Greetings readers,
I hope you have come through the election unscathed. As I told my butcher on Saturday, “This election feels like when your teacher asks you if you want the cane or the strap.” GenX and up will get that one.
Anyway, enough about that nonsense; I hope you are well. It’s been another few weeks of madness on the farm, not helped by spring gales, which we are not complaining about because this time last year, we were ankle-deep in mud.
So grab your hat tightly, and let’s catch up.
We were at the pub on Sunday (of course we were), and the wind was howling. During spring, especially in an El Nino, Australia throws great big batches of hot air at us off the desert. It roars across the Tasman, getting as angry as your grandad when you don’t put his tools back where they belong and then slams into the mountains.
You can see it coming because the clouds form this pressure wave in the sky as the wind heads up and then comes racing back down this side and across the valley. At home, the porch is filling up with pine needles as the wind slams into the shelter belt behind us. We bail into the car and drive a few kilometres to the pub. Trees are bending, the wind is trying to push us off the road, and stock is huddling together where they can find shelter.
The sun is out, but we drive through big showers of rain, thrown thirty kilometres or more off the top of the mountains into the valley. When we arrive at the Gladstone, the power is off.
Disaster.
Thankfully, the beer is still pouring, but the chillers are off, the kitchen is out, and the bar staff have trapped a bunch of city folk who can’t pay their bill. Talking to the others, power is out all over the valley, and just as we are talking about it, K notices that all the security cameras, bar one, have just gone dark at home, which means the power is off there as well now.
As it turns out, trees on the highway have not only blown into the main power line, but they’ve also had the cheek to burst into flames. Quite a few people are going to be trapped at the pub while they deal with that, which the locals agree is not such a bad thing.
One of the locals, an electrician, arrives with a generator on the trailer, and the day is saved. Beer will remain cold, the kitchen will remain in action, and the city folk can escape the increasingly rowdy locals back over the hill to Wellington.
The wind here at this time of year is known as the “Wairarapa Hair Dryer,” occasional days of strong, hot, dry wind, getting rid of the excess water after winter. Wellington people are used to it; they, after all, are the windiest city in the world, and the old joke is that Wellington has four seasons. Summer (two weeks only), Autumn, Winter, and Shitsville. The wind doesn’t stop there for weeks at this time of year.
By the time this hits your mailbox, the round pen will be finished. As I write this, Tim is out in the paddock finishing the final rails and building a gate. The horses have seen the half-finished product, and the mare did her usual “Dear Jesus, what is this strange thing doing in my paddock!” dance for a bit.
I should mention that K did a bit of whip practice in the half-finished pen a few days back. The horses got up to full gallop on hearing the cracks, and the mare had a put-on panic. The dogs all bolted from the paddock and went and hid in the house, looking back out the window. All so dramatic.
It’s an impressive piece of engineering when you consider that all the posts are from our trees, and when you are in the middle of it, you realise it’s a decent size. It’s a major milestone for K, and she’s been talking to some of the stunt training heavies about them coming and making use of it and the other things she has built. I am proud of her; this one has been a long time coming. I can imagine myself hanging on the side of the corral with a beer, watching stunties fight and fall off horses. Who needs Netflix?
No doubt, as this arrives in your mailbox, we will be having a beer in the corral. No, really, there is no doubt. We will be.
The glamping site is basically good to go, with K tidying it up after winter and getting things in order. We were due to open this weekend, but it might take a little more time. There is no rush; we’ve lived here long enough to figure out things happen, then they are ready and trying to force it along just means unnecessary stress.
As the sun comes out, the gun comes out. There is nothing more satisfying than shooting off the porch. There is nothing more dissatisfying than getting my arse handed to me by K, who outshoots me every time.
“This gun isn’t sited in right!” I complain as I miss the targets completely, again. K calmly picks it up and hits just the left of the bullseye from 45 feet out. “For fucks sake”, I moan as I take a shot from a prone position and still miss it. Ah, well, practice makes perfect, I guess. No one is going to take me hunting at this rate; I’d be shooting everything but the tasty deer.
We had a few of the neighbours from near and far over for a Sunday Bathurst afternoon. It’s becoming a tradition, and I really should learn that I need to take Monday off afterwards.
For international readers, Bathurst is a town in Australia that is converted into a race track that runs over the top of a mountain. Well, the whole town is built on the mountain. Once a year, the supercars have an endurance race there. The supercars are big 5.4L V8s putting out up to 635HP and hitting speeds of 300kmh.
They probably make Greta very, very angry.
It’s a good excuse for a get-together and a long afternoon and evening of drinking and eating. It’s plain New Zealand food from the 1970s. Sausage rolls, cheerios, cheese and crackers, pickled onions, homemade hamburgers with fake cheese and roast lamb.
Our good friend Ken bought the pickled onions. “I prepared these especially.” He said.
“How did you do that mate?” I asked, thinking that he may have actually made them.
“I cut them in half.” He replied.
K taught one of the neighbour’s girls how to stunt sword fight. I must ask Donna how their house is looking after that; I can imagine she went home and kept practising. It reminds me of the time that I got revenge on one of my sisters.
This sister was always getting her older brothers into trouble when we were younger and then just pulling a tear, so we got punished. She ended up with four boys (I think, there are so many and probably punishment enough) and a few years back, I bought them all slingshots for Christmas. Good ones, properly scary ones. Carnage and chaos ensued.
Late in the night, we followed the torch of our last guest as he walked home across the paddocks. In the immortal words of Yellowbeard, the Pirate, “Stagger! Stagger! Crawl. Crawl. Jump!”
As I said, it is always best to take Monday off, and I always forget. Sunday sessions are great, but Monday hangovers are hell on earth.
K got her Aussie pyro on; the burn pile was set alight in the last week, an impressive stack this year after deadfall and pruning shelter belts. Sorry about your washing neighbours, but you know the drill. There are certain times when you go on a burning spree, and the day is perfect, with rain predicted that night to keep the pile under some control.
That day the neighbour came and rolled the paddocks. During winter, when the ground is soft, stock leave hoofprints, and horses leave quite large holes. Once the ground dries out, working in the paddocks can become a bit of a nightmare because it is just not flat.
Rolling involves a tractor (who doesn’t love a tractor) that pulls a huge roller behind it, funnily enough. It flattens the paddocks and gateways down, so when the summer comes, you aren’t rolling your ankle every ten steps. It’s good to have good neighbours; we couldn’t do it ourselves, and trying to get a contractor organised is a) expensive and b) almost impossible to get them to turn up.
There is still spraying to be done; thanks to the flooding, we’ve had an outbreak of buttercup in one of our lower paddocks. It’s a pretty yellow flower, but it’s poisonous for some kinds of stock, horses in particular, but also sheep. That means until it’s sorted, the paddock is not useable. They’ll generally avoid it, eating around it, but it’s not worth the risk.
One of the things that I like about the Valley is people building new small businesses. K’s glamping site is a case in point. And you spot it everywhere, and the people who create them stick together rather than competing with each other, a distinct difference between urban and rural. Often referring customers to each other.
With Christmas coming, I wanted to give a shout-out to a couple of people. First of all, K has a limited number of very nice gift vouchers for the glamping site if you want to shout someone a night or weekend away. Get in touch with her at karene@threefires.co.nz
Donna, the neighbour of ours whose daughter is now a sword-wielding pirate, has a new venture called Bays & Leo. She creates unique candles, like the one you see above, and can also tailor-create candles for you personally, a one-off unique gift. She also curates and sells other local crafty, high-quality gifts. Her long-term goal is an on-farm shop, which would be awesome.
For the locals, she’s opened a pop-up store in Greytown on McMaster Street, just off Main Street. I’ve left her contact details at the end of the post so you can pop off and visit the website.
Another local business starting up in the next three months has me excited. A mad ex-farmer and chopper pilot is building a wild game meat factory out this way. Basically, he goes out into the bush, hunts, brings it back and dresses it, gets it certified, and sells it on.
This fills me with great joy because I can get whole beasts and take them to my butcher to get them processed how I like. It’s also great for the community because people can band together and buy a beast splitting it between them. The cost will be far lower than going to the supermarket that has put an extortionate markup on meat. And the quality is better. Plus, it’s better for the environment. The meat doesn’t leave the region to get processed and then trucked all over the place.
I’ll let you know when he gets started.
That’s all from me; I can see that Tim has nearly finished the gate for the corral and should be looking good for a 4 p.m. finish. K is working hard at the Glamping site, putting in replacement trees, killing weeds, and turning the winter lawn into a work of art.
I see that Sparrow has just arrived at the neighbours to do some work. It’s almost as if that sneaky devil knew there were going to be four o’clock beers and timed his visit perfectly.
Until next time, take care, and as always, thank you for reading. Share it if you love it.
Bays and Leo Website - All the social media links are at the bottom of the page.
Christmas is coming