Tuateawa Bird Spot. White Heron/Kotuku.

A white heron seems to be a regular feature these days. This picture was taken alongside the fire station in Kennedy Bay. Another, or the same bird turned up in the wetlands at the south end of Waikawau Bay the day after this sighting. A white heron has been sighted in both locations from well before Xmas. It is hard to miss when it is around. Hopefully it will be with us a lot longer!

Tuateawa Bird Spot: Pied Shag.

Might you be wandering around the new subdivision this Queen's Birthday Weekend? If so, to the south you will find a superb viewing point, overlooking a shag community.

The community is a year round feature. Once they reach three years of age they start to breed. It is pretty much of a year round process. It takes nearly six months from egglaying until the end of parental caring. The eggs incubate for about a month. The young can take two months before they fly. After that the parents keep feeding them for close to another three months.

Parents produce two clutches of eggs per year so there is always a lot of activity going on. These are not shy birds. People don't seem to bother them and you can get quite close. They are worth watching for a few minutes and the photo ops. are great.

Tuateawa sourdough

Bread making is great. You can change the shape and make loaves, buns, naan etc., alter the ingredients and make it sweet or savoury, put things on it and have a pizza or in it and get calzonni, quiche or Chelsea buns. Sourdough bread has its own special flavour and texture. You can't beat it but you need a sourdough starter and you can't buy it you have to make it. Starters are cultures of wild yeast and acid producing bacteria. They don't all come out the same but when you get a good one don't loose it, it's precious.

Sourdough starter

My starter is Tuateawa made and has two special Tuateawa ingredients: air and honey.

Bees travel far and, in theory, their honey should be a great source of wild yeast and beneficial bacteria. Our air gets around too. We don't grow our own rye so I rely on the organic shop for rye flour.

Ann's starter



1 cup organic rye flour



1 Tablespoon Tuateawa honey



2 cups warm water

Dissolve honey in the water in a bowl, add flour and mix well. Cover with muslin, to keep out flies and let in yeast spores, and leave outside for 3-4 days until it starts to bubble. You've got some yeast! Transfer to a big jar and add 1 Tablespoon high-grade flour and half a cup of warm water. Repeat every 2 days. You'll know it's working well when you get a layer of clear "hooch" on the top and it smells vinegary. If there is any pink or green colour and/or it smells like nail polish remover, it is infected. Throw away and try again. Your starter will just get better and better but don't forget to feed it. When you feel it is growing well take a cupful and freeze, then you can revive it if the original gets contaminated.

Ready to rise

The baked loaves

Purists use only the starter to rise their bread. I've done it but it takes hours or even overnight. I use "Surebake" yeast to rise my bread and add the starter to any recipe. The starter gives the bread a special flavour and texture, a thick crust with a caramel taste and light, elastic crumb structure.

Tuateawa gardening: The short arms, long pocket syndrome.

If you looked at my vege garden now a number of thoughts would cross your mind. The first would almost certainly be, "how scruffy". You would see lettuce gone to seed, discarded courgettes the size of marrows and fat yellow cucumbers that were once gherkins before inflation caught up with them. I would like to say, in defense, that your first impressions could be, well, not quite correct. Really, it's all part of a master plan to gather seed for next season. Well, that's my story. You didn't notice all those weeds did you?

It is worth saving seed though and I already have lots of beans, chillis and tomatoes saved away. Dry seeds are no problem. Tomatoes need a different approach. Smeared over some kitchen paper, which you then fold and label, they can be dried in some warm place. The top of the fridge is ideal. Heirloom tomatoes do come true from seed. They are usually robust and disease tolerant. Best of all they have great flavour. Some commercial varieties are well worth saving as well. They do tend to travel well. Should you want a tomato that can be dropped from the Skytower without bruising don't choose the Heirloom varieties go for more modern types.

Gourmet seeds can cost $10.00 for a packet of 20 seeds. Luckily they also come prepackaged in much larger quantities. You get them from the vege shop, eat the package and SAVE THE SEED! Pumpkins are a great example. The small sweet capsicums pictured came this way. The plants have proved to be ideal for the home garden. They do not rot on the plant like the larger bell pepper, they are sweeter, quicker maturing and will ripen after picking.

There aren't many opportunities for a free lunch, but gathering your own seed is certainly one of them.

Tuateawa gardening.

Quite a few of the full time residents in Tuateawa have great vege gardens and orchards. Tuateawa does present particular challenges but it also has good soil and growing conditions. If you have just bought in Tuateawa, or intend to spend more time here than in the past, a garden makes good sense. We are a distance from the shops and having fresh garden produce to hand is a real boon.

If you would like tasty new potatoes and fresh dwarf beans for Xmas 2009 you could make a start this Queen's Birthday weekend. Select a spot that gets a lot of sun. Levelish places are best as the soil is usually deeper. It will almost certainly have a lot of grass on it. You can use a strimmer to get most of this, dig your patch over with a fork and then weedspray it. This is the hardest part of the job. Remove and reserve as many of the stones you dig up as you can. There are a lot of locked up nutrients in the soil so a dressing of lime will pay dividends in the future. Alternatively you can weedspray your selected site and save the digging for three or four weeks later.

It is best not to be too ambitious when it comes to size. Rabbits are a major problem and they have to be kept out of your garden. The cheapest way to do this is to make a shade cloth fence around your plot. Bunnings warehouse sells shade cloth in 15m.x1m. quantities for not very much. It is easily fastened to a few metal stakes banged into the ground. A Taranaki style gate will let you in and keep the rabbits out! The reserved stones, and perhaps a few others can be used to hold the bottom of the shade cloth down. The plot could do with another weedspray

before planting out and a topdressing of fertilizer to help things along.

One other problem with gardening in Tuateawa is the heavy winds, but the shadecloth will act as a windbreak so a fairly exposed site can be chosen. Then there is the lack of water. You may have sufficient reserves and be able to spare some which would be great. The soil is a fairly heavy clay/loam so it does retain moisture well. You could also mulch around your plants which will conserve soil moisture. It also helps to get an early start with your planting. There are almost never any frosts. Potatoes could go in by mid August, ready to eat in November. You may need some pesticides. Shield bugs are often common on the brambles and they multiply very fast.

Soon it will also be time to plant fruit trees. Plums are particularly good but you need to select varieties that will fertilize each other. Apples are easy and there don't seem to be any codlin moth in our part of Tuateawa. Peaches are particularly good as many varieties fruit over the Xmas period.Both apples and citrus are also, unfortunately good rabbit food! They will eat the bark and kill your trees. I am using lengths of gutterguard as a temporary fix on my trees.

The best sites have deeper soil and some protection from the wind which is valuable at blossom time.

Permanent residents could certainly add a lot more information, so, make a point of asking around as to the most suitable crops and techniques.

Audio Review: Tsunami.

Radio New Zealand maintains an excellent website full of an incredible variety of audiofiles. Should you ever need a break from TV this could provide an entertaining and informative alternative. Seeking an eyewitness account of the Whitianga Tsunami I came across a recent series concerning Civil Defence Emergencies in NZ. This was recorded in 2008. If you click on the following www.radionz.co.nz/specialfeatures/whenthesirengoes/tsunami it will take you to the site. At the bottom of the page is an amazing account of the Whitianga Tsunami from the harbour master of the time. At the top of the page there is connection to a longer file about tsunami in the NZ situation with particular references to our region. Both accounts mention a typical approach to a tsunami warning. "lets go down to the beach!" More appropriate responses are also included, including the development of an evacuation plan. I am unaware of anything in existence that relates to Tuateawa. Low lying areas are naturally at greatest risk so it is likely that property damage would be slight should a tsunami arrive on Tuateawa's doorstep. We do however spend time at sea and on the beach and drive through coastal areas. This audiofile does have good suggestions as to the most appropriate way to behave should you become aware of an impending event.

Tuateawa Tsunami?

The Scream Edvard Munch

In the late summer of 1883 the evening skies of Norway were dramatically changed by the sudden appearance of fiery tongues of light in a blood red sky. It must have seemed like some apocalyptic message to Edvard Munch. It provoked him to produce his painting "The Scream" portraying deep anguish and despair. It has now entered popular culture in the form of Halloween masks and tacky teen horror movies.

On the other side of the world, on the 29th of August 1883 the seas suddenly rose by 1.8m. in both Whitianga and Tairua. The event that connected these two happenings was the eruption of Krakatoa in Indonesia on the 26th of August of that year. Quantities of dust in the air produced memorable sunsets around the world and reduced the planets temperature by over a degree. The sonic boom was so large it was heard in Australia and it's power created sets of sea waves known as wave trains. When these reach land we know them as tsunami or harbour waves.

This tsunami was one of eleven to hit the Coromandel since 1840. Most of the tsunami originate from vast earthquakes of the western shores of S.America, particularly Chile and Peru. Wave trains are created that can have an height of 18m. at source. This conjures up an impression of huge walls of water rushing toward NZ to create death and destruction. The reality is a little different. It takes almost 18hrs for the waves to reach NZ. By this time the individual waves are quite small and present absolutely no threat to vessels out to sea. While the height of the waves are not maintained the distance between them is. This is the most crucial aspect as it is one of two factors that will determine how destructive a tsunami might be.

Young children have an almost intuitive understandingof the mechanics of tsunami. They love to make an impact on their environment and the bath is a great place to do just that! A slight movement of the body makes a wave, another slight movement, at just the right time adds another wave on top of the other. Before very long water is rushing to and fro soon to produce a flooded bathroom and a rather annoyed parent! The very best effects come when there is a very precise time interval between the creation of waves. The longer the bath the longer the time interval must be.

In the Coromandel environment the equivalent of the bath is known as the Whangapoua embayment. It is the sea that is enclosed between Port Charles and Otama and includes the Mercury Is. The precise time interval between waves that will produce tsunamai will vary from location to location. In 2003 Environments Waikato and Bay of Plenty jointly funded a three year study into tsunamai in their regions of responsibility. Part of these studies involved modelling two different possibilities. Both involved simulating wave trains, with the individual waves separated not by seconds as in the bath but by 75 and 90 minutes. The result of this mapping located hotspots where the largest tsunamai might occur. In these sites an increase in wave height by a factor of twenty was possible. So, quite small waves could be amplified into something extremely destructive.

The significant period for our location was 90 minutes and for Whitianga 75 minutes between waves. In 1960 Whitianga did experience a tsunami with a wave interval of around 40 minutes. It was close to optimum. There was some flooding, sea level reached 2.5m. above normal, boats were washed from moorings and live fish were found flapping on the coast road.

Port Charles is our local hotspot. It was hit by tsunami in both 1868 and 1877. Neither event was severe. Logs and milled timber was washed away and some houses were flooded to a depth of 2ft. in 1868. The sea rose by 6ft. in just 5min. In 1877 the sea fluctuated in level by upto 12 ft which doesn't much exceed the change in a normal tidal cycle. Here though the tide rushed in and out every 20 min. for most of the day!

The past is a reasonable predictor of the future. In the normal course of events a "run up" of 2.5m. above normal height is expected to be a worse case scenario for the area. Archeologists have found evidence of run ups over 5m. but the most recent is many hundreds of years in the past. These days there is a Tsunami Warning System which, for tsunami originating at considerable distances, would provide early notice. Tsunami originating closer to home with consequently less warning time are thought to be unlikely. There are some details regarding safety measures in a tsunami to be found in the back of the Yellow Pages.