May 16, 2011
The first ripe Barnea
Our very first harvest was just around the corner, but Rick and I had no idea how to harvest and no equipment to do it. So that first year in Martinborough, I volunteered to help Helen at Olivo with their harvest. That way I could learn how to do it myself.
In late May I stood in the Olivo olive grove with Helen and her harvest team – Mavis, Scott and Bernard (pronounced BER-nerd here, not Ber-NARD the American way). Mavis was a thin, elderly woman. Scott and BERnard were clearly used to physical labor. I, it must be said, was not.
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Posted by Moon Over Martinborough
April 18, 2011
Overgrown olive grove, 2006
Rick and I were standing with our neighbor John down in the olive grove. The trees were thick and green all around us.
“Look how great the grove looks,” Rick said.
John scowled and shook his head. “Well, you’re not done yet.”
Rick and I had only been living in Martinborough for less than a month. When we moved in the grass in the olive grove had been chest high, and John had helped us to hire a contractor to mow it.
Now the beautiful green grass was low to the ground and wonderfully even – with 500 significant exceptions. Around the base of every tree, there was a perfect square of long, ungainly grass that the contractor’s enormous tractor mower hadn’t been able to reach.
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22 Comments | Neighbors, New Zealand, Olives & olive oil | Tagged: kind neighbors, olive grove, olive trees, prune, pruning, satisfying work, secateurs, suckers, water shoots | Permalink
Posted by Moon Over Martinborough
July 25, 2010
Frantoio olives (click to enlarge)
Podcast available.
“They’re all still green,” Rick said.
We were standing in the middle of the olive grove on a cold morning in the middle of May. Nearly five hundred olive trees surrounded us, and there wasn’t a single ripe olive to be seen.
The frosts would be starting soon, but the grove simply wasn’t yet ready for harvesting. We didn’t know what to do.
Frost damage can completely destroy your crop, because it ruins the taste of your oil. We needed more time.
I looked around at all the green olives. “We have to delay the harvest. There’s no choice. We just have to hope the frost doesn’t get us.”
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20 Comments | Neighbors, New Zealand, Olives & olive oil, Podcasts | Tagged: city friends, gratitude, kind neighbors, olive grove, olive harvest, olive oil, olive press, satisfying work, Wairarapa Lifestyle Magazine | Permalink
Posted by Moon Over Martinborough
June 27, 2010
Gumboots and firewood
Podcast available.
Back in March, just as the fall weather was setting in, Rick and I were talking with our neighbors at a dinner party about getting firewood for the coming winter.
When you heat your home with a woodburner, getting wood in for the winter becomes an annual event, like the changing of the leaves and the onset of shorter, cooler days. Rick and I have been living in the country for over 3 years, and every year we’ve picked up the phone to have firewood delivered.
When I admitted to this, I received some strange looks from around the table that night. I didn’t understand. Had I said something wrong?
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38 Comments | Country dinner parties, Neighbors, New Zealand, Podcasts, Woodburner | Tagged: gratitude, kind neighbors, pickup truck, satisfying work, ute | Permalink
Posted by Moon Over Martinborough
May 1, 2010
Sunshine
Podcast available.
“Buy a used tractor?” I said to Rick. “Do we need one?”
Three years ago, after finishing the paperwork to purchase 20 acres with an olive grove in Martinborough, Rick and I received an email from the real estate agent asking if we’d like to buy the vendor’s tractor as well.
In our city boy minds, a used tractor would break down and require mechanical know how. We wanted a new tractor, but we were already broke from the mortgage. We planned to wait a few years before investing in equipment.
So we sent an email back to the agent confidently telling him that we did not yet need a tractor.
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19 Comments | Neighbors, New Zealand, Olives & olive oil, Paddocks, Podcasts | Tagged: gratitude, kind neighbors, olive grove, satisfying work, tractor | Permalink
Posted by Moon Over Martinborough
December 4, 2009
Great news. I’ve just learned that ‘Moon over Martinborough’ is a finalist in the very exciting ONYA awards!
The ONYAs celebrate those who design, develop and create New Zealand’s best websites and applications.
One of the judges said, “Jared’s blog is engaging and entertaining; he is taking the Wairarapa to the World and doing so with aplomb…”
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12 Comments | Guest posts & media, New Zealand | Tagged: gratitude, satisfying work | Permalink
Posted by Moon Over Martinborough
November 28, 2009
Squiggles the pig (image by Leanne French - www.madltd.co.nz)
When a 200 pound pet pig named Squiggles greets you at the front door, you know you’re at the MAD house.
I patted the pig on the head and laughed as she squealed a charming little hello.
My human friends Leelee and The Wolf stood just behind her, and I gave them both big hugs. I like these two humans a lot, and I was thankful that they were helping Rick and me out in such big way that day.
Leelee and The Wolf are the brains behind the Martinborough Art Department, or MAD for short. Walking into their charming colonial cottage is a little like walking into Peewee’s Playhouse. It’s a fun-filled place full of love and a little bit of madness in the best possible way.
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22 Comments | Neighbors, New Zealand, Olives & olive oil, Pet kunekune pigs | Tagged: bottling olive oil, labels, olive oil, satisfying work | Permalink
Posted by Moon Over Martinborough
August 8, 2009
The finished product
Ever since I’d read that pickling food can create botulism, I’d been a little nervous. Yet there I was, ready to put our olives into jars.
This is the part where it can all go horribly wrong. One false move and you’ve created the Olives of Death.
I stood at the island in the center of the kitchen. It was a bright Saturday morning, and the light was streaming in the French doors that open out to the deck and the olive grove beyond. Above me the peaked wooden ceiling spread its wings.
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21 Comments | Food, New Zealand, Olives & olive oil | Tagged: kitchen, pickling olives, satisfying work, table olives | Permalink
Posted by Moon Over Martinborough
July 18, 2009
John from down the road walked in and set an unlabelled bottle of red wine on our kitchen counter. That was the first time I saw that wine.
It was two years ago, at a dinner party Rick and I were throwing for our neighbors.
“This is a special wine,” John said. “You can’t buy it anywhere.”
Something about the unlabeled bottle seemed vaguely illicit, as though a dodgy liquor store owner had started whispering to me about his secret stash.
I suppose I hadn’t seen a full, unlabeled bottle of wine since I was a boy, when we lived in Minnesota and my dad decided it would be a good idea to make ‘dandelion wine’ in the basement. It must have been horrible wine, since I only remember picking the dandelions for it once. I don’t think he ever repeated the experiment.
I eyed John and his unlabelled bottle suspiciously. “What kind of wine is it?”
“Good wine,” he said, and then told me the story of where it came from.
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11 Comments | Country dinner parties, New Zealand, Wine & vineyards | Tagged: pinot noir, pruning vines, satisfying work, vineyard, Wine & vineyards | Permalink
Posted by Moon Over Martinborough
June 27, 2009
The day after our big olive harvest with the city friends, the weather took a turn for the worse. It didn’t matter. Four of us in the harvest gang were determined to hand pick some olives for pickling and preserving. We weren’t about to be put off by the weather.
Olives and macrocarpas in the mist
Everyone that morning was sore from the day before. Inside the fire was going, and outside the temperature had plummeted. The mist across the hills had thickened. But we four intrepid olive harvesters put on winter coats and gloves, left behind the others who were reading by the fire, and headed down into the grove with a couple old plastic buckets.
It doesn’t snow in the Wairarapa valley, except for occasionally up in the mountains, and the coldest days in Martinborough are nothing compared to the serious, snow-filled winters of my native Michigan. But my body seems to have changed.
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8 Comments | Food, New Zealand, Olives & olive oil | Tagged: city friends, gluten free, manzanillo, olive grove, pickling olives, recipe, satisfying work, table olives | Permalink
Posted by Moon Over Martinborough
June 6, 2009
Mist on the hills beyond the bottom paddock
The first of the city friends arrived on Friday night, driving over the Rimutaka Hill Road after work in the dark, ready to settle in for a three-day weekend full of food, friends, olives, and a lot of hard work.
There were big hello hugs all around and bags deposited in guest rooms.
We operate a B&B here, so the extra bedrooms come in handy at harvest time — and also throughout the year, when friends and family occupy the rooms between paying guests.
As they arrived, everyone was talking about the horrible weather that had been forecasted for the weekend.
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7 Comments | Neighbors, New Zealand, Olives & olive oil | Tagged: city friends, frantoio, gratitude, kind neighbors, leccino, nets, olive grove, olive harvest, olive oil, olive press, satisfying work | Permalink
Posted by Moon Over Martinborough
May 8, 2009
Last weekend Rick and I began stacking wood. Since our house is heated with a woodburner, we’ve come to associate a nicely stacked wood pile with security and comfort. So it’s satisfying work.
The woodburner that keeps us warm
We’re like two bears, hunkering down at the end of autumn.
John, our neighbor, once told me, “Wood makes you warm three times. Once when you cut it, once when you stack it, and once when you burn it.”
Winters here are nowhere near as cold as the winters I grew up with in Michigan and Minnesota. There’s no snow in Martinborough.
Even so, these winters are damp and wet and at night the temperatures plummet. Mornings can be frosty. It’s not unusual that we make a fire in the evening and again first thing in the morning, but by noon we’re often opening the doors and windows and eating lunch out on the deck. It’s not a bad winter life, really.
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5 Comments | New Zealand, Woodburner | Tagged: Chickens, firewood, hayshed, log splitter, satisfying work | Permalink
Posted by Moon Over Martinborough
