Mary Evans's blog

It's come to that season again when everything is growing and I can't get to it fast enough to cook it. We picked the delicious little plums just befor Christmas and I made a couple of plum cakes from Stephanie Alexander's Garden Cook book but am having to throw some to the chickens.

I have put up a recipe for Anzac Biscuits and will put the plum cake recipe up for those who are fleet enough to get them before the birds.

Yesterday I found two chickens -both broody - trying to squeeze into the same laying box. One was sitting on the other's head. They were competing for eggs laid by another hen.

Act and United Future?

My mother had a job as a reporter for a farming magazine when she left school This would be in Bournmouth where she and her family were escaping the London bombs.
She researched and wrote an article about keeping hens, which I guess was pretty important during the times of real austerity.

My father kept hens in Murupara and Waipa and Rotorua all his life. We have kept hens in St Mary's Bay and Ponsonby and Matakana. I am fascinated by them. Read more »

In early 1969 I had my first taste of living in Herne Bay Road. It was an old flat, I was a student, I worked in a sandwich bar in Hobson Street and the trams were still running. It was summer: the streets were hot with red McCallum chip and the walk to the sea was under fragrant pepper trees. Annie Bonza opened a shop; I brought a red tie- dyed coat and it was stolen from a party. Read more »

This is our 21st vintage, and the first one when both David and I have been around together to tend the harvest. I was teaching and/or running a restaurant for all the others.

When we first planted the vineyard, we were determined not to have a monoculture- so along with the grapes we planted figs and olive trees and a mulberry tree. We extended that into apple trees, old fruit and nut trees and citrus trees, specifically limes. Read more »