Ann & Peter
in New Zealand
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Ann & Peterin New Zealand | |
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2009 |
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Kia Ora The weather at the beginning of the month was stunning. Beautiful clear blue skies during the day - warm and dry, and freezing cold at night - with a ground frost making everything look white when we woke up. Now it’s warmed up (60 -70 degrees now – not bad for early Spring) and the grass is growing at a rate of knots – so we’re (meaning Peter mostly) back to weekly or twice weekly mowing – thank goodness for a ride-on mower. Everything is beginning to bud at the moment. The bulbs in pots are looking great and Ann picked some daffodils the other week for the kitchen - their scent is wonderful. The bonsai are also starting to bud - which means if we’re not careful they’ll get away from us and we’ll be playing catch up for the rest of the season again. We need to keep on top of the bonsai as we have our annual show next month, and we want to take some trees for display this year. We’ve managed to clear out the shade house, mow everywhere and transplant over 50 strawberries. Still got another 300 or so to go. We’ve also bought some seed potatoes and will plant them in the large vege bed once they’ve sprouted. The birds are having a hard time in our garden at the moment. We’ve had several dead bodies to deal with this month. They keep flying into the windows – why we don’t know as there aren’t windows at the other end of the room to fool them into thinking they’re still outside. Jaz is her usual self - so long as she takes her tablets then she doesn’t have many accidents. Maxie loves the fact that every morning she gets free cheese (it’s the only way to get Jaz's tablet into her - try giving one dog cheese without treating the other the same)! We go through a fair amount of sliced cheese every month. Mind you it’s usually Peter who does it and he’s quite stingy really. He gets to do the easy bits - Ann has to give the worm tablets - horse sized pills which are much harder to get down, and the flea treatment - back of the neck stuff which both dogs seem to see as some sort of punishment. They sit there looking for all the world as if Ann is torturing them, then afterwards they sit together commiserating with each other and looking daggers at her! We gave both dogs some very large bones a couple of weeks ago – wont be doing that again! Maxie pinched Jaz’s when she wasn’t looking and buried both bones. It took us 48 hours to find them both and dispose of them. Why we hear you all mumble? Because the fighting between both dogs over food is quite frantic and there is usually flying fur with a little blood and guts involved if we aren’t watching them behave themselves.
Peter has been moaning that the week-ends aren’t long enough. Ann told him we need to give up work so we can spend more time in the garden. The trouble is then we wouldn’t have any pennies to spend on it. Jaz and Maxie say they wouldn’t be happy if we couldn’t buy them treats either - so we have to go to work! Following on from his last course Peter passed yet another Microsoft exam. His boss has promised not to make him take any more just yet - apart from one more Citrix exam. Yeh right! We had an unwanted visitor this month – a large ‘not so cute’ looking rat took up residence in our compost bins. Maxie sat at the fence on rat watch for hours. It took lots of ‘special’ rat food and a week to finally evict him! Ann has started planting her summer veges – lettuce, carrots, radishes, tomatoes, courgettes, red and brown onions, and basil (for her home made pesto sauce). News from Home
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