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Photos du Jour: Misty Walk, Back Beach Port Chalmers.

6/5/2021

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​The weather moved me yesterday.  It was misty in that patchy, anomalous way that means you can't see shit one moment while it's clear as a bell 10 m down the road.  Always look behind you into the sun during mist.  These are a wee bit noisy but the camera was ancient and tiny, so whatever.  I didn't throw on any FX filters, just black and whited them.  This is pretty much how it looked.

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The sun was pushing through the watery suspension and lensing into the void over the bay in the form of a cold white rainbow- the opposite of darkness yet somehow vacant of all the properties you expect of light.
​ I had never seen this before.

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Photo du Jour: Fir

1/3/2021

 
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The white dust ring around his nose is a product of his insistence on digging up the stones under our café table chairs so he can lie in the cooler shade.  

It always amazes me how different two dogs of the same breed and strain can be.  Fir is a lot more easy going than Felix, who didn't care for unfamiliar dogs; he loves everyone and takes nothing personally, assuming any aggression or rebuff is just some sort of misunderstanding that you will reconsider as he trots away, unshaken.  Many crises have been averted by his breezy diplomacy, for which we are incredibly grateful given the burgeoning ranks of poorly-socialised dogs and clueless owners.  He is extremely affectionate and trusting, welcomes any and all attention and sits patiently through baths, haircuts and flea-pickings, another tremendous relief (although Felix was similarly tolerant).  

He's got a few annoying quirks, though.  Obsessively coveting my hair bands, for one, stealing and eating them whenever they are in reach, necessitating public extraction of the poopy elastic from his bum hole while out walking.  The kleptomania is apparently congenital, his grandmother being an accomplished thief of dog treats from concealed tupperware according to his breeder so there's not much to be done about it.  Socks are another illicit passion.  He snores while lying on one particular side due to a slightly sloppy palate.  And my god, his ability to find and devour anything disgusting or hazardous while out walking is a continuous nightmare.  Our battle to stay between Fir and the street caviar he finds so compelling has so far kept him out of dog hospital, but it would be great if filthy arseholes stopped throwing their fishing gear and chicken bones on the fucking ground.

So, how's your week going?

The Titan Arum, Amorphophallus titanum, in bloom at the Dunedin Bot Gardens

9/2/2021

 
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Thanks to Jo for the phone pics.  We had to wait in a sweaty line full of students to view this vegetal hulk and convey its magnificence to you, constant readers.
 
​YOU'RE WELCOME.

Photos du Jour : Port Chalmers Represent

2/2/2021

 
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How's it going?  

I'm posting new things.  Doing it.  Doing it.  
Feels good.

The blank black sign looks shopped but it was real, wired onto the fence outside the Port facility. Then it was sadly withdrawn, presumably by the very same hand that affixed it, sucked back into the silent wormhole of entropy from whence it came.  All I know for sure is that someone billed us for it.

There's been some quite good tagging on the trains lately, but we hardly ever have a camera when we see it.
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Photo du Jour: Fir

26/6/2020

 
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Arisaema flavens

2/2/2020

 
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I haven't had this species long so I can't really comment as to its ease of cultivation and durability, but I thought I'd post some clear pics of this nice little group of young bulbs as it emerged in early summer.  As mentioned before, I had lost a bunch of Arisaemas after planting them out without pondering our soggy winters; they went off to plant heaven soon after that fateful day so maybe don't plant them out unless they're protected by a dry, snowy winter or tree cover that will keep them from rotting.
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To provide some perspective, this flower is about as large as my thumbnail, but it is full of intriguing, lizardy detail- veiny striations, an almost furtive little hood and pale, waxen spadix.  The lemon yellow in the spathe curls around a smoky umber throat.

Arisaema flavens is a variable species/cluster that originates from an enormous range stretching from Ethiopia to Sichuan, so you may not be shocked to hear it has a bulletproof reputation and is probably a good and inexpensive candidate for the cobra lily novice.  I keep mine in a dry bark-heavy mix under cover over winter and put them out in late spring to wake up and catch the rain, but they're staying potted.  Arisaemas are forest creatures, by and large, so don't bake them in the sun as maltreatment will cause the bulbs to dwindle over time.  Some are invasive and you should check out their weed potential in your area before unleashing them on your unsuspecting biome.  Most are perfectly benign, though.  

Some of the rarer, trendy species are fuuuucking expensive.  I don't suggest you start with those guys since attrition can be frustratingly high before you find your cultural footing.  This site is a great, unpretentious resource for the enthusiast.
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Photos du Jour: Random December Views, Port Chalmers

18/12/2019

 
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Fir / Spoon / Back Beach  / New Oak / Spray-seeding the Scraped Hill / Doll / Tulips
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Late Spring '19: General Garden Business

6/12/2019

 
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We can't afford to smash a bottle of champagne against the prow of our new porch to declare it officially open, so just imagine video hos twerking in a semicircle to celebrate the occasion.

Unlike those other bloggy people who pretend they love working together as part of their particular romantic coupley brand, R and I usually end up at each others' throats in the course of practical projects, due to our shall we say conflicting modi.  I am proud to report that nobody died during this one, but I feel it was more of a fluke than personal progress.  I'm sure plenty of people still got to hear me losing my shit at crucial moments as they walked their dogs past the site.

This structure was necessary due to a month of downpours and high winds robbing us of our treasured purple bird plum, which provided shelter to this spot before keeling over toward the house one morning during a gale, almost taking the aviary with it.  It was gut-wrenching to have to cut it down and we will miss the yearly blossom spectacle horribly.  
Neither I nor our textile collection can stand much UV beaming directly into the house so this newly naked northern aspect needed something to replace the plum's generous shade.  As a bonus, I now have a place to house the cacti and aloe oveflow from elsewhere as everything gets bigger.  

​You don't really think about that as you're amassing a collection of tiny little baby plants; the Aloe alooides in the centre of the above image used to fit in the palm of my hand.  Now it could scoop the brains from ten craniums at once with its monstrous extremities, if it were so inclined.  If you want to save yourself some hard choices, be wiser than me- take a rational moment in the midst of your compulsive acquisition to wonder about ultimate sizes and where all that arrant vegetation is going to live, long-term.  

Half an acre and a knack for building awkward polycarbonate structures mean I can flip moderation the bird for a few more years.  Here are some of the fruits of those happenings.
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Various Rebutias, Lobivias and Sulcorebutias.  I cannot be arsed trying to keep up with their highly mutable taxonomic nomenclature so they remain 'that purple/orange/yellow one' to me.  Most are easy to both both acquire and cultivate, so if you're looking to get into cacti, you might as well start with these guys.  The flowers are gorgeous and reliable, often repeating throughout the summer months.  The pale crustiness you see on a few is supposedly spider mite damage, but it doesn't seem to affect them too much and we are anti-spray, except in the case of losing a valuable plant I couldn't replace (it hasn't happened yet).  Mealy bugs are their worst enemies.  I squish the bigger ones with tiny twigs and blast them off with a hose or camera-blower thingy.
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The incredibly luscious, neon-emerald velveteen of Tibouchina 'Moonstruck's foliage.  I planted the darker purple variety out last year but it shit itself over winter, so I'll keep this guy potted.  Tibouchinas are super-draggy in flower but I don't accept that there's such a thing as bad-taste plants.
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Below: the lovely silver and indigo stylings of Salvia discolor.  It's a brittle, slightly awkward plant but the near-perpetual flowering and scent of blackcurrant cordial pleases me greatly.
With the newish potted garden out the front of the house, I've been getting into Salvia in a big fucking way.  These are a selection of the earliest flowering wee jamensis  and microphylla hybrids; there are red and yellow varieties just coming on.  I have other larger species, including the obscenely green involcruta below left, but they're generally more of a midsummer-autumn thing. 
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Ambridge Rose: one of the pretty bloody wimpy DA roses I've rescued from very moderate competition in the general garden.  Its revival from a single cane is more tribute to the quality of the graft than the plant itself.  I persist with this variety because the colour is lovely and the scent is a truely delicious hardcore myrrh.  Wish I knew how to quit you.
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Metrosideros 'Springfire', a nice little hybrid (?) Pohutukawa from somewhere in the general Pacific; I can't be more specific because every single fucking nursery claims it is something different, ranging from a true dwarf species to a hybrid larger tree.  I'm not even sure this is Springfire since it seems to have lost most of its leafular waviness, but I'm enjoying the dangerous volume of that orange and the prospect of extended summer flowering.  Bellbirds skulk around it furtively, defying my presence to get at the early nectar.  We sincerely hope Myrtle Rust doesn't make it this far south and wipe out all our fantastic Myrtaceae specimens, as it has done in Australia.

Notice the ye olde wrought iron fence panel in the background- that's new too.  We bought some online a while back that looked like they were probably yoinked out of some Victorian grave somewhere and painted them up to put up along the front garden.  Hot tip: paint your rusty iron panels before you attach them to a fence over a 15 foot drop.
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The very gratifying Urospermum dalechampii, the Golden Fleece Daisy.  The foliage is dandylionsque and the leaves you see at right belong to an unrelated nearby sage.  It's supposedly a pest in some places but guess how many shits I give.

Below: much excite-, the slow unfurling of Arisaema speciosa, the Beautiful Arisaema.  After getting a bit too fucking optimistic and planting out the Aroids I had amassed, then losing the poor little buggers to our wet winters, I decided to try again and stick to pot culture.  This guy is the first one up.  I will post more pics when the other species do something interesting.
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Roses  *   Succulents   *   General Pics


Photos du Jour: Misc Spring Scenes

24/11/2019

 
Driveway daisies (we don't drive)
Evaporation haze over Sawyers Bay
Rebutia albispinosa OR helilosa OR senilis, too tired to look it up right now. 
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Yes I know the blog has been somewhat okay very slow of late; that is because I am writing the next book a lot, and R and I are building stuff around the house, renovating the aviary, repotting my entire succulent collection (I am not talking about 5 little cacti on the windowsill, I'm talking epic triffid battles x 100), cleaning up the shitty area behind the kitchen, weeding and planting the whole garden, doing guest laundry, clearing out a tree that fell over and trying to find the right box dye shade for my new hair and it's all very fucking exhausting.  It's also rained every day for about 2 months and that has severely compromised our general flow.  We're almost on top of it, just the front fence to rip out and replace and that should be it for the major hard labour projects so shit should pick up in a week or so.

​Thank you for your patience, constant readers.  


Photos du Jour: Bromeliad Quesnelia liboniala in flower

28/8/2019

 
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Photos du Jour: Midwinter

26/8/2019

 
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Photos du Nuit: Full Moon with Halo

19/7/2019

 
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The moon was a jewel at god knows what in the morning a few days ago, so I took some pics.
 
After all this time, I still don't know shit about cameras or exposure or aperture priority etc. and you can probably tell.  I was quite proud of myself for finding the ISO button in the dark and knowing to dial in one direction instead of the other.  Normally I would be embarrassed, having to admit such abject ignorance, but when it comes to photography I just don't care.  It's such a fucking vainglorious and utterly bullshit conceit, all that framing and recording, as though you were somehow responsible for the beauty or intrigue of the result.  Unless you create objects to photograph, calm your auteur hauteur and realise that your genius eye is a commonplace thing, and that you might as well be taking brass rubbings for all that you actually contribute.  Photographers can only ever convey what they once looked at; BFD.  We should be grateful we've had the opportunity and just leave it at that.

With that in mind, I have a lot of (exemptionalist and nepotistic) respect for my partner's images and his impressive technical knowledge.  He pursues photography as a craft and a science, striving to better represent the natural world that he values so much.  It's not a vanity project.

Anyway, I prefer the one below lol.
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Photos du Jour: On the Second Shortest Day

7/7/2019

 
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We live in a beautiful place.  It enjoyed some 20C the other day, which was a record for the month.
June is supposed to be winter, with temps between 5 and 10 C.
I personally feel as though this super-ugly climate clusterfuck stuff is going to kick off much sooner than most people realise; it is already underway in more marginal parts of the world.  We don't have kids, have never owned a car, don't fly and live very modestly, but we'll still be eating shit along with everyone who couldn't be bothered to do one fucking thing to be less of an environmental catastrophe.  Cheers, arseholes.  Cheers.

Photos du Jour: Firecracker / Candy Corn Vine, Manettia luteorubra

5/7/2019

 
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Syn. M bicolor, etc.  A bird pollinated coffee-relative from montane forest understory in Brazil.  It's easy here in coastal New Zealand, flowering spectacularly and pretty continuously, enjoying the same sort of conditions as the other not-strictly-tropical/upland forest South American plants in our collection.  

A lot of people seem to have trouble with this otherwise desirable group; in this mild maritime situation we have canopy shelter, temps mostly under 30C during summer and cooler nights.  So if you can modify your situation in this direction with shelter and shade, you might have success with flowering and general health.

This vine is supposedly hardy down to a soft Zone 8.  Its leaves are tender and spinachy though, so I wouldn't put it anywhere it cops wind, hail or more than a brief powder frost.  This one is potted and spending some time outside during winter to kill off the bugs that had scuttled over from a manky Hibiscus I'd put on a nearby windowsill.   Other than this minor issue, it's never given me any trouble, self-twining over a 6 foot bamboo tripod in one season even with a couple of major hack-backs.  The flower cover in these pics is relatively sparse compared to its usual performance as I had unfortunately hosed most of them off getting rid of the aphids.  The bellbirds are hanging around it already, looking for nectar.  I highly recommend this plant if you can find one.
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Photos du Jour: Domestic Elevations, miscellaneous barbaric items.

13/5/2019

 
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Although I definitely appreciate asymmetry in Japanese artistic expression, I do not enjoy shit being off-centre in my daily life, so I apologise to all my strictly midpoint homies for this left-side-of-the-bed-wide-angle wonk.

A few years ago we were compelled to fell two young Himalayan Birches in a garden realignment and decided to screw them into the end of the bed.  Since then, all manner of international glamour has settled in their branches, including but not limited to:

Malband (for securing/decorating baggage and animals during migration), probably Anatolia or could be Persian/Bakhtiari, 20thC.  It's a particularly festive one with metallic thread and a billion multicoloured tassels.

Yak hair rope with white terminal details.  These are apparently made and used everywhere from the Wakhan Corridor to Mongolia and possess really peculiar physical properties, being exceedingly bristly, as well as light, strong and waterproof.  This one is from southern Tibet.

Ikat Hinggi, Sumba, circa midcentury onwards.  Sneaky dealers try to pass all of these impressive pieces off as antique, but if you've travelled through Indonesia in the last 30 years you may share my suspicion of this attribution.  To my jaded eye this piece has the slightly generic look and certain lack of conscientious detail that usually hint at modern production.  I could be wrong; the colours are definitely all combinations of red, blue and neutral, exemplifying the traditional palette.  All I know about textile production in Sumba is that it has always been regarded as highly idiosyncratic.   I'm not entirely sure they're still being executed in this particularly large format as the process is almost unimaginably skilled and laborious.
​

​No matter what their age, large expanses of ikat will always trip you the fuck out and reward hours of idle contemplation.  Here's an interesting piece on it.  I can't be mad at anything that boasts both chimeras and skull racks. 
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Below right: Fuck yes I'll have that for $40: a lovely vintage Siirt battaniye, a Turkish/Kurdish iteration of that most treasured of domestic ephemera, the angora blanket.  Local goats are shorn of the silky fibres that are hand-woven into simple kilim-style cotton-warp plainweaves and then given a thorough brushing to yield this pelt-like pile.  They are light, dirt-resistant and warm without inducing the sweaty thermal panics that characterise my relationship with duck down.  

Just as an aside to that particularly baffling cohort of anti-wool (wool?  You're angry about wool?) agitators out there; shearing a caprine is not inherently distressing, cruel or painful and I'm not sure exactly where people have been getting that fucked up idea.  Wild sheep and goats lose their wool/hair via seasonal moults, like cats, but most domestic breeds absolutely require manual wool removal if they are not to end up lodged somewhere like a wad of felt.  I've shorn and crutched sheep myself, both with hand shears and a comb, so I'm not just talking out of my arse.  There's really no way you can shear a sheep without its cooperation.  They quickly learn the process and relax into the positions as you make your long blows down their flanks etc.  It's no more traumatic than getting a buzzcut when you'd rather be having lunch.  Watch this to see what I mean. 

If you have animal husbandry concerns (and all of us should), I urge you to get off your arse, visit a farm, see what goes on for yourself and make decisions from there.  PETA's campaigns have done more harm to public perception of animal welfare reform than anything else I can think of.
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Top left: I'm not 100% sure where this length of tent/yurt band came from but because of the width and very atavistic motifs I'm guessing Central Asia, probably Uzbek or Kirgiz.  Turkish dealers always cut these for some fucking reason, which really pisses me off as it takes ages to sew them back together.  
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^ Doga, Duacik, Tawiz or Moska, an embroidered amulet from northern Afghanistan/Uzbekistan, possibly Chodor Turkmen people.  This one has pages of the Qu'ran or a similar text (I haven't been tempted to look) sewn into it but others contain salt and other auspicious substances to repel evil influences.  A nice man gave it to me for washing his Kente cloths.  Thanks Philip!
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Dog, circa last year.  The most expensive fibres in this array by a factor of 10, and connoisseur of Siirt angora.
(Disclaimer: apart from said dog which was an essential purchase, all of these items are vintage/second hand and nothing cost more than $100; most were less than $50, so we're not exactly flexing lol.)

See more Ethnographia   *   Photos du Jour   *   Port Chalmers, New Zealand


The Blackthorn Garden: Autumnal Potplant Action

30/4/2019

 
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You know your raver days are two fucking decades behind you when you start getting just as excited about incoming blooms as you once did about BPM, random sex and synthetic stimulants.  My stimulants are organic nowdays.  Autumn used to be a bit of a dud around here since we don't get great deciduous colour, being windy and maritime; all the summer flowers are fucked out and the aloes have yet to get their shit together.  

So I decided to establish a bit of a crazy pot farm in the front yard.  It covers the scabby concrete and tarmac patches, feeds the bees and pleases the eye with an array of exotic salvias and all the half-hardy beauties that might lose their roots in the clay.  It's getting more and more crowded as I get into all those mesoamerican sages and South African bird polinated thingies that do so well here.  Above: Aloe hoffmanii, first flowers I think tee hee!
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The first flowering on this exceptionally emerald green Aloe glauca clone.  I almost lost it a couple of years back to root rot after letting too many old leaves get manky around the base.  Don't do that.  
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Salvia splendens 'Giant Form' apparently tops 6 feet and the hot red variant certainly curb stomps the colour gamut in late afternoon sunlight.  Bought both the merlot and the scarlet versions; it was the right decision.
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Salvia involucrata  
​This head is only half-out but is already gratifying us with this intense candy blue-pink. I have several largely unnamed forms of this group and I love them unconditionally.  They become enormous here with our decent rain and pissweak-to-absent frosts.  The foliage is huge and plush.  You can hear the clickety clack of bumblebees sawing into the base of the flower to get at the nectar (they are bird pollinated in native situ I think).  Plant some today.
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Salvia fulgens 'Red Dragon', a tall, open bush with attractive corrugated leaves and nonstop fuzzy scarlet floral business.  Something, I suspect a Bellbird, comes along and snaps off half the damn heads trying to get at the nectar.
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Fuzzy.  Silky.
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If I had a dollar for every euphorbia I had going on, I'd have about $12.50.  The lazy gardener's main ho.  Can't remember the name of this cultivar, but it's from Marshwood Gardens in Invercargill.  Their online shop is like a tinny house for plant tragics.  Sheeeeeeiiiiit.  Peruse at your peril.
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Salvia sagittata supposedly but it looks like it might be a hybrid with something else.  The flowers and parts of the stem are an incredibly dense Afghan lapis blue, which is as much as you can ask of any given organism really.  Not quite out yet, but you get the picture.

Below: good old Salvia leucantha, which I only discovered a couple of years ago after encountering its luxurious, almost extraterrestrial plushness in the flesh at a garden centre.  

​​Always touch plants.  The tactile dimension is a whole nother thing.
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I always try to have some Dagga (Leonotis leonurus) going, even though this plant seems to labour under a curse in our garden, attracting all kinds of misfortune and mysterious fatalities.  I have a slightly disappointing creme version too, which unfortunately looks like used bogroll a lot of the time due to the unsightly off-whiteness of the bloomage so I might pass it on.  Dagga is supposed to be psychoactive but it looks  like it tastes like something you would do in your late teens because you couldn't get any real drugs.  So I haven't been tempted.  Give it a few more years.  I may well regress to vomiting sludgy decoctions in someone's backyard.  Lol.

The honey-seeking birds tend to give it a fucking hammering, which is why some things are better closer to the house where the avian contingent is a bit more circumspect about humping the shit out of popular plants.
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We got ninety nine problems but a bush aint one: the Garden   *    More visual shit


Photo du Jour: R's nice butterfly pics

20/4/2019

 
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​He spends all day taking and fucking around with them, then posts them in his blog and doesn't tell me.
See more here

Blackthorn Public Service Announcement: Red Kiwifruit Review

2/4/2019

 
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I don't know if they've granted this new colour variety an inevitably stupid, swishy, committee-generated, focus group-tested, utterly inapposite proprietary name yet, but I'm sure it's in the pipeline.  

Aesthetically, we were a little underwhelmed after the hype accompanying the limited release.  Are we just being picky cunts when we expect a little more red in a red kiwifruit?  Whatever.  There's no denying the cross-section offers a pretty burst of ruby, it's just that it's not entirely obvious how a meringue or pav is going to seriously benefit from this partial and somewhat parsimonious novelty.  On the plus side, it sort of looks like it's on its rag and I don't hate that.  With all these things considered, I bestow an eyeball score of 6.5/10.

I was tricked into eating some arse-gapingly horrible Italian kiwifruit the other day by our utterly unscrupulous dickhole of a supermarket.  Jesus fucking wept, I actually spat it on the ground and this mushy, gluey insult to my unsuspecting gob reminded me of the simple pleasures of the kiwifruit OG, that homely local variety with its Colombian emerald flesh and indefatigable strangeness of flavour.  I like its pubic furriness, sometimes punishing acidity and translucent Kermity beauty.  The yellow depilated variant is a different, more melony customer that has only recently earned our respect after distributors apparently learned not to sling shitty, half-fermented, golden snot-like sub-export trays at local consumers.  Which only took about 5 fucking years.  

Taste-wise, the Zespri Red is utterly forgettable and harkens back to those bad old days of crap yellow kiwifruit, shying away from its progenitors' noble and quite frankly essential acidity in favour of mealy, omnireferential neither-norness.  There's a hoarse whisper of guava, maybe a tired shrug of rock melon but nothing that amounts to more than a limp-wristed gesture toward tinned fruit salad that's been sitting in a cup on the bench for three warm days.  

4/10, would not bang.  
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Photo du Jour: pointy morning cloud, Otago Coast

9/3/2019

 
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My mum caught this on her phone whilst driving up toward Oamaru.

Photos du Jour: Chaffinch chick

11/1/2019

 
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So cute it makes my teeth ache.  Thanks Lovely R

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