Kia Ora and Welcome to our news for July

Walking back with the dogs one evening about 30 minutes after sunset we noticed a moonbow (a faint rainbow created by the light of the almost full moon) by the mountain. We'd never seen one before.

For Peter's birthday Ann bought him a large bonsai pot and Jaz and Maxie gave him a voucher to get some beer.

After the invite for us to dig up the hawthorns we went for a visit to see how many trees there were before bringing the bonsai club out for a dig. The lady who owns the 'little' farm (only 90 acres)! had some very cute lambs which had just been born the day before we took these photos.
	Two weeks later 12 of us went over to dig up the hawthorns. After two weeks of heavy rain we had a beautiful sunny day and between us we managed to dig up about 40 trees. Ann got 6 and Peter got 3 - guess how many Peter had to dig up?

We’ve been wearing scarves, hats and gloves as it’s been so cold this month. However the other day Peter left his favourite knitted diving woolie hat in the garage and now it’s – GONE! We can’t find it anywhere – which usually means only one thing – Maxie has taken and buried it. The last time she snaffled and buried Ann’s gardening gloves we only found one of them again, and only when we had heavy rain which brought it to the surface.

When we cut up the dog treats we get a very attentive audience.
Ann finally found a squeaky toy that lasts more than 30 seconds, although after 5 minutes of constant squeaking she regretted it. Fortunately we can distract Maxie after a few minutes then hide the toy till the next day.
	Jaz is happier to cuddle up to a non squeaking Pudsey bear.

We've sold some of the trees in the growing on beds - now we have to dig up more and put into containers so we can plant the twenty pines we have waiting to go in.

We had rain for almost two weeks solid, along with thunder, and some spectacular lightning shows that lasted 5 days and over a 1000 strikes (according to the weather forecasters).

Our fruit trees are doing well and we've got mandarins to eat, whilst Peter has fresh lemons and limes for cooking.

Ann is definitely a wreck - she spent the first week of her holidays on more antibiotics – which really caused havoc with her wine drinking! She finally feels better - just in time to go back to work. Peter was going to book some time off work too - but then what seems like half of his colleagues either went away or were off sick - so no time off for the poor old man!

Our 4 year old washing machine broke down. A week later the repair man came out but couldn't fix it. He's ordered another part but as it's a Whirlpool machine the part may take 6 to 8 weeks to arrive. This has meant us spending a lot of time and money at the laundrette so we decided to buy a new one and plumb the old one into the garage for doggy and muddy clothes washing when the parts arrive. Fortunately we had taken out an extended warranty on the machine when we bought it so the repairs won't cost us anything.

One of our bonsai friends suggested we take a trip to Matamata where Daltons make their compost rather than us buying compost in bags. We took the trailer and bought 2/3 of a cubic metre of compost and 1/3 of a cubic metre of pumice. When they filled the trailer and ute they were a 'little' generous with the filling - it was more like 1 cube of compost and 1/2 of pumice. When we got home we started mixing it and gave up after making up 20+ bags of mix. We'd used less than half of the compost in the trailer and had to empty the pumice into tubs in the hot house as we needed to have the Ute serviced. All of this (including the fuel) cost us the same as 10 bags of compost at the garden centre!

NEWS FROM HOME

Vicki and her boyfriend, Sean, have bought a house - Congratulations! (and commiserations as they say goodbye to any spare money they have).