This morning I checked on my passionfruit vine that I had planted only a week ago and it was dug up by the roots. Sigh.
Chickens again?
I have to resign myself to the fact that chickens are sabotage my attempts to grow fruit. They also thought that it would be fun to dig up my freshly planted taro plants that haven't even been in the ground for three hours.
I may have to double fence the area again or drape netting over the whole border. Or use my water gun, I don't know why they don't like me I have never been mean to them and feed them corn cobs and bread and they still don't like me.
Has mum trained them to root out any plants she doesn't like? But she doesn't even know I planted taros. I pulled out the swan plant, but then I was the one who planted it so that was my prerogative. As far as I know the chickens have not planted anything of their own...
Anyway aside from minor annoyances my garden is going great and I'm enjoying all the spring flowers and new growth.
I have been on a short visit to Katikati where they grow avocadoes and all the seeds from Kings are packed there. I helped on a new orchard that had fifty trees, mulching and weeding. In a few years time the yield from all these trees is going to be huge! They still need protection from frost though so its not you can just plant an avocado tree anywhere and it will grow. But Katikati has fine soil, perfect loamy texture and is the ideal place to grow fruit.
While there are orchards out in West Auckland still they are dying out and the soil here was never that conducive to abundant yields, being mostly clay. You can still work the land but its much harder, even at Woodside we need to bring soil in. My home is on a former apple orchard subdivision, and when it was developed they took all the good topsoil away, so we were left with like a few inches. When developers do that because they want homes on a level site they ruin the soil structure by digging it all up and scaring all the worms and beneficial fungi away, plus spraying with roundup, and God knows what other herbicides.
Maybe with all the Chinese buying land now even orchards we may start to see paddy fields with rice and the reason they are flooded is because then the weeds are kept down and nobody needs to spray rice as rice survives wet land. I am sure the rich Chinese investors actually don't really want more hotels, apartment blocks and eyesores, they come here because NZ is so beautiful and plentiful and want to get away from living in a ghetto. Thats my theory anyway, I really don't say we can blame one group of people for the way housing and land prices are these days. Well at least not a whole nation. I would say its the greedy people from all nations that are ruining it for the rest of us. If someone offered me a billion dollars for my bit of land and it was the only home I had to live on and I loved it no way would I say yea sure. Thanks for your ridiculously expensive offer but its my homeland and I'm not selling.
