Pears, pears, pears, pears

Extrordinary! It has taken me 14 minutes to connect to the Blogger site so that I can write this post. (I will still have to write and publish the post, which will take more time.) This is why I haven't written more - I seem to be having a terrible time with either my interest connection or with access of the Blogger hostsite. I'm giving serious consideration to Broadband.

We have been away for a couple of days over the long weekend. Grandad has an old farmhouse in South Wairarapa which has a small orchard. Every second year there seems to be a good crop of pears, and this was the year. (I don't know what happens in the intervening year - maybe the tree has a rest.) Acutally, there's more than one pear tree, and the small variety was fruiting this year. (Does that mean that each tree needs more than one year off?) The trees don't get any thinning or pruning, or maybe they would fruit better when they do. This year there were as many pears as we could be bothered picking, but all small to middling.

Because Bern and I are both so busy studying at the moment, bottling pears DID NOT figure high on my preferred activities list. I have an essay due in a fortnight which is starting to worry me. (Hopefully I'll get some actually words written tomorrow.) But I was determined to get some of those pears, so we decided to take a couple of days, spend some time with the girls, (study for a few hours a day!) and get some of the pears.

(We had to wait until the bulls left the orchard. They like sitting under the fruit trees - but you don't feel like picking fruit with 6 or 7 bulls around for some reason!)

The girls lent a hand, and we got a total of 23 jars bottled, which I was quite pleased with. I have, in the past, done quite a lot more, but this was a reasonable compromise between getting some free fruit put away and getting on with study. Uncle Michael also came over for the weekend, so he also took a jar away, but is not too bothered about pears in general.

Nice weather over the weekend too, so the girls had lots of walks.