Month: October 2019

tripping over food

| tink

A few years ago, a friend gave us a (please note the singular form) shark’s fin melon. Also known as Cucurbita ficifolia, fig-leaf gourd, Malabar gourd, pie melon and Thai marrow.

We must admit to not eating it. Instead, it sat rather sadly in the laundry until we threw it into the compost. There it lingered for well over a year until earthworks moved the compost pile – and a mound of the surrounding soil – to the top of the paddock closest to the house. Over the summer, that patch of living ground was entirely ignored – we didn’t water it, no food, no attention – but when Autumn 2018 rolled around we discovered a bounty of 40ish melons.

After being harvested, the majority of those 40ish melons sat on the deck on the cottage, where Adam and I spent 8 months while the big house was renovated. One by one, as they began to decompose, I tossed them onto the bank. Side note, I remain faintly concerned that Adam’s Mum and Dad (Pam and Brett), who now live in the cottage, will wake up one day to discover pie melons trying to get into their house.

And so Autumn 2019 rolls around and it would appear that we missed a few of those indomitable melons in last year’s harvest. Wandering down amongst a sea of large cucurbit leaves we literally tripped over them…Easily 120, likely more, to be honest we lost count.

A friend sold a few at the local farmers market but most have been consumed by friends’ very large pet pigs, just up the road. Although, this time, we did eat a few ourselves but somewhat unfortunately the harvest coincided with our experimenting with a very low carb way of eating, and low carb they are not! Still, this land seems determined to grow gloriously abundant free food for us, so we will continue to let them do their in the paddock and hedge rows.

There were 80ish in this pile
Friends harvesting melons for their pigs!
They’re amazing, really, they store for up to 7 years, and the seeds are rich in fat and protein. In Africa they eat the leaves and make alcohol from the fruit, in Asia and Europe, the flesh is baked and in Central America, the flesh is turned into a kind of confectionery.

so here we are

| tink

I (Tink) have been meaning to post regularly here for ages. Ages. But I keep getting stuck writing an update, trying to summarise what we’ve been up to for the last few years. I don’t like having our life at Peka Peka shared solely on Instagram and Facebook (as convenient as it is) so I’ve decided to start again here, with a few words, and a few photos each day. And in the the meantime, what have we been up too? Well, we built a cottage (or more accurately our wonderful team of architects and builders did), moved into it while the big house was renovated, moved back into the big house, Adam’s Mum and Dad moved up from Blenheim and into the cottage and gradually, with the earthworks complete, we’ve been chipping away at the garden. We’ve also dipped our feet into the waters of running workshops here and at some stage in the next year or so, we’ll turn our attention to the 10 acres of paddock running across the hill.

DragonKnows. Twice a year, the sun sets just in front of the Dragon’s nose and we celebrate.
Dog noses.
Vege beds.
After the renovation, so much light and space.
Adam
First test of the new, fat tyre, e bike in the paddocks.
As my understanding of the importance of soil health grows, so does my appreciation of rocks. Essentially, I’m increasingly curious about ‘life’ beneath our feet. On this note, I have a favourite rock (about the size of a sheep) in our south facing paddock and as coincidence would have it, our neighbour Jeff is a geologist. He tells me that it’s “Wellington Greywacke (German for grey rock). This is a nonspecific terrane term for a mass of jumbled geology but this area is mostly what is called the Rakaia Terrane … late Triassic to early Jurassic 230 to 180 million years old. It was formed on the continental slope if Gondwanaland (the original southern Super continent) probably off the coast of what is now Australia. Greywacke is notoriously hard to date with any accuracy. Gondwana started breaking up about 85 million years Uplift along the NZ spine has elevated it and at some stage our rocks have tumbled down (maybe earthquake maybe flood) and left to us mere humans to trip over.” Cool huh?
The boys.
Planting out the little old fashioned yellow banksia grown from a cutting from the rose which clambered up a trellis at my old family home.
Keto fudge – food is medicine here and we’re constantly exploring.
12 baby avocado trees, of 9 varieties, are growing.
Brassicas doing their thing.
This, this is – as Adam says – farkin delicious. Cherimoya. The texture is a somewhere between a melon, avocado and icecream. The flavour is complex, it begins with a kick of toffee, followed by guava, then something a little more tart, maybe strawberry. Just the right amount of funk. It reminds me of the Just Juice I used to drink as a kid which had – I think? – guava and passionfruit in it. But this is the wild crafted, grown up version. I spend a great deal of time trying to create deliciousness in the kitchen but right now, I’m hanging up my apron and bowing down to Nature. Fortunately, it would seem we can grow cherimoya here. We’ve already planted the seeds from last night’s fruit. Fingers crossed.
A mighty cabbage.
Full moon set.