Beaver Liquor

I just had to stop the truck and take a photo! Spotted in Queenstown.

Welcome to 'Shield' Country

Over New Year I took my parents for a road trip down to Fiordland. Just through Queenstown we saw this sign, ' Welcome to Shield country'.


Needless to say, we felt very much at home!

And very tasty it was too!

Christmas dinner was great!

Home Kill Lamb for Christmas

Jeff had his 50th birthday last night and we all trooped over for a hog roast and a quiet drink (or four!). There were some fireworks to enjoy and a bar that Kirsty ran for most of the night ... she had the job sussed in a matter of minutes (not bad for a 9 year old!) . She would have given Betty from Coronation Street a serious run for her money!

I started talking to Mark's (of electric fence testing fame) Uncle Gavin who is a farmer from the north island. Gavin asked me if I would like him to kill one of our lambs for Christmas. It was an offer I could not refuse.

We got up early this morning and played a game of sheep dog in the front paddock. After being given the run around for 15 minutes or so, Mark finally caught the biggest lamb; it weighed in at 26kg. After looking at my array of blunt knives, Mark took them over to his place and got his grinder out.

Some minutes later, with the now sharp knives, Gavin promptly dispatched the lamb and we took it over to the wood shed to skin and gut.


Once complete, the lamb was dressed in a muslin cloth and left to hang to cool. I should be able to move it to the garage later today and butcher it on Monday evening. I used to work as a butchers boy as a young lad in Tom Horsefield's shop in Hornsea, East Riding of Yorkshire, so I am quite happy cutting it up into joints.


I guess we'll be bar-b-que-ing over Christmas and the New Year and no doubt the neighbours will be coming round to help!

I wouldn't have it any other way!

Oxford Sweet Oxford

Oxford is the largest settlement close to where we live in Canterbury. It has a population of approximately 2,000 people. However, it enjoys some fantastic amenities that would put my old village of Holme-on-Spalding Moor, located in the East Riding of Yorkshire, to shame. Both villages are about the same size. I have listed a few of them below:

No1: Clean and working public toilets.


No 2: A fire station (eat your heart out Cllr Engall - you can't close this one!)


No 3: A farmers market on a Sunday morning


No 4: A council service centre, library and post shop


No 5: A police station (not that we have much crime)


No 6: A skate park (didn't Holme-on-Spalding Moor used to have on of these - what happened to it?)

No 7: An outdoor heated swimming pool


No 8: A sports ground with squash courts, a bowling green, cricket and rugby pitches and a nice sports pavilion.


No 9: An adventure playground for the children


No 10: A community hospital with beds (so the old folk can be cared for close to home and friends)

No 11: The Town Hall


No 12 - A monthly craft market.


No 13: An observatory at the local school


No 14: The A & P Showground


It just goes to show, 'There is no place like Oxford!'.

I'm a Dad again!

The first chick hatched out this morning. I had been told it was really hard work to hatch chicks - I found it to be really easy - I was laid in bed at the time!

You have to remember to turn the eggs 2-3 times a day and make sure the temperature stays as close to 102 degrees F as possible but it is very easy to do.

I feared I may have lost the eggs due to the temperature surging well past the recommended level on the first day. I now know not to adjust the thermostat when you first set the eggs in the incubator!

The chick will be going into a nursery in the pump shed and hopefully joined by its brothers and sisters in the next couple of days.

Rural Broadband speed in NZ

I see there are complaints regarding the speed of broadband services where I used to live in the UK, a small rural village called Holme-on-Spalding Moor in the East Riding of Yorkshire.

I live in rural Canterbury about 7 Km away from the village of West Eyreton. NZ Telecom have invested in fibre to the cabinet and I can download in a very rural location (I am 500 metres from the nearest road!) at 4.8 Mb per second which is very reasonable especially when you consider the service is sold with a theoretical maximum speed of 7.6Mbps.



If New Zealand can deliver the services out in the sticks then I have to wonder why the UK struggles to provide similar services? Perhaps more importantly, why do the local politicians allow British Telecom to provide a sub-standard service?

All credit to Howdenshire Cllr Paul Robinson for raising the issue even though he lives outside of the village. What is the resident Conservative councillor, Cllr Doreen Engall, doing about it? My guess would be very little!

Tunnel House Update

The tunnel house is running away with itself this year. We have been already eating lettuce, basil, spring onions and radish. I can now report the new potatoes are rather tasty too.

Tomatoes and peppers to look forward too soon.

Vegetable Garden starts Growing

Our vegetable garden is starting to grow. We have put a lot of time and effort into the garden this year and it is starting to come together. We have lost a lot of seedlings germinated in the tunnel house due to late frosts; the last of which was earlier this week. The potatoes are doing well as are the cabbages, cauliflowers, beans, peas, pumpkins, courgettes and sweet corn.


Over 300 leeks have been planted this week along with a load of onions. There are a load of tomatoes in the tunnel house that we will be planting outside very soon.

It is all work in progress but it is coming along very nicely.

Sheep Shearing

My four ewes needed shearing so I gave Gayle a call.

He came over this afternoon to give the four ewes a short back and sides.


He checked out their hoofs and teeth and concluded that I am actually running an old folks home for elderly ewes! I will now refer to them as a parish council of sheep - over the hill, not fit for purpose with too much to bleat about!

I should get some more lambs next year from the the remaining 3 ewes who are still fit for purpose and the new one born earlier this year. They are still a good return on $200.


Anyway, they all seemed pleased to be finally rid of all their winter woolly coats.

Eggs in the homemade Incubator

In you have the chicken run you might as well have an incubator to populate the chicken run. This incubator is built from MDF, some chicken wire, two light bulb fitments, two light bulbs, a PC power cable and a central heating thermostat. The whole project came in at under NZ$20 - about GBP8!

I have 24 eggs (Shaver and Leg Horn cross) that cost a NZ$1 each with another 2 dozen to follow. It will be fun to see how many eggs hatch.

Garden Expands

With all the planting I have had to increase the size of the vegetable plot to over 250 metre square.

I still need to dig some of it over and pick out the stones which will be re-used as a foundation for the drive up to the garage. There is still quite a lot of preparation to do but the hard work is largely completed.

The Fruit Orchard

We have expanded the soft fruit orchard by planting another 12 trees. We had added a walnut, nectarine, apricot, green gage plum, cherry, bramley apple, mandarin, pear and a couple of others whose names escape me.

The Tunnel House

Our tunnel house is stuffed full of seed trays, salad stuff, potatoes, cauliflower and brocolli. This year we will be growing a whole load of vegetables including tomatoes, cabbage, sweet corn, leeks, onions, courgette, cucumber, lettuce, basil, peas, beans, water melons, pumpkin and many other things besides.

Spring at White Rose Farm

We have had a cold snap over the last few days. A cold southerly came through and dumped a load of snow on the Oxford mountains. We escaped the worst of it although we were concerned for our lambs which were born a few weeks ago. Our four ewes (we had 5 but the dog got one of them .... a 22 rifle then shot the dog!) have had 5 lambs - 4 boys and a girl. We have named the boys Fisher & Paykel, Kelvinator and Electrolux.

Sterling Collapse

When we moved out to New Zealand in 2006 we got NZ$2.89 for every£1 we brought with us. If we were emigrating this week we would have received only NZ$2.26 for every £1. By my reckoning, that is a de-valuation of the UK pound of 22% against the kiwi dollar in just three years! This is on top of any loses we would have incurred from the UK property market slump which has been struggling for the last couple of years.

It is not bad for a country at the bottom of the world that only has a population of 4.5 million and exports milk solids, meat, wool, timber, coal, wine, kiwifruit, apples, aluminium and has some of the most breath taking scenery in the whole world!

New Zealand ... you cannot beat it!

Scout Geek Camp

It is Pre-JOTI (Jamboree on the Internet) aka Geek Camp time again but this year it is bigger and better. We have again returned to Cotswold School to give 18 Harewood & Bishopdale Scouts a change to get familar with the chat program we will be using for JOTI.

We have replaced all of our old computers with 40 Pentium 4 machines kindly donated by Chrischurch City Council and the University of Canterbury. Each workstation has a 19 inch monitor and upto 1Gb of RAM and will be used for a variety of scout activities.

Jaymo_Black can be seen in the above photo running a workshop showing the scouts how to embed scripts within the chat program for doing things like writing text is different colours.

The Southern Alps

On my last trip to Perth (and the one before that for that matter) I flew with Pacific Blue to Sydney and then onto Perth. The cloud cleared over the Southern Alps so I got chance to take some photos as the sun went down.


If you look closely you can just see Mount Cook in the distance. The next photo is my favourite as the aircraft leaves the west Coast and heads across the Tasman to Australia.