It's a beautiful morning on the island and Santa found a way down my chimney to leave some goodies that I'll unwrap later. It's my first Christmas Day on the island as last year I was in Christchurch. A few pohutukawa trees have been introduced to Stewart Island but our native Christmas tree is the rata; where possums have been controlled the rata make spectacular displays up in the canopy. It's hard to capture the impact of a bright patch of red in a photo but you get the idea!
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| Flowering rata |
Another good show provided by our amazing ngahere (native bush) is the indeterminate number of colours, shades and textures, both from afar...
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| Lime-green ponga in amongst the kotukutuku (native fuchsia) |
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| Coastal temperate rain forest |
and close up...
It's great to be on holiday for the next two weeks but I'm not sure if it's going to be long enough to get through a lengthy To Do list. First up is the revamp of the vege garden area with a raised bed and clearing the weeds and reeds so that I can assemble the 'shade house' - well, it's actually a pet enclosure but I'm going to cover the netting with micro-climate cloth which lets the rain through whilst keeping some of the heat in. It's heavy enough not to be blown away and the netting will keep the possums out. On the subject of possums, my Goodnature trap hasn't caught any yet but the one at Dancing Star did last week.
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| 23 December: A big heap of weeds, not really a vege garden at all! |
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| Christmas Eve afternoon - a raised bed in the making |
I've been doing a bit of orchid-spotting; Aotearoa has many native orchids - check out this website if you are interested
http://www.nativeorchids.co.nz/ or buy their excellent colour field guide for only $20 incl p/h. Here's one of the 36 taxa of
Pterostylis, the principal genus of the greenhoods - I still have to work out which one it is!
The above clump was on the road bank just down from my driveway. Another common one on my property is
Thelymitra cyanea, or striped sun orchid (I think!!!). The flowers are fairly shy to open and most of the time the buds are closed tight. I've just found a white one open, will put that in the next blog!
