9. Miscellaneous Snippets

Although the title of today's blog post sounds like a Dickens character, it is in fact an excuse for not doing, seeing or photographing anything important enough to warrant its own post. So it is more of a roundup of recent news.

The main headline today, I have bought a new frying pan. It is a huge one that takes up one and a half hobs on the cooker. I can fit all my breakfast in it in one go. Its predecessor could only manage a few rashers of bacon and one egg. The importance of breakfast is paramount. Having been up working for three and a half hours, the 8am fry up is vital to keep my spirits, energy levels and cholesterol up. 

There are a few issues with recreating a home from home style full English breakfast. Firstly and most importantly is the quality of bacon, which is seriously lacking. They do not really do back bacon and tend to have shoulder or middle bacon. Admittedly it fits in a sandwich better but is the wrong shape and shrinks too much during frying. 

The sausages here are also not great. The traditional NZ sausage is made of beef, which to me seems a bit wrong. A lot of the sausages in the supermarket are labelled 'pork flavoured'. On closer inspection of the label, the top ingredient is 'meat (misc)', and this worries me! Proper sausages are really quite expensive, an accountant inspecting my weekly food budget might think my priorities are distorted. 

Here is this mornings feed:

Meanwhile on the farm, fertiliser in the form of urea is being applied to the fields. Because of the recent wet weather and the steep banks in the area, a tractor and spreader is ill-suited. A more mobile machine is required:

The chopper carries the spreader and flies pretty low over the fields he is fertilising. There are some serious air-acrobatics going on. When he banks around and turns sharply the bucket swings out to an almost horizontal position. I tried unsuccessfully to get a ride to show the driver which fields needed doing. He managed it by himself.

In other news, Daniel has gone back to Ireland for a few weeks and has been temporarily replaced by an Austrian girl called Dana. It is important to point out that she is from Austria and not Germany, it would be unwise for anyone else to make that mistake. The downside of having a female bungalow-mate is that now I have to be a lot tidier, and I am being made to do something called 'washing-up', which I am very suspicious about. Why clean a plate when it is being used for exactly the same food the next day? On the plus side I am being made lots of cups of tea, and I am no longer the newbie on the farm.

It is now truly an international workforce here, and on that note I finally put something up on the blank wall space in the sitting room.

And here is the latest weather report:

IT HAS FINALLY STOPPED RAINING! 

We had 40% of the expected annual rainfall in just two weeks. Which when combined with a lot of cows and a few quad-bikes made a lot of mud. We have managed to confine the ruined ground to just one 4.7 hectare paddock that will probably not recover and will need reseeding. The ground is drying off now though and the cows are calving on to cleaner grass.

The rain has been replaced with fog which hangs around all morning, lurking in the valleys and dips. It looks quite spectacular and a little bit lord-of-the-ringsy. Although it does freeze your face on the bikes.

Right that's all for now, back to the studio (the quadbike) and I'll be back in the next week to bring you more NZ news.

Thanks for reading, please feel free to comment and share amongst your peers.