I was riding an elephant in Malaysia when it occurred to me that I hadn't filed (or even written) my first June column, and it was too late to do anything about it. I had no choice but to carry on enjoying my holiday.
Busy as a bee; a hive of activity, making a beeline. Humans and bees have lived together for so long that the habits of the bees are part of our language.
Otago Harbour shone like glass in the autumn sun. There was not a breath of wind, which was bad luck for yachties and windsurfers but great for the kayakers, rowers and dragon-boat paddlers who were making the most of the glorious weather.
Headlights cut through the early morning gloom; a car crunches to a stop in the loose gravel at the top of our drive.
I've got a lump on my head like a small egg; a hole in my bee suit will need stitching; and my girls are pretty annoyed at me right now, but my beehives are home at last.
As the nights draw in, our thoughts often turn to firewood. And I don't mean just burning it, but planting it, pruning it, cutting it, carrying it, splitting it and stacking it to dry, too.
Sometimes things go perfectly right.
Ikebana - the Japanese art of flower arranging - is an offshoot of Zen Buddhism. But there's no need to head to the Orient to study it - Dunedin has its own teacher. Charlotte Morris, director...
It's sometimes hard to get started on a column, but I've never found it harder than today.
I love to think of myself as self-sufficient, and I enjoy the sort of practical tasks there isn't much call for in town: clearing ditches, unblocking drains, that sort of thing.
"Slow down, you move too fast ..." sang Simon and Garfunkel cheerily.
We're all going on a summer holiday ... Yeah, right.
On my bench top is a bowl of flour and water mix, just beginning to bubble. The friendly wild yeasts that hang around my kitchen are moving in, ready for me to bake sourdough bread unlike anyone else's.
For the third year in a row, our sheep have gone wild. They are roaming the property willy-nilly, but this weekend I plan to stop them in their tracks.
Christmas is coming; buy, buy, buy. Never mind about a budget. Pay later, pay next year or the year after. Shop til you drop. They make it, we need to buy it. Or do we?
When a great big anticyclone parks overhead for days on end, my thoughts turn to the beach, and our wee beach house that has been mostly empty for ages.
It might be Labour Day but my tomatoes are not planted. Even in the greenhouse, I have never found it worth the effort to plant them so early in this Southern climate. They'll fruit just as well if they go in next month.
Poor wee Skinny Mini is no more. I suspected as much when I didn't see her at the morning hay fight, and then realised I couldn't recall seeing her for a few days.
Well, the lambs might have come as a surprise, but the mud hasn't.
Every garden bed contains billions of tiny gardeners, aerating, fertilising and helping the plants along. Janice Murphy investigates the soil food web.
