High Summer

Summer is at its hottest. The Matainui has dried up. All along the dusty road huge dragonflies lie lifeless, their cycles complete. Up the valley road the blackberries are ripening, growing fat and sweet in the heat of the long days. Days are spent roaming, the children disappearing into the tangles of wild blackberry bushes, emerging hours later with buckets overflowing. It is barefoot season, shoes have long since been forgotten in the cloak room. Even the snow on the Alps has receded so you can only catch the tiniest glimpses from the house. We are making wishes on first stars and dandelion wish fairies, wishing that the summer never ends.

Autumn in the rearview mirror...

This month marks the closing of Autumn . Days are getting shorter and we are seeing more of Jeremy around home now that things are slowing up on the farm with winter on its way. Phineas is walking everywhere now and its hard to believe he will be one in just a couple of weeks! The week began with a decent size earthquake which shook us into action and we have had a rather productive week! We dug over all our rock hard, summer baked gardens and filled them with spring bulbs and hollyhocks. The weather this week has been unusually warm, reaching 30 degrees,  almost unheard of for late autumn,  and the vegetable gardens we established just a few weeks ago are flourishing,  with a great crop of cabbage,  parsnips, carrots, rainbow chard, lettuces, romanesco, broccoli,  cauliflower, spinach,  beetroot, herbs and even a rogue chilli on the way! Time will tell how they fare this winter, and with snow days getting close we will see sooner rather than later!

Autumn,  as always,  has been a flurry of foraging;  from wild parsnips,  blackberries and apples along the Waiau,  to fennel seeds and rosehips in the Lewis Pass,  to boletes and puha around Hanmer, we have had an incredible wild harvest this year! We are really missing the chestnuts, almonds, hazelnuts and walnuts we usually look forward to gathering around Marlborough every autumn, but are loving the plentiful meadow mushrooms, pine boletes and shaggy ink caps growing around here,  perfect in soups and wild mushroom galettes!

All in all it has been a beautiful, bountiful autumn, and as it draws to an end, we are busily squirrelling away winter bedding for Morel the rabbit and Sancho the guinea pig and making bird feeders to hang up for our feathery friends, and making sure everyone will be warm and nourished this winter!