Funky Fruit and Sunshine

Golden Bay!! It's such a fantastic place. Yummy. I've been staying with Brett and Jane who live just outside of Takaka. They have a magical spot with hundreds of fruit trees dripping with fruits, from avocados to tangelos (small and very sweet oranges), bananapassionfruit to black boy peaches, feijoas to chillean guavas, and a polytunnel packed with the biggest tastiest softest tomatoes I ever saw. Yum yum yum.

Sunny tangelos -


Avos ripening up -


Brett picking avos -


Just a few for now -


Many luxurious times in the kitchen making marmalades and whipping of salads of all sorts. They have a lovely house here that Brett built from scratch when he first moved here. It's a house of many little treasures, and also the most ingenious soap holder I ever saw (very lakeland plastic...)

Nell enjoying evening sun on the wisteria clad deck -


Brett is also a trug maker (I hadn't a clue what trugs were until I got here, and thought it may have been a spelling mistake, was he a rug maker or a drug maker??). But trugs are baskets used for harvesting veges from the garden.

The workshop -


The finished piece -


Veges waiting to be trugged up -


Wwoofing here has been awesome as well. There's been some other wwoofas staying while I've been here, so it's been fun to work with them. Here is David fulfilling his childhood dream of driving a tractor (with a trailer full of horse poo behind!) -


I also got a wirl on the tractor after David left which was great fun, and have spent a lot of time digging and harvesting potatoes and tomatoes and picking up horse poo and destroying blackberries.

And celebrating my birthday with a bbq. It was lovely and slightly strange to have a day spent in perfect sunshine (it usually manages to piss it down on my birhtday) with shorts and t-shirts and bbq. But the nights are getting much much shorter - it gets dark here at 7ish now, and I am unpleased at the idea that the UK is getting more daylight than I am. Humph. But I can't have it all.

Birthday bbq with Brett and Jane -


Another birthday treat was a day long flax weaving course with Maureen, which was really cool. She taught me alsorts of techniques and bits and pieces about the tradition of flax weaving, and I made up a few different flowers, bags and a box. I'm now inspired to try and make a hat.

The green pieces in the picture are what I fangled, the hat was not made by me - no where near that competent - but is my ultimate flax weaving goal.

Other delights of the Golden Bay area are Wharariki Beach, right up near the northern most point of South Island, which has amazing rock formations and sanddunes.


And the brilliantly named PuPu springs which are either the biggest natural springs in Australasia/the Southern Hemisphere/the World!! I've heard different reports so don't know for sure, but they were pretty cool. Very crystal clear water -


And now it rainsrainsrains pittar patter splash splot tipapatatipapatatipapa. I was going to do some hiking around and about, before heading to the next woof in Nelson, but that may be rained off. Cinema and chocolate eating is plan B. Not a bad plan B....