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!

Five Sri Lankan Oddities

1. Sri Lankans like to use place-mats and coasters.
2. Meals are universally enormous.
3. Double bed sheets must be nearly impossible to find, because beds are nearly always made up with two single sheets arranged vertically. The sheets are often folded into origami-like patterns as well.
4. Smoking is unusual.
5. I've not yet seen  single child selling or touting anything. I think kids here are actually in school or playing at home. This is a refreshing change!

Five things which are the same everywhere throughout tropical Asia:

1. Stray, mangy, emaciated dogs.
2. Terrible roads, open drains, bad or non-existent plumbing.
3. Dragging poverty in some areas (though no one here that I've seen so far seems to actually be starving...)
4. Bus drivers with death wishes.
5. Bananas, papaya, mango, pineapple, rice...

I had a photo too, but Blogger doesn't want to play today...

I won't name names...

I knew this hotel was dodgy and chose it (online) because of it's proximity to the airport in Kuala Lumpur. We three (four?!) are on our way to Sri Lanka for a short holiday, and until recently our flight to Colombo left ridiculously early in the morning so I wanted to be close. The flight time has since be changed to 11am and there is now no need to be out in the sticks of KL at all, but nevertheless, here we are.

We have stayed in plenty of shoddy places before. And it's not like this place is particularly decrepit, really. First impressions were not great: the building is a  Classic Tropical Concrete construction, painted maroon and green. The corridors are painted an insipid lime green with chocolate brown doors and trim. Our room follows the lime green and brown theme. We seem to be on the edges of some kind of derelict estate and were not keen to explore further than making a loop around the block to find the only restaurant open (but busy, at least) for a quick dinner of ordinary nasi goreng and mee goreng. Almost all of the buildings are deserted and in a state of disrepair, featuring broken sidewalks, weeds, and even half-grown trees sprouting out of gaps in the concrete.
Still, our room is clean and dry, has hot water and electricity, beds, a TV... far more than we've had in many places before. So I'm not complaining about our hotel, as such, although it was exorbitantly priced for something so ordinary. 

Anyway, enough of all that. All things being even, this time tomorrow we should be eating dinner in Negombo, Sri Lanka, by the beach, and deciding where we are going to go after that. We're half backpacking it around the country, as in going with the wind as much as travelling with a toddler will allow. We have a rough idea of where we want to go, and are just going to get people to point us in the right direction. Our girl turns three years old in a week, and we're hoping her birthday involves elephants somehow.

Front fence revamp #2

So, the long awaited update! I get there eventually...

When last I posted, I was busy pulling up daggy lamb's ears and some Lomandras I was never happy with, and replacing them with a group of small, native ground covering plants (lots of daisies, plus a few ring-ins). I'm happy to report that most of my new flower patch is doing quite well. We have had a bit of a break in the hot weather recently with milder days and even a little bit of rain and the garden is loving it (as am I). A special mention here to my Helichrysum rutidolepis ('pale everlasting daisy'). It's a local species and classified as Threatened, and apparently it likes it in my front yard - with it's dripper irrigation and thick layer of pea straw mulch - because the few plants I put in have rocketed along, tripling in size in three weeks. Woohoo! Now, if only the rest of the plants would do the same thing...

Photo #1: Long shot of the front yard. The 'gap' at the front is actually a transplanted Poa lab and Scaevola 'mauve clusters,' which are still considering whether or not they are going to join the party.

Photo #2: Helichrysum rutidolepis going gangbusters.

Front fence revamp.

Those lamb's ears? They're doing nothing for me, so out they come, starting today. They're going to be replaced with an all-native flower border (so I'm calling it).

There are a number of little native plants right up again our fence already, including:

Brachyscome multifida var. diliata
B. 'Break O Day'
B. 'Pacific Sun'
Dampiera rosmanifolia
D. dysantha
Laurentia 'blue stars' (annual)
Chrysocephalum apiculatum prostrate form
Ajuga australis
Helichrysum scorpiodes
Wahlenbergia stricta
Billarderia cymosa (climber) and
Clematis microphylla (climber)

Today I'm planting a couple more Brachyscomes, Dampiera diversifolia, Halgania cyanea, Wahlenbergia communis and Helichrysum rutidolepis.

I will add a few more updated photos at the end (as well as a spelling and grammar check, which I can't do on my phone!)

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 :)