We've had a rocky night here at Muntanui but we are both OK.

Woken with the bed rolling around by 7.5 magnitude earthquake, centred near Hanmer Springs at 12:02am this morning. Both jumped out of bed as things started falling off shelves. It was by far the longest and most violent earthquake either of us have ever felt, seemed to go on for ages. Lots of aftershocks, still happening this morning after a mostly sleepless night. No work for me today, apparently severe damage to the winery where I have been working.

Hope all family here in NZ are OK.

Posted by Farmer Wan

​Just heard about the death, earlier this year, of a mate.
 
Andy,
 
Great mate, all-round top bloke, whisky afficionado, advertising genius, dedicated twitcher, WWII tank enthusiast, snowboarder, fisherman, Mustang owner I will miss you.
 
I hadn’t been in touch for a while. I wish you’d made the trip over here to see our wee farm and I wish we had made the trip back to Sydney to catch up, but “Hey”, you don’t know when it’s the last time you’ll see someone. The photo above is the last time we saw you, back in ‘08.
 
Thanks for being just the friend I needed back in ’98. Thanks for the fun times in Sydney in ’99. I can’t believe you’re gone. Too bloody soon.
 
We’ll be having a wee whisky tonight in your memory.
 
Slàinte

Posted by Farmer Wan

Yesterday the Godzone Adventure Race competitors started coming down Beeby's Knob and through Muntanui. We didn't even know it was coming this way until the support teams started setting up in the paddock across the road. We could see headlamps coming down the track from Beeby's late into the evening as teams kept going through the night. There is video here of the leading teams coming down the track and passing our top paddock yesterday afternoon. It looks like there will be competitors coming through for the next 24 hours at least.

We are now posting pics of what we're up to on Instagram.

Take a look here:

muntanui

It's hay-making time at Muntanui and we're close to harvesting our apples and plums.

​posted by Farmer Wan

When you start getting emails from people you've never met, asking why you haven't updated your blog in ages, it's time to pull finger and write something.

I didn't realise anyone outside of our immediate circle of friends actually visits this site, so it was nice to know there are others enjoying our misadventures.

I've felt bad knowing we haven't posted anything since April. It simply boils down to being too damn busy. However, with a new year comes a new resolve and we'll try to be a bit more consistent in 2016.

In the meantime, here's a distillation of the last nine months, utilising that wonderful Japanese poetic form, the haiku. And some pretty pictures. Enjoy.

Posted by Farmer Nik

DECEMBER
​Another one done
So bring on the hangovers
And Happy New Year!

One of the most stressful annual exercises in our farming calendar is TB testing. Every year we try to get a little bit better at rounding up the cattle and putting them through the yards, and every year we promise to put them through the yards more often so that they get more used to it. We're definitely better at rounding them up but we still don't put them through more than once a year. Will try harder!

This year, there was added pressure to get this done before I disappeared to the US for a short construction shutdown in Pittsburgh. The tester assigned to us was unable to book in before I was due to leave but he did arrange for a colleague to attend. The day for the injections was one week before I was due to fly out, with the return visit to check three days later.

We already had the cattle grazing the hay paddock and so it was easy to set up temporary fencing to guide them towards the outer fenced area before the yards themselves. The idea is to get them all in there and then we put through whoever heads into the yards first -- no particular order.  By 7:30am on the Saturday morning, Niki and I had all the cattle in the outer yard, Stew (the steer) was in the crush and Bonnie, our largest beast was in the race behind him with a wooden post holding her in place. 

The tester arrived. One by one they went through, until we got to wee Flora. She walked into the crush and then managed to stick her head and front legs through the headbail, becoming wedged. Freeing her involved disconnecting the vertical bars in the headbail, pushing her back into the crush and then opening the gate to let her go.

It was a complication but the entire testing process still only took around 15 minutes.

Tuesday morning came around and it was time to round them up again. This time, they wouldn't go into the outer yard at all. Even with the two of us trying to herd them, we only succeeded in making them go round in circles. This is when the stress levels rise, especially when we could see the TB tester coming through our front gate and heading up the hill to the yards. Luckily at that point, Stew thought it would be a good idea to head into the fresh grass in the outer yard and all the others followed. Phew! 

All good. Finally we were left with only Bonnie and Hamish (the bull). We got Bonnie into the crush and then tried to persuade Hamish to get behind her. He was having none of it and started to get a bit grumpy. On each attempt to get him in the yard, he'd drop his head and swing his horns. At one point I thought he was going to have a go, so I dived over the electric fence. 

Many thanks to everyone who expressed interest in (and/or bought!) our saffron corms. We hope they grow well for you!

With the harvest due to start any day now, we won't be selling any more corms until late Dec 2015 / early Jan 2016. If you'd like us to notify you when they become available, please let us know via the contact form and we'll be in touch.

Now let's hope for a great harvest. . . 

Posted by Farmer Nik

Happy New Year, she said, knowing the sentiment loses a little of its gloss when expressed on the second day of February. Ah well. We do our best.

I think we've worked harder on the farm over the last couple of months than we ever have before. Major milestones have been reached --  the new water tank's finally been installed, our cows have come home from across the road because we now have enough feed for them, and the pasture Farmer Wan sowed in November is coming along nicely.

So now it's time to deal with the saffron.

Saffron corms should be lifted and re-planted every three years.to prevent the beds from becoming overcrowded. We're doing this right now. It should have happened back in December, but we were too busy being overworked farmers to tackle it earlier.

As always, we had a plan. It was a good plan. We called it the Saffron Plan and it went like this: figuring that our original 1,000 corms in their eight beds would have increased by two or three times over the last three years, we'd be able to plant out another eight new beds and sell any surplus.

Then we come to the bit where the Saffron Plan fell down: we dug over 2,000 corms out of a single bed. In just 36 months, 144 corms turned into more than 2,000. (Someone who's good at maths will know what sort of percentage increase that is and if that smarty-pants person is you, please do enlighten the rest of us.)

I wanted Muntanui to brim with fecundity. The fecundity gods obviously listened and responded by blessing our corms with tribble-like properties.

So, the bottom line is that we have a serious surplus of corms and we're selling them to anyone in NZ who wants to buy 'em. If you or anyone you know is interested, check out our TradeMe listings or drop us a line using the Contact form.

If you need convincing, here's a little bit of sales pitch stuff I've taken from the TradeMe spiel. It's all true and everything. If you don't like sales pitch stuff, I'll just summarise it by saying that our saffron corms are awesome and tough and you should definitely buy them:

So get cracking, please! Buy our corms! Now!

Posted by Farmer Nik

We love Christmas!

With whanau (family) coming today, I've just reached that wonderful point of Zen equanimity when I realise there's no time left to do anything more except pick some flowers for the house. That's a nice space to be in.

We hope you have as restful or as exciting a holiday season as you could wish for. Enjoy! Be safe!

Posted by Farmer Nik

Given that a picture's worth a thousand words and we've had very little time to post anything of late, I thought I'd let this say it all:

Incidentally, that hail storm lasted an hour and it took nearly two days for the deepest patches to melt.

Our 2014 lambing season was the best yet  -- poor old Spidey outdid himself. He fathered 14 progeny and we only lost one, so there are 13 of the little darlings running amok and keeping us entertained. They're in incredible shape. It's a very graphic demonstration of the difference good pasture makes to the ewes.

Onwards and upwards! Although I'd just like to say that we are TOTALLY over snow, hail, frost and freezing winds -- and we're only two weeks away from the official start of summer!

Posted by Farmer Nik