Back in July, one of the other World Cup volunteers gave me some of her sourdough starter. She’d been feeding it since January this year, and it was growing faster than she could use it.
To be honest I’m amazed I kept it going through the last weeks of the Cup and the move. I did switch it from regular flour to white rice flour to make it more friendly for Laura. It not only survived the change, but has been happily bubbling and fermenting these past couple of months. And it’s been the basis of some yummy gluten-less* treats.
*I use the term ‘gluten-less’ because the gluten should now be mostly gone from the original starter, but I don’t trust it to be properly gluten-free.
We’re still not fully unpacked, and we haven’t hung up any of the art, or even so much as a calendar or clock on the walls because they are pristine, and we’re still a bit reluctant to put in any holes. But for the most part, we’re feeling relatively settled and comfortable in the house.
Our focus is now turning to the garden. It’s spring here, which unfortunately for Wellington means colder weather than what we had in actual winter, a lot of wind, and a lot of rain. Somehow I get surprised by this every year, thinking that springtime should be nice, even though it rarely is.
We have a black tulip magnolia (the stick on the right) and a meyer lemon in the front yard that have been struggling a bit with all this wind, so we got some steel waratahs and wind netting to try to give them a bit of protection. We tried to put up the netting last weekend, and it was so windy we had to give up!
But this week we gave it another go, and I’m hopeful that with a bit of shelter, they’ll get some new growth.
The next project on the go is the deck. At first we thought we just wanted a little one out the back.
But then we realised that actually, it made sense to have a larger deck that connects to both sets of sliding doors. So the plan is now for this:
We also worked with a landscape architect to come up with a garden design for the house, since the outdoor space is really quite small, and we wanted to make sure we made the most of it. I really wanted to have an urban food forest, with as many of my favourite fruits and berries as we could squeeze in. Top of my list was a fuyu persimmon, but persimmon trees are actually really hard to find and super expensive. They grow well up in Hawkes Bay, but Kāpiti would be a bit more of a gamble. So that’s on hold for the moment. We’re now thinking a couple of cherry trees, a couple of plums, and probably a feijoa (though I’m still angling for a french sugar fig.) But they look a lot like our black tulip magnolia – just a stick – and I think Laura would prefer us to plant trees that actually look like trees and will provide some shade from the summer sun.
Regardless, we want to get the deck done before we put in the gardens, so I think the fruit tree planting won’t happen till the fall. In the meantime, I did buy a raspberry plant, which I’ve put in a pot and is sitting outside my office window at the moment. My other top priority is a passionfruit vine because not only are they one of my favourite fruits (and stupid expensive at the supermarket), but also the flowers are stunning.
So, at the moment its baby steps, really. A lot of planning and considering (and also saving up!) Every time I go by a garden centre, I want to buy a whole bunch of plants and just get started, but I’m committed to really taking our time and doing it right. The soil needs a lot more work before we start putting anything else in it, and there are still rocks *everywhere*. But we’ll get there.
My Life in Aotearoa New Zealand 