Seeds and seedlings

With spring in the air, it's time to focus on getting those seeds sown for all the summer veg we require.
Some of my broccoli, tomato, basil, zucchini and butternut seeds have germinated. A few Jalapeno chillies are starting to come up, but none of the other chillies or aubergines are as yet. I think maybe it's been too cold for them, so I will try sowing them again. I was given a handy tip to get them going - cover and wrap the containers tightly in glad wrap. Might give this a go as these seeds especially need all the warmth they can get to germinate.
Today I ordered some more seeds from Kings Seeds, tomatoes - 'Black from Tula', and 'Cocktail Mix', Cucumber 'Mini White', Eggplant 'Tsasoniki', Pumpkin 'Musquee de Provence' and some dwarf beans 'Fin de Bagnol'.
Still have a bit of clearing to do in the veg garden, a few old bunching onions etc to remove to make space for all of the above!

Beautiful flowers

Just a few pics of the beautiful flowers we received:

Sad news

Sad times here on Cabbage Tree Farm, as we are grieving the loss of our stillborn baby boy Lawrence (born 11/9). Took us completely by surprise.

We had a small family ceremony here yesterday. What a beautiful day it was too. We planted a kahikatea tree down in our patch of bush in remembrance of Lawrence and scattered his ashes nearby.

Our heartfelt thanks goes out to all of our friends, neighbours, family and the wonderful Maungaturoto community for all the gifts of flowers, food, kind thoughts and offers of support.

Beef, beef and yet more beef...

At last we have had one of our cows 'done' and now have a 300L freezer completely full of wonderful organic beef. The cow was the smallest of our tiny herd (5), but even so it clocked in at a whopping 230kgs! (dead weight with bone).
The local home kill butcher did a great job of turning it into lots of lovely cuts of meat for us: steaks, roasts, casserole meat, schnitzel, mince (lovely quality - nice and dark) and sausages (no MSG).

Yes, more fruit trees

It's coming to the end of the planting season, so today we grabbed a chance to purchase a few more trees to get in the ground before it is too late and would have to wait another year.

So we bought another pear - 'Winter Nelis', an almond - 'Monovale' (the almond we purchased a couple of years back seems to be a plum..), and 3 more fig trees: 'Brown Turkey' (a larger size tree than the one we just planted), 'French Sugar' and 'Brunoro Black'. OK, so we're going to heaps of fruit in years to come but rather that than not enough. Also our thinking is that we can feed the birds as well as ourselves, rather than worry about not getting to the fruit in time. That's the theory anyway!

We also picked up a kowhai tree (we don't actually have one on our property, but overlook several on a neighbouring farm). The kowhai are all in flower at present and are putting on a real show with their yellow flowers.

And lastly 2 kahikotea trees. We only have a single specimen in the bush on our property.