May 2015

The trees have been pumping this year, due to Glen's application of home-made worm juice. She has a flock of tame worms.

Feijoas.

How these little green globes can be a two-edged sword is the subject of this weeks newsletter.

About as kiwi as that other kiwi fruit, the chinese gooseberry, feijoas are actually from Brazil. But for the same reason as our hedges are crawling with hedgehogs, New Zealand gardens often sport a feijoa tree or several. Somebody let them loose, and now you can love them or hate them but you can’t avoid them. They can’t be stored long once they are ripe, and the folks that don’t hate the things have numerous ways to extend their shelf-life as feijoa-based products. Made into a cake, chutney, a daiquiri or a crumble, added to smoothies, or fired out of a vacuum cleaner tube with a compressor attached: feijoas can be put to many uses.

We like them, and we look forward to the couple of weeks when the trees are pumping out ripe fruit.

The problem is that when they really hit their straps it is also the end of the indian summer, if we were lucky enough to get one. After you have wound the daylight savings out of it, you can set your clock by it. Feijoas going off, so is the weather. And if you want to ride your bike while the sun is up, you will need to throw a sickie or be gainfully semi-employed.

The other thing that occurs in synch with feijoa season, but thankfully not every year, is the Rotorua version of the Singlespeed Championship of whatever region we feel we have some right to claim as ours. I say ‘we’ because Nzo is always up to its neck in this event, taking entries as best we can, designing various aspects of it, and this year defending our use of the word Anzac on prime time news. We have variously held New Zealand, World, Rest of the World, and this year, Anzac title races with similar results. Well, no results in the true sense of the word, the races produce one winner per gender and everybody else came second.

Doing some stuff for the event in the months leading up to it is all good, because on the day I don’t feel so guilty about lining up to ride in it while the rest of the organising committee do useful things.

I had a stellar race, finishing second equal with 180 other people. Two beer shortcuts into it I fell off, with the grace of a sack of potatoes, if one of the potatoes could stick its hand out just before impact. My doctor diagnosed the resulting banged up wrist as a classic FOOSH: Fell On Out Stretched Hand injury.

It has stopped me from riding through the back half of the feijoa period, and also made it really awkward to eat them.

Posted on May 14, 2015 by Gary Sullivan