Cloudy Corner

Cloudy Corner Adventures in a paddock of about 300 lovely young olive trees and a vege patch in rural New Zealand. What more could a girl ask for :-).

Towards the latter half of 2020 I grew some indigenous oyster mushrooms. They were inoculated in a plastic bag in a stra...
30/05/2025

Towards the latter half of 2020 I grew some indigenous oyster mushrooms. They were inoculated in a plastic bag in a straw substrate. All very sterile and hygienic. Mushrooms are fussy that way. After the initial fruiting of the bags, you get another flush or two, but afterwards you throw out the lot and start over. It seemed like a lot of wastage if you can't reuse or repurpose some of the stuff.

So while I was contemplating the situation, I threw out the contents of the bags on the side of our hill, and forgot all about it.

This year, low and behold, we have oyster mushrooms everywhere. Well, not everywhere, but it's getting there, and that's just growing in the soil under the pine trees. No fancy stuff required. I'm super excited! Will leave them be this year, but come next year ...



Our late bloomers are gigantic this year. With the westerly blowing like it's blowing now, we just filled a wine box wit...
30/05/2025

Our late bloomers are gigantic this year. With the westerly blowing like it's blowing now, we just filled a wine box with windfall fruit.

Four gum emperor caterpillars completely obliterated our young yellow cherry guava tree/bush. Not a single leaf was left...
09/03/2024

Four gum emperor caterpillars completely obliterated our young yellow cherry guava tree/bush. Not a single leaf was left unturned 😆 We've seen them on the cherry guavas for a few years now, but previously on the red guava. Videoed a moth wiggling out of a cocoon on the red guava. But I didn't realise they could be so destructive.

A photo I posted in February of 2021 of a caterpillar on a pine tree shows how beautiful they are, and in July that same year we found the cocoons in the guava.

14/06/2023

It was a harvest moon.

Over the long weekend at the start of June, we picked olives for three days straight, day and night. Grateful for the he...
14/06/2023

Over the long weekend at the start of June, we picked olives for three days straight, day and night. Grateful for the help of Ross and Kati, who came over on short notice to help pick on the last day.

We had 180kg, ending up with 24 litres of oil. Since we planted table olives, our oil is very smooth and mild - not even a one cough. ☺️

Looking forward to the sediment settling (in a month or so) so we can start using it.

It was a good year for feijoas. We got heaps of decent sized ones, including a 'double yolker'. 🙂
13/06/2023

It was a good year for feijoas. We got heaps of decent sized ones, including a 'double yolker'. 🙂

I don't mind the rain so much, but the wind is really getting to me. Stormy weather this past week (month ... months!) a...
27/11/2022

I don't mind the rain so much, but the wind is really getting to me. Stormy weather this past week (month ... months!) and more gale force winds, brought down yet another half a tree.

Precisely because of the wind, the growing tips of most of our pine trees snapped off when they were still young. This resulted in the trees forming a cluster of new upward branches resembling 'growth tips' Forward twelve years, and the bushy tops of our pine trees start to split in the wind, with some huge branches blowing over.

Plans always get derailed by things like this. 🤬


In a hurry to whip up some cream for our freshly baked blueberry friands, I accidentally added black colouring instead o...
09/10/2022

In a hurry to whip up some cream for our freshly baked blueberry friands, I accidentally added black colouring instead of vanilla essence to the Chantilly cream. 🙄🤣

Maybe it can be a thing. 🤔

Still searching for a friand pan, instead of using my round muffin pan.

My forte ... producing miniature fully grown veges. 🙄
27/08/2022

My forte ... producing miniature fully grown veges. 🙄

Too wet and too windy for olive trees in our neck of the woods. This one was in a particularly bad spot, but there are o...
25/08/2022

Too wet and too windy for olive trees in our neck of the woods. This one was in a particularly bad spot, but there are others in a similar situation. The poor things are suffering. We will have to thin then out considerably.

Flop crop (and flop photo 🙄). Perhaps if I gave the earth gems a bit of attention during the growing season, it might ha...
18/06/2022

Flop crop (and flop photo 🙄). Perhaps if I gave the earth gems a bit of attention during the growing season, it might have been a different story. Still a good handful to chuck in the vegetable curry tonight.

We've had a fair bit of rain this past month or so, but it is not reflected by our water tank. 166mm for the month of Ma...
05/06/2022

We've had a fair bit of rain this past month or so, but it is not reflected by our water tank. 166mm for the month of May.

Need to investigate the tank situation.

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Aokautere
Palmerston North
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