A bit of backtracking.

There are a couple of things I forgot to mention.

This is the carport. The much less leaky carport. Clever uncle Phil works in a timber mill, where they use these giant sanding...belts? I guess you'd call them? So he was able to grab some used ones that were going to be thrown out. They have a sort of rubber backing. He sort of stapled them to the carport roof. Ta-da! Now there are only one or two bits where it leaks, where the belts overlap. Much better working conditions for power tools now. (Don't look at me like that! It's only temporary!)

Also forgot to mention my other uncles genius idea. Getting bits of tin out of a scrap bin.....

....in order to patch some of the bad holes in the weatherboards! This resulted in at least one pair of birds being ejected from their nesting site. Unfortunately not the very noisy stomp-y ones in the roof over my bedroom.

I knocked together a seat for the kitchen out of bits and pieces too.

In garden news...

Started picking my lettuce and spinach already! And those tomato plants have flower buds starting on them. Crikey!
When I planted this garden, I kind of forgot I had already planted a tray of various seedlings. Instead of wasting them, I decided to build another garden. Not sure how wise that was.

Here they are all covered in bird netting. Cucumbers, courgettes, more lettuce and more spinach, and more tomatoes.

...and here is the strange frame I made to hold up the netting and for the cucumbers to climb. Will it work? We''ll see.

The feijoas have flower buds. I wonder if they will come to fruit? They haven't been in the ground long.

I admit, I've been raiding the green waste dump again! Picked up some bromeliads, succulents, and possibly some kind of dietes? I will have to wait until they flower to find out!

Trains and automobiles. And hedges.

The good news is... the BBQ works! (How could it not?) See my lovely assistant dressed in fetching "country attire". You can't beat a proper wood-fired BBQ for that smokey flavour. We had BBQ for dinner two nights this weekend, just to make sure the first night of deliciousness wasn't a fluke.

Sunday was a Bush Tramway day. It's open first Sunday of the month April to December, so the next one is the last until Autumn. (Apparently they aren't allowed to run in summer because of the fire risk!)

Here is Conrad with Pukemiro Junction Station behind him.

Somewhat confusingly, Pukemiro Junction isn't that close to Pukemiro. Infact, Glen Afton village lies between the Junction and Pukemiro Village, about 5km distant. Somewhere down that way.

It's free to enter the "grounds" but to ride the train you need to buy a ticket for $10, that allows you to ride all day. Our train was stopped by this solitary bandit.

In house news, someone threw out a whole hedge, which I proceeded to rescue from the green dump across the road. I think I got about 10 plants. I reckon they would sell for at least $15 each at the garden centre, so it's kind of like rescuing $150 from the rubbish.

Because I don't know what type they are (some kind of buxus?), I don't know how large they will grow, so I'll have to wait and see if they will need to be moved. I need a reasonably tall hedge as a wind break, so if they remain small I'll have to move them up the back. No biggie. The soil is actually quite nice and easy to dig compared to the volcanic Mt Eden soil I'm used to!
The vege garden is doing well, I think the lettuces and spinach will be ready to start picking in another week or two, which seems very quick growing to me. The corn and tomato plants have doubled in size during the week too. The boysenberry I planted against the fence has new shoots, so I guess it has survived, and the mandarin seems to have kept it's blossoms, (unlike the plums). I didn't know I was supposed to trim the plums when I planted them! It wasn't mentioned in the gardening book, but I recently read another one. All the information about pruning is terribly confusing.

Oh, and in non-house news, my car was a victim of siphoning. (In Auckland, not Pukemiro!) Someone got under the car and cut the hose! Bastards. So I lost about $60 of petrol (They would have got about $35 worth, and I tried to put $25 in and it all fell out)and it's going to cost another $70 to get it fixed. I'm resolving to not have a full tank of gas anymore. Half will do. Unless I'm travelling out of town. Which is every week. Grrrr.