Hello readers, I am sitting in my office sweltering at 33 degrees C. I will not complain about the temperature; all I need to do is remember winter and how damn cold it was.
The dogs are lying around panting, and K has taken to the spa pool to cool off. The sheep have been shorn, and the horses are peeking out from under the trees. The year is nearly over, and it’s time to review.
So grab a drink, unless you already have one, in which case get another one so you have two, and settle in for a bit.
“You have to carry the fire."
I don't know how to."
Yes, you do."
Is the fire real? The fire?"
Yes it is."
Where is it? I don't know where it is."
Yes you do. It's inside you. It always was there. I can see it.”Cormac McCarthy, The Road
A - Alligators
We don’t have any on the farm, but it would be funny if they were in the lagoon. I can imagine them cruising around, eating the ducklings, eating the swans, and generally making a nuisance of themselves.
It feels like we survived a year that seemed to have a lot of alligators. Storms, winter, COVID, the government, things that broke, morons in the city, and vet bills. But, we are still standing, undaunted (maybe a little bit daunted), doing it because we have to, and never going back.
B - Bastard
I really like the word “bastard” as a swear word. It’s more versatile than most and is deeply satisfying to apply to things. “BASTARD LAWN MOWER!” for example. Or “get out of there, you bastard dog!” It’s a great word. It’s the swear word of 2023.
Bastard isn’t always a bad word; for example, we know a lot of bloody good bastards out this way and have always enjoyed our time with them over the last few months. Now, just let me carry on writing this bastard postcard, would you?
C - Cows
Thank god we don’t have any. They are lovely creatures and smart, but once bored, they are destructive bastards. There has been a lot of repair work around the place this year to fix what they did last year.
The neighbour has the most amazing cows. They are in incredible condition. K talks to them, and so does another neighbour who will not be named, and it’s great to look at them through the fence and not standing in the middle of our ruined chicken coop.
D - Dogs
Where would we be without dogs? Well, by my calculation, on holiday in the islands at least once a year. We wouldn’t be without them, of course.
They are growing older and, as they do, starting to fill out their personalities. Each has routines now and character.
Freya, when in heat, builds nests. Dog beds, outdoor cushions, toys, clothes, and random objects are all dragged under the cover of one of our big trees. She then pulls branches off the tree and drags them into the nest as well. It’s hilarious to watch and save K a lot of pruning time.
Arlo continues on his adventure to be the protector and grumpy old man. He growls at the other dogs if they are having too much fun and sits, affronted, looking at Freya when we come home and discover she has eaten the entire roast lamb. Mostly, he sits with his back to K, a sign of complete trust and an aspect of protection.
Koda. That dear, sweet bastard Koda. Still hasn’t figured out how curtains work and frequently gets stuck coming in or out. Stick is life for Koda, and he is very proud when he is carrying one. He’s not bad with sheep either, helping K instinctually when she is moving them around. But my word, when they were handing out brains, he got swapped with a chicken’s, I swear.
E - Elevation
The picture above shows the neighbourhood. We forget the overall view sometimes because we’re all living down here on an old island (that occasionally reappears in flooding) in a bit of a bowl. It keeps us protected from the worst of the winds, and it drops the temperature in winter and increases it in summer.
You’ll find us halfway down the gravel on the left, surrounded by good neighbours. To the top of the picture is the Ruamahanga River, and just to the left of the plane’s nose is the Waiohine River. You can see where they join, and in the big rain, they overflow back into this area. Bastards.
F - Farming
After four years of experimentation, including cattle, pigs, chickens, and chillis, we’ve decided the best way to make money out of the land we have is glamping. In fact, a recent survey of farms across New Zealand showed that the most profitable farms in order were dairy, arable (crops), and accommodation.
Bottom of the ways to make money included beekeeping, native forestry, and “other stock.” That’s you, llama lovers, and other petting zoo varieties. Just don’t do it. Just stop it. You’ll end up making the vet rich, and yourselves broke. There will be no island getaways for you.
We kept the sheep, though; the annoying ones are just so delicious. Nothing like a mutton burger made from the most annoying and angry ones. Chops, roasts, stuffed shoulders, all so much better than vac-packed store-bought meat.
G - Gardening
Once the domain of a quiet Saturday afternoon in an urban backyard in Wellington, with a garden the size of ours, it requires a nuclear response from K.
Hedges are shaped with a variety of power tools, including the chainsaw. Anything that is annoying is sprayed to death. Freya prunes all the low branches. Trees that are in the way are attacked and destroyed.
New trees are planted en masse, and sophisticated electric fences are deployed to keep sheep and horses at bay.
The weedeater is an essential weapon in the war and is used liberally on everything. Pruning fruit trees is brutal, and so far, they have all survived under K’s savage haircuts. Gardening here is like hairdressing in the 80s when you got a bowl over your head and a brutal cut around the bottom.
Gardening in the cities these days is like a modern haircut. $350 for six plants that will die because you forgot about them but looked bloody good when they first went in. And at least you had the chance to post them on your “socials” before they died.
K does a great job, and we do love living in a huge garden in the home paddock, especially this time of year.
H - Horses
Mahi and Strider continue to grow under K’s training. This year, K and the fencer, Tim, hand-built a horse corral from timber that K had cut and milled. It looks amazing, and aside from the sheer bloody creativity of the K and Tim, it saved a fortune to make it this way. It’s a one-off, unique, and I sometimes sit and drink beer in it and look at the magnificent bastard.
The horse community can be hilarious. They are all good-hearted people who connect and support each other. However, there is often no filter, and advice can arrive unsolicited. I kid of imagine it like you have your child in a cafe and a complete stranger coming up to you and telling you that they shouldn’t be eating what they are eating and then offering dietary suggestions.
Then there are the equestrians, riding horses in circles, jumping over stuff in very expensive clothes, with very expensive gear, and very expensive things in general. These people are definitely a different kind of human that speak a strange language and drift in different circles. More power to them. Me, I like to see K on Strider, putting up with the occasional bucks and kicks.
I - Ideas
The irony of living out this way is that it creates room to have ideas but also soaks up money, so you can’t always execute them. We have plenty of ideas about what's next, but thanks to the bastard bank, trying to get funding to make them happen is nearly impossible.
Don’t get me wrong, the glamping site, an idea of K’s, has happened. It would have been a lot easier if the bank had played ball, but as I have said before, they don’t understand rural. They live in a concrete jungle, in small boxes, slaves to social media, eating meals wrapped in plastic.
There are a lot of ideas out here and small business ventures. They don’t always succeed, but that is not the point, the point is that people try new ideas and maybe fail, but at least they broke free from the pack.
J - Jack & Jenny
According to Google, farming words that start with J include Jack and Jenny. Sorry, I was struggling with this letter.
A Jack is a male donkey, Jenny is a female donkey, and don’t get any ideas K, donkeys are banned from the farm.
Donkeys are interesting things, but strike me as particularly annoying. They don’t really have a fear response, which is mistaken for stubbornness. Their ears are part of their cooling system. Who knew? Google also told me that in some parts of the world, there are conservation efforts to protect “Wild Asses.” I read that as “Wild Arses” and went down a totally different rabbit hole.
God, J is an annoying letter, and I can’t eat it. Begone J!
K - is for K
The subtitle of this letter should be “This one goes out to the one I love.”
Constantly moving, managing the farm, managing the house, rain, shine, hail, night, day, she’s doing it. Despite feeling sore, injuries, tiredness, and things breaking all the time, she’s doing it.
She’s building all the new businesses while I try and hold together the old businesses long enough for us both to jump. She is, simply the best.
L - Long Time Ago
It feels like the city life is now a very long time ago. I often have momentary nightmares where I have to walk to the bus on a cold, windy day, get into the giant petri dish with other humans, sit in an office with people I don’t like, buy a sandwich for $16, do more sitting, return home via the pub, and repeat the entire process five times a week for the rest of my life until I die.
D is for dramatic, Ian, I hear you say. Indeed, it is, but it reminds me of the need to keep moving forward and loving what we have, even when it is trying to bite us. It’s still better than the alternative, urban wastelands.
M - Munted
I’m reusing a word from the last time I did an A to Z, I know, but it is still relevant. That is, the farm and environment break things. Things that once worked well are now mounted and need to be fixed.
This year, things that got mounted included the ride-on lawn mower (more than once), the weedeater, the entire septic drainage field, the septic pump, tools, the ute (more than once), the tractor (more than once), the electric fence, some of the baleage, and other miscellaneous items.
Total muntage bill estimated to be circa $10k. Now, if K hadn’t un-munted the majority of the bastard things, the total bill would be circa $25k.
Farms are expensive, but we don’t want to live in a box and go to another box each day via a human-size Petri dish on wheels.
The other thing that got munted was us in the Australian term of the word. When we needed it, we downed tools, got out the booze, and got jolly munted.
N - Neighbours
The bad neighbour left. We do not speak of them anymore; they are gone! The farm munted them right back to the city. New neighbours came, and they are good bastards. We’ve already got very, very munted with them.
You can’t survive out here without having great neighbours, and we have the best. We have the annual Bathurst Bash where we all get very munted. It’s always a struggle for people to walk home via paddocks and laneways. And I am sorry, Mike, but the bathroom scales aren’t broken; you just had way too many lamb burgers that night.
And I love how everyone names their places. Pleasant View, Three Fires, Riverpoint Farm, The Ark, and so on. Each with an identity of their own.
O - Owl
As a kid, spending half my life in deep rural, 70km inland from Napier, the one thing I always remembered was the Morepork. A native owl to New Zealand that makes a call that sounds exactly like its name.
There must be a few around the island because you often hear them at night. We’ve seen one up close once, at dusk, in a Kowhai tree. They are smaller than you think.
There is nothing like the silence of 3 am being broken by two Moreporks calling to each other across the neighbourhood.
P - Planning
It never, ever stops. There are so many things to do, big and small, that must be planned for. Season changes, animal husbandry things, and long lists appear on the blackboard and in notebooks. Notes are emailed to yourself so you don’t forget the next day.
Plans are laid and the weather disrupts them, meaning more planning.
A is for Adaptable.
Q - Queues
There are no queues out here except for two. Recently, we travelled to Queenstown, and I forgot just how annoying queues can be. I think it is a minor affliction that should be banned. All that waiting around is annoying and a literal waste of your life.
The first queue in rural is at the bar. This is an acceptable queue, and if you time it right, you can finish your beer as you wait and continue socialising. This is an art.
The second queue is the one that occurs when a tractor is driving on the road. The cars queue up behind the tractor in what is known as a “parade.”
“I saw you leading a parade down state highway 2,” is the saying, “Oh yes, I had a very big parade.”
R - Reducing
The statistics about small blocks and farms show that across the country, they are reducing. A lot of the larger farms are going into forestry, and small blocks are hard work and expensive, causing a reasonably high turnover. Some farmland is being sold off as urban blocks.
Also reducing are prices for staples like lamb. For many reasons, now is not a great time to be running sheep.
What, of course, is not reducing is the price of everything. But the government will fix that by changing the names of signs and giving us tax breaks, so it will be fine.
S - Setbacks
Along with things getting munted come setbacks. I think that we have finally gained “valley time.” We are much more relaxed around when things happen (except when the septic system blows up) with an “it’ll happen when it happens attitude.
The valley has a rhythm, and things literally do happen when they happen. With everyone planning, things getting munted everywhere, and the weather just doing as it bloody well pleases, there is no point in stressing about it.
T - Tractor
I’ll leave this here as an ode to the Tractor. It speaks for itself.
U - Understanding
The more we do, the more we understand. We have a lot of friends who have taught us and continue to do so. They are good bastards. We know more than we ever did, but still, we don’t know everything.
This is good because every now and again, you run into a know-it-all, and they are not the good kind of bastards. They are the annoying ones, and you can’t eat them.
V - Vegetables
My doctor tells me I don’t eat enough of them. Nonsense. Potatoes are a vegetable and the grain that goes into beer.
Vegetables, at least in the valley, are a lot cheaper than elsewhere because of orchard shops. Straight in from the field to the store, minimal wastage, maximum freshness.
Yes, Dr T, I promise to eat more potatoes.
W - Wairarapa
It’s been a tough year over here. With it starting so wet and extending all the way into late winter, crops, contracting, and farming, in general, were hard work. A lot of people were losing money, and interest rates being hiked by fat cat bankers didn’t help.
But, with summer here, we have turned a corner, I think and provided we don’t swing into drought, which everyone is prepared for, it should be ok.
X - Xylophone
I’m at the bit where I wish I had never started this postcard. I can honestly say I have never seen a Xylophone out here. What would you do with it, play it to the cows at milking?
Y - Yes
Yes. We’d do it all again; we’ve said it time and again; there is no going back for us now, just deeper into the valley and farm. We’ll never be true locals because we weren’t born in the rural stock out here, but we don’t mind.
Z - Zoo
It feels like a zoo here sometimes but in a good way. Animals in all directions, K leading out like Dr Dolittle, organised choose, dogs invading the spa pool, horses lifting gates and getting into paddocks they shouldn’t be, lambs decamping through fences into neighbours' properties, and Freya chasing low-flying birds.
Sorry that petered out a bit at the end, but seriously, I’m getting thirsty and I’m trying to deal with some letters that really don’t associate with farming.
Anyway, have a great break, and make sure you all get munted, you bastards. I’m off to find a beer.