Gett’n in the manuka

If you know anything about New Zealand, or about honey, then you know about the famous manuka honey. As it happens, there are some hives at my place in NZ which yield some pretty good manuka honey.

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So I’m replanting some of the land with manuka bushes… Manuka, in case you haven’t seen it, has a beautiful flower and right now it’s spring so the manuka bushes are all in flower at the moment.

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Its a beautiful thing. I also have some grass on my land that I’m trying to get rid of, so I ran across the harbor today to Ahipara and bought 75 saplings.

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And my neighbor Patrick, who has been doing some work on my land, has been digging them in.

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Most of the larger shrubs to the immediate left of Patrick are manuka bushes around 3-5 years old. You can see some flowers on them. The really big ones at the back left I think might be 15 years old or so. Manuka can get big, it sort of transforms from a nice bushy bush to a wild twisty tree when it gets older. They can get quite huge. Anyways, in 2 years or so I should have a little 3-4ft manuka forest out there 🙂