Struan Farm

Post-Christmas & Boxing Day Post

Our holiday marathon started with the Piopio Christmas parade on Christmas Eve. And believe it or not, Piopio Community Fruit & Veg Stand's float in the parade won a first prize in the "Family, Friends & Whanau" category, woo hoo!

We had three lovely little bunnies munching away on artificial carrots and real lettuce, while the scarecrow they christened "Zack" napped above them. Walking alongside with me were mums Lulu and Jo, dressed as a carrot and a watermelon. I was attired in denim overalls and a big hat, carrying a garden trug full of flowers and veggies. (Can I just interject to say that I hadn't worn overalls since high school? They are very comfortable but seriously unflattering, John has made me put them away.) The float was driven by John on our vintage David Brown tractor. And while it did shower on and off before the parade started, we didn't get rained on during the parade. 

After the parade the planters full of homegrown, beautiful lettuce went to our local Fat Pigeon Cafe, while scarecrow Zack has found a home overlooking one of my tomato beds here at Struan Farm.

Christmas Day here is almost entirely about getting ready for Boxing Day--I cook while John mows and sets things up at the Homestead. Although we did find time for a reasonable Christmas dinner. Acceptances for Boxing Day totalled 45 this year, with the possibility of farmstay guests joining us, so I wanted to make sure we didn't run out of food, dishes, or cutlery. John's brother Carrick kindly made his mum's delicious dinner rolls. The actual number of people who came ended up lower by 11 due to illness (3) and no-shows (8), so we seriously over-catered, and have been working through the leftover ham, salmon, salads and baking ever since. 

The kid's archery competition ended up being quite the contest, with the leader choking and a come from behind victory in the over 9 age group. The Axten brothers triumphed on the croquet lawn. We also had a reunion of sorts amongst John's Robertson cousins, and the launching of the HMS Maurie down at the pond.

It was a good day. Along with the leftover food the leftover flowers were enjoyed too.

We've now cleaned everything up and recovered, mostly. John has been out rolling grass seed with the tractor and spraying, while I've had a session in the glasshouse potting up 200+ basil seedlings. The sort of things one does to relax and ground oneself here at Struan Farm!

Brief Holiday Blogging Break

There's lots happening here at Struan Farm at the moment. The Piopio Christmas parade happened on Christmas Eve, Dec. 24th, followed by Christmas, and today's Boxing Day, with the annual gathering of extended family here at the farm. I need to take a brief break from blogging to get through that, but will come back to you soon with lots of stories to tell and an update or update(s) I'm sure.

 

Merry Christmas: A Pohutukawa Flowers in Piopio

There's always been a pohutukawa tree growing at the edge of one of the QEII native bush reserves here at Struan Farm. Well, almost always. It was planted by John's sister Julie many years ago now, but we've never seen it flower. Piopio is well outside the range for New Zealand's native "Christmas tree," being inland and mostly too cold. 

We've never seen it flower until now, that is!

All the best for a very Merry Christmas from our family to yours.

Perfectly Legal

Our vintage David Brown tractor is now perfectly legal, wow. With the tractor scheduled to pull the Piopio Community Fruit & Veg Stand's float in the Piopio Christmas parade, much discussion happened about how the tractor was going to get into Piopio and back home without a major accident and without getting into issues with the police.

We looked at borrowing or hiring a trailer, however the tractor's double wheels made that hard. John announced he was just going to get up early one morning and drive it into town, something I wasn't terribly keen on. But then he started doing research. The tractor had been legally registered previously, there were two very old license plates on it, one on the front (589HQ) and one on the back (588HQ):

He went online and made some calls. Turns out he was able to update the registration and get new plates, then drive legally into town at 25 or 30k per hour.

And so we made the 10k drive into Piopio very early Christmas Eve morning, with me driving behind the tractor with emergency flashers going the entire way. John waved at the cows along the way, thought it was a great adventure. As you might imagine, I was just relieved we all got there in one piece! 

Project Peas

This season I decided to try to grow peas seriously for the first time here at Struan Farm, especially since we now have two strong and higher fences in the backyard veggie garden area, aka "Veggie World." I move the tomato plants around each year as recommended, and peas would be done their dash well before the corn starts to kick in. So they're a good transitional veggie to grow.

I tested two dwarf varieties and two conventional ones. "Pea Sugar Snap Dwarf," "Pea Sugar Snap Conventional," and "Pea Petit Provencal" from King's Seeds, and "Peas Easy Peasy" from Egmont Seeds. While John "interfered" with my limited efforts to support the growing dwarf peas, I've decided they're pretty much a waste of time either way. The pods are small. In terms of the conventional peas, "Peas Easy Peasy" win my vote. Beautiful long pods with nice sized peas. I will grow these again! 

Piopio's Next Top Model 2018

It's time to announce the winner of the competition between this year's pet lambs to be featured on Struan Farm's annual Christmas card. Pet lamb "Jelly" has won the much coveted prize! She shares this honour with previous winners Ruby, Alfie, and Cookie. Quite the creme de la creme.

The popular vote went to a landscape image of both Jelly and her twin sister Jam, but since we needed a portrait/vertical image for the card I made a casting vote for Jelly. Granddaughter Violet preferred this one too.

All our best wishes for a very Merry Christmas and holiday period to your and your families (including pets, of course!).

 

Onto the Benches

Our confirmed headcount for the upcoming Struan Farm Boxing Day bash for extended family is at 46, so now is the time that the tough get going. Hedges are being trimmed, weed whackers and leaf blowers deployed, mowers mowing. I must confess that the chef has been busy baking, so the gardener isn't out there deadheading the roses and weeding nearly enough. She'll get there, I know she will.

Given the numbers coming I decided we needed to overhaul a few of the wooden garden benches that sit out in the gardens. Three plus one from the Cottage have been water blasted and re-painted. (The chef wields a pretty mean paint brush too.)

We're definitely not striving for perfection here, just tidier seats someone could actually sit upon and balance a plate of delicious holiday food. But they all do look much better. John's dad Maurie built solid wooden benches that last and clean up well, especially with a fresh coat of paint.

Cordially Yours

We have several elderflower bushes on the edge of the backyard near "Veggie World" here at Struan Farm, grown from cuttings. I hack them back radically at the end of each season so they don't get out of control, but I've been keen to use the flowers for cordial and other natural things. You will know me by now.

This was my first attempt making elderflower cordial. I used this Jamie Oliver recipe. There are others out there with slight variations in ingredients, but I chose the simplest for this initial experiment. Flower heads, sugar, water, honey, lemon.

After gathering and washing the flower heads a sugar syrup is made on the stovetop with the water, sugar and honey, into which lemon zest and lemon juice and slices are put, along with the flowers. This concoction then infuses for 24 hours before the cordial is strained through cheese cloth and poured into sterilised bottles.

While I like the idea of this, and it was easy to make, I'm not so sure about the taste. Sugar and lemon predominate; I find myself wondering what elderflower actually tastes like. Perhaps I should have waited for more mature flower heads, or steeped the liquid longer. Or it just may be that I don't like cordials, they're too sweet. Elderflower cordial can be put into sparkling water or sparkling wine, and used in baking/icing. I was prompted to try to make this after discovering a lemon syrup cake with elderflower mascarpone icing. That was rather special, but I didn't want to have to purchase cordial when I made it again.

Boxing Day Baking, Rounds 2 & 3

I'm getting there with the baking for our annual Struan Farm Boxing Day event. RSVP's now total 47. And yes, I do have enough cutlery and dishes, thanks to a good sale at Briscoes! I've been able to get another batch of cream cheese Christmas cookies done, and second batches of brownies and cupcakes. Also the mince tarts baked and two batches of lemon verbena shortbread. (And pssst: John's Christmas cake iced with Royal Icing, just not decorated yet.)

I still have to thaw and bake the "pain d'amande" dough. At some point the cupcakes will get iced and decorated. I'm pondering a lemon thyme syrup cake, we'll see if that gets done. But what I do need to tackle this week is the icing of John's Christmas cake. It's been fed weekly with a healthy dose of whiskey. I've never made royal icing before, let alone with a layer of marzipan and apricot jam underneath. Stay tuned!

Basil Bounty

My basil bounty continues, even after having donated a fair number (40+) of seedling plants to the Piopio Community Fruit & Veg Stand. So I'm now bartering cut basil for coffee vouchers at our local cafe, The Fat Pigeon. It helps with their holiday catering jobs, especially since fresh produce deliveries are only made to Piopio once each week.

And I enjoy coffee, so it's win/win. We're almost through the first round of planting, but I've just potted up 238 more seedlings into cells. It may be pesto time once again!

Bye Bye Bottles

It's getting to be about that time here at Struan Farm. Christmas means the end of bottle feeding for the pet lambs. We're down to one bottle in the evening for the five remaining ewe lambs: Jam, Jelly, Bambi, Fergie and Camilla.

The other day I walked them down to the yards so we could move the ewes into different paddocks and the pet lambs into another. I lead them with bottles in hand, cajoling and trotting along. It's rather amusing to observe, I can only imagine! Once in the yard they get their bottles. Several have forgotten how to suck and are pretty much over them, except for the contact with me and the daily routine.

I've been starting to break it to them that the bottles will be in short supply soon. I'm trying to introduce apple treats with limited success so far.

Sheepish Wails and Woes

The past few days much has been happening on the sheep front here at Struan Farm. Farmer John arrived to commence weaning, when the lambs are separated from the ewes. At the same time the stock agent arrives to pick those lambs ready to go off, while the rest of the lambs (except for my ewe pet lambs) head off to Farmer John's property down the road.

As you might imagine there were wails on both sides. The ewes settle down much faster than the lambs, somewhat relieved not to be pestered and bunted for milk.

My former pets still on the farm, Rosie, Ruby, Pip, Pepper and Cookie, all came up to me for pats and reassurances. (Okay, Pepper not so much.) But Rosie, Ruby and Pip wanted comforting especially. Sheep don't like change, they are creatures of habit.

To some extent they were comforting me as well, since pet ram lamb Whiskey went off to Farmer John's place with all of the ram lambs that weren't taken away. Rosie advised everyone to get with the programme, and led them down the paddock, through the gates, and into the next paddocks. She's amazing. Of course I took her and Ruby some apples that evening.

Word of the Year 2018

I thought it was about that time of the year and it is. The Oxford Word of the Year has recently been announced, and it's "TOXIC." The word of the year is meant to reflect the ethos, mood or preoccupation of the present year in an array of contexts. And it seems this is where we are right now. Sad but somewhat true, isn't it?

Other words or phrases on the shortlist were: "Gaslighting," "Incel," "Techlash," "Gammon," "Big Dick Energy," "Cakeism," "Overtourism," and "Orbiting." The Overtourism issue seems to be a theme in certain circles of New Zealand, most recently Tourism NZ, an arm of our central government, in its effort to get overseas visitors, but not Kiwis, to sign up to the "Kai Tiaki Pledge." 

I don't know about you, but I definitely need to do more homework on that shortlist!

 

During, continued

Work on removing the macrocarpa trees down from our house here at Struan Farm was suspended for awhile due to heavy rains. But the sun came out and the digger contractor arrived, so it's all back on.

At the same time we're also grading an area for a new tractor shed closer to our house, so that soil has been redeployed to the re-landscaping of the former macrocarpa area. Four other trees have come down, two dead Lombardy poplars and two other scraggly poplars. For those unfamiliar with poplars in the NZ climate, after 20 or so years they start to fall down, dropping major branches. So often it's better to take them down when the situation permits before they fall down.

Here are some photos taken over the past few days. The Fire Service website indicated that we are still permitted to burn given the amount of rainfall that's occurred, so there have been major bonfires of macrocarpa scrap and poplars. Not great for those of us outside gardening, but oh well!

This was the starting point after the digger pushed all of the tree rubble down the hill:

It's also a bit hard to take cleansing breaths at the moment, but we'll get through this little project. We will.

 

Random Cutbacks

Ah yes, the gardening rarely stops here at Struan Farm, especially at this time of the year. But sometimes when I cut things back I pause and say to myself "this is too pretty to toss into the trailer or compost, at least just yet."

And so bunches of wild carrot flowers and eryngium went off in jars to be shared in the Piopio Community Fruit & Veg Stand as "Random Garden Flowers." With a note that they're not edible, and to please return the jars so I can reuse them.

Pulling Poppies

It's time for the heirloom poppies to come out of the gardens here at Struan Farm. They have done their dash, gone to seed, and are swooning over other plants making a mess of things. Over the years I've learned that gardening is about managing transitions, and of course weeding. There are times when you really just need to crack in, and this would be one of those times.

I cut off the seed heads, tossing some back into the beds to generate flowers for next year and saving others in two big buckets. Four trailer loads done. Now I can see the weeds, so a different type of cracking in continues!

Bee Bombing Success

A few days ago I wandered up to where I'd dropped the seed bombs for bees early this past spring here at Struan Farm to see what if anything had grown. I'm popping in a few more swan plants for Monarch butterflies in this weedy area on the edge of the road as well, since it's safe from the sheep (swan plants are poisonous to stock, just in case you don't know that).

It seems the bee bombs were quite a success! Blue flowers with honey bees and bumblebees everywhere. I definitely will make them up them again next year. Who doesn't like playing in the mud, really?

Interesting to see very little borage grew despite a considerable quantity in the mix. So I'll adjust it accordingly for this area. It's the right thing to do. It's a messy area on the roadside edge of the orchard, and the bees and butterflies need all the support they can get.

Hello from Veggie World

The backyard at the house, aka "Veggie World" here at Struan Farm, wanted to send you a wave. It's getting into peak season, and everything looks fantastic (if I do say so myself). Tomatoes, peas, corn, garlic, shallots, herbs, edible flowers, beans, mesclun lettuce, carrots, radishes, zucchini. Don't think I've forgotten anyone.

Oh yes I have. The blackcurrants, lemon trees, pomegranate and lemon verbena bushes, potatoes, cherry guava and elderflowers have reminded me to mention them too. Everything is thriving and wants to show off.

A word du jour

The other night John and I were watching news on CNN when commentators/reporters started throwing around a word I didn't know: trope. It's pretty unusual for me not to know words, and I wondered if this was one that had suddenly become fashionable while I wasn't paying attention. Rather like "bespoke" awhile ago. Sometimes I do get out of the loop, it's hard to believe but true.

I have since learned that a "trope" is the figurative use of a word or an expression, a figure of speech. Oxford defines it here. I'm also thinking that if I didn't know what "trope" meant that most of the audience watching didn't either (John didn't). So why would the commentators use it, several times? To confirm their intellectual superiority? The word dates back to the mid-16th century, is of Latin and Greek origin. So it's not a new word by any means, rather a very old one.  It also meant that we didn't understand the point of their story, which rather defeats the purpose for news reporting.

 

Let the Boxing Day Baking Begin

Several rainy days this week got me started baking for this year's Struan Farm Boxing Day family gathering. You will remember this is a much anticipated annual event, a gathering of the extended tribe. Current RSVP's approach 40, so I am being organised. Out of character, I know. The ham has been ordered for weeks, and I've just ordered several salmon fillets.

On rainy day #1 I made (and froze) "Margaret's Easy Mincemeat," from Simon and Alison Holst (they quibble over using store bought pastry, which I will use as does Simon), batch #1 of my classic "Chewy Fudge Brownies" (the recipe for which I managed to find online here), the dough for David Lebovitz' "Pain d'amande," (one granddaughter calls these "crispy almond cookies," which they are), and batch #1 of mini cupcakes (to be iced and decorated festively the day before). 

I appreciate none of the above look terribly appetising in their pre-freezer state in bad light on a rainy day, but they will when cut and/or baked and/or decorated on the day!

On rainy day #2 I made our "signature" chocolate chip cookies and the first batch of Cream Cheese Christmas cookies.

The Cream Cheese Christmas cookies have meaning to me, they are/were a Barrett family Christmas tradition, one of the few that lasted over the years (along with homemade apple, mince and pumpkin pies). My mother made them every year and the three kids would decorate them with sprinkles, candied cherries and/or chocolate chips. She used a recipe from a book that came with her cookie press, but I managed to find one online that is similar (predictably I can't manage to find it right now to provide a link). Ingredients are butter, cream cheese, sugar, vanilla and flour, so quite simple in that respect. But they are fiddly to make, the planets must align and temperatures cooperate. I've recently learned that it helps to chill both the press and the cookie sheet in addition to the soft dough in NZ's summer climate. 

Next I'll probably make a lemon verbena shortbread. With these done, and after I get the second batches of cupcakes and brownies made, I can take a breath. I'll have the basic offering covered and will be free to experiment if time permits, or bake things that can't be made ahead and frozen. I always put out a big crystal bowl of Piopio Berry Orchard strawberries and blueberries. Also a bowl of Cadbury "Roses" chocolates, which the kids sneak, wanting more than parents might otherwise allow. Let's let kids be kids, at least for one day, eh?

My motto for Boxing Day: have something for everyone so it's a fun and special day, and look forward to that cold glass of white wine when it's all over!