Cyclone Cook

We are sitting here, prepared as much as you could possible befor Cyclone Cook. According to the weather man due to hit North Island as we speak. We are just south of Auckland, in the Franklin region and expecting 150klm winds and heavy rain. our driveway at the gate floods but so far we have been lucky in the storms we had this month. How bad this will get who knows. Our old villa we are staying in was built in the 1880's one of the first homes built here when the town was first established. A sleepout/granny flat was added with a breeze way. Thank goodness someone put a roof over it. the old wood stove was removed and a wood burner was put in it's place. the kitchen was extended and now we use the old space as a small lounge/home office/kitchen wish it was just a little bigger. but it is where we hang out most of the time. There is an old dairy which is now stables and wash bay for the horses and a small tackroom. Unfortunately this home has seem many years of neglect and tenants When we moved in about 8 months ago the garden was a huge weed invested area, wild turnips, thistles, celery and dock .. you name it we had it. Not liking chemicals weed spray I started hard pulling them and and letting them dry out on the concrete dairy path. Hopefully i got to them before they set seed esp the wild turnips. Weeding will be an on going battle but regular mowing should also help a lot. Digging new veggie beds was my first task so I set aside a sheltered area and as it turned out previous gardeners thought it was a good spot too. It was also the old pit and as I dug old pieces of glass and pottery and china showed up. I collected as much as I could find, washed, sorted out beautiful coloured glass into bags. I found old treasures, worthless to everyone else but they told me a story of times gone by. Maybe one day I will find out who lived here. Sorry got a little side tracked there .. we had a good crop of climbing beans, which I made into curry beans and bottled about 8 jars, a old South African recipe. You will find the recipe in the blog under recipes. We eat freshly dug up good crop of Nadine potatoes oh so fresh with butter. Zucchini in abundance, grated, drained the liquid off and filled ziplocks bags and put them in the freezer. Made pasata with most of the Roma tomatoes. We made beautiful spinach pie with lovely healthy spinach leaves. ATM we have sweet potatoes/kumera, pumpkins, peppers,celery, lebanese cucumbers and chillies. now something I have never tried before is an late garden, sowed carrots and pasnips and covered them with a plastic grow tunnel. the seeds have all come up. now to see if it will work for the winter. Next spring I plan on doing a bigger garden I need to figure out how to load pictures again. so until next time regards Rina update we got fair bit of rain but nothing like they predicted. the cyclone turned and swept down towards The bay of Plenty and then on to Wellington.