• Plant tomato, cucumber, peppers and chillis etc into your garden by early November
• Continue to plant seed potatoes and side dress with potato food.
• Sow dwarf and climbing beans now for harvesting in late January, do a further sowing at the end of the month.
• Plant up hanging baskets and pots for Christmas and summer colour.
• Check roses for signs of aphids and mildew - spray if necessary with Super Shield and Rainguard
• Deciduous clematis hybrids need to have new shoots trained up and keep up the snail bait
• Protect Dahlias, Delphiniums, Hostas and Gypsophia from slugs and snails
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The fact that one man with a forklift was able to take out the power supply to the top half of the North Island shows how fragile New Zealand’s electricity network really is. Friday’s accident, in which a container hit a high-voltage power line in Otahuhu, caused extensive disruptions as some 280,000 homes and businesses lost power for several hours.

This, of course, is not the first time an accident has caused major blackouts in the country’s busiest city. In June 2006 a snapped transmission cable at the Otahuhu substation cut power to over half of Auckland, and in 1998, a major failure in the 40-year old power supply cables cut electricity to downtown Auckland for over a month.

The security of supply, as well as the rising cost of power, are key concerns of New Zealanders.

In response to this latest incident, Transpower, the State Owned Enterprise that owns and operates New Zealand’s national grid, explained that the accident had happened while the reserve circuit was out of action due to maintenance. Had it been operational, the blackout would not have occurred. A $540 million parallel cable that will take the risk out of the supply system is being installed but will not be completed until 2013.

I Have just read a blog by Paul Holmes, which basically gives reasons to
love your school. While it appears to be designed to teach existing students to enjoy, and take the maximum benefit from their school years, it caused me to reflect on my own school years in Central Hawkes Bay.

My initial schooling through the infant class, the primmers and the first of the standards, was done at St Josephs in Waipukurau. The fact that those school years were not very pleasant for me, was probably as much my own fault as it was the fault of the good "Black Joseph' nuns.

Why should we privatise ACC? Of course we should not!!

It would not help to do so!
Privatisation would not help the present situation at any level. All it would do is add another layer of private board members adding their further outrageous demands for incredible renumeration for infrequent input at infrequent board meetings, with the overriding problem to be solved being how to guarantee even higher returns to themselves and those private shareholders.

Central & Southern Hawkes Bay Eventing’s spring horse trials at Arran Station on Saturday 31st October/Sunday 1st November have received more than 200 entries from throughout the North Island, with the secretary fielding a number of late entries due to the cancellation of the Bay of Plenty event at Rotorua which was scheduled to run the weekend after.

The final selection trial for the NZ Trans-Tasman team at Taupo on 17/18 October resulted in a number of the squad members falling by the wayside for a variety of reasons, so they have been advised to compete at Arran Station after which a decision will be made as to who flies to Adelaide to defend the Trans-Tasman Trophy.

Jonathan Paget and Frances Stead’s Clifton Promise are no longer in contention after
a hoof problem caused them to lose too much preparation time, while Matthew Grayling and Carolyn Jolley’s NRM Parklane Hawk has been withdrawn as the horse is on the market.

If sharing information is the point of social networks then Twitter is the stingiest of the bunch. Perhaps thats why celebrities and corporations like it so much.
I have strong doubts about the long term future of Twitter in its current form.

Though it is still receiving rounds of venture capital funding it hasn’t made a single dime making any money right now nor has it announced any business plans. I fear that once the venture capitalists realize there isn’t a business plan at all they will pull their money out. Twitter’s popularity will ultimately be its downfall as bandwidth and server costs will quickly swallow their remaining funds.