Janice Murphy

Right when we want to be basking in summer sun, here comes the long white cloud.

The call came while I was at lunch: "Your bees are swarming and they're at the neighbour's".

Could do better. It's a comment that blighted my report card all the years I was at school, even on one rare occasion when I topped the class. And I still feel the burden almost half a century on.

Eggs in the hedge, in the woolshed, in the mint patch; eggs on a shelf in the garage, down the driveway, in the coppice: we're sick of our hens running wild and laying everywhere but the henhouse.

Our place seems to be great for breeding.

What were you doing before breakfast on Wednesday? Maybe you were making your lunch, or listening to the news before getting up. Maybe you were reading the paper. Me? I was up in the paddock with a grubber, directing a creek back into its channel.

You'd think I would have sorted things out by now, but every spring it happens - our lambs arrive at the same time as the daffodils, and the only place with lovely rich grass for them is the daffodil paddock at the front of the house. So my beautiful display gets nibbled by lambs and squashed flat by ewes plonking down for a rest.

Well, they finally got me. After a year and a-half of poking around in bee hives, moving them, stealing honey from them, taking them apart box by box to check every frame for disease and generally interfering with the bees, I have finally had a bee sting.

Money talks, they say, but all mine has said lately is goodbye.

Winter must be on the way out - I've been feeling the urge to spring-clean.

When Shrek the famous merino visited an iceberg off the Otago coast, he was fitted with little crampons so he didn't lose his footing in the slippery conditions.

I wish I was a gardener; a proper gardener, with neat raised beds bursting with winter greens - silverbeet, spinach, cabbage, cavolo nero, bok choy - and carrots and parsnips just waiting to be pulled up. Broad beans would be well on their way to producing a spring crop.

I knew things on the feed front would be tight this winter when Mr Reliable, the gentleman who sells me the bulk of my hay each year, told me he had none to spare.