Living in New Zealand: It's Not 100% Pure Like the Advertisements Say

One of my favourite wild places to go near Christchurch is Birdlings Flat. It is very wild beach with a significant undertow and you can't swim there. But it is wonderfully scenic in a bleak way. A bit like Chesil Beach in Dorset.

Te Roto o Wairewa/Lake Forsyth is just beside the beach. It has been dangerous for years, but for a different reason. Nitrate run-off from agricultural land that feeds into the waterways that's ending the lake cause toxic algal blooms. It's too dangerous to even walk your dog your dog there.

Toxic algae in New Zealand waterway Click to see options for using the image

The saddest thing is that this isn't the only lake or river that is in this condition. All over New Zealand the pressure of intensive agriculture is ruining the waterways, making rivers that kids played in a generation ago unswimmable now.. Some farmers are doing something to stop it (by fencing stock out of rivers, planting at the edges of waterways to soak up any run-off and reducing stock and chemical levels to prevent excess nitrates reaching the water). Unfortunately a lot of farmers are either ignorant of what they need to do or more concerned about profit.

We saw these irrigators everywhere driving through the Canterbury plains and the Mackenzie Country. Some of them are a kilometre long or more.

Update: we walked up the Opuha river in Canterbury. A dry summer has been compounded by intensive agriculture and over-extraction of water. The river is very low and to add insult to injury we saw cows walking in and out of it and every feeder stream we crossed was full of cowshit.

Cattle having just crossed a stream that feeds into the Opuha River

And this is what you find in a Conservation Area

Why New Zealand Rivers are in a bad way - a simple diagram

Update: Shortly after I posted this, a report highlighted the trouble the NZ environment is in: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/18/decades-of-denial-major-report-finds-new-zealands-environment-is-in-serious-trouble

Reasons to Be Cheerful - Saving Seeds From a Borlotti Bean Harvest and a Recipe for Pochas

When we were living in the Basque Country, we discovered the bean dish, pochas. It was a kind of bean soup, made with semi-dried beans, from that year’s harvest. I have looked up the recipe for this and it varies widely. Most recipes use a sofrito of finely chopped vegetables, often onion, carrots, peppers and garlic. A quartered tomato is added to this fried reduction and sometimes all of these vegetables are then either strained all pureed . I couldn't be bothered with that and I also wanted to use my borlotti bean and courgette harvest and some home-made chicken stock I had, so this is my interpretation of pochas.

Ingredients For Pochas (for 2 people)    

• A cup or two of beans harvested from dried pods

• 1 carrot

• 1 onion  

• One small courgette for the sofrito (or use a green pepper) and one to add at the end (or a chopped red pepper)

• 2 garlic cloves

• 1 tomato

• 250 ml chicken stock (or use vegetable, or water)

• paprika, salt and pepper

Method

Dice the carrot, onion, courgette and garlic cloves and fry in olive oil on a low heat until soft. Quarter the tomato, add to the sofrito and cook until it begins to break apart. Stir well, or puree if you can be bothered. Add the beans and stock and top up with water until the beans are just covered. Simmer for 45 minutes, or stick in the oven at 180°C degrees centigrade for the same amount of time. Add the other finely-chopped courgette and a teaspoon of paprika (picante or dulce, hot or not) and cook for a further 15 minutes. Add salt and pepper to season before serving with bread and guindillas (mild spicy green peppers). If you have a meat tooth (like the boyf), you can add a few slices of chorizo that have been warmed in a pan.

It wasn’t exactly as I remembered it in the restaurants in Spain, but it was good!

Reasons to Be Cheerful - Seventhwave Wetsuits Are Made-to-Measure

I tested it out at Taylor’s Mistake (not great surf, but it is always good to go in).

The Seventhwave factory-shop in Ferrymead, Christchurch, NZ

See more of what Seventhwave do here.

Living in New Zealand: Reopening of Sumner Road Over Evans Pass

Last Friday Sumner road reopened to traffic, Including cyclists (including me) and walkers (although the road isn't great for walkers as there isn't much room and there are lots of blind corners).

Cars are supposed to be going at 30 km an hour because of the roadworks, but they are going much faster. So are the bicycles going downhill. Except me. I’m a wuss.

The boyfriend and I took our Jack Russell friend in the Land Rover up and over the pass today to go to Sumner . It's great to be able to do that more easily, to go to beach and the bakery and even to pick up some free comfrey plants at the share stand. Score! Hopefully we will be back more often, not just at the beach, but also the Hollywood Cinema and some great local restaurants.

New Zealand Garden Diary: Planting Winter Vegetables

Yesterday was 25 degrees but it plummeted about ten today. And the sun is getting lower and will soon be disappearing behind the crater rim mid-afternoon. Time to get the winter veggies in.

Click to see options for using the image

I’m hoping the purple-sprouting broccoli I also planted does as well as it did last year.

FAB Club 2 Wins Bronze in the Wishing Shelf Awards for Books for Children 9-12

FAB Club 2 – Friends Against Cyberbullying has just won bronze in the wishing shelf Book awards. FAB (Friends Against Bullying) Club was shortlisted for the award last year, so I’m delighted that the sequel was an even bigger hit with young readers.

Click the image below to see the other winners in the awards.

Reasons to Be Cheerful - Dog Borrowing

We are still missing Billie and we aren't ready to get another dog. But we are able to borrow a dog from up the road when the owners go away. He is a proper Jack Russell and chases everything. One time he stayed with us he escaped at 4 o'clock in the morning and we had to give up trying to get him back. He was chasing possums and the boyf was out on the street calling him back, wearing only a T-shirt, underpants and a pair of Blundstone boots. He saw Jack going in and out of people’s yards on the chase but felt he couldn't really follow him into our neighbours’ properties, in the middle of the night, dressed like that. I was up the road seeing if Jack would return to his home. He didn't.

We left the front door open and it was over an hour later that we heard the tic tic tic of his nails on the floorboards as he slunk back in.

Now he is ALWAYS on the lead with us.

Or on a very long rope.

Dog on a rope