it really isn't any good for putting into coffee. But it is fantastic for making butter! It turns into butter a whole lot faster that 'fresh' cream does - under 5 minutes with a hand churner. And considering how expensive both cream and butter are ($5 - $6 per 500g/lb for standard butter, up to $10 for organic/free range/artisan butters), it's a real win. I always buy up large on the 99c cream if I have the money at the time.
A hand churner actually works better than a blender/food processor for making butter. I find with the blender/food processor, it happens so fast that by the time the cream has turned into butter and you stop it, the buttermilk has already been whipped back into the butter, then it is quite a chore getting the buttermilk out again. With a hand churner, once it separates, it stays separate, and you just pour the buttermilk off.
I had been looking for a hand churner for some time, but didn't have any luck, so pretty much gave up once I got sick. Last weekend I was at my friend Tui's place, and she mentioned that she had been looking at a little hand butter churn on the Fly Buys reward page. Being an expensive item, naturally it took a lot of Fly Buy points to get it, and none of the places I shop do Fly Buys rewards anymore - fewer and fewer places are staying with that rewards program. I only had 1/3 of the points needed, with basically no chance of getting more. Tui said she had a ton of points (petrol stations still do Fly Buys, and she does a lot of driving), and offered to do a swap - I would get something on her rewards wishlist for her to the value of the points I had, and she would get the hand churner for me. Woohoo! I was certainly happy with that! Thank you Tui!
So here is the wonderful little hand churner, and two jars of butter - the one on the left a honey cinnamon butter, and the one on the right is a Mediterranean butter (shredded fresh basil leaves from the garden, chopped sundried tomatoes, and grated parmesan cheese).
The churn does a manageable, 300 ml (1/2 pint) of cream, which makes a nice amount to mix with herbs or spices for spreading on toast or fresh bread, or enough (about 120g/4.2oz) for most smaller baking needs, in around 5 minutes (10 minutes if you are using 'fresh' fresh cream instead of older fresh cream). Love it! It is easy to use, easy to clean, and doesn't take up a lot of storage space. A definite must-have for any DIY kitchen.