Want to see my vegie garden?

It occurred to me that I've been showing you lots of photos of produce, but nothing to show you where it actually comes from. So today, here is my veggie garden in all it's blazing summer glory. The photos are not fabulous, but that washed out glare is not such an inaccurate representation of mid-summer here in 'Laide. I affectionately call my back garden 'The Shambles,' because it is! One day there'll be proper retaining walls and lawn and so on, but for the time being this is it.

To kick off today's set of terrible photos, I present a Window's Paint diagram of our backyard, next to the latest satellite photo of it. I like to call this one, 'Mama has too much time on her hands.' (Click to zoom so you can actually read the titles!) It's there to give you a rough idea of the layout of the place at the moment.


If you stand on the old patio looking out, this is what you'll see. My patch.


Here near the front is the oldest sowing of baby corn which is running out of steam now, and right in front of that are the eggplants which had the first fruit. The box contains a mostly unsuccessful attempt at sowing carrots when it was much too hot (but it means I have a spare box to fill, woo!) At the very back is my Moorpark apricot, planted in October 2010, which has grown immensely and all of a sudden is taller than I am.


To the left (North) of this bit are my bags of potatoes (behind), and my okra (front).


And behind that, on the patch of ground that will one day be our lawn in between the shed and the water tank, are all of the pots with my little fig trees, citrus, pomegranate, and plums (waiting to go in the ground for our 'real' yard, this winter, maybe?) as well as most of my currant tomatoes, the rhubarb, and a few bigger tomatoes and a variety of randoms like spare strawberries and more beans.


If you step UP the hill here, you'll meet my baby mulberry, look how big he's getting! He was one of my first trees and planted in October 2010.


Behind him, is my fig tree, which whilst not exactly covered in leaves (far from, in fact) is growing us a lovely batch of five figs right now. Yum! This one is a Brown Turkey fig.


Near here are my madly prolific tomatoes (although, slowing down a little now, thank God, was getting very sick of eating them).


And if you stand at the back of the yard, under out half built chicken-coop, this is the view in the other direction. Artichokes blooming in the front, fading sunflowers behind, and just some of the veggie Styrofoam boxes, which currently house a few carrots, the latest batch of bush beans and baby corn, the baby watermelon, the mini-rock melon, and the only successful capsicum bush so far. The tall patch of corn is a mid-season sowing and is just coming into bloom now.


Like these: mini watermelons (well, one!)


And the mini rock melons which are just a little over tennis ball sized.


I also have butternut pumpkins (or butternut squash, as the rest of the world calls it...) scattered throughout the yard in the hope that this year I might actually get one or two of them to eat. This one looks promising...


So that's it (well, not really, just a selection of 'it,' too much and too messy for one post alone.) Next time I'll try a renovation update, since a friend reminded me it's been ages since I've done one, oops!

PS. Just as the tomatoes begin to slow down the zucchinis begin to take over....

General Update

Too many things to write individual posts about, and none would make an especially interesting blog post on their own, so here is a brief update about what's been going on around here:

The tomatoes dried beautifully in the oven overnight. Halved tomatoes needed an extra day of drying, so I quartered the next lot and they dried much faster. I think we're going to invest in a real dehydrator soon, as I hope to have years and years of harvest gluts ahead of me, and I'm just not comfortable leaving the oven on overnight. And the taste? When eaten alone they are, as Chef D put it, 'not that nice,' as they are so intense, but I have been chopping them up and adding them to bread and that's a very good way to eat them and use up quite a lot of tomatoes in one go. Since the toms keep pouring in, my next job is to make and freeze a whole lot of Neapolitan sauce.


I am still trying to grow various things from seeds. The latest to sprout are a whole heap of red onions, and I'm making a last ditch effort to grow melons (Eden's Gem) before the season is out.



And on the house front? We have been painting at last! And that's nearly done, too (inside anyway). And the floor polishing guy has been in and is making our place sparkle, but no photos yet because we can't really go inside while that is happening.


And last but never least, despite her diminutive size, SP is cuter than ever and we are starting to consider 2nd birthday cakes! She has requested a bird cake, specifically :-)

xx

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!

More garlic!

I have harvested the rest of the garlic from MIL's garden. She tells me the pantry now looks like something from an Italian farmhouse, so strung about with garlic that it is. When the garlic has been cleaned of its clinging dirt with a dust-brush, the skins look silken and white streaked with purple. Next year, however, I will plant both early and late-maturing varieties so that it doesn't all need to be harvested at the same time.

As for those gloriously purple flower /seed heads, can anyone tell me if I can do anything with them? Can I plant them for next time, or can we eat them?

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.

Chicken fortress

Continuing on the mammoth updating sessions I have been posting, here's tonight's: Our Chicken Fortress! It's still a work in progress and nowhere near finished yet (as you'll see), but you can see the bones of it at least.

We've never kept chickens before. The total sum of our chicken care experience is one week a few years ago house - and chicken - sitting for friends. Nonetheless, they're on my 'must have' list, and nearly everything I've read about chickens makes me want them. I even know what kind I want (I want to say 'cultivar' because I work in a nursery... what's the word if it's an animal, 'breed,' right?) Anyway, I'd like to get some Wynadottes if I can, because they're apparently quite docile, good layers etc, and pretty too (I'm not really an animal lover, I like 'em small and manageable if they're close up, anything bigger than a cat I keep at arms length).

I've been reading books on chook care, but the part that worries me the most is foxes. Most Australians will know they're an introduced pest, but the amount of environmental damage they have done to our native wildlife and agriculture is staggering. It's estimated that foxes are responsible for environmental and agricultural impacts valued at $200 million each year. $200 MILLION! (Click here for reference). Ecological impacts aside, there's nothing a fox likes better to eat than a chicken, and I've read and heard far too many stories about foxes eating urban chickens lately. Driving around our area at night we will often see foxes scurrying off into the undergrowth on the side of the road so they are very much an active presence in our area.

Anyway, bearing that in mind, we're attempting to build an impenetrable coop for our chickens. 'How to fox proof your chicken coop' was one of the most useful articles we read with regards to choosing appropriate mesh for our fortress. Although a lot of our coop (so far) has been built with recycled materials we did have to buy all the wire, and it has not been as cheap an exercise as we'd hoped, but I'm sure it will be worth it.

The coop is going in the back right hand corner of our yard. It will have a boxed in part for sleeping and egg-laying, and an enclosed open part for the chickens to roam about in when I don't want them destroying my veggie garden. As much as possible, I want to let them roam about the yard too but appreciate it's not always practical (I value my seedlings too highly!)

So, here goes: progress so far!

Chef D measuring up (note ginormous peastraw bale! It's slowly shrinking as I make inroads on the mulching). Can hardly wait until the piles of renovating rubbish can go... ahem.


Chef D cutting recycled hardwood timbers: (These timbers are part of the batch our neighbour gave us to use to say thank you for getting rid of the pine tree. The straighter ones are under our floorboards, and these were the leftovers.)


Miss SP 'helping' with the building:


Just to prove I really exist, here is a rare photo of me. I'm only putting it up because I look relatively normal in it...


This whole structure will be eventually enclosed with wire mesh. It's quite big, but we hope to keep between 4-8 hens in it at one time over the years.


And here's the beginning of the fox proofing. Don't worry, the wires go more than partway across the base! The mesh size, by the way, is 100mm squares and 2mm thick. It goes roughly 30cm past the edge of the coop (like a skirt) and we're digging it into the ground so that the chickens can still scratch around over the top. We've started putting the wire 'walls' in with a smaller mesh size but I haven't got a picture of that part yet. Probably because it was a total pain to do - literally! - as the hardwood is so hard to hammer the nails into (odd, that) and wiring the floor wire to the wall wire was much harder to do than I thought it would be and I ended up hot, bothered, scratched, and grumpy by that endeavour and I'm only halfway around so far.


So that's where our chicken coop is so far. I don't know when we'll get time to continue work on it, Chef D tells me he's working every day from now until Christmas Eve, and I have an 'active' toddler to look after who makes doing anything other than running about after her near impossible. But, since we're not back home yet, our chickens-of-the-future don't need a completed coop until next year some time (early next year, fingers crossed!)