Autumn Red

The weather has just recently turned a touch autumnal. Where summer is bright blue sky and yellow daisies, and winter is a sea of black coats walking headlong  into a southerly, autumn is the red of a ripe chilli pepper and a turning leaf. I'm noticing lots of red at the moment, especially in the tomato patch. Seems everyone's tomatoes are ripening slowly.  The cherry tomatoes have been ripening steadily for a few weeks now, but the last remaining grosse lisse tomato plant has just the one ripe tomato shining up like a beacon from the green of the plant. It is the first time in three years of gardening that I've had a large size tomato ripen, which is, in this climate, and with everything I've had to go through to keep these babies alive, a bit of a miracle.

Autumn makes me think of Tokoroa, and the start of hockey season. Hockey practice after school would end about 5pm, and I would walk home afterwards with it getting steadily darker, the sky big and wide and still. I was a dreamy teenager, kind of lost in some other place. I loved walking home and seeing the lights on in people's houses, seeing them going about their evening rituals. I wrote poems in my head as I walked. It was lovely to get home and find the fire on, I can hear the sound of my mother pulling the drapes closed across the patio door. The drapes were red. My cheeks, chilled by the crisp air, were red.

Four

Tomorrow you turn four. Four years sounds very serious. Not quite serious enough for school, but not frivolous like a three year old. My mother, your Nana, always tells me about how she and my father walked around the rose garden the morning I was born. And then I arrived with a holler at 3.20pm, in time for afternoon tea. Before you were born I would roll my eyes and groan something teenage-y whenever I heard this story; oh Mum, you're embarassing me. But I get it now. I get it because every year on the 4th of February I do the same thing. I tell you about how your dad and I went and had a last supper, well, it was lunch, at Ernesto's. We ate hash browns and eggs and hollandaise. I went to the chemist and bought the last of the supplies I thought I would need to look after a little baby. We went home and packed those few last things in my red suitcase, which is now your suitcase, and then at 5pm we went to the hospital. It was a dull overcast day, a little windy. As we came down the hill to Newtown, Christy Moore was playing on the stereo, a song I'd been teasing your dad about. I asked him how he felt. Scared, he said. When we got the hospital, your dad took photos of me beside the sign at the hospital, with my suitcase and my bump where you were. I knew I wouldn't have the bump next time I stood in the carpark. The same Christy Moore song was on the stereo when we brought you home two days later.

So it's six hours until you are four. Tomorrow when you wake up you'll come into your mum and dad's room and clamber in between us. There will most probably be a tickle fight. I will look at you and see every day since the day you were born, and when you're five, I'll get nostalgic about it.

Summer road trip: homeward bound

We are now vampire proof

My trusty assistant was on hand to harvest our 14 bulbs of garlic. They've been in the ground since the shortest day, June 21, and according to garden lore, should be harvested on the longest day, December 21. I decided to leave them in the ground a touch longer, until the first leaves started to die off. I dug them up with my new garden fork which melts the soil like butter. Oh, the bliss of a new garden fork.

I also have shallots in there, and I've left them in a bit longer to get bigger and fatter. H got a bit excited though, and pulled one out.

The next step is leaving them to dry. If we could be assured of a couple of days of sunshine, I would have left them out on the soil, but we're enduring some four-seasons-in-oneday weather, so they are tied up in the shed to dry off. I can't wait to plat them and hang them in my kitchen. This is definitely a crop I will grow again next year.

Summer road trip: part three

Summer road trip: part two

Summer road trip: part one

Spud-o-rama

This is my potato patch. On the left, five jersey benne plants. On the right, five agria plants. I planted seed potatoes in September with lots of seaweed and some wood ash. The yellow flowers are just some chysanthemums that grow like weeds all over the place.

In NZ, jersey bennes are the traditional boiling spud of Christmas, though I don't reckon it's Christmas without roast potatoes. However, I thought it would be fun to try growing them just because I could. We're off to Auckland for Christmas so I thought now would be a good time to harvest the jersey bennes and eat them before we leave. My trusty assistant was on hand with a trowel.

And what do you know? A spud!

They kept coming out of the ground like pearls in the soil. Like finding more Christmas presents under the tree.
In the end we harvested just over 3kg of spuds. The most one plant had was nine potatoes.

I'm so used to having leeks that look like spring onions, lettuces that bolt, tomatoes that never ripen and carrots that look like baby fingers that this haul of treasure has me absolutely stoked.

Rothfest

It was my Dad's 70th birthday this month, and to celebrate, my Rothwell uncles and aunts and most of my cousins came over from Australia. It's the first time most of us have been together for more than a decade.

It's great to have family. Even if they think your accent is funny.

A long weekend

At the weekend, we watched with hands over our eyes as St Piri flubbed a few kicks at the final of the RWC.

But in the end, the All Blacks won by one point. I'm still a bit deaf in one ear from all the yelling.
The next day, we went to the Wairarapa and visited our pals Al and Rose at The Crate Outdoors.
Then we rode a new bike trail.

The End.

I love France, but not that much

Been thinking a bit this week about the France/All Blacks showdown on tonight, in which the winner of the Rugby WC will be determined. If it were any other country in the final with France I would be supporting Les Bleus to the hilt. But it's not.

If we were all, say, a series of doors waiting to be opened; our memories, experiences and loves behind each one of them, then behind one of my doors would be France. I've been there on four different occasions, each one a revelation. The last time I went there I spent three months in an old campervan on my own, wandering aimlessly from village to town to city, discovering that while some of the cliches of French life exist, it's also possible to find badly dressed women, to find supermarkets full of processed food, to hear that beautiful language used to discuss such unglamorous subjects as banking and parking tickets, (gonflage, the place at a petrol station where you pump up your tyres remains my favourite French word), and drink wine that can only be described as utter crap. I also saw no trace of that supposedly Gallic trait, arrogance. Instead I found friendliness, curiosity and an ordinariness - much like you find in New Zealand.

On that last trip, nine years ago, I worked for a week picking grapes on a vineyard in Burgundy. My French being also pretty rubbish, I barely spoke to a soul. But those who knew I was Neo Zelandaise, not a deaf mute as one girl thought - or worse, English - tried to engage with me and teach me some French words. Moutarde, panier, sang, caisse croute, porteur; some words were learnt out in the vines, autumn sun turning the scene golden, others over the daily long lunch of five courses and wine, then a sleep in the sun. The village church bells signalled lunch time. Hearing people talk was like my high school French lessons come to life. It was all too beautiful. Except when it rained.

So France, though I love that you brought us gratin Dauphinoise, the croque monsieur, Champagne, Matthieu Kassovitz, wrapped sugarcubes, broiche and Le Tour, I am hoping that tonight you'll forgive me my lapsed nationalism. Go the All Blacks!

Why living in Jville is better than the city

4.30pm

4.35pm

4.40pm

Happy o'clock