Meet the locals

The hut is on standby as our building team are scattered all over NZ on holiday with family or working out of town. Also next weekend we have a traveling teacher coming so we will concentrate on some good Dharma talks instead.

Our trees are doing okay- some are still dying and needed to be replaced but only a few and the wind protectors stayed intact despite ongoing severe nor’westerlies.

One thing of interest about the land that you might not know about is that we have some sheep there. As it is New Zealand and we are famous for our sheep it is very fitting that we have some at Glentui.

They don’t actually belong to us. Someone else pays us to graze his sheep on our land. This works out very fine for us as the sheep keep the grass down and also stop the gorse getting out of hand. And at $50 a week it goes a long way to helping us pay the rates and do some development on the land.

Paul, the owner, is a hobby farmer and grazes the 40 odd merino sheep there – which are renown for their fine wool. Depending on the quality of the wool it can fetch very high prices per kilo. The sheep on our land are not of premium stock so they look a bit runty.

He has only six ewes (females), the rest are wethers (young castrated males). Unfortunately though, due to an exceptionally cold snap in the spring, all the lambs died during lambing time. On a recent trip up to the land though the weather was stunning and the sheep looked very happy. We hope they are absorbing some blessing from the land and will also get enlightened one day soon.