Blooming Lovely!

Hello... I can hardly believe that one month has passed since I arrived here at Awhitu, Aotearoa... it’s strange because in many ways, I feel that I’ve been here so much longer...
& then there are days when I feel that I stepped off the plane just a day ago.....
there are times when I feel so very much at home here & then there are unexpected moments of profound loneliness... missing family, friends, & all that is familiar so very much...
so thanks for the emails & please do come & visit Aotearoa/New Zealand & stay with me... it’d be wonderful to explore this amazingly diverse beautiful country together...
& share the adventure!
At last, here are some more photos & a brief resume of my adventures thus far...
Tanya & Charmaine (T&C) have gone on holiday to Samoa, Pacific Islands, for 10 days, leaving me in charge of ‘Earthtalk’.... chucks, ducks, guinea fowl, harvesting fruit, slug/snail patrol... – hey, it’s no joke going out with a head torch & collecting slugs & snails late at night, all busy devouring transplanted lettuce, broad beans & other precious little plants that you spent hours planting out with lots of tlc & plenty of nitrogen rich worm poo from the worm farms around the place... T. tells me that the little plants apparently still reel with shock for up to a week following the transition from the greenhouse... whereas I’m still reeling with shock at so many slugs gathered in one veggie patch... anyway, as this is a full-on very ‘pc’ organic permaculture project...absolutely everything has some positive benefit to the land... so, the chucks & ducks have a wonderful feast each morning gorging themselves on the night’s haul & then we humans benefit as we devour the rich yellowy yolked eggs from the chucks... with even their egg shells recycled in the compost afterwards...
a little bit of trivia is that chucks can eat egg shells if they’re boiled or cooked in some way... that's fine... but not raw shells!
These are the chucks in their run.... apparently their days are numbered as they aren’t laying enough eggs... T&C tell me that they believe that if they want to eat meat that they have to be prepared to slaughter their own animals in a humane way... so, they’ve already begun to initiate me into the slaughter ritual... C. holds each chicken in her arms & thanks them for the eggs they have laid in their lifetime. C. tells me that the chickens usually go into some kind of relaxed, mesmerised trance at this point, bored with her muttering on.... & so she hands over the chuck to T.... who promptly chops its head off, draining off any blood... returning said chuck to C for hand plucking & whatever else one needs to do before their ready for the freezer.... not what happened in Wallace & Grommit’s ‘Chicken Run’, eh?

Gorgeous Feijoas.... I'm picking them daily.... helping to prepare them for Charmaine's '100 things one can do with a Feijoa'.... or is that 101 things??? They're very delicious... with soft fleshy insides....