Mouse Melons

Or cucamelons, or Mexican sour gherkins, or Melothria scabra (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melothria_scabra): cute, tasty, perfect snack size for the kidlets,really do pretty much taste like an ever so slightly sour cucumber, wish they were a bit more prolific but more plants next time. However, under no circumstances should you eat one which has fallen, overripe, from the vine: it will taste like arse. 

Chilli Day!

Almost too beautiful to pick... 

Thai chilli 'Siam' (my favourite)

Front 'Red Cap Mushroom' hot hot hot, behind is a Thai Birdseye. 

Forget, label toddlered, Anaheim? Looks totally different to the Anaheim I've grown in the past. 

Forget. Label also toddlered! Possibly Anaheim. 

Most of these beauties will be made into Pik Nam Pla (chillies in fish sauce), Pik Nam Som (chillies in vinegar), or frozen.  

Eggplant 'Fairytale'

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

Fractals

Romanesco: Seriously, the prettiest broccoli out. 

Oops!

I've accidentally deleted the last post, a case of slipped finger on an iPad screen, and no second chances. Never mind, it wasn't a good photo in any case. I had a browse through some old posts, I really MUST start uploading some real photos again. I've been window-shopping for camera lenses too, and with my tax return weighing down my back pocket, I may have even found one to buy to replace the one pulled off the table by my orangutang-armed baby boy (expensive mistake on my part).

Meanwhile, here are two phone-camera pictures of our very first blood orange! I was worried the fruit would be sub-par; such a small tree, and in its first year in the ground I really shouldn't have let it develop, but I couldn't bear to pluck it off. It was worth it. It was perfect.

PS Next week we four are heading off to Japan for a holiday. Can't wait!

All good things

Rag ends of our only successful tomato crop: currant tomatoes. 

My monster

Check out this 'baby': 724g in a single quince! Isn't he lovely?!

Quince is such a nice, fragrant fruit. Well worth the long wait for it to ripen. In fact, I picked this quince (and a few smaller ~500g siblings) a touch green because my poor tree was so overladen with heavy fruits that I thought the branches were going to snap in two.

Last year - the tree's first year in the ground - I had seven individual fruits, and this year I have fifteen. So, it's quite a productive little tree for one so young (in contrast, we are still waiting for the first of our three year old lemon tree's fruit to ripen).

It's been a remarkably low maintenance tree too. It is in an irrigated garden bed, but otherwise gets absolutely no special care at all. It doesn't get any extra fertilisers, or seaweed extracts, and I've never seen any serious insect problem or hint of disease on it. Every year I take photos of the blushing pink flowers, and then promptly forget to put any pictures on the old blog.

As I always do with quinces, I peeled them and chopped them, removed the seeds (and was generous taking the flesh from immediately around the seeds as this part can be quite grainy and spoil the texture of your finished product), and poached them in water, sugar, golden syrup, lemon and spices. I'm happy to say that cooking slightly green fruit hadn't been a problem and my quinces are just as much of a treat as always.

Internet recipes often warn you that quinces are very hard to cut, but I haven't found this at all; they are just as soft as their apple cousins. Perhaps it's the variety? My little tree is a 'Pineapple quince.'

Happy Easter, all xx

More chilli than you can poke a stick at

Pregnant woman loves eating chillis; who can see a problem with this statement?!
Our vegie patch is not doing brilliantly at the moment. Half because when it needed to be lavished with love, care, and water, I was in the throes of morning sickness and spent a lot of time feeling sorry for myself rather than working in the garden, and half because a reasonable amount got wiped out by the endless hot weather we had about two months ago (all the bigger tomatoes, in particular). However, excuses aside, the four chillies I planted from a mixed punnet are doing brilliantly. My favourites are the blasting hot Thai chillies (prik kee nu, literally 'rat shit chilli,' because that is what they look like), which we like to chop up small and soak in fish sauce (prik nam pla, ie 'chillies in fish sauce!') and eat sprinkled on practically anything savoury. I also have the bigger varieties Anaheim (lots of fruit, but suffers more from what may be blossom end rot than the others), Cayenne (not prolific) and Jalapeño (also not especially prolific).
Yet again, for about the third year running, I promise myself that I'll try to shelter the plants over winter so they have a chance or survival. Being tropical perennials, there is a chance they can make it through the cold if protected, but of course this does rely on me actually making an effort and not leaving it too late!

Happy New Year, love Moorpark

My baby has borne its first fruit! My Moorpark Apricot was the first tree I planted in this house, in autumn of 2010. We have been waiting for nearly three years for fruit, and she did not disappoint us! We have been eating apricots since Christmas and have just picked the rest after the birds found them (I am feeling a bit too broke after the orgy of Christmas spending to invest in a good bird net). I never weighed or counted the fruit properly but we are drying about 40 apricots in the sun; I have another 80 or so (about 3kg) for jam; we have eaten uncountable numbers straight off the tree, and so have the birds. Pretty impressive!

Speaking of babies, our second child will be landing earth-side around the end of June :)

Small and perfect

That's my baby broccoli. I am super happy with it, because it's green and beautiful, and because I get to eat it before the aphids do! First time for everything, oh happy day.

Eighteen days left of winter.

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!

What we are eating: December, 2011

There is so much going on in the garden right now, and we are starting to harvest some long-maturing crops planted earlier in the year as well as eating early summer veggies. It's all a bit fabulous!

The garlic I planted way, way, way back in April finally flopped over and the leaves dried out, so out of the ground it came. It was such a good crop to grow, set and forget! Needed nothing more than the occasional weed and it did it's thing (albeit very slowly, not a good one for the impatient).

The 'Early White' softneck garlic bulbs were quite small but came out of the ground largely intact and were easy to clean up.


The 'Early Purple' garlic is a hardneck variety. The bulbs are much larger, around supermarket size, but the skins tended to split or be absent from at least half of the cloves I pulled out and were a bit of a bugger to clean all the dirt out of. The skins were also very fragile and a number of bulbs were easily damaged by pulling and cleaning. As that's not good for storing the garlic, I crushed all the damaged bulbs and mixed them with oil and have frozen the mash to use as we go along (the oil makes it easy to just scoop out teaspoons of frozen garlic).


Now these, these are completely fabulous and I can't seem to stop raving about them. They are the first of the potatoes I planted in August. The potatoes themselves arrived in the post in June - you might remember I didn't know exactly what they were! - and I think they're fulfilling all the promise of that mysterious brown paper bag. Now, these particular potatoes I grew in green plastic potato bags and they suffered a Lack of Water while we were away and the tops died off in these particular bags so I unearthed the lot. There are still half a dozen plants growing well in the ground, and a few more still in potato bags for later in the season. So far we've had about 2kg of the beauties! Many of them were a lovely size which fit in the palm of my hand.


And an awful lot of them were the size of peas. After a thorough scrubbing, we boiled them up, then cooked them briefly in a pan with loads of home-grown garlic and parsley, salt, pepper and an unhealthy amount of butter. Despite their small size, they were delicious (of course!)
At my best guess these potatoes include Bananas, Cranberry Reds, Sapphires, and Pink Eyes (or are they Pink Edwards?)


We're also still eating mushrooms out of September's mushroom kit. You might wonder how we kept it going while we were away for a month? Well, I handed it to my mum who got about two mushrooms out of it, and then she went away for a while so she lent it to her mum who got a few more, and then it went back to my mum where it did nearly nothing, and then it came back to us and it's had it's first genuinely decent crop - 200g - of mushrooms, enough for one pot of mushroom sauce!


Added to that mushroom sauce was a glorious FAT Red Legs spring onion. I much prefer spring onions over normal onions. They are easy to grow (but much slower than I realised they would be) and they don't hurt your eyes when you cut them.


And for dessert? Muffins made with the first of the rhubarb.


And finally, though not for eating - unless they have seeds and then our future-chickens will get them - are my sunflowers. The yellow variety is beginning to open:


And the reds are open all the way and are much lovelier and more varied in their colour than I imagined they would be, shot through with russets, golds, oranges, and stems of deep purple.

Radishes?

Goodness me; I knew radishes grew quite fast but I didn't realise that I'd be eating them within five weeks of sowing them! I didn't buy these 'Easter Egg Radish' seeds, they were sent as a bonus in one of my many batches of seed purchases. Radishes haven't featured highly on my 'to grow' list (daikon excepted) as I remember disliking them when I ate them as a kid. I've never enjoyed that bitey/spicy thing they can have going on. When these seeds arrived I figured I may as well give them a go and I sowed a few of them in a Styrofoam tub with some French carrots. That was back in early September.

Yesterday I noticed the rounded red tops of the roots were starting to poke out above the soil so I pulled these five radishes out. Such colours! I am always amazed by the vibrancy of home-grown produce. It might be a little bit battered, bruised, insect eaten and inconsistent but at least it wasn't harvested months ago and left in a cold store before being transported in a truck across half the country (or further) and then left to languish under fluorescent lighting waiting for someone to buy it and consume what's left of it's nutrients... The other day I saw Mexican garlic for sale at the supermarket - and no Australian garlic option. I went home and looked up how far it had come: almost 14,000km (8699 miles). That's a long way for a bulb of garlic.


I scrubbed them off and sliced off the end off a couple to taste. They still had that typical spicy radish taste that I remembered, and everyone else in my family refused to try them. But that was eating them raw, and for lunch I fried them off in a hot pan with some butter and sweet soy sauce, and a whole heap of Greenfeast peas and Aquadulce broad beans out of the garden and it was pretty good and not at all 'radishy,' so I think overall radishes deserve a second chance and I'll continue to grow them in the garden. Too easy!


Incidentally, I thought that white radish might have been a ring-in but when I googled 'Easter Egg Radish' I got a tonne of pretty pictures with reds, purples and whites so it seems that's just how they come. Random and bright, can't do much better than that.

Mid-September back garden tour

I have shiny new and uncorrupted camera cards so I am back to my old snap-happy self and to celebrate I'm going to share a dozen or so photos from the (mostly) vegie garden out the back of our house.

We've had a few little harvests lately:

There was a lovely big bok choy (growing in a pot with a baby plum tree).


And the experimental Greenfeast peas had enough fat pods on them to be able to cook enough for a side to dinner for three adults and a pea-'loving toddler.


And there are more peas on their way, although the whole plot is starting to look decidedly lopsided now and I don't anticipate it will last much longer.


There were a couple of baby beetroots (not my forte, not yet anyway!)


I was going to throw all these baby beetroot leaves into a stirfry - since the actual roots were so disappointing but I accidentally left them out in the garden overnight on Monday and it absolutely bucketed down that night and the were beaten down into the ground. Still, I thought the photo was too pretty not to share; those colours! Imagine the vitamins in them!


And, as ever, the rainbow chard is still providing loads of leaves for us for no effort at all on my part. It's not quite as vibrantly coloured as it was when the weather was cooler.


We've got more fruit and veg on it's way too.

There's the Aquadulce broad beans, which are taller than my waist. I have dutifully nipped out the top buds of each plant. Apparently if you don't do this they will not set fruit, and I can say that despite all the flowers over a month ago I didn't see a single bean pod until after I'd done the nipping.


The other broad beans - Bunyard's Exhibition, that I sowed much later - are only around a foot tall but producing flowers already. Now, do I do the nipping now, or let them get taller and then nip them? I always feel like I'm making up this gardening gig as I go along!


And for months and months I have been looking at the purple pepino flowers and moaning that they were doing nothing. And then, suddenly, there are at least a dozen fruit! I theorise that the weather had to warm up enough to bring out the pollinators (feral bees, no doubt). I don't know how long they'll take to ripen, and I don't know what they'll taste like (like 'melon,' I've read), and I don't even know if we'll like them but it will be good to find out!


Some of the recent sowings are doing quite well so far and not too attacked by snails, like these daikon which I'm growing in one of my Styrofoam boxes (the carrots have sprouted too, but are too tiny to photograph).


There's beans doing their thing. These might be butter beans, but I can't remember what I've put where (it is written down though!) For some reason, the beans in the pots sprouted weeks ahead of those in the ground. Maybe because the pots are warmer than the ground?


Oh gosh, I can't remember what these are either! Pumpkins? Cucumbers? Zucchini? Eek! It's a pot luck garden! These were sown in jiffy pots and then transplanted.


And just for fun, I've planted lots of red and yellow sunflowers, and 'black' and white hollyhocks along the fence. I'll write a whole post about this soon, I'm hoping.

The red-flowered sunflower seedlings have red stems and leaf veins too. These were planted in toilet paper tubes filled with seed-raising peat (I love that stuff!) I accidentally left the tube poking a bit above the ground but I'm sure it won't matter. Some bugger of an insect has had a nibble on a number of the sunflower seedlings which is a little bit irritating.


These are tiny baby hollyhocks. Some I planted singly, and some in pairs like these two, in anticipation of some natural attrition!

Seems such a shame that nasturtiums are a weedy nuisance when out in public! They are supposed to be total pest magnets in the vegie patch so it seems contradictory to plant them there, but the idea is that you attract the bugs - aphids especially, but also slugs, snails and caterpillars - to the nasturtiums and not to your vegies. However, I seem to have the healthiest, pest-free nasturtiums out there, and my brussel sprouts are absolutely covered in grey aphids and not fit to speak about (or eat, for that matter, might give the old brussels a miss next year)


It's a very exciting time of year, this ever-lovely Spring.

[and, even better, look at this! A new satellite photo of our little house:



It shows my still unfinished path out the front, the new extension out the back, the water tank which, thanks to the big downpours earlier in the week, now has enough water in it that some comes out when you open the tap, and finally no more huge pine tree! Compare it to this photo back in April:



Woohoo, rolling along quite nicely!]

We'll still have to go to the Green Grocers for...

Rewinding this on July 1st 2011, not because it's a funny post, because, let's face it, I'm not a funny writer, but because quite often in this gardening gig you need to have a sense of humour or you'd give up completely.

We'll still have to go to the Green Grocers for...

... our sweet potato, because, clearly, I've not yet got the hang of growing it!


The sweet potato (kumara) in the background is one we bought from our friendly neighbourhood vegetable wholesaler this afternoon. It was an especially big one, granted. I weighed it and it was 1010 grams. Then I weighed our minute harvest, which is from two plants, and in total the weighed a mere 118 grams.
But nothing is wasted: I scrubbed them clean, and they were tossed whole into the pot with a free range chicken, some kipflers, a lemon and big slug of verjuice, and they tasted so good, so very, very good, that I really, really wished they had done a little better. They were so much brighter and deeper in colour than our bought whopper, and so much more intensely flavoured.
I think the lesson here is that next time, I should do a little more reading and preparation before I plant them, rather than just chucking them in the ground and hoping for the best!

Successes and failures

Remember how I mentioned our corn harvest about a week ago? We ate them last night, and they were delicious. Some were perfect and almost supermarket worthy...

And some were decidedly not! Next year I will shake those stalks more assiduously.

 

And out in the garden? The garlic has sprouted! I can hardly wait until we can harvest these babies (patience, Grasshopper, patience). Not much is more exciting than green shoots!

And the peas-straw peas which sprouted and I let run riot have the prettiest pink, purple, lavender and mauve flowers. Some of them have set peas already, too. Does anyone know if we can eat them? I'm thinking we could, but the question is: are they delicious?