The last of the summer crops have to go

Drying bay leaves in the sun room

4.6.2018

We have been waking to heavy mist but by lunch time this has cleared, and the sun fills the house with warmth and light.  Edd is off on the tractor clearing up in the top paddock.  There are still dead trees there that were cut down after the fires and not tackled because they were mixed up with wire from the old fence line.  Edd is organising everything into piles that can be burnt. We hope it will then be easier to extract the wire.

I have spent the morning pulling out old tomato plants and pumpkins that were killed by last week’s frost. It is a very odd year, usually mildew kills all the pumpkin leaves long before the frost gets them.  There are still tomatoes ripening but the taste has gone out of them and they are often too damaged to be worth collecting.  We have a good choice of winter vegetables, so I thought it was best to ditch the summer ones and gain more planting space.

I also pruned the pear trees on the fence as they had already lost their leaves.  LYN made a good job of rescuing the young fruit trees from kikuyu grass that was trying to strangle them.  Last week I harvested what was left of the olives and made my first oil.  We had only one jam jar full from 3 kilos but it tasted fantastic.  I think I need a different system of pressing.  The cheese press was not ideal.

The goats are gradually all coming into season, about 2 months later than usual.  Lorna was mated yesterday but Imogen, Rita, Angie and Cassie are not showing any interest in the buck yet.  We have let the young buck into the croft next to the does so that they can smell each other directly through the fence, but still mating is going very slowly.