You’ve undoubtedly heard of Peter Rabbit, Beatrix Potter’s mischievously loveable bunny who took the world by storm in the 1900s.

But did you know about New Zealand’s very own Peter Rabbit connection? Possibly not, because Peter Rabbit’s House has been a special secret in Garston for a long time now.

Once upon a time, a rabbit dug a burrow under an old fir tree.

Thirty years ago, only those who crept under the spreading branches of the massive fir tree between the Presbyterian church and the Garston cemetery knew the secret. Someone had spotted an abandoned rabbit hole and put up a tiny sign — “Peter Rabbit’s House.” Then came a small washing line with delicate, knitted garments and, next, a lopsided bunny dunny.

Who put them up? It’s a bit of a mystery, but whoever it was, I hope they know how their whimsy brought smiles and that gradually more secret “rabbit paraphernalia” appeared.

Back then, our family went to Mass twice a month in the “other church” across the cemetery. And when the kids disappeared afterwards, we usually found them playing at Peter Rabbit’s house. Every now and then, someone would add another surprise. How thrilled we were the day we brought our own tiny toys down and secretly popped them in front of Peter’s dunny.

Letters come from near and far

Eventually, someone added a visitor’s book… then another… and another! That’s how we learned that we weren’t the only ones to visit Peter (who was, strangely, never at home.)

Now the wooden box built to house the collection is almost overflowing with notebooks big and small. Some messages are whimsical, others poignant. Some are neat and proper, others scrawling. Many leave just a few words, while others take a whole page.

Village expansion

In 2017, Garston School kids got enthusiastic and surrounded the tree with a miniature gold mining replica village. It took the children weeks to build the stone houses at school before carefully carrying them to the cemetery.

They learned about town planning rules, consulted with the community and wrote to then-mayor Gary Tong to get the SDC’s official blessing. Mr Tong came up trumps and even attended the opening ceremony to cut the ribbon and give the village his official seal of approval.

Peter’s village gets a companion

Until now, most travellers who stopped off at the Garston Village Green to stretch their legs had no idea that Peter’s village existed. But occasionally, we’d meet people peering under trees on the Green — always in slightly the wrong place.

“So-and-so told us about it,” they’d always say. And we’d point them in the right direction and wish them luck. It was a secret, after all.

But a couple of years ago a new kid appeared in town, and now the secret’s out!

Yes, Peter’s village has a companion — a beautiful book-inspired thinking seat designed by SDC graphic artist Donna Hawkins and local legend Pam Naylor and built by Riki Shuttleworth at Creation Signs.

“When I saw Peter’s village next to the cemetery, I thought it was so cool to have something there that kids could relate to. I wanted to create something where you could just sit and think, and to tie Peter Rabbit in as well.”

Donna Hawkins

A helluva mission

Don’t dismiss this seat as “pretty” or “cute!” Because, honestly, it was a helluva mission to get this particular seat made.

Not the seat itself. Once Riki sorted the metallic construction, it was easy to put together. It was the images that caused the headache.

“The problem I had was copyright,” says Donna.

“Because although Beatrix Potter had passed away more than 50 years ago and some of her stuff was in the public domain, I didn’t realise it didn’t include all the graphics.

“I ended up on a two-year mission — sent thousands of emails to people all over the world and no one answered, except one professor in America. He said, go back and talk to the original book people, so I tried that. Nothing.”

Fortunately, help was at hand. Donna got a lucky break when Cr Margie Ruddenklau came along.

“I heard Margie talking about Esther Nicholson — Beatrix Potter’s niece.”

Actually, Esther was Beatrix’s husband’s niece. Still, as Beatrix and Willie had no children, Beatrix had taken great interest in educating Willie’s family. That included Esther, who moved to New Zealand in the 1920s and eventually headed St John’s School, Invercargill, for an astonishing 32 years.

“Esther retired to Te Anau in 1968, and Margie was reminiscing about visiting Esther in her wee cottage. Margie said she always remembered the little Peter Rabbit posters all around the house, sent by Beatrix herself,” Donna explains.

“Margie’s cousin owned a bookshop, so the answers finally started flowing when Donna and Margie enlisted her help. At last, one email hit the jackpot when Thomas Merrington, the Creative Director at Penguin Books, wrote back. Donna emailed her plans; Merrington suggested changes. Donna tweaked the designs, changed the name to Our Peter Rabbit™ Thinking Seat, and just like that, the approval went through.”

The grand opening

On February 22nd 2023, around 30 SDC councillors and council staff took time out from their “Bus Tour of Southland” to join the locals at the official seat opening.

Naturally, there were speeches. Northern Southland Community Board chair Greg Tither, Margie Ruddenklau, Mayor Rob Scott and Garston/Athol representative Pam Naylor all paid tribute to Donna’s dedication. And it rained — our first rain in weeks, so there were smiles all round, and no one cared that the plush cloth covering the seat was a little wet.

With the seat duly opened, it was time for some entertainment at Garston School. The children treated us to a hilarious retelling of Peter’s problems after escaping Mr McGregor’s garden. According to the kids, encountering an angry elderly gardener was nothing to Peter’s troubles when his family found out where he’d been.

All fun and frivolities aside, Donna says there’s a deeper meaning behind Our Peter Rabbit™ Thinking Seat, and the clue is in the name.

It’s not always easy to visit loved ones in a cemetery, especially when children are involved.

” I saw the Peter Rabbit village when we did the Cemetery sign,” says Donna, “and it was something that I felt was needed. Somewhere to sit and remember and enjoy the beauty of the spot. It seemed so cool that kids could relate to Peter Rabbit, even when they were feeling sad.”

And it’s working just as Donna intended. And while her Peter Rabbit mission might be over, Donna’s larger plan rolls on.

“I keep getting photos from people saying they’ve been up there and taken photos of their kids on it. It’s a real stopper, and that’s the one thing I wanted to do. Have something in all the small towns that stopped people. That they look and go ooh, what’s that?”

Athol has an Anzac Poppy seat beside their memorial hall. Garston has its Thinking Seat. I wonder which lucky Southland town will be next?

And it’s true!

Since the 20th century we’ve let many old varieties of fruit and vegetables slip quietly into oblivion — and with them have gone taste… aroma...and diversity. Count up how many different apple names you can see on the supermarket shelves. You might see six, but years ago there would have been dozens throughout the country.

It’s both sad and dangerous for the environment that we’ve lost so much plant diversity in the last hundred years. That’s why we treasure the oldest tree on our farm.

Mystery

In a quiet gully, far from prying eyes, stands an old apple tree.

Why is she there, far from the houses and sheds on the farm?

The now-dry creek used to wash down through the paddocks and home orchards on the terraces above. Perhaps an apple tumbled downstream, or a bird deposited a seed as it flew by?

However it happened, a seed sprouted and against all the odds, our tree thrived. How long she’s been there no-one can say but she’s old in New Zealand apple-tree-years, make no mistake about that.

A Special Apple Tree

We have lots of old apple trees dotted around the farm.

But it’s not just the isolation, nor even her age that makes our old girl special. It’s that she’s a heritage tree. Because she has grown from seed this tree is actually unique — the only one of her kind in the world. You can’t be more special than that.

And her apples are beautiful; cooking apples like your great-grandparents grew. Raw they are tart on your taste buds, but cooked they turn fluffy, sweet and delicious. You might find apples like these in a farmer’s market, but not on the supermarket shelves.

Our family loves this old apple tree, and when we climb up the gully each year at harvest time there’s a niggle of worry at the back of my mind.

“What if a fire raced unexpectedly down the dry gully? Would we lose her if disease struck? Even trees succumb eventually to old age...”

The world is losing its unique plants and animals at an alarming rate. I would hate for our old tree to join that list.

And yet, we may have worried, but year after year we stayed stuck in procrastination mode, until one day we met Riverton’s famous tree-saving duo.

Tree-Saviours Arrive On The Farm

Robert and Robyn Guyton are passionate permaculturalists and have developed their once-gorse-covered Riverton property into a food farm which supplies most of their daily needs. They are also the guiding lights behind the Riverton Environmental Centre and are well known in Southland for their conservation efforts and their enthusiasm about saving trees.

One windy, wet Sunday in early spring, Robert and Robyn decided to explore the old orchards around the Garston area. Our son Chris found them peering at some apple trees near the woolshed.

“These trees aren’t bad,” he told them, waving his hand around the nearby orchard, “but would you like to see the best tree on the farm?”

Of course they would. So he drove them up the gully to the quiet old tree.

So that’s how it came about that when Terry and I drove home from church that Sunday morning, we discovered Robert, Robyn and Chris all dripping wet and happily stowing cuttings into their car.

“What a find!”

Robyn Shields

One of the Guytons’ missions is to train other people up in the art of tree-saving. So they passed the cuttings onto Robyn Shields, a former student of theirs, who lives not far from Queenstown.

Robyn’s always loved old things so the idea of saving plants that might otherwise disappear for good immediately attracted her interest.

Naturally, she was keen to learn how to graft trees from the Guytons as part of their programme aimed at saving Southland heritage apple trees. In fact, the idea combined Robyn’s two favourite passions: gardening and antiques.

Not long ago the Shields were immersed in running a busy paua shell and souvenir business in Riverton but when they retired to Queenstown, Robyn ‘seized the day’ and set up a tree-saving haven in her backyard.

Grafting Baby Apple Trees

To get a true replica of an apple tree you need a cutting — or scion — from the new growth of your original tree, and a rootstock to graft it onto.

Rootstocks come from trees that are particularly hardy and disease-resistant. They’ll ensure that the new tree has well-developed roots and a good uptake of nutrients. The rootstock also determines the size of the new tree and you can find ones from dwarf all the way up to vigorous (which are likely to be huge.)

When the new growth has hardened up — usually in late winter — Robyn takes cuttings from the old tree, pops them in the fridge and ensures that she’s got enough rootstock growing in her nursery.

When spring arrives it’s time to graft the scion.

First, Robyn carefully makes a split in the top centre of the rootstock stem. The next step involves shaving the bottom of the scion into a wedge and inserting it into the split. She tapes the two together with a special tape which will wear off over time.

Our Baby Heritage Trees

When visited Robyn in 2019 she showed me a group of splendid year-old saplings growing strong and straight from our original heritage tree.

Interestingly, she mentioned how hardy and resistant to insect damage the saplings were. The weather had been warm and wet that summer and Robyn’s garden was plagued with aphids, but there was not one to be found on our young apple trees.

I took a few saplings home and planted them around the farm.

It’s comforting to know that when our old tree finally gives up her heritage will live on.

Sales reps and stock agents called in regularly and most negotiations were conducted over a cuppa.

And I catered for every big job on the farm.

From haymaking and harvesting to crutching and shearing, I’d be carting “smokos”, lunches, dinners and sometimes suppers out to the woolshed or paddocks all over the farm, depending where the work was going on.

Fortunately, I had a bit of time to learn. My mother-in-law was legendary for her baking, and she started me off slowly. I made the mousetraps and sandwiches, while she provided the biscuits, cakes and buns.

I could never compete with her baking skills. I’m way too haphazard a cook, and even when I tried to follow her recipes things never turned out the same.

Eventually, I took over the food completely and had to develop my own baking style — and that includes producing scones at the drop of a hat.

My road to the perfect cheese scone has been a long one. It started in 1980 after a “bake off” with my boyfriend. At the time scones were the one thing I actually knew how to bake. So when Neill showed me his scone recipe — which was very different from the one I used — I was somewhat scathing about it. I distinctly recall saying “that’ll never work.”

Naturally he challenged me to a scone baking contest. He cooked every day. I could barely boil an egg. What was I thinking?

Of course he won the contest, hands down. His scones were light, moist and HUGE. Mine were tiny and tasteless.

I buried the remnants of my pride and wrote down his recipe.

It’s morphed over the years — just last year my daughter, Jenny, tried oil instead of melted butter. Result: the scones were even lighter and she skipped the butter melting step.

So now, here it is. Our latest recipe for making light and delicious, perfect cheese scones.

Lyn’s Cheese Scones

2 heaped cups of plain flour or gluten free flour (Jenny reckons the Woolworths gf flour is best)

4 heaped tsp baking powder

2 cups tasty cheddar cheese (shredded)

1 egg

1 dessert spoon sugar

50g butter (melted) or approx 25ml cooking oil

Approximately 1 cup milk*

pinch salt

*You may need a little more milk than this, depending on how much you’ve heaped the cups of flour.

What to do:

1. Preheat the oven to 200°C. I use fan bake.

2. Combine flour, baking powder, salt and cheese into a large bowl.

3. Make a well in the dry ingredients. (A well is like a hollow or depression.)

4. Mix egg and sugar in a cup and pour into the well. Don’t mix it in yet.

5. Melt the butter and add it to the well. Still don’t mix.

6. Pour 1 cup of milk into the well. Now you get to mix.

7. Use a spurtle (see Tip No. 1) to combine the ingredients so they form quite a sticky dough (see Tip No. 3). Add more milk if necessary.

8. Turn out onto a floured surface and gently squeeze the mixture with both hands to further combine. (See Tip No. 4)

9. Press, roll and pat with your hands until you’ve formed a long, fat rectangle.

10. Cut in half lengthways, and then cut each half into 6 pieces. Place the 12 scones onto a metal baking sheet, slightly separated. They shouldn’t stick to the tray.

11. Bake at 200°C for 13-15 minutes. Makes 12

Notes:

Perfect cheese scones are best served warm, with your favourite toppings. I like lashings of butter. Others prefer to add jam; my Farmer always tops his with honey. Some of the family love to add slices of tomato and ham, and — if you’re in New Zealand — you can always add some Vegemite. (A special savoury topping, loved by New Zealanders and Australians.)

These scones will keep for a day in an airtight container, or can be frozen for up to 3 months. You can refresh them in the microwave, wrapped in a dry paper towel.

Five Tips to Make You a Scone Expert

# Tip 1 — Use a spurtle to mix your scones.

A scone mixture shouldn’t be stirred. Instead you pull a spurtle through the mixture, almost as if you’re cutting it. As you cut, turn it over to mix. Stop mixing as soon as the dough comes together.

If you don’t have a spurtle, a blunt knife is the next best option.

# Tip 2 — Be generous with your measurements.

Scones respond well to generosity. My cupfuls look like mini flour mountains.

# Tip 3 — The dough should be somewhat sticky and moist.

It should still be dough-like, but dry dough equals dry scones. It’s better to make it slightly too wet than too dry. You can always add more flour to the board when you tip the mixture out, to counteract any excess stickiness.

# Tip 4 — Don’t over-mix the dough.

As soon as it comes together, turn it out onto a floured surface. Squeeze and pat it with your hands until it forms into a long, fat sausage. The less you have to handle it the better. Having said that, over-mixing is not a catastrophic mistake. The scones will still taste great but might not be quite as light.

# Tip 5 — Practice makes perfect.

The more you make these, the better they—and you— will get.

The Easy Way To Make Hay

At its simplest, hay is just dried grass stored for the winter. Cousin Matt — with just five sheep to feed — has haymaking down to a fine art.

At some point during the summer, when Terry or Chris are cutting a paddock of hay down that way, they’ll run the mower over the grass verges near Matt’s house.

A few days later when the long grass has dried Matt picks it up and dumps it into large sacks (called fadges). Now, that does take a while, cos Matt’s in his 80’s now.

Still, it’s a great way to keep the side of the road tidy and stock up for the winter at the same time.

But of course when you have 3000 mouths to feed the process becomes a bit more complicated.

Back In The Day

Once upon a time, skilled farm-hands would have cut a paddock of long grass with sickles — those wicked-looking long curved, super-sharp blades. Others would follow behind and hand-spread it to dry.

A few days later, they’d pitchfork the hay into huge piles called rucks.

It was slow going and very labour intensive. No wonder that farmers began to embrace the new technology of tractors and hay-makers when it began to surface.

There are a few vintage machinery clubs around Southland and it’s always interesting to go to their open days. We had one such demonstration here in Garston in 2019 and it was fascinating to think how this old stationery baler — so slow compared to our modern machines — must have been revolutionary when it first came out.

Graham Petersen demonstrating hay making using an early stationary baler at the Garston Vintage Machinery Day, February 2019.

Farmers would have towed a “sweeper” behind a horse to gather up piles of hay and dump it beside the baler. The strings are threaded between each bale with a giant metal needle, then tightened and tied by hand. Graham told me this process needed at least four people: one to fork the hay, one either side to tie the strings, and one to drive the horse.

And don’t forget there was also mum at home making the mountains of food needed to fuel so many workers.

Square Baling On The Move

By the time I came onto the farming scene in 1983, haymaking had become rather more sophisticated. One person could mow the grass with a tractor and mower, then turn it over with a tedder or a hay rake, and tie it up with a baler which moved with the tractor. (Nowadays we call these square bales, although of course, they’re not actually square at all.)

The baler pumped out the bales and dropped them straight onto the ground. Usually we towed a gatherer — kind of like a big metal frame on skids —behind which slid the bales along the paddock until there were enough to make a stook. Then the tractor driver pulled a rope attached to a gate at the back to leave the bales behind and closed the gate to start the next group.

My job was helping to build the stooks. No need for a gym membership in those days because freshly-made bales made great weights! And of course, since the finished stooks were always head-height, I needed an extra bit of oomph to heave the last bales on top.

Introducing The Sledge aka “The Man-Killer”

Another way to build the stacks was on a sledge which towed along directly behind the baler. You stood on the sledge and picked up each heavy bale as it pumped out of the machine. Relentlessly, every 10 seconds, another bale to lift and stack. No wonder we groaned when the sledge came out.

Hamish and Peter Naylor making square bales and using a sledge. Horse owners and lifestyle farmers often prefer to use these small square bales because they can be picked up and moved by hand whereas round bales are so big and heavy you need a tractor to shift them.

Rain Covers

Most summers there’s at least one time when you’re racing to get the hay made before it rains.

So, back in the day Terry would come in and say “Get the hay covers, it’s going to rain.” (No cell phones in those days — he had to deliver the message in person.)

I’d drop everything and load the car up with the dusty covers piled in a corner of the workshop. (In later years I added kids and the latest baby as well.)

Nowadays, there’s not the same panic if it rains; the big modern round bales are reasonably waterproof. But the small bales would rot if they got wet so we had to protect them if we didn’t want to lose the lot.

Our covers were large canvas rectangles with hooks fastened on with rubber bands at the corners and side edges. (I remember repairing these by cutting the bands out of old tyre tubes, slipping them onto the hooks then looping them through the reinforced holes in the covers.)

There’s an art to covering a stack in the quickest time possible — and often we did have to be quick!

Working together, two people could put the cover on top of the stack, roll it out and hook it up to the sides of the hay bales in less than a minute. Then you dashed onto the next stack, and the next. It was actually pretty fun to race the rain.

This was a time-and-motion study in action and it all worked because of the way we had folded up the covers when we put them away the season before.

It was tempting to leave them all in a messy pile at the end of the season, but Terry would never allow that. Folding — and unfolding — those covers correctly was one of the first things I learned on the farm.

Sadly, I never got round to taking a photo of covered stooks., so that piece of our history is lost.

Keeping Up With The Times — Technology Moves On

But although haymaking had become easier and faster than those earlier times, we still needed a lot of hands on deck to make it happen. Nowadays, just as winter feeding out has become a one-man-band, our son, Chris, can make hay singlehanded.

Cutting the Hay

Modern mowers are huge, noisy and fast. Ours is by no means the latest model, but it can still turn a huge paddock into long, flat rows of mown grass in just a few hours.

Turning the Hay

If the weather-gods are kind and the sun shines bright, the grass will be ready to turn in a day or two. Often, the rows are so thick that the grass dries on top, but stays wet underneath. Then we have to turn them over (called tedding.).

Later, Terry or Chris might go round again with a “haybob” which fluffs up the hay and puts it into defined rows which are easy for the baler to pick up.

Ready to Bale

In a few days, the hay will be ready to bale, and that’s when the big round baler swings into action. (Of course just as the “square bales” aren’t really square, “round bales” are actually cylinders. Who knows how they came to be called round?)

So, around the paddock you go again. This time the baler chomps up the fluffy rows of grass and spits the hay bale out the back like a hen laying an egg.

Each bale is the equivalent of a whole stack of square bales and there’s no stacking or stooking to do. We usually leave them in the paddock to settle for a day or two, then use spikes or clamps attached to the tractor arms to pick them up and cart them off to the shed.

A Bountiful Summer

In Garston, we have to feed our stock in winter. There are months and months where the grass doesn’t grow, and our sheep depend on hay, balage and grain to survive.

And the weather in spring and summer is a crucial factor in the cycle of winter feed.

Some years we’re blessed with plenty of rain — but not so much that we’re drowning in it. There’s plenty of grass in the paddocks, and lots to spare for haymaking.

Other summers bring drought conditions and we’re lucky to get any paddocks shut up for hay. For example, on drought year Terry managed to shut two paddocks up for hay and one of them managed a measly 19 bales in total. The next year that same paddock yielded 19 big round bales in just two rounds.

What a difference!

Baling the Lucerne

Most farmers in this area have added lucerne (aka alfalfa) to their stock feed options. The bigger farms have paddocks and paddocks of the stuff. We have just one which gives us three cuts per year, in December, January and early March.

You can make lucerne into hay. It’s more nutritious than grass hay, and that’s what we did with it back in the ‘80s.

Nowadays we make balage, which ferments the lucerne, turning it into a sort of pickled mixture high in protein, calcium, magnesium and fibre.

You can pickle lucerne or grass in huge plastic-lined pits. That’s called silage, but it takes a lot more crop than we can produce.

Instead, we make balage by leaving the cut lucerne to wilt for a few hours, then bailing it as round bales and wrapping each bale firmly in plastic. Because no oxygen can get in, bacteria ferment the lucerne’s natural sugars over the next few months, producing a sweet, highly nutritious food perfect for feeding pregnant sheep during the later winter months.

Have you ever been near a big silage pit, or a batch of balage, when it’s first opened? I thought it smelled terrible when I first moved to the country. But I remember asking my father-in-law, Tommy, why the sheep liked eating it so much.

Tommy was good at explaining farming practices into concepts his townie daughter-in-law could understand.

He told me that for the sheep, the difference between balage and hay was like the difference between eating chocolate and cabbage.

I know which one I’d prefer — and luckily for the sheep, in this case the “chocolate” is even better for them 🤣.

“What on earth is that?” exclaimed a visitor when he spotted the Muscovy duck sauntering past our gate last week.

I laughed. We’re used to reactions like that when people first see the oversized birds that live in the paddocks around our farmhouse. Muscovy ducks aren’t the most common farm birds in Southland, but they’ve become a bit of a hobby for us in the last few years.

So what are Muscovies and how did they get to the farm just as I’d managed to become pet-free? Here’s how it happened.

Muscovy Ducks Arrive On The Farm

When Chris came home from Uni you could hear his battered Toyota rattling all the way from the main road. He pulled up on the front lawn as if he’d only been away for a day rather than a whole year. Then, instead of coming inside, he opened the car door and started rummaging in the back.

I kept cool and sauntered out to say hello.

Chris dumped a bag overflowing with dirty washing on the lawn and grinned.

“Gotta surprise for Dad,” he said. “What d’ya reckon he’ll say?”

He pulled out a large cardboard box and lowered it onto the grass. The box hissed. Then it cheeped.

What the heck???

Gently, Chris opened the lid and tipped the box on its side. Out waddled the largest duck I’d ever seen, followed by 10 tiny, black and yellow ducklings.

Before I had time to draw breath, he reached back into the car and produced a grizzled drake the size of a small goose and two more ducks. Suddenly, a complete family of Muscovy ducks was wandering around my garden.

“Dad’ll be thrilled, eh!”

Never mind about Dad. I’ve been down this track before with pet lambs and puppies.

“Who’s going to feed them?” I wanted to know.

“I’ll look after them,” promised Chris. “They were on the pond outside my flat and I’ve kinda got attached to them.”

Luckily, Dad was as pleased as punch with his Muscovy ducks. And neither of us mind feeding them. Which is just as well because it wasn’t long before Chris took off to wander the world, leaving us to mind the fort, and the ducks.

Now, 10 years later, the Muscovies are well and truly at home on the farm, and it’s hard to remember life without them.

What Are Muscovy Ducks?

Muscovies are a type of waterfowl native to Mexico and parts of South America and were one of the earliest water birds to be domesticated. Their dark, glossy feathers have a beautiful green tinge in sunlight and they have distinctive red, warty-looking bumps around their faces and beaks. These are called caruncles and they help to keep the ducks’ faces clean when they poke around in the mud.

These birds are a strange mix. Their bodies are duck-like, but their long necks and beaks make them seem more like small geese. I’ve never heard our ducks quack — and in fact, they’re often marketed as “quackless.”

Muscovy ducks aren’t silent, though. The drakes have a whole variety of hissing sounds in their vocabulary. When they feel threatened or are fighting their hisses raise the roof — and it’s best to back off quick. But when they’re swimming, or waiting for grain, their calls are gentle and quiet. The ducks have a maternal, clicking hiss that they use to call their ducklings and an indignant squawk reserved for courting drakes.

Compared to most breeds of duck, the drakes are massive. Fully grown, they’re about 86cm long and weigh 7-8 kg. Females are smaller, but still an impressive 5kg. Contrast that with a mallard which is less than 1.6 kg and you can see why people would want to breed Muscovies for their meat.

They Take Out The “Duck Personality” Comps

Muscovies have distinctive personalities. Some are shy, others pushy, always arriving first to the grain bucket. Some stick close to the pond but a dozen or so range far and wide over the paddocks. One duck is a loner and likes to potter up the gravel road far from home.

A few of the older ducks like to visit my garden. I wouldn’t mind them being there, if they didn’t poop all over the yard. So I chase them out with a broom! They regard that as more of a nuisance than a reason to stay away.

In Spring and Autumn, the ducks and drakes pair off and begin to prepare their nests. These could be found anywhere: in the rushes down by the pond…between two hay bales…under the enormous rosebush beside our living room window.

But the one place you’ll never find our ducks is up in a tree. The lighter ones can fly but they tend to stay low to the ground. They keep their flight for important stuff — like racing up the paddock when it’s feeding time. Domestic Muscovies would never dream of doing anything as precarious as nesting in a tree.

Nesting quietly in the hay barn.

The Water Bird That Shouldn’t Get Wet

One peculiarity of Muscovies — and this is truly bizarre — the ducklings cannot get wet!

Say what? Hey back up — these are water birds that can’t get wet?

Yes, strange as it may seem, if domestic Muscovy ducklings get their backs wet and cold in the first few weeks of life it is usually fatal.

However, neither ducks nor ducklings are aware of this fact and they scramble to dive into the water whenever they see it. That’s okay in warm weather. But spring nights (and days) can be colder than winter ones and that is fatal to wet Muscovy ducklings.

If they’re lucky we find them in time. We rush them inside by the fire and dry the downy little feathers with a warm hairdryer. It’s magic when their cold little bodies revive and you hear the cheep, cheep coming from their box next morning.

All this means that we keep the mothers and babies in sturdy hutches for their first few weeks. After that, they are free to enjoy the pond on fine days, but we still shut them in at night or when the weather is rough.

The cages protect them from more than the weather. There are stoats, wild cats and hawks around. Those pests are properly wary of the adult birds, but the ducklings make tasty treats.

Ducklings, just one day old. Safe from the rain and predators in the sturdy hutch, built for us by Garston School’s Year 7 & 8 woodwork class one year.

Feeding Muscovies

Because our adult birds roam free they largely feed themselves. Muscovy ducks eat worms, grubs and grass in the paddocks and love to dive for fish, insects and waterweed in the pond.

Their favourite food is barley, and luckily for them, we have heaps in the silo. In late winter Terry feeds the pregnant sheep some barley every day. The Muscovies love that and rush to pick up the leftover grains in the paddock. Then they get bossy and push in amongst the ewes to get first crack at the grain.

But in spring, summer and autumn, we mosey up to the pens twice a day to feed the ducklings their gamebird crumble and throw some barley to the adult birds. When they hear the chug-chug of the Polaris (Terry’s side-by-side vehicle) or see me walking along with my yellow buckets the ducks and drakes fly in from all directions.

They skim over the fences and land with a thump. Then they waddle to catch up as fast as they can go — which is actually pretty fast. When I’m walking uphill, I can keep ahead of the flock. But when I start on the downhill slope they surge forward and trip me up if I’m not watching my feet.

Nowadays, a trip to the duck pond is part of our tour whenever visitors come to the farm. And it’s not only strangers that are impressed.

Feeding the ducks has been one of our grandchildren’s favourite farm activities ever since they were old enough to throw a handful of grain.

Nowadays, I suspect it’s got more to do with the Polaris than the ducks, though. Harvey could drive the Polaris by the time he was five years old, thanks to those feeding trips.

Too Many Ducks

Muscovy meat is tender and sweet, and the eggs are huge and tasty. Both are considered delicacies amongst the duck-connoisseurs in our community. But these birds are our pets, and although we use the eggs for baking (when we can find them), somehow we just can’t bring ourselves to eat the ducks.

However, they’re prolific breeders and their pond won’t stay healthy if it’s overpopulated.

So the first time the population rose above 30 I put an ad in the local paper. “Muscovy ducks for sale.” I couldn’t believe how fast they sold. We haven’t had to advertise again. Those same customers now phone up every season:

“Are there any ducks for sale?” When the answer is yes, they can’t get here fast enough.

I don’t ask what they do with their ducks. I don’t really want to know.

Update: we’re down to just six adults and a few ducklings right now, so we have no ducks for sale.

I’ve lived on a farm in Garston for more than 40 years, so that almost makes me a local. But my husband is truly Garston born and bred. His family were one of the first to settle in the valley when it was opened up to farmers in the 1870s and McNamees have been here ever since.

So for our family the ties to Garston run very deep, and we’d find it pretty difficult to leave.

But what is it that makes this quiet country village so hard to beat?

The View

Well, our location is hard to beat.

The village is set in the narrowest part of the Upper Mataura River Valley, and mountains range on either side, as far as the eye can see. Their beauty is different from the craggy splendour of Queenstown’s Remarkables range. Our’s are “working” mountains; home to animals — farmed and wild — rare bugs, mountain plants and above all, the golden tussocks which colour the landscape.

Above the village, hidden terraces slope in layers up to the foot of the mountains, and this is where our house can be found. When I step out of the back door there is not a soul to be seen. It’s just me, the birds and the sheep.

What a way to begin — or end — a day.

A Tough Start

When Europeans first arrived they farmed the Upper Mataura Valley as one giant sheep station. But later on the area was divided into 200 acre sections and these were balloted out to small farmers and settlers.

And that’s where the modern history of Garston begins. Our family came from the lean pickings of the gold claims in the Skippers Valley to try their luck at farming. Others made money killing rabbits — a lucrative enough trade in those days to enable them to save enough to buy into a farm. Some came from family farms further north or south.

Life was pretty tough in those early days. The valley had very few trees back then and firewood was in short supply. The winters were brutal. There’s a famous tale of one long ago winter when the deep snow lasted for so long that the settlers had to use their carefully-hoarded fence posts for firewood just to survive.

Money was scarce too. The kids walked to school from farms dotted around the countryside whether they had shoes or not. My father-in-law used to say:

“We never minded stepping in a cowpat on the way to school — at least it warmed our feet up.”

I still don’t know if he was joking or not.

Gold

There’s gold in them thar hills. Or at least there used to be.

Shortly after the settlers arrived gold was discovered in creeks and cracks all around, and life got busy as the gold miners flooded in. They came from all over the world to try their luck, set up camp for a while and livened up the area.

Eventually the gold became too difficult to find, and the miners drifted away to try their luck elsewhere. They left reminders of their stay, with a little cluster of Chinese miners’ graves in the cemetery, and the great water races which they dug high in the mountains to supply water for the great sluice guns in the Nokomai Valley just beyond Garston.

The Roaring Lion water race winds around the back of the mountains above our farm. When new, it stretched 47km from the Roaring Lion Creek to Nokomai valley. Nowadays, only a deep ditch remains and the Welcome Rock mountain bike trail runs alongside part of it.

There was another water race on our side of the mountain range, too. I can see the remains of it from my window as I write. I’m not sure if it ever functioned properly, though. The engineers began digging the race at both ends. Somehow, measurements must have gone awry, because the two ditches didn’t meet in the middle. Unfortunately, so the story goes, the side coming from the water source was much lower than the ditch to the Nokomai Valley.

Loving Reminders

John Newman

It’s easy to guess that Garston is proud of its history. One of the first things that stands out when you stop is the information booth, which was updated after much collaboration by local historians. And when you start to look around you’ll find caring memorials all over the Garston Green.

North of the shops is the picnic area dedicated to John Newman, a former owner of the Garston Hotel, who planted so many of the trees between Athol and Arrowtown. Take a stroll towards the tree-covered hillside nearby and you’ll find a gorgeous little walk called Newman’s Way which takes you up over the knoll to Garston School.

The Vital Rail Link

Further down the Green you’ll find tributes to the time when the trains ran through Garston, because when the railway from Invercargill to Kington opened in 1878 it was a huge boon to the area.

In those days before sealed roads, fast cars and huge articulated trucks, trains were the best and fastest way to travel the long distance between the “big smoke” of Invercargill in the South and Kingston — the gateway to Lake Wakatipu and Queenstown — in the North.

Farmers transported stock in and out of the valley by rail right up until the early 1970s.

Loading sheep onto the train at Nokomai Siding, just South of Garston Village, 1968. Photo courtesy of Peter and Pam Naylor.

Even when trucks took over the job, the famous Kingston Flyer steam train ran through Garston as a tourist attraction until 1979, when floods damaged the railway tracks so badly that the whole line closed.

Garston doesn’t forget, though. On the Green you’ll find tracks, trucks and a display of antique jiggers. There, too, is a loving memorial to Russell Glendinning, a towering figure in local railway lore.

Peter Rabbit’s Village

Peter Rabbit’s House has been a hidden part of Garston for a long time now. It’s a bit of a mystery; who did put out that little clothesline and Peter Rabbit sign next to the rabbit hole? Whoever it was, I hope they know how their whimsy brought smiles, and that gradually other secret “rabbit paraphernalia” appeared.

Someone added a diary, and visitors started leaving Peter little notes.

The House expanded in 2017, when the Garston School children decided that Peter needed company, and made a whole replica gold-mining era village.

It’s not hard to find the rabbit village these days, because in 2022, it got a companion — a Beatrix Potter-inspired thinking seat designed by SDC graphic artist Donna Hawkins — right beside Peter’s tree.

The River

Winding through the valley, the Mataura River is world renowned for its trout. People come from all over the globe to try their luck in the cool, clear waters during fly fishing season. Some eat their catch, or mount it to sit proudly on a wall.

But others are simply there for the love of the fish and the sport. Those intrepid fishermen are found in the tricky “catch and release” sections of the river. Some of the fish there are huge — and wily — having been caught and released more than once over the years.

My favourite river memories are set in the 1990s. Baking summer days, at the stony beach under the old railway bridge where all the local mums and kids gathered to cool off.

Steph and I at the river in 1987.

The children floated down the river on giant old inner-tubes from their dads’ tractors, jumped off the rocks and ate enormous afternoon teas. The bravest of them hung over the rail of the towering bridge above.

“Watch me! Watch me!” they’d yell and then leap down into the deepest pool below.

We still leap off the bridge today. Not me, of course. But it’s become a rite of passage — my kids, the Garston nephews, many of our workers have taken the plunge. And just the other day, my 8-year-old grandson took great delight in conquering his fears and proving that he, too, has what it takes.

Stretch Your Legs In Garston...

Nowadays Garston is moving on and looking outwards.

Travellers stream through on their way to the glories of Milford Sound or Queenstown and many stop at the Garston Green for a welcome break.

Kids race to recover from their long journeys on the playground. Adults discover the delights of The Coffee Bomb, and The Hunny Shop next door.

...Or Stay A While

But some opt for more than a quick stop.

Fishermen, bikers, hikers and those who just want a slice of rural peace and quiet, can find a bed at the former Garston Pub (now called The Garston) or at one of the local B&Bs.

There’s no denying that living in the country has its challenges. Farmers tend to work the daylight hours: short in winter, long in summer. And of course in the spring lambing and autumn harvest seasons, work can continue well after dark.

And almost every trip requires a car: there’s no public transport and we’re simply too far from everywhere to walk.

But despite that, Garston is a special place to be. Friendships run deep and beauty surrounds us every time we step out the door.

I am lucky to call this little slice of New Zealand home.