Country Life

Rosemary Freeman is switching her role as an AgResearch technician for an apple picking role until the country moves out of Covid restrictions.

SMASH, Norsewood cemetery, an apple picking guest, stranded RSE workers from Vanuatu, the Regional Wrap and what has happened next for Dayanne Almeida.

Just over a year ago Michael and Susie Woodward packed up their 4 children, cows, goats, chickens and farm equipment and moved from a 50/50 sharemilking position in Canterbury to their own farm in King Country. The move was 15 years in the making.

Jack Perkins from the RNZ Spectrum programme is talking to Phyl Christie and Joan Poulton about their childhoods growing up on Clarence Reserve Station, inland from Kaikoura. Their father Percy Acton-Adams brought his family to Clarence Reserve just before WW1. It was a large station along the lines of Molesworth and Erewhon ... 148 thousand acres with one sheep to eight acres. There was a tightly structured community with stationhands, shepherds, aunts, a governess, cook and nurse.

We're back at Te Hera Vineyard where winemaker John Douglas has had an unusually solitary time, thanks to Covid-19, nurturing his fermenting grapes, measuring sugar levels and pressing the grapes ready for the barrel.

Farmers in most parts of the country are longing for rain forecast for this weekend. RSE workers have finished long seasons in New Zealand but many can't get home to the Pacific because of Covid-19 restrictions.

A couple looks back on their first year of farm ownership - a wet winter, a drought, a disease they had never seen and, for the first time ever, managing stock on hills.

Lavender Fields was one of New Zealand's first lavender farms. Jim Curnow started with two plants which gave him hundreds of cuttings.

Orchid-grower Eva Yin came to New Zealand as an international student from Weihai in China 14 years ago. She arrived with just a suitcase and a desire to do something different. Now she cultivates thousands of orchids for the local market from her 1000 square metre greenhouse near Otaki.

Twenty-seven year old Jack Raharuhi has added to his string of awards by recently wining Australasia's Zanda McDonald award for leadership in the agriculture sector.