Agricultural and pastoral shows, usually known as A&P shows, are somewhat in decline but still an important part of rural life in New Zealand. Some, like the Canterbury A&P, are huge. Here in the Wairarapa, Masterton has the biggie. Smaller by far is the Carterton A&P Show we visited today. (Technically it’s the Wairarapa Agricultural & Pastoral Society Show and it’s held in the Clareville Showgrounds just north of Carterton, but Carterton A&P Show is what people call it.)
We had a particular reason for attending this year: to see if Liz had won a prize for her woolcrafts. Liz has been spinning and dyeing wool, knitting and weaving for almost all of our married life. She was very much a lone wolf when we lived in Wellington, but since moving full-time to Martinborough she’s been a regular at the Wairarapa Spinners and Weavers Guild that meets in Masterton’s Wool Shed museum. This year, for the first time, she decided to enter some of her work in the homecrafts section of the Carterton Show. Insisting she’d only entered to make up the numbers, she got quite flustered when I suggested she might actually win something. Well she did:
Liz pretty chuffed with her first prize for Skein mixed natural fibres. (Top left.) She also collected a second prize for a felted scarf and a third for some hand-spun dyed wool.
It was a warm, if windy, morning and we enjoyed pottering around the show. Here are some impressions:
An apparently content Jersey calf.
Raucous rooster racket is frightening for a small girl.
A Polish rooster.
Watching a junior show jumping event.
What they were watching.
The dressage ring.
Two fine Clydesdales.
Old boys and their antique toys: yarning round an old Massey-Ferguson tractor.
Old boys and their antique toys: old-fashioned belt-driven hay baler.
Martinborough Musings 
Great photos and congratulations to Liz. One interesting historical anomaly. The old hay naler was never designed for baling twine. That machine required wires that were bought cut to length and with a twisted loop at one end. One man pushed the ends through the slots in the platen and the other quickly inserted the free ends through the loops and the bale moved on to the exit.The baling wire was a damned nuisance to all if left lying around after the bales were fed out in winter, except for small boys who could make all sorts of things with it.There were probably as many temporary repairs made to farm gear with baling wire as with Number 8 fencing wire.