Whew. 😅 The community BBQ a small group of us organised went off really well. 65 said they’d come and at least 50 turned up. There was enough food, and people were really pleased to meet their neighbours. The weather even turned out OK at the time. Now I can relax!
Wild rabbits are a pest in New Zealand, but they’re also very cute. Especially tiny Spring baby bunnies just outside the front door. So cute! 🐇 // @hollyhoneychurch @jeannie
A small group of us are organising a BBQ for our neighbourhood this Labour Weekend. ~60 are attending! Another ~15 gave apologies. Council gave a grant for the food and soft drink. Today I need to go shopping. ‼️ I’ll be glad when it’s all over. Organising food is my nightmare.
Dogs, eh! 🐶 Sasha flops, Oshi looks cute.
In October 2007 I was lucky to attend a release of 130 juvenile tuatara into Zealandia Sanctuary in Wellington. They had come from Stephens Island. It was an amazing opportunity to get up very close.
survivors of an order of reptiles that thrived in the age of the dinosaurs.
will digitise 25 years worth of te reo Māori archives. … create a te reo digital dataset large enough to be used for machine learning to create chat bots, online education, games, transcription of archival material, and real-time captioning in te reo Māori.
I’m really enjoying the TV series All Rise. It’s a courtroom drama that features people with skill and heart delivering justice rather than sentences. The solutions are ingenious and innovative.
As we arrived at the beach today a small flock of half a dozen birds startled. I was very excited — they are the first arrivals this season of the Kuaka, Bar-tailed Godwits, fresh from their 12,000 Km, 8 day flight from the Arctic. So glad I took my Fuji X-T2 and zoom lens! 🐦
Down at the beach this morning we upset a Pied Stilt who was presumably nesting nearby. 🐦
Today I attended a yoga class at the Wananga o Raukawa in Ōtaki. That’s a Māori institution of learning. I was initially puzzled by the sign for the women’s toilets, then realised it represents a woman performing with long poi. This video shows poi in action.
The lupins are in full bloom — in the dunes and everywhere. Not so good for us hayfeverish types.
Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s sci-fi perfectly matches my tastes. Her novel, The Renegat is absolutely brilliant. She weaves together two timelines and a bunch of excellently drawn characters into a riveting story.
A ship of misfits and screw-ups sent on an impossible mission.
📖✨🚀
Today’s garden haul will contribute well to this week’s dinners: celery, carrots, silver beet, parsley, quail eggs, strawberries. The weather still hasn’t been hot and sunny enough, but the celery’s a bit bigger, the strawberries a better colour.
Hmmm, that was interesting. The Laundromat, starring Meryl Streep.
The film follows Ellen Martin (Streep), whose dream vacation takes a wrong turn and leads her down a rabbit hole of shady dealings that can all be traced to one Panama City law firm…
Inside the Panama Papers …
I don’t think I’ve ever watched any of the other Spiderman movies, but I enjoyed Into the Spiderverse. Clever, and with humour.
Interesting: the 40 minute Netflix movie Ladies First
a 2017 Indian documentary on the life of archer, Deepika Kumari. … it chronicles her journey through living in poverty to world #1 to competing at the 2016 Olympics.
Oshi and his duck have been together since we first brought him home. The duck’s a bit the worse for wear. It’s been buried and dug up again a few times, hidden under cushions and carried round protectively. It’s still hanging in there though. 🐶 Substitutes not accepted.
Growing Waikawa Beach
In the earliest times of course, the dunes of Waikawa Beach were covered with native plants. They were perfectly adapted for the climate and conditions: fierce westerlies, stormy tides, cold and hot, wet and dry.
Then came people who cleared the land. They planted marram to hold the sand long enough to put in exotic forests. But the marram thrives at the expense of native species such as pīngao and spinifex. Marram doesn’t much like salt water and creates steep rather than extensive dunes. Native plants make lower dunes that also reach closer to the sea.
Most years the Horowhenua District Council invest about $5,000 into Waikawa Beach, buying spinifex and pīngao — around 3,500 plants. Locals (and some generous off-duty Council workers) gather together and plant out areas of the dunes. It’s a great community activity — an opportunity to work together to create something of enormous value. After all, we’re enhancing, even enlarging our land area, protecting it from erosion and helping to shelter the community from wind-blown sand.
The other benefit is that because the labour is free, the Council can buy more plants.
And so, a year to the day from the previous planting, a dozen or so folks gathered at the end of September with spades and goodwill to plant out 500 pīngao and about 3,000 spinifex. The turnout was lower than in 2019 2018 but spirits were high. Dig in a spade, wiggle it around to make a hole, then insert the plant — good and deep so the roots get into the cooler, damper sand — then tuck the plant in firmly. Next!
We didn’t get all the plants in the ground that day, but over the following week various people planted out more, and then on the first Sunday in October another dozen or more willing volunteers gathered for a final push. Within the hour the remaining 500 or so plants were tucked into place.
Interesting was that during the week several trays had been covered by windblown sand a good couple of centimetres thick. There can be much more sand blowing about than you realise.
Thanks to the Horowhenua District Council, the Council staff who helped out on their own time, and the volunteers from the community. Waikawa Beach is growing — in the best way.
Originally published in Ōtaki Today, October 2019, page 22.
It’s always good to get an all-clear after a mammogram.
