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Coolest trailer carrying seedlings poised for planting.

As the farmer set off to work with four professional tree planters, I thought about the behind-the-scenes effort that’s often required to produce results.

Years of grit, guts, luck, courage, team work and a heap of money was behind our thrilling America’s Cup win. On average, each race took a few minutes short of 25. I’ll set the average at 20 which is perhaps a tad low, but remember nose-dive day? It counted but we didn’t cross the start line.

Our fast and, as it turns out, frail Aotearoa set sail 33 times – 10 in the Louis Vuitton Round Robins, seven a piece in the semis and finals and nine nail-biters against Oracle. This multiplies tidily to 660 minutes or just 11 hours of racing after an investment of gazillions of dollars and labour hours.

Now let’s look at the Melbourne Cup. In 1990, Kingston Rule finished in a record three minutes, 16 and a half seconds. Even the slowest time is less than four minutes. Vast amounts of skill, work, luck and money got those horses to the starting line – then finish line first.

Now to tree planting, less sexy but ain’t that life. No shiny silver cups, no roaring crowds or pots of prize money.

To have professional tree planters rock up, as if by magic, and plant 1000 baby native trees in two hours on the shore of the Kaipara Harbour has taken years of work by man with a mission Mark Vincent, countless volunteers and the farmer who’s fenced the shoreline, bought trees, divided flaxes, planted, planted and planted – and got involved with Otamatea HarbourCare.

It’s the brain child of Mark Vincent who’s created a native plant nursery, acquired seeds and seedlings and all they require to grow, nurtured them, got sponsorship, organised working bees and planting days, inspired celebrities to get on the end of spades (Te Radar, Paul Henry and our Kaipara mayor), delivered trees to planting sites, dug too many holes and done too much more to list here.

All this earned Otamatea HarbourCare the credibility to get funding for professional tree planters. They came courtesy of Reconnecting Northland and its Go with the Flow: Northern Kaipara Harbour Project.

Reconnecting Northland is the first WWF-NZ and NZ Landcare Trust project of its type and is designed to restore “natural processes and ecosystems”, while Go with the Flow is about restoration and working with landowners.

And there we were last Thursday with potted plants jam-packed on the oldest and coolest trailer I’ve ever met. Odd fact that relates to this yarn – the farmer bought it from the second female to ride in the Melbourne Cup, Linda Ballantyne, who used to live nearby.

In just two hours the four guys planted 1000 plants. Snap! Job done! But mostly tree planting is DIY and not quite so speedy. On Wednesday 16 August we’re having a planting day here at Batley and need new blood in our team, even if just for this project. You needn’t dig holes. That’s the domain of strong blokes. I generally follow along and pop in trees. Easy.

Beforehand you’ll have morning tea and learn about our 150-year-old house at Batley on the Kaipara Harbour near Maungaturoto and afterwards we’ll gather for lunch. Please say yes.

The harbour needs you, you’ll help our beleaguered planet and make a positive difference. Questions are welcome and RSVP is essential. Please message the Otamatea HarbourCare Society’s Facebook page.

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The suspected lamb whose bloody birth was seen by a passerby who assumed the sheep had ‘sprung a bearing’.

Spring has sprung, the grass has ris’, daffodils are blooming and lambs have bloomin’ popped out everywhere.

But unfortunately it’s not always a lamb that pops out but what farmers call a ring or bearing. In fact, it’s a prolapsed vagina.

The farmer reckons about three of his sheep a year suffer this misfortune which, generally, can happen just prior to lambing, often if a sheep is fat, has a full rumen, a full bladder and the lambs are about grown. The sheep’s internal accommodation is packed to the max – then some. Pop!

The Ministry of Primary Industries begins its webpage on the subject, thus: “Bearings (prolapses of the vagina) in ewes can be a problem every year as lambing approaches, even on the best-managed farms.”

There’s a delicate balance – insufficient feed in the weeks before to lambing can also be a culprit. Scanning can determine which sheep are expecting multiple lambs and need more food – but not too much.

In basic terms, the solutions for a prolapse are: clean it, let the bladder empty, shove everything back inside the sheep and hope it stays there – or euthanasia.

In the two cases I’ve seen the vagina didn’t stay put, despite the use of a special contraption and both had to be killed.

Case number on was a pregnant ewe and case two was Ashley, a too-fat former pet lamb. I made very sure no bits of little Ashley ended up in our freezer.

The worker’s grand-daughter had named her two pet lambs after the Olsen twins. After weaning, Mary-Kate joined the flock while Ashley hung around our garden gate and scoffed.

Last week at nine pm, the farmer took a call from someone who’d driven past earlier that day. She said she’d seen a sheep with its ring out, had left a note in our letterbox and asked whether the situation had been handled.

The caller was off a farm, she said, and she and her friends were appalled. Plus, she insisted, she saw the farmer drive past the suffering sheep without stopping, and she’d be in touch with the newspaper and SPCA if the sheep wasn’t taken care of.

Ashley’s friend Mary Kate sometimes got tangled in weeds.

As I said in Love at the End of the Road,  farming is a high-vis business, and it’s Murphy’s Law that the day an animal dies/gets caught in a fence/breaks a leg/springs a ring is the day you’re off the farm or busy elsewhere.

The caller got so worked up, the farmer found no air time in which to say he wasn’t driving the ute she’d seen. The wife of a former farm worker who’d been to visit was at the wheel, and other visiting farmers hadn’t spotted the troubled sheep either.

The farmer’s next question, after the indignant caller hung up on him, was to me. Had I seen the note she’d left, given I’d just cleared the mailbox – after dark and during a TV commercial break?

Nope, sorry. As I love after-dark missions, we headed off with headlamps to see if we could spot the sheep and check the other farm mail boxes. We failed on all counts.

The farmer and farm manager scored another epic fail the next morning. But while they didn’t find a suffering sheep, a ewe with newborn lambs was in about the spot of the perceived crime. It had been a bloody birth and the ewe was still trailing the ripped amniotic sac.

The farmer concluded the appalled group might have seen a ewe giving birth – when the placenta appears first it can look like a prolapse.

Farmers appreciate passersby who take the time to report problems – when they’re kind, well mannered and don’t jump to conclusions or act like know-it-alls – even if they’re right.

I can confirm living on a farm doesn’t qualify anyone to be a farmer. Once while driving from the farm, I was politeness itself when I phoned the farmer to report a suspected dead bull. There it was, lying on its side and still as a rock with birds hopping about on its bulbous tummy. When the farmer checked it out soon afterwards it was standing up and eating grass.

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This brown scum that thrives in our wet winters is called Nostoc Commune

Anticipating cultured conversation after a local theatre performance, we retired to the bar for a night cap. But as this is a rural area, talk was all about an entirely different type of culture – a strange gooey, gunky and shiny brown growth.

I’d first spotted it while being a marshal for the Rally of New Zealand. After poking it with the toe of my boot, I decided it resembled seaweed or pond scum – except it was flourishing in roadside gravel. A while later, there it was again – gleaming (in a rare spot of sunshine) on our drive.

That night after the play, I was in the company of many seasoned farmers – who had all spotted its recent arrival, but knew nothing about it.

“I’ll do the research,” I said, “and let you know.”

Northland Regional Council’s biodiversity specialist double-checked with NIWA’s algal experts who confirmed it’s Nostoc commune, commonly called Blue Green Algae.

A mind-dizzying visit to Wikipedia and thereabouts taught me it’s a type of cyanobacterium (blue bacteria) which can live in salt and fresh water, soil and, as we know for a fact, bare rock.

As well as finding out spirulina belongs to the extended family and that there are countless types with long and scientific names, I also know this: “They are Gram positive prokaryotes. They are photosynthetic and have pigments like chlorophyll a, carotenoids, along with phycobilins. They have autotrophic mode of nutrition.” And on and on. Knew you’d be fascinated.

The Nostoc thriving in Kaipara may be the strain known as fallen star or star jelly. It can fix nitrogen, reclaim soil and is so hardy that, after lying dormant for ages, it grows again when exposed to water.

You can, apparently, kill it with various things: salt, vinegar, copper sulphate, dairy alkali cleaner XY12 (full strength or one part to two of water) or possibly glyphosate or algae killer.

As some strains of cyanobacteria are highly toxic, I’d recommend you do more research before you use Nostoc as a food supplement which is what they do in China.

Several people have since told me they reckon it grows where glyphosate (better known by the brand name Roundup) has been sprayed. More research is underway. Stay tuned.

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The farmer prefers talking to animals, but here he is speaking to visitors from Auckland tour company Ship ‘n’ Shore.

At a seminar about the challenges farmers face when employing staff, the farmer turned to me and whispered, “This is why I work with animals.”

When you work with animals, you don’t need to talk to them and if you do, it doesn’t make a jot of difference to their behaviour.

When he moved sheep into the house paddock, Rex stood by the back door and called out: “Baaaaaa. You sheep eat up the grass.”

They obliged, but would have done so without his guidance.

After he’d bought some steers that seemed tame, he asked. “Were you blokes hand reared?” then lay like a starfish while they sniffed him all over. They would have done this whether or not he’d asked how they had been reared.

As he’s well used to the optional aspect of chatting with animals, talking to the resident human is often also discretionary which leads to a life of surprises.

A while back a truck carrying a giant yellow digger roared down the road, turned and departed. When a visitor asked about it, I airily replied that it was a council digger, forgetting the roadside drains had been cleared a few weeks earlier.

The next day the digger sat in a paddock; Rex had hired it to clear dams and resurrect an overgrown track.

Soon afterwards I observed low-flying clouds – a fertiliser truck thundered through the paddock by the house – and kindly fertilised the laundry.

While returning home at night I watched a string of red lights snake up the road. Perhaps it was a low-flying space ship or a bus heading to the marae.

When the lights entered the farm I concluded they belonged to a stock truck and trailer. By the time I reached the yards it had reversed up to the loading ramp and our headlights were eyeball to eyeball. Rex later explained that it had delivered a couple of hundred sheep.

I’d considered saying hi to the driver, but drove on; I wanted an early night because the following day I planned to paint the interior of our shed.

After I’d finished painting, I tidied the shed and carport so my car and the farmer’s ute could be parked in their respective nests.

When Rex arrived home in my car I ducked outside, planning to direct him in the style of a pointsman into the dazzling shed. Too late! He jumped out of the car, started the muddy farm quad with its flat tyre and drove it into the space designated for my car.

After cheerily saying hi, he said: “That can live in there until I get it going again.”

I could have said something to the farmer, but instead engaged in an intense conversation with the dogs. The result was the same – it didn’t make a blind bit of difference to anything.

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Please stop staring at me. I promise, I’m a bull – not a male cow.

I’d just made morning coffee for a visitor when I spotted cattle meandering down the road.

The visitor agreed to help return them to their paddock, saying he’d seen them on the road and, in retrospect, should have mentioned them.

Townie, I thought.

And, he said, he’d have sworn they were cows.

Townie, I thought.

This is a bull farm and bulls don’t get enough credit. Most terminology relating to cattle farming presumes the livestock are cows: cow dung, cow pat, cowboy. Have you ever heard of bull dung, bull pat, bullboy?

Words prefixed by ‘bull’ have nothing to do with farming and everything to do with aggression: bulldoze, bull headed, bullfight. There’s also that other word: bullshit.

In the kids’ cartoon movie Barnyard, the bulls even have udders. They are big, brutish and brawny, while the cows wear pastel-coloured bows.

An offended movie reviewer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, refused to see the movie, saying it “takes liberties with mammalian anatomy”. The promotional material even described one character as a “male cow”.

On an Internet forum, correspondents jokingly suggested the movie is a gay/lesbian conspiracy and that the bulls have had sex change operations.

One delicate individual said, “Udders are probably more appropriate than the alternative.” Really?

Unbelievably, on Wikipedia and Yahoo, people asked: Do bulls have udders?

And more unbelievably, someone claiming to be “an old farm boy”, responded: “Cow is a generic term for bovines.” Really?

“There are female cows and there are male cows,” he wrote. “A female cow is called a COW, a male cow is called a BULL.”

Does it therefore follow that a female man is called a woman and a male woman is called a man?

Someone else weighed in with: “Female cows have udders. Bulls have the ‘other’ tools.”

When our guest and I began herding the cattle home I realised he was right. They were indeed cows – they had escaped and walked four kilometres to our place.

It also turned out the visitor had a lifestyle block and knew how to handle cattle. As I drove, he bounded along the road keeping them moving and preventing them from jumping a cattle stop into a bull paddock – or should that be a cow stop into a male cow paddock?

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Strangely enough, standing near bulls of this size and with this attitude is not my idea of fun.

My fitness programme – moving cattle every other day – is apparently ‘green exercise’, not because grass is involved but because it serves a purpose. However, like other fitness programmes, I soon didn’t want to do this one either.

After turning off the power, I’d pin down the electric fence in the technosystem and step aside so the cattle – six mobs of 17 – could step into fresh pasture. Being a few feet from the leaders posed no problem – until they grew and grew and grew.

Bulls put on about a kilogram a day, therefore I was moving an extra 700 kilograms or so of bull each week – an extra three tonne a month. Plus bulls get stroppy in summer and kick up their heels.

One day I turned around to find a bull was right behind me. The next day, a bull ran at me.

Hoping the farmer might move it (perhaps to the far end of the farm), I pointed him out. “Him?” scoffed Rex. “He looks like someone’s pet.”

The next day, another bull took a prancing charge at me. I yelled. It stopped. It pranced. I yelled. It stopped. It pranced. I yelled – the same expletive each time followed by the word “off”.

Then I heard the farmer call, “I’m here. I’ll save you.” He was running towards me, his arms outstretched. Sometimes he’s so silly.

“I’m not moving the bulls any more,” I declared. “I’ll build fences instead.”

After I’ve pinned down the fence, the bulls – which are keen to get onto fresh grass – step over the wire – while I rapidly step aside

Carrying about 30 electric fence standards and a reel designed by a man for use by men is the reason I was moving the cattle in the first place – it requires no muscle power.

Every day the farmer tried to coax me to return to cattle moving. Each day I’d say no before loading up and stumbling away to fumble through building the next fence.

“You need to get over your fear of bulls,” he said until finally he conceded: “You’re really not going to move the bulls, are you.”

“No,” I replied – not until May when the big boys will be replaced by weaners which will be more my size – until they grow.

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Scalloping on the Kaipara Harbour – taking scallops from the dredge while Richard Williams films us for Country Calendar.

The Country Calendar camera was rolling when the farmer flung himself off the couch and started crawling towards the kitchen. He’d been quietly reading the newspaper while producer/director Kerryanne Evans interviewed me.

Before filming started, we’d gone all out to ensure silence because the smallest sound gets picked up by the high-tech equipment. The fridge and water pump were off, an errant fly had been swatted and I’d glanced at the dishwasher and decided it had finished its cycle.

Being a professional, Kerryanne merely blinked and continued our interview while the farmer continued his stealthy, silent and sneaky crawl. Not being a professional, I lost my focus. Rex’s distracting journey finished at the dishwasher when he snaked out his arm and made a wild stab at a button.

All of us, Kerryanne, soundman, cameraman, Rex and me, dissolved into helpless giggles. Turns out, Rex could hear the dishwasher humming on its drying cycle and had turned it off.

Actually it was a change to have him trying to play by the rules as his tendency during interviews to slip in what he calls his ‘one liners’ must have landed the end of a few sequences on the virtual cutting room floor. Unfortunately, we were not like the Queen whose performance with James Bond for the Olympic Games opening ceremony was filmed in one take.

On one occasion we were being filmed walking on the beach and talking about fencing and planting the land on the edge the Kaipara Harbour. We’d nattered on about how we’d dug up and split massive flaxes and had planted the cuttings, then I started on about how I’d dealt with flax seeds.

Preparing to act as a ‘gate’ while Rex drive bulls along the farm road. A few seconds later Richard filmed me waving a cattle stick like a demented windmill as I directed the bulls into the paddock at the left of the shot.

After making a concoction of compost and, um, cattle doings, I’d added flax seeds and enough water to make soggy yet solid balls. Having carried buckets of the cocktail to the beach by quad, I’d wandered along the waterfront, throwing the balls up banks in the hope the seeds would take and flax would grow.

“So you walked around throwing s**t everywhere,” said the farmer.

At which point the soundman, who is trained to be silent, burst out laughing.

The farmer delivered another one liner at the tail end of an interview about his new sheep handling device.

For years he’s farmed bulls, which can be contained by two-wire electric fences, while the few hundred sheep he keeps to remind himself not to farm sheep, have the run of the place. Insulated by their wool, they merrily slip through these fences.

These days, however, prices are good (or were), he’s got a sheep-friendly manager and so many sheep he needs to keep them organised.

“As you’re increasing your flock,” said Kerryanne, “you’ve got a lot of fencing to do, haven’t you?”

“I do,” replied the farmer. “Perhaps I’ll have to teach my wife to fence.”

This was a cue for more laughter – and a fencing lesson for me the next day atop a blustery hill. As I was a contrary student, that footage did make the show.

If you didn’t catch our episode of Country Calendar on TV1, you can watch it by clicking here.

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Country Calendar sound recordist Don Anderson (standing) and cameraman Richard Williams wasted no time feasting on the oyster farm.

“I’ve got eagle eyes,” trilled the farmer in a most unfarmerly fashion while strolling down the hall and waving something small and shiny.

“My watch!” I’d spent ages scouring the gravel road several kilometres from home where I was sure I’d lost it months earlier while moving bulls.

Remarkably, it was in perfect condition which was odd after weeks of weathering rain and vehicles.

I was having this thought when I noticed the farmer’s sheepish smile. Turns out he’d found it in his ute which he was cleaning, an event as rare as the times he arrives home after a hard day on the farm and says, “Don’t move a muscle. I’ll cook dinner. White wine or red?”

His domesticity was inspired by the impending arrival of a crew from Country Calendar, the television show that’s central to our Kiwi culture. It’s the country’s longest-running TV series, and is probably only pipped as the world’s longest-running show by Coronation Street which started in 1960, six years before Country Calendar.

Anyway, we were all of a dither, mowing, weeding, dusting and cleaning. And when you’re going to be on television and you’re female, you realise you own no suitable clothing and, in my case, hats.

After rushing out and buying a merino top, two friends immediately said it didn’t suit me and I returned it. I know my hats didn’t pass muster because I was wearing my favourite when the farmer said, “You look dorky in that hat.”

Fair enough. I’d told him he looked dorky in a particular pair of shorts the day before. These frank exchanges surely stemmed from pre-Country Calendar angst.

Some months earlier Kerryanne Evans, a director and reporter for the show, visited and we’d had another frank exchange while enjoying the farmer’s oyster fritters, answering more curly and personal, but gently put, questions than anyone else had ever asked.

She’d become interested in life at Batley after reading Love at the End of the Road about life on the shores of the Kaipara Harbour with the aforementioned not-so-eagle-eyed farmer.

Kerryanne visited when the harbour was bleak and wind ruffled. The next day was so glorious I took photographs of the bright blue harbour reflecting puffy cottonwool clouds and surrounded by electric green hills.

Soon after the filming dates were confirmed, things fell magically into line. The Mangawhai Garden Club planned to visit and agreed to do so while the crew was here, an Ohope Beach oyster farmer serendipitously timed his arrival to coincide, and some Otamatea High School students were to have a shearing lesson at the Country Club where Rex often helps at shearing time.

We located accommodation for Kerryanne, a cameraman and a soundman who’d spend five days here, then got busy tidying and straightening the house, farm and ourselves as much as we could, which in some respects, wasn’t much at all.

When Kerryanne asked if the Kaipara Harbour was always so grey and windswept, I emailed my blue-sky photos and she was most heartened. Then the week of filming turned out to be grey and windswept, perfect moody Kaipara Harbour weather.

Country Calendar, Saturday 11 August, 7.00pm, TV1.

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Imagine walking into a bull in the dark…

As we are a fully trained search and rescue team thanks to a late night request to help find a fisherman missing on the Kaipara Harbour, here are some handy hints, with the tips following the lessons and the most important tip last because that was our learning process.

The farmer and I were asleep when neighbours across the river phoned at 11.30pm. A fisherman hadn’t arrived for a rendezvous a few kilometres further up the river. It was howling a gale and, had the motor failed, his boat might have washed up on the other side of our farm. Could we check?

We bolted out of bed and pulled on warm clothes. I grabbed a hat, jacket and our biggest torch. Yes, the farmer jumped into the truck without a torch presumably figuring the headlights would do the work.

After driving to the point near the house (no luck there), we headed through the farm where the torch came in handy.

Tip Six: Take a torch.

We walked along the beach then, because the tide was so high, through a wet, puggy paddock. I asked the farmer to slow down so he wouldn’t leave me in the dark which gave him a bright idea – he could travel faster without me, so why not leave me all alone in the dark!

Sure, I said as he took off for the bluff with the one and only torch.

Tip Five: If possible, take a torch for each person.

It was a black, black night. I couldn’t see a thing, including the nearby towering pines which didn’t break the screaming wind. I envied Kate the dog who’d come for the adventure, but had sensibly stayed with the truck.

Tip Four: If you can wangle it, stay with the vehicle.

And it was so cold. Lucky I grabbed that jacket and hat.

Tip Three: Dress warm.

While I stood in the paddock my mind galloped. What if the farmer fell and dropped the torch? How long would I wait? Could I get back to the truck? I couldn’t use the fence as a guide – it was electrified. Were there bulls in the paddock? Imagine bumbling into a sleeping bull.

After what seemed like forever – about 20 minutes – I saw the farmer’s torch flash and he showed up shortly afterwards having found nothing.

As we stumbled back across the paddock I suggested holding hands would make things easier. The farmer said he doubted this was acceptable on a search and rescue mission, but held my hand anyway.

Tip Two: Hold hands, especially if it’s really dark.

We got home at 12.15pm to find two messages from our neighbours. The first had been recorded moments after we left – as they’d watched our vehicle lights disappear through the farm, they spotted the lights of a boat heading up the harbour. The second message, at five past midnight, confirmed the missing boatie had arrived. Sigh… if only we’d known.

Tip One: Take a cell phone. Then HQ can phone if the lost person is found and you can immediately return to your warm and snuggly bed.

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Bulls stepping over a wire in the intensive grazing system

Farmers use special language to speak to dogs even though they – the dogs – can work things out themselves and understand conversational English. ‘The farmer’ appears to think dogs understand expletives and he uses terms like “Git away back” and “Git in behind” which I suspect are the farming equivalent of legalese which we all know is designed to make us feel out of the loop.

Rex’s dog Kate recently proved that she knows more than she lets on.

This year’s yearling bulls are in a grazing system that relies on hot wires – electrified tapes. To reach fresh grass, the cattle step over a wire which we drop onto the ground and lift up afterwards.

When young bulls are still figuring out the grazing system, mobs sometimes get mixed up and have to be returned to their mobs. All it takes is a power cut, a stray bull or, on one occasion, low-flying ducks.

While the farmer separates and sorts the bulls, I stand in the make-shift ‘gateway’, i.e. a gap in the fence, stepping aside at crucial moments to let bulls through.

During the last reshuffle I was in a mellow frame of mind and everything went so smoothly, the farmer said afterwards, “Well done. We’ll make a cattle handler of you yet.”

Soon afterwards, while he was way down the paddock, I had to coax some inexperienced bulls to make the daring step over the wire. Kate marked me like a rugby defender, moving as I walked forward, trotting ahead if a bull looked reluctant or threatened to head in the wrong direction.

She hadn’t been asked to do this – I don’t know how to ask a dog to do anything as smart as what Kate was doing – and only when she had overseen the last bull safely into its paddock did she gallop off.

Soon afterwards the farmer asked me to go and open a gate so he could move some sheep and that’s when my dog Floss and I found Kate a few hundred yards away chasing birds (a favourite pastime). She was supposed to be helping her boss.

Armed with the thrilling knowledge that I have potential as a cattle handler, I figured I’d try advanced dog handling. Flapping an arm in the direction of Rex, I said, “Kate, get back there and help Rex with some sheep.”

Kate’s bat ears perked up and, after a second’s indecision, she took off at a gallop. I’d take the credit, but you already know Kate’s the one with the brains.