It might as well be spring

A glorious warm day (albeit we got down to 0C at 3am). By early afternoon it was 23C and I was in T-shirt and shorts. 

This Yellow Admiral, or kahukowhai, fluttered about me as I wandered around the herb beds. They are native to NZ and Australia. Unlike some butterflies, Yellow Admirals can live for several months and therefore they often look pretty tattered by this time of the year. This one is remarkably intact. I often see them even in the middle of winter.

I prepped the tunnel house bed for winter brassicas and progressed fast enough to plant them before the end of the working day. 

I began to dig out twitch roots (ropes) from the bed which will have garlic sown in it next week. But I decided to quit after an hour and only 1/4 of the bed cleared. It can wait until tomorrow.  A beetroot curry was calling from the kitchen…

Bean continues to mend. Her energy is returning and she is absolutely starving, but still on a boring restricted diet. I’ll start to get her back onto raw food again from tomorrow.

I cooked up various types of meat which I want to feed her, to observe amounts of fat. Happily none of them had much at all: even her regular chicken necks. While I’m delighted that it means I can confidently give her a low fat diet, it does make the cause of the episode of acute pancreatitis a mystery. 

I may have contributed by giving her whey, but not enough to make her so ill. Perhaps she ate something disgusting / delicious* when we were walking at Kakanui the day before she became ill. We will never know…

* disgusting to me, delicious to Bean.