Posts for 2025

Auckland stays peaceful during the holiday exodus as farm life continues. Time off work means tackling essential fence repairs and dealing with cheeky goats testing boundaries.

And the weather is a bit of a roller coaster with ups and downs in temperature, wind and sun, interleaved with rain. One day you burn and roast in the sun, the other days it’s southerly with clouds and 10 deg.

The goats decided to go through the fenced off area with shrubs and decimate them. No good. Turns out, the poly wires were too old and did not work any more as they should.

Discover the essentials of rural grocery shopping – from emergency bird feed runs to visiting farming supply stores like Helensville Farmlands and PGG in New Zealand.

Discover how New Zealand’s first queen yellow-legged hornet detection is prompting locals to build DIY wasp traps to protect honeybees and crops from this invasive threat.

“If you don’t like the weather, just wait 5 minutes.” Spring came with beautiful warm and sunny days, storm, hail, rain and sunshine in between. It was cold and a few hours later warm again and vice versa.

There was nothing extraordinary to write about this winter, really. It’s not been too wet and not too dry, neither too cold or too warm. We had a few frosty nights and a few pretty rainy days but all in all it was reasonably warm…

Feels like summer was just happening. Winter started off beautifully with warm days and sunshine over the long King’s birthday weekend.