Eggplant 'Fairytale'

Fooling around with the eggplants; too much time on Pinterest!

Corn already?

Baby corn! 'Mini Pop F1,' to be exact.

These you are supposed to harvest as soon as you see a hint of the silks, but I forgot at first and left them a little longer.


Still, it didn't seem to matter and they were still tender inside and a little bigger for longer on the plant. Uncooked they were on the bland side, but once steamed they were delicious and nicer than anything we've bought in a supermarket before.


So far, out of the first block of 20 seeds sown, I have harvested 13 baby corns (I am keeping track of harvests with weights and numbers properly, for once!) I have also sown more baby corn successionally, so there are small, medium, and fully grown plants now, and yet more seeds in the packet for another round in a month or so.


We ate our corns together with a stirfy including yet more Redlegs spring onions (these just keep on coming and getting bigger and bigger. They were planted with a well over-packed punnet bought at a shop, but now I have seeds which I am also successionally sowing;


And a couple more Lebanese eggplants. These are small, but I am wary of letting them get too big and becoming inedible.


And in tomato news? The plants are still going great guns. My early planting of bought-in largish 'seedlings' has proved fruitful to say the least. I have picked almost 4kg in the last fortnight - not including the ones eaten while gardening and never weighed.

Some we eat fresh, some we cook into dinner, some have been frozen whole to cook with later in the year, and some I'm attempting to dry in the oven.

The tomatoes towards the top of this picture are either Tigerella or Green Zebra. I have managed to lose the label (I think it might have blown behind a pile of inaccessible renovation bits and bobs in the shed). The ones at the bottom of the picture are small Grosse Lisse. Now, those stripey numbers are a little on the bitter side if they're not totally ripe, I've found, so they were my chosen candidates for oven-drying (the Grosse Lisse are super sweet and completely beautiful).


The tomatoes are cut in half and spaced out on an oven rack, then sprinkled with salt, and dried in the oven for hours at a low temperature (between 60-80c, as low as your oven will go, basically). To be safely kept at home they need to be as dry as you can possibly make them, like leather, I've read, and even though they were in the oven at 60c overnight they were still quite squishy so now they are in the oven for day 2 to see what happens. They are so beautiful when they are cut, I love the way the seeds are still green inside!


I will let you know what happens with the tomatoes. If they stuff up, never mind, hundreds and hundreds more where these came from!

*

Summer is here!

I mean here-here, really here, and loaded with tomatoes. The downside to summer is sweeping on us from the west with temperatures of 39c (102f) expected within the week and nothing under 34c (93f) for the next five days. We've had an easy start to summer throughout December, but it's all on from here out. Dry dry dry and hot, and that's not great for gardens, not even Mediterranean-styled ones. With plants, surviving is not the same as thriving.

Anyway, the upside to summer is also on us: veggie harvests! Yesterday I collected the first of the eggplants (two, Lebanese), a decent handful of beans (butter beans, and two other green types I forget the names of), yet more spring onions (Redlegs), and over two kilograms of tomatoes, and that's not even including the tomatoes I have been picking over the last few weeks and forgot to record, or all the ones I have been snacking on as I water the garden. We are going to be overrun. So far I am picking Tigerellas, Grosse Lisse, and Dwarf Figs and there are dozens upon dozens to come. Happy Happy!

Feeling seedy

See? I told you I am addicated to sowing seeds; I have bought even more! I realised the other day that despite all my mad sowing, I didn't have any eggplants at all to speak of. I went out almost immediately (well, a couple of days later) and bought a punnet of Lebanese eggplant, and another of the fat 'normal' kind, the name of which escapes me, and planted them out in the garden. And I got a couple of packets of purple eggplant seeds, but, like a true addict, it wasn't enough and I needed more: Ebay beckoned.

First port of call? Yet more eggplants!

Thai 'Udumalaphet';

Source: google.com via Katie on Pinterest

'Casper' white;

Source: google.com via Katie on Pinterest

A funky unnamed red variety;

Source: flickr.com via Katie on Pinterest

Famous 'Listada de Grandia';

Source: google.com via Katie on Pinterest

And while I was on a roll with the weird and wonderful?

Silver Queen, burgundy, Star of David and Clemson Spineless okra: (cool binomial name too, Abelmoschus esculentus). I don't even like okra - I think it's like eating glue - but Chef D does and I couldn't resist the mixed colours.

Source: google.com via Katie on Pinterest

White beetroot (isn't that mutually exclusive?);

Source: google.com via Katie on Pinterest

'Moon and Stars' Watermelon;

Source: google.com via Katie on Pinterest

and green tomatillos (and what do they taste like? No idea!);

Source: google.com via Katie on Pinterest

But now, a little bit of a problem: We're off overseas in a month for a month. Should I plant these now, or later? Eek! I got carried away and didn't think of that when I was madly clicking 'buy it now' the other day. I think I will hedge my bets: Just a few of each now, and more when we get home. Is it just me or is Spring running away with us already?

Kudos for Amish Paste.

It might not look like much, but this is the basis of tonight's dinner. Fairy and Lebanese eggplants from the garden (white and green respectively), as well as our Amish Paste tomatoes. I added an onion, a bit of bacon, a dash chardonnay vinegar and half a cup of chicken stock, cooked the whole lot down et voila: a sort of ratatouille with bacon. Healthy, with loads of vegetables, and most of them from our own garden.

I think I can safely recommend the Amish Paste tomato for cooking. It's not an attractive tomato, being quite lumpen, but it was the plant which produced far and away the most fruit (kilos and kilos of it), and has proven it's worth for cooking over and over. I'll be planting it again next year. Maybe even two!

April Harvest (2)

We made a visit to our little house the other day and found that there is still lots of edibles in the garden. The corn looked as ready as it was going to get, I peeled back the layers and had a look, poking it with my fingernail and the juices were foggy and yellow so I took the plunge to pick. The smaller patch had small cobs (although not as much as a failure as the back patch which had nothing!), the bigger patch had nice big cobs, almost supermarket-worthy. I gave half of it to FIL, payment for his excavation work so far ;-)
There were also a few long but thin Lebanese eggplants, and a couple of the 'Fairy' type which I picked even though they seemed quite hard. There were even a few purple capsicums ready to go. The capsicums and eggplants have all gone straight into a big pot of bolognese sauce for lasagne.

While I was picking the corn, I found a surprise! Here I was thinking that the rockmelons were a total flop, and yet, there, hidden amongst the corn was a fruit! I wasn't sure if it was actually ripe, the vine was still pretty green (though the leaves are just starting to yellow), but the millipedes had found it and were gnawing, creeping and crawling all over it, so I thought it best to pick it before our one and only rockmelon became food for legions of Portugese pests!

It wasn't bad actually, it weighed almost 1kg (2 pounds) and was very edible, though a little on the bland side. I think it just needed more time.

I pulled the last of the tomato plants from their pots because they really were just looking too shabby to go on with. They've been hung in the shed, a bit experimentally, because I've read that you can ripen late tomatoes that way. Besides, I want the big pots!

And out there, still growing surprisingly well is the pumpkin plant I thought wouldn't set fruit at all, and the rainbow chard which is so pretty and bright even though it's sorely neglected.