Note To Future Self

One of the best things about our house is that its previous owner was an avid gardener who liked to plant one of everything. We’ve got asparagus, rhubarb, peaches, apples, gooseberries, black currants and the most glorious display of snowdrops and grape hyacinths I’ve ever seen.

The worst thing about our house is that its previous owner was an avid gardener who liked to plant one of everything. In our front yard, clockwise from the corner of the house, we have a climbing rose (pink), a lilac (white), a camellia (fuchsia), a pieris japonica (mostly dead), a butterfly bush (deep purple), some random bush that blooms for months (blush pink), a large rhododendron (pink), another lilac (lilac), a witch hazel, a forsythia, an azalea (magenta), another rhody (also pink), a kowhai, a hebe (lavender), a blooming cherry with red foliage, a rose (cerise), hollyhocks (dark pink, magenta and pale pink), 3 or four peonies (peony), a large standard rose (mauve) and five shrub roses up against the house (shell, coral, cream, its-a-girl pink and lipstick).

To be fair, the previous occupant did try and temper things by under-planting everything with calendulas (blaze orange).

In late spring, when they’re all blooming, it feels like we live inside someone’s grandma’s underpants. Then, just when I think I’m going to have to bleach a jolly roger in the lawn or die of shame, they all finish and leave me with this …

Its not completely scorched earth, I do like that bed of dahlias in the corner

but the front bed is what people see as they walk past.
Its so full of bulbs that I can’t just throw some summer annuals in there because every trowel thrust cleaves at least one bulb. Really. Every time. So, naturally, I started hatching schemes for digging up the whole bed as soon as the first frost knocked everything back. There’s just one problem:

Yeah, that’s right. The tomatoes are rotting on the vine and my spring bulbs have sprouted.

Help!

All I can thing to do is scatter seeds or small bulbs (glads? more dahlias?) on the surface and dump some compost on top and hope that the bulbs can grow up through it.

Any ideas? please?

It was bike to work week last week. So I did.
At the celebratory breakfast, I, and nearly everyone else at my table, won a door prize:

What are those credit card looking things you ask? and why would you need 4 of them?

Glad you asked, because I did.

In the slow, dulcet tones used for soothing infants and the insane my co-workers explained that those are scrapers. you know, for scraping ice off your windshield. Do they not have winter where you come from?

If anyone wants one, I’ve got a couple spares.

At the risk of mixing cliches, the Milford junket was a journey of personal discovery. For example, I learned I’m a sucker for photos of clouds at play across hillsides.

Didn’t get enough in the previous posts? Here are a few more….

I also discovered that Milford Sound really is that spectacular, like all the tourist brochures say.

Yes, even with a million tourists per year and 300 buses per day in the high season. For example, how long did it take you to spot the 30-meter tour boat crammed full of tourists in the photo above?

In more current news, Anna and I have been ping-ponging some sort of antipodean ur-cold back and forth all week. I was sick during the mid-week and got to miss work during some of the most beautiful weather we’ve seen all summer. Now it’s the weekend, Anna’s sick, and the weather has gone to custard (as they say).

Not sure if this is a boast or a confession, but as part of my convalescence, I’ve watched approximately 30 (hour-long) episodes of Top Gear. I suddenly feel rather dirty. And I have this uncontrollable urge to buy one of these and one of these.

Well, we’ve been here 11 months. Mostly we fit in well. Dare I say it we’re happy.

But every once and a while, we get a little reminder that we live in a foreign country.

Yup, you are looking at a roll of imitation greasproof paper.

We found it in the grocery store in Te Anau. It cost $5, which seemed a bit dear for satisfying idle curiosity. So we still have no idea whether the greasproof-ness has been imitated or the paper-ness.

Truly, we live in a world of wonder.