Dexters and a Chinese Greenhouse

Imagine you are ready to carve out your own self-sustaining existence in the countryside — produce all you need to survive. Where would you begin? With dreams of a self-sufficient future, Pat and I were quite pleased to make the acquaintance of Marion and Lee. From nine to five they practice landscape architecture and accounting, respectively. During all other hours they are slowly beginning to live off the land.

Marion works from home, so we were able to arrive in the middle of the morning and jump right into our wwoofing. (A work exchange program we’ve participated in between bouts of backpacking and sightseeing). After a quick run to the local nursery for supplies, we spent the afternoon digging up baby tussocks (New Zealand ornamental grass) and bagging them — maybe to be sold at the Farmer’s Market in the spring?! We spent the next day digging ditches to drain swamp-prone areas and weeding.

During the course of our stay, we learned about the type of cattle (Dexter) they’ve chosen to breed, how they plan on using their land, how they’ll manage the stock (including a small flock of sheep) over winter, how they chose their chicken breed, and what the master plan is for their garden and orchard. Exciting!

Their main project for us was a greenhouse assembling project, which had to wait until the weekend. In anticipation of long weekend work days, we were free to spend Thursday catching up on some much needed recovery-time and Friday doing errands and seeing some of the sights in Dunedin. Our vehicle was due for it’s bi-annual Warrant of Fitness inspection (which turned into a total nightmare and will be an entire other blog entry). While it was being inspected, we embarked on our first ever chocolate factory tour! YUM!

The voracious, almighty dollar hasn’t taken over New Zealand culture quite as much as it has in the U.S.A. (Plenty of places are still closed on Saturdays, and almost nothing is 24/7 excepting the dairy industry which has grown like a tumor.) As a consequence, our 11:45 (nearly lunch) time slot left our small group with less to see than usual. Our Cadbury guide felt bad and plied us with heaps of chocolate. We did learn how they

make hollow figures (spinning molds), coated candy (spun in a cement-mixer-like machine as coatings are ladled in), and liquid chocolate (sweetened condensed milk, cocoa power, cocoa butter). We also got to taste almost everything, including a cocoa bean. I was really surprised by the lack of mechanization (many things packaged by hand) and the fact that the factory doesn’t run 24/7. Fun fact: the factory produces 10 hollow Easter eggs for every New Zealander every year!

After Cadbury, we made our way to the Speight’s factory. This place is like the Budweiser or Coors of New Zealand. The tour was really polished — very Disney — and the ancient factory was different than any other brewery I’ve been to — basically because all the vessels used in the process retain the copper shell of days past. The brewery ordered steel, but copper is what was delivered to this small-ish South Pacific Island so very long ago and they couldn’t afford to wait for new materials. I even learned how ancient Egyptians made beer from bread. The end of the tour was the best — 30-40 minutes in the tour bar pouring as many samples as we wanted! We then explored the downtown shopping district until it was appropriate to get behind the wheel for our return trip on the freeway to Marion and Lee’s.

Now, we’d heard about Dunedin’s amazing Farmer’s Market, and it looked like our Saturday with Marion and Lee would be the only opportunity to check it out. They treated us to a delicious breakfast of crepes before we wandered around enjoying all the sights and smells of the market and buying the gnarliest block of bleu you’ve ever smelled! Upon return, the breeze was too strong to erect the lightweight greenhouse kit, so we set about preparing the ground and getting things in order. We got up bright and early Sunday and were tackling the project before the sun made it over the hill.

The greenhouse kit was shipped from China and contained mystical directions about fitting L-02 with T7 and securing it all with W-04 and part S-21. You can imagine that it was an amusing, frustrating, and eventually gratifying process to match everything up. By lunch, we’d only finished 15%. We got into the groove after the meal and managed to install the remaining framing, panels, bracing, doors, and weather stripping before dark! After one more day working on small projects, we said goodbye to a fantastic experience and wonderful couple and headed back to the city.

Click here for a few more photos.