She's all ours, mate!

It was the dead of winter when we finalised the sale of Fantail Farm - which, it has to be said, we got for far more than the proverbial song. Indeed we got told several times we should have been arrested for what had to be the steal of the century. The flat to slight rolling five acres, split into four paddocks of two large and two medium sized, had been offered via council tender as surplus to their requirements. Originally, I'd been looking at a section when I found this, recognised it as land we had thought about leasing two years previously and said to Ken "Why don't we throw an offer of $10k on the table and see what happens?" No, that was not a spelling mistake. It really was an offer of just $10,000. And yes, it was laughable. Nowhere in New Zealand should we have been able to buy that kind of land for that price, let alone just half an hour out of the city of Rotorua.

But... we were still in the middle of the Depression (not recession, it has lasted long enough to earn the title of the worst thing since the Great Depression of the early 20th century) and for most people, money was a little tight. And the land, at the time, wasn't in the greatest of conditions either. But still..
You could have knocked us over with a feather when we got a call from the council to let us know we had won the tender.
The second visit out there was - different. We took our small mobile home and the dogs and parked up in the paddock for the weekend, walking around and really inspecting what needed doing and what we were going to do with it. The boundary fences were, for the most, in reasonably good condition. Enough to hold in the two horses that were currently in there and whose owner had had no idea until that week that it was going to be sold, let alone had been. For the rest, it was simply a blank canvas waiting for someone to put a brush to it.
The big thing for me was getting an orchard started. We'd picked the biggest of the paddocks, which happened to be at the rear of the property as being the one we would live on eventually and more than half of that was to be handed over to a good sized home orchard from which we could sell to locals a wide variety of fruit. Winter/spring being the best time to plant, the next three months would see me planting out more than 45 fruit trees of almost every available variety that would grow in the climate we had - and even a couple that, as I write, may not.

The interesting thing is that from a geological viewpoint, we had about 30cms of topsoil, underneath which was about 60-80cms of pumice, volcanic ash and sand that had been rained on the region during the eruption of Mount Tarawera in 1886. Under that was around a metre of topsoil from what had been there before the eruption. So what we had was extremely free-draining soil in a climate known to be perfect for stonefruit; very cold winters and very hot summers. It is also great for berries of all kinds as well as grapes, being an alkaline soil.
The downside was and is that you do have to work organic materials into it on a frequent and ongoing basis - but we had a great find to help us with that (more on that later).
The original plan had been that we would plant the trees, remove the horses and perhaps resow all the paddocks. But we were told that spring wouldn't be a good time for this, as the summers are arduously hot here and likely to kill off new grass growth; so what we did was mowed the paddocks down every few weeks and allowed what was cut to compost back into land with the help of the spring rains. This is a natural way of fertilising the land and one which we were happy to do until the autumn rains in March meant we could fertilise and resow. We had no plans of putting any stock on the land for at least a year.

We planned to live off the grid; using a large housebus and two 40 foot containers for garages, but felt that we would need to wait a couple of years before we did this, needing to tidy up some loose ends and sell out property. At that time, I was in the middle of getting the first series of the TV programme The Garden Pantry underway and weekends were the only time I had to do anything on the land. In addition. Ken had full time work as a painter and decorator and he also only had time at the weekends.
But life changes, as it does, and decisions we made in late winter, early spring had to be revised. My mother needed to move from where she was and came to stay with us - and at about the same time, we discovered that of the two homes that backed onto our property, one was empty and could be purchased from an absentee landlord who lived in Auckland, for $35,000. It was terribly run down from a cosmetic viewpoint, but as both Ken and I have renovated many homes over the years, we were able to look past it and see what could be done. So we purchased it and over a two month period, got it fit for Mum to live in (it truly wasn't before that!) by repainting it completely inside and out, putting in new flooring, a new stove and benchtop and everything else it needed to get its good bones back up and looking like the lovely home it had once originally been.
Having Mum out here also made us decide it was time to rethink the timeframe of getting ourselves out here. Ken decided he wanted to move lock stock and barrel out here as soon as we could sell out home. I had an offer made on the company I owned which was responsible for producing tv programmes and it was one I was happy with. As soon as we made that decision, a number of siginificant things happened - we decided to buy a large housebus and within a couple of weeks, someone contacted us wanting to do a swap with the one we had for an 11 and a half metre housebus which has been beautifully done up inside for permanent living. An offer came for our house that we couldn't refuse and within a matter of weeks of having made the decision to go much earlier... we were on our way before Christmas.