I’m still here. I haven’t blogged in three months, which means autumn has been and gone. Here is what’s happening at the Mustard Yellow House and the Paddock World it occupies.
Winter came
The frosts, when they’ve hit, have iced the paddock, stiffened the frost cloth that I drape over the ambitiously chosen plants in our yard (papaya, passionfruit etc), but not yet frozen the pipes as they did once last winter.
Paddock World on a frosty July morning.
But those frosty mornings grow into glorious middays when I can open the french doors on the north side and the dogs can spread out on the warmed-up carpet.
Today at 1.32pm I sat on a folding chair on our sunny “porch” of shipping pallets and shared the national two minutes of silence for the 50 fellow Kiwis murdered exactly a week earlier in two Christchurch mosques.
Halfway through those two minutes, Phoebe trotted up to me so I picked her up and cuddled her in the early-autumn sun.
This week, Australia has kindly expelled a continent-size puff of its preposterously hot summer air and sent it floating across the Tasman Sea to settle on New Zealand.
Doors and windows open, but it’s not an oven inside.
I write to you from inside the sultriness — it’s now 31 deg C (88F), a throwback to last January, which was the hottest month in New Zealand’s history.
Right now, the fan is recharging, all windows and doors are open, Phoebe is hidden in the shady notch between couch and coffee table, and Connor is stretched out on the bathroom floor.
Connor finds a place where the breezes meet.
I’ve been putting ice cubes in the dogs’ water bowl and trying wet-towel wipes to help cool them.
Meanwhile, there’s plenty of breeze to cool a man’s singleted torso.
Apart from the heat wave, this summer has been pretty typical in its rhythms.
Grass growth in Paddock World stopped about two weeks ago — which means less mowing but also less mulch for the garden. I’ve taken to gathering cowpats and horse poo from the paddock to make a nutty poo tea to feed my plantings.
Rabbits are every-damn-where. Including, sadly, my Golden Garden, which I made to sit near the Rainbow Garden and colour-coordinate with the Mustard Yellow House. Cute bunnies have striated the flower bed and gnawed almost everything down to a nub. Undaunted, I’ll rethink and replant.
The pea fowl are near the end of their breeding season. There’s much less hooting at all hours of the night, apart from squawks from the remaining unmated desperates. The males lose all their eye-spotted trail feathers and become infertile till spring. Peabody, the semi-tame fellow whose territory includes Paddock World and nearby copses, lost his feathers in a matter of days, and now looks tiny.
Poor rain-wetted Peabody (with Weet-Bix). Inset: how he looked in spring.
Makahuri’s village garden is starting to burst with vegetables, including a ripening ton of tomatoes.
The Mustard Yellow House is in dire need of a spruce-up. Dust, sea salt and spider webs are dimming our beautiful house’s glow — so I’m determined to get out and give the place a scrub.
This is our second summer in the Mustard Yellow House, and we’re nearly at our second Christmas and New Year here. But it doesn’t feel like we’re on much of … Continue reading Christmas, And The Rainbow Garden
It’s a year since Tom and I moved out of our last land-based “big” house. Our life now is different in many ways. What I want to talk about here is the change in life’s rhythms.
The Mustard Yellow House — the view George the cow gets as she heads to milking.
These are the signs of autumn in the Mustard Yellow House.
The generator is humming. Using what turned out to be a short break in the rain, I set it up in a rain-shaded spot this afternoon to bring the battery up to a full charge. In the 209 days since we switched on solar power in our tiny house, we’ve used the generator fewer than 10 times.
There’s a warm fire. Our little burner is simmering away, fuelled by “logs” of good Makahuri wood cut to the rough dimensions of a biscuit packet. This is so they’ll fit in the stove. Until a few minutes ago, there was a dog lying in front of it toasting his belly, but he moved before I could get a photo.
Looking east from the doorway. Note the neat border of mowed and unmowed grass.
There is condensation. I don’t know whether it’s a tiny-house trait and how much this is going to be a problem in the coming cold months. I suspect the current steamed state of the windows is due to me returning to the house a little warmed by tending to the generator and collecting firewood. (more…)
The Mustard Yellow House 