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...October newsletter... |
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October enews 2005 The month opened with us featuring in the new ‘Taste’ magazine. Christine set up a window display in a New Plymouth bookshop to help promote the magazine and our products. We also attended a mini tourist expo in New Plymouth at The Quality Hotel organised by Venture Taranaki. A range of tourism businesses exhibited from those involved with Maori Tourism, adventure tourism, to famous gardens, a conference organiser, a new British Double Decker bus and other transport companies, deep sea fishing, bed and breakfast accommodation providers and us. The idea was to let each other know what our businesses did. The concept was good but the opportunity to open it to the public and to raise the profile of tourism in Taranaki went begging.
Our tourist side of our business is a constant delight to us. Whether it is individuals visiting on our open Sunday afternoons or church family groups, car rally groups or large Probus groups visiting by arrangement during the week, we enjoy making them welcome, sharing our story, our enthusiasm for macadamias and our beautiful property.
The tours start in the orchard. Many visitors have never seen a macadamia tree before this. Questions abound: ‘Why did you decide to grow macadamias?’, ‘How do you prune them?’, ‘What fertiliser do you use?’, ‘How tall do they grow?’, ‘Are possums a problem?’ and so on.
The orchard is especially beautiful in full flower. It is one of the best times to visit. Every tree is smothered with cream flower racemes and the perfume is heady. Bees, moths, in fact all sorts of flying insects are drunk on the nectar and the air is a -buzz as they inspect each flower.
Another feature of the orchard is the amount of bird life. Each macadamia tree has a nest in it usually a black bird or thrush’s nest. Then there are fantails, wood pigeons, zebra finches, Californian quails, pheasants, harrier hawks, grey warblers, king fishers, swallows, starlings, magpies, bell birds, tuis and more. We are spray free and cat free so the bird life abounds. This is of course of special interest to overseas visitors and enjoyed by all.
Next we show our visitors how we harvest the nuts, then take them through the factory, The Nutcracker Suite, following the process from nut in husk to finished product. We installed phones in the factory this month not only improving access to Christine during the day but also allowing us to move to EFTPOS in out retail shop.
We had a very special visitor in the middle of the month, Rex Morgan one of New Zealand’s leading chefs. Rex has a wonderful restaurant in Wellington called the Citron. He spent an afternoon with us touring the orchard and factory. We are going to be working with Rex in the New Year developing recipes, demonstrating our nut products and developing new ones. We feel very privileged.
The month ended with the shelter trimmer at work. It is amazing how much light well-trimmed shelter lets into the orchard. On the last Friday of the month The Taranaki Rhododendron and Garden Festival began. We open as part of that. More about that next month. The year is flashing past!
Archive If you would like to read previous newsletters, please click on one of the following links:
[ introduction ][ history ][ macadamias ][ factory ][ products ][ favours ][ orders ][ tours ][ contact ]
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