I decided both sides of my Ruel Quilt needed to be interesting so the back has chickens and chicken netting. I have just sewn the binding on and will sew it down tonight.
It's raining here today so we were very lucky on Friday to get a bright sunny calm day for spraying our kiwifruit vines. I took these photos standing up in the park behind us looking down into our property. I went up there to make sure no members of the public were eating their lunch there, and to prove just how little drift there was. Here in the BOP at the moment there are folk wanting all spraying of crops to be stopped. They still want fruit and vegetables to eat with no bugs of course. YES, I know it can all be grown organically but the production is far less and the work even greater than we do now.
We are exceedingly careful about it all. Every neighbour gets rung to warn them it is going to happen and to keep their pets inside just in case. We still use small amounts of fertiliser as well as mulch and do soil tests and leaf tests to make sure it is being used up. We feel that the earth on our place is better than it was when we arrived 31 years ago.
In the photos you can see that the vines are bare at this time of year and have been pruned and tied down, all ready to burst into new leaf and buds in a little while.
4 comments:
Hi
I'm doing a homeopath course & in one part it shared how a lot of people have become allergic to kiwi fruit. They wondered if it was due to the spraying, not the actual fruit.
Love Leanne
How many years can you use the kiwi plant?
I love the chickens on the back of the little quilt- especially the ones trying to escape!
The sight of that land makes me homesick.
Thanks Meg, I do too. Perhaps I'll start saying that is the right side!
Gudrun, Kiwifruit vines last a very long time. 50 years or more.
The oldest of ours we planted when we got here 31 years ago and have had 27 crops off them. In Te Puke there are vines older than that. The vines are kept in very good order with annual Winter prunig which just leaves the trunk and some old canes and some new canes tied in so they look kind of like ribs on the spine ( skeleton ).
Leanne, you could be right BUT there are lots of other reasons too. People are becoming allergic to lots of different food types.
Please note the vines we were spraying were bare - no leaves and certainly no fruit yet. When we first started growing kiwifruit 30 years ago the method then was to do preventative spray regularly ever 14 days. This hasn't been the case for the last 10 years. We monitor for pests and only if a threshold is passed do we spary and THEN only certain sprays and a limited number of times. ( almost organic )
What worries me more is I know that cauliflowers are dipped in bleach to make them white before selling and possibly carrots too. Right on the part folk are going to eat. That is why we try and grow lots of our own veges and fruit.
The other thing folk tend to overlook is all the other pollutatnts in the air especially from vehicles of all sorts.( that gets all over everything we eat )
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