The Good Life with Sue Edmonds

This business of self-sufficiency and growing one's own vegetables can be full of surprises; some nice – some not.

After my successes during the summer in keeping myself supplied with lettuce, tomatoes, beans and courgettes, plus the enduring silver beet plants, I chose broccoli as the winter vegetable most likely to get eaten.

Punnets of vege plants seem inevitably to come in sixes. So, if I succeeded with them, there was going to be a lot of broccoli to pick at some stage.

The vege patch is around the far side of the garage and, when I'm busy, it doesn't get visited very often. When I did check, the plants were growing all right, but the slugs and snails were doing their best to give the leaves a perforated look. I finally remembered to fling round some slug baits and things grew faster, although they wouldn't have won any prizes for good looks.

Finally, the flower heads began to form and I kept reminding myself that broccoli really should be on the menu, rather than the quick or instant meals I was existing on during a very busy patch. I finally picked one huge head, which was at least 25cm across and was going to do me for multiple meals.

More forgetting occurred and then one evening I suddenly remembered my growing crop and sallied forth with a knife.

I gazed in astonishment at six leafy plants with not a skerrick of flower heads between them. The pukekos had beaten me to it!

The neighbour's steers had been working on the assumption that the ‘grass is greener over there' and had been pushing down the chicken netting which I had lined that part of the boundary fence with. I hadn't noticed any real holes, but the ‘pukes' had obviously found one and pounced. The total area is too small for them to manage taking off within it, so it must have been a ground level raid.

So before next summer I've obviously got some anti-pukeko strategising to do. In the meantime, it's back to the supermarket for all but silver beet, just when all the prices have shot up.

On a more cheerful note, the grass is finally growing again and my 27 bales of hay have been carefully eked out to provide supper for my six fatties. The cows are definitely feeling the most hard done by. The goats simply glide under the tape each morning and jeer from the ‘good' side all day and the donkeys stand at the back fence giving me the evil eye until I relent and go and open the gate. They then either wander round the garden for a couple of hours or, if the front gate is left open, they trundle off down the road, returning when they've filled their tummies.

However, despite accusing me of starving them all day and practically leaping on their hay ration at night, Sally and Rosie do not appear to have lost more than a kilo each. So I've assured myself I'm doing them a good turn by looking after their waistlines!