The Good, The Sad and The Freaky

Posted on 25th January 2011 in Bugs, Crazy Car Man, Field at the Front, Just Stuff, Side of the House Garden, Sunflowers, Vegetables

I would love to be a lady of the land – in much the same way that I’d love to be the lady who ate all the pies – but in both instances I don’t think my heart could handle the strain.

Farming is for the strong and for the gamblers. Or maybe the ability to gamble comes first and the strength is merely a subsidiary skill. Either way, so much of the process is left, quite literally, in the hands of someone else. In this instance, Ma N, who we all know is going through a bit of a tanty phase. And my goodness, is she not screwing up a lot of livelihoods right now?
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The Kingswood’s Future

Posted on 19th January 2011 in Crazy Car Man, Kingswood, Musings

Crazy Car Man’s 1977 Holden Kingswood is his pride and joy. He sees beyond the fact that it takes 15 minutes to get it running on a good day – it gives him time to tune in the CB radio; he is stoic in the face of ankle deep water when it rains – he merely takes off his shoes and puts on a hat to keep the raindrops off his face; and he sees beauty when others see a filigree of rust on wheels. He beams proudly upon his classic car like a father gazing adoringly at his first born child.
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The Face of Evil

Posted on 10th January 2011 in Crazy Car Man, Field at the Front, Sunflowers, Update

Do not be fooled by the pristine whiteness of it’s plumage. This bird has a soul as black as the pits of Hades. Blacker even – as black as Hades’ pits after a hard day chopping wood. It’s purpose in life is to make me run screaming out of the house, waving my arms and shrieking like a banshee. And the little snotrag waits until I’m within whacking distance before shrieking back and then taking to the heavens on it’s pristine white wings of wrath inducement.
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Graves, Snakes and a Mild Case of Hysterics

Posted on 4th January 2011 in Crazy Car Man, Musings, The Bush

A hundred years ago the British sent people suffering from tuberculosis out to a sanitarium just up the road from Crazy Farm. I’m guessing they thought the clean, fresh coastal air would help heal them (and make the perilous journey worthwhile), and while I’m sure some of the patients survived, during the 30 odd year existence of the hospital, over 2000 people died, and were buried in the cemetery attached to the site.
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2010 Round Up

Posted on 2nd January 2011 in Carnivorous Plants, Chickens, Cooking, Crazy Car Man, Field at the Front, Foreign Lands, Hugh of River Cottage, Just Stuff, Musings, Not For Eating, Round Up, Sunflowers, The Bush, The England Files, Update

2010 was an absolute corker of a year. This garden malarkey sunk it’s teeth in with a vengeance and quite suddenly I was looking at the world with new eyes. I fell off a motorbike and got married in a Lahu hilltribe ceremony, I fell off a step and discovered Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, I got a new job and found a new career. And I grew loads of plants, battled snails and weeds, contended with Mother Nature’s temper tantrums, experimented madly, got things badly wrong and occasionally got them right.
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Bloated and Seedy

Posted on 20th December 2010 in Crazy Car Man, Just Stuff, Update, Vegetables

No, not me.  I know it’s the season of over-indulging, but I’m at work until Wednesday and so can’t really indulge in an ‘over’ kind of way until then.  Ask me at the end of the week, though, and my description of myself may more resemble the above.  Or I may just be too bloated to get off the floor to answer the question.
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Garlic Snails

Posted on 12th December 2010 in Bugs, Crazy Car Man, Just Stuff, Vegetables

I know that a plate of snails swimming in garlic butter is a delicacy in some countries, and it is something I do plan to try at least once in my life – merely as payback for the things of mine they have eaten – and while I knew that garlic and snails went together really well, I didn’t know they went together really well.
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The Sunflower Advocacy

Posted on 8th December 2010 in Crazy Car Man, Field at the Front, Not For Eating, Update

I came home from work today feeling a little bit hot, a little bit cranky, a little bit looking forward to a glass of New Zealand’s finest grape juice for big kids – I pulled up in a cloud of dust (I don’t know why, but the little car really likes to skid to a stop) and hauled out my grown up handbag (honestly, it’s bigger than the bag I take with me when Crazy Car Man and I travel – how I can get through months on the road with my worldly possessions stuffed into a 30 litre day pack and yet feel the need to carry enough luggage for a family of five with me when I go to the office is completely beyond me). I was, to be perfectly frank, in a mood.

And then I saw this….
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Hardcore or Mad – My Pursuit of the Third Sister

Posted on 5th December 2010 in Crazy Car Man, Field at the Front, Update, Vegetables

You know you’re either hardcore or mad when you spend your Saturday afternoon outside in the rain planting beans. Or maybe just desperate. Desperately hardcore or madly desperate, it’s all one and the same when the third sister needs to go in.

I wrote here about turning my Field at the Front into an experimental North American Indian field of food planted in a most companionable way. The corn went in and Ma N pulled the plug out of the great bathtub in the sky resulting in the corn seed being washed out of the earth and promptly eaten by birds. I shook my fist as the sky (a futile gesture but kind of satisfying in a Scarlett O’Hara kind of way) and railed at the birds for acting in a bird-like way (totally unacceptable behaviour when it’s to my disadvantage) before sighing in resignation and buying some more seed and planting it in tubs to ensure germination.
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Green Things Robbed From Carmen Miranda’s Garden

Posted on 2nd December 2010 in Crazy Car Man, Foreign Lands, Not For Eating

We went to a One Hundred Years party last weekend. Longevity runs in the family, I’ve seen how I’m going to look at 97 (a little wrinkly, a little hunched, a little deaf, but with full control of my bladder and all marbles accounted for), but this one was not for just one person. My Aunty was celebrating her 60th and my cousin had hit the big four oh, and in true mad relly style it had to be celebrated with a fancy dress knees up.

The party was held at their local RSL club in a real country town and I feel a few unsuspecting farmers got the shock of their life to find themselves standing at the bar next to the Grim Reaper, or a crocodile, or a Whoopie cushion (a weird costume but a great one if you have a predilection for being poked in the stomach, or alternatively are talented at farting on cue – my uncle can do both, at the same time…..he’s ruined the excuse of not being able to multi-task for all of the male species).
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