Really Small Bees

Three Years Later

My last update was March 2022*, and it’s now January 2025.

Close enough to 3 years, and coincidentally, around how long I had been telling myself it would take for my new garden to ‘get good’.

The definition of good, well, if you don’t include ‘tidy’, and simply measure it’s ‘goodness’ by how many imperfect raspberries you can pick on a summers day, then I think it’s doing ok.

It has been a chaotic few years. But, probably starting to feel a little settled now. Have had the first family trip back to Auckland, and it actually felt like home on our return here.

I always intended to become a writer in my 40’s, but I never took into account how much I actually dislike writing. However… blogging is somewhat cathartic. And with the youngest off to school next month, I may have a little more time to hammer out a few words between work projects.

I may even endeavour to do more cooking stuff. I don’t know. It’s a beautiful sunny day so I’m feeling very motivated and optimistic, but who knows how long that will last!

*Edited to add, I’ve since been working on transferring a lot of social media posts to the blog, so many more will pop up between these two dates!

Giant Sunflower

I haven’t posted in ages again. Hard to find a handful of uninterrupted minutes outside of work hours. But here’s a collection of garden photos from summer.

1. Giant sunflower and sun
2. Random self-seeded dahlia with bumblebee
3. A handful of ivory raspberries
4. A yellow tomato from the garden, joining a fruit bowl full of veggies from

… Well I’ve been interrupted before I’ve finished writing notes for the photos. Pressing post anyway I guess.

Popping Corn Polenta

Last summer I grew a bunch of popcorn corn, that once dried unfortunately had very low rates of popping.

It looked very pretty though! But eventually after tiring of it hanging up in the pantry, I thought I’d try an experiment.

I chucked some corn into my flour mill and ground it up, and yes, you can make a delicious polenta from this corn.