Chop Chop!

Another great day at the block, today I put on my Lumberjack Hat and attacked the poplar tree that fell down the other day with the chainsaw.   

Such Fun!

So I also chopped down another 4 small pine trees, well small but really tall.  I think too many had been planted to close together, so a few of the pines are really lanky and some growing at crazy angles, just waiting to be blown over in the next storm.  I did a count and there about 30 of these trees, so I will go through and cut them down overtime, thinning out the pine trees.

So we will have plenty of firewood! For now I've just cut them at manageable lengths, and made 2 stacks under the other trees to dry. Then I just need to work out a good way to get them up the hill to the house.

I'm Lovin Summer!

Just a quick update with some photos.

I just spent a wonderful day at the block... what a beautiful summer day, beautiful blue sky and a gentle summer breeze, just perfect!  I can't really  describe the sense of satisfaction within me. It was just amazing!

A perfect day for mowing the lawns, tidying up the vegetable garden, but the trip today was really to just have a little sneak peak to see how the house if coming along, and coming along it is!

In the above photo, you can see the farmer making hay... while the sun shines.

 

The vege garden is doing well, although we are a bit tired of cucumbers, they grow very well here.  I've only had 2 tomatoes so far. But plenty more to come, they just need to ripen.

 

Don't you just want to roll down the hill in the grass? It was alive with bees and crickets.

If you do want to roll down the hill.. you do need to be mindful of the sheep poo!

 

Above is the cut grass drying, and below the farmers have just started bailing the hay, just as I was heading home for the day.

The bad weather we had last week blew a tree down. It's fallen over the boundary fence, although I don't think the tree is mine.  But being the tidy kiwi I am, on my next visit, I will get the chainsaw out and chop it up for firewood. The only issue I have is how do I carry the wood up that big hill? I guess even the early settlers that came to New Zealand perhaps had Clydesdale Horses or something along those lines to pull the logs. I'm thinking if I chop it into manageable sizes I can carry it up. Maybe one day soon I will look like a Clydesdale too!

Well that is the end of today's updated. I can't wait to go back!

UP UP & AWAY... As The Framing Goes Up!

We had a very nice surprise this weekend at the block. 

We were greeted to the bare bones of the house! YAY!

In one week the flooring and framing has gone up! Awesome! We can now get a real feel as to the floor plan/layout room size etc. It really doesn't feel as small as we had initially thought.

It looks great! We're both very happy with how it looks so far!

The above picture, is looking down hallway to kitchen/lounge.

The above is the Lounge/Living Room/Kitchen

The above is looking down the Hallway to the Bathroom.

The above picture is one of the bedrooms, each will look out to the valley.

HAPPY NEW YEAR - GARDEN UPDATE

Happy New Year To All! 

I hope you all have been enjoying the summer holidays!

We've spent the summer holidays developing the garden area, enjoying the warm sun and fresh air, finishing the day with a swim at Mangawhai beach before heading back to the city. Just beautiful. We can't wait until the house is built so we can enjoy this all a little more.

Below is some of what we have been working on. 

This is just above the vegetable garden, next to the driveway.  We have shaped one of the excess dirt mounds that was left over from the driveway excavation, put down weed mat, bark and planted it with Manuka Leptospermum Burgundy Queen and Grass Carex Buchananii Red. 

I also want to add in a small flax... I do like the Phormium Evening Glow, but I'm finding it difficult to purchase this flax at a reasonable price. So I will keep looking and add later.

I'm hoping that the 3 plants will all grow quiet nicely together, below was my kinda of idea I had with the colours.  

I'm hoping that it will become a little bushy, and provide a little protection for the garden with the westerly winds that seem to be reasonably frequent during spring.

We have also been enjoying some of rewards from our garden. At the moment, just cucumber and peas, but lots of both! Below are the short green cucumber and the apple cucumber, very yummy!

 

Quick Garden Update

The Vege Garden is coming along rather well, but it needs a little more love and time spent with it. Which is a bit of a challenge as we are not living on site. So it tends to do it's own thing, and I tend to the garden only once every 2 weeks. Not ideal, especially for the kinda of plants that bugs like to eat.

Watering the garden is an issue, I've brought a seeping garden hose and attached that to a water timer onto the Garden shed water tank. I kinda don't think this is working too well.  It worked really well to start with, and dripped water really well, but it doesn't seem to drip as much as it started too, so I might need to take another approach to the watering side of things.

We Have Piles! Lots of Them! YAY!

We have piles!! Well in the building sense that is. Whoever thought that getting piles could be so much fun!

A nice surprise this weekend to see the piles, the foundations of our home have gone in. 

You can now get a sense as to the size of the house. I'm kinda hoping the house will be big enough.

 

Below is the view that we will have from the deck.

Consent To Build Has Been Granted! Finally!



Yesterday we finally received the building consent! It's seems to have taken forever... but now the building company can start building! YAY!  So we should have a lot of new & interesting photos coming through soon on the build!

Oh... and we've been told we need to create a 45,000 litre water reserve for fire fighting purposes.... so we are building a rather large garden pond! Something I wanted to add in eventually, but it will be on a much larger scale! Awesome!

Power Is The Ultimate Aphrodisiac.

Well it is to me, once the electricity people have just installed the power cable from the road down to the building site, but I don't think that is what Henry Kissinger's quote above was referring to.

We had a nice surprise at the block this weekend. The building company has laid the power cable! The power box is also set up to provide the builders with power... Exciting!  This means if the builders now have the power, the start of the build shouldn't me too far away! Hallelujah! Very Exciting!

Our Babies.... Beautiful Vegetable Seedlings

Springs is here, and we've been super busy preparing our vegetable garden.  

Well technically we don't actually have the actual vegetable garden ready yet, we haven't got that far, but we've been sowing seeds like crazy... and most of what we have sown in the tray's in our city flat are germinating really well... and very quickly!

It's super exciting to plant a seed and then to watch it grow. I've been watering them twice a day, and I put the tray's outside if the weather is good. Bringing them back inside at night to keep my babies warm.

We didn't know what we wanted to grow, so we have set 3 criteria in deciding what to grow:

1. We have to be able to eat it,
2. The plant is a companion plant to another plant we intend to eat,
3. The plant is a native.

So as long as the plant comes under one of the above criteria, we will give it a go to see if we can grow the plant successfully.

I started out ordering some seed catalogues as we needed some ideas of what we can grow, and what should grow in our area:

    www.kingsseeds.co.nz
    www.egmontseeds.co.nz

There are so many plants to choose from!

It can be a little pricey starting out, so here are a couple of tips to keep costs down:

TIP 1:  Compare the pricing between the above companies along with seeds at The Warehouse. Keep in mind the special discounts when making a big purchase. The Warehouse was very cheap with your more standard varieties so I purchased the more common seeds from The Warehouse.

TIP 2:  Keep in mind seeds expire.  Some of the seed packets come with far too many seeds, and for us we will never use them all before they expire. So keep that in mind when purchasing. It might seem good value to purchase the packet with 200 seeds, but when you will like only use 50 of the seeds before the expiry date, just go with the cheaper smaller packet.

TIP 3:  Ask your friends if they have any seeds they are not going to use!

In the future I intend to hopefully try to gather my own seeds from the plants successfully grown.  I'm not sure how to do that yet, but I will give it a go.

Below are some of our babies:

There are 11 different Tomato varities, 2 different Lettuce, Pak Choy, Peppers, Crenshaw Melons, Kiwanos, Sugar Baby Water Melons, Peas, Green Cucumbers, White Cucumbers, Broccolis, Cauliflower, Marigolds.

At a rough tally we have just over 200 seedlings that have sprouted so far. 

We have a lot more seeds to sow, but we are a bit limited on space in our flat.

Sadly the Passionfruit hasn't been successful.   

So we must get a move on, and prepare the actual garden bed. So far this is as far all we have done on that part:

We need to finish the fence, make some garden beds, prepare the soil, sort out the irrigation, so much to do! But if the weather is good over the next couple of weekends I'm sure we can make some good progress. I will let you know how we get on.

Well... a quick update, we managed to do some of the above over the weekend:

We still need to build a gate... plenty still to do.
 

A Long Overdue Update On The Build!

We've been waiting for the building company to finish the plans/council consents etc.  It has been so quiet on that front for a long time but I guess a lot has been underway in the background.  It would be nice to receive regular updates from the building company.  However there finally there seems to be some life emerging on that front! YAY! 

Last week while up at the block I ran into the site manager by accident. He was spray painting some marks on the ground and putting up the building company sign.

Ok so not a lot of progress, but hey... it's a start!

But I managed to get an update on the progress of the build, and it seems we might have a foundations, walls, floor and roof all done come Christmas!  The plans are still with the council, but they have the builder already to go once the consents are sorted, also a digger/electrician is suppose to be arranged within the next couple of weeks to lay the power cables.

The latest new addition to our block, the builders sign...