Harvest Monday - 4th Feb 2013

Well I finally have a range of produce to report on. While the pickings are tiny compared to this time last year, the move, the record breaking heat, the newly-made beds and the lack of water have meant that it's been a tough season.But enough explanations - here is what I have picked this last week.

Cucumbers and eggplants. The cucumbers are small but regular and very crunchy. The eggplants are tiny - no doubt from the stress of travel and transport, but there are eggplants!

Lots of mint. I pick a handful most days for salads and Middle-Eastern inspired dishes.

Rocket. I didn't take any photos of the rocket I have picked but again I am pretty much picking rocket every second day. Here is a picture of my rocket patch.

Radish. I's be picking more of these beauties but they seem to be a favourite of the raiding Wallaby.

Tomatoes. Tiny amounts of tiny tomatoes. Broad Yellow Ripple Currant and Brown Berry. The heat has pretty much wiped the plants out.

Zucchini. Just this one from my second Greenskin plant. There will be more.

And the first of the peach pick. I'm ripening some inside and some on the tree. These were too low on the tree within tempting reach of the raiding Wallaby.

Pilfered apples - These apples were not grown on the property, just a neighbour kindly brought them over after having gleaned them from the roadside. I was naturally delighted! They are better for cooking than eating. So far they have made an apple cake and tomorrow they are going into my Tomato Chilli Jam.

I am contributing the to Daphne's Harvest Monday. I am sure others will have much better produce to admire. Pop over and take a look.

Being handy - dibber, dripper, detector

I am not very handy really.  I am a fair sewer and cook, but when it comes to non-fabric or food related things, well, I am pretty hopeless.

Rightly or wrongly I usually ask the lad to do these things for me for which I am very grateful, but over the last couple of days I have done some of my own (minor) handywork.

Fixing the ancient dibber

This ancient dibber is a lovely thing. I love how old and warn the wood is, but probably becasue it is so old and dry, it had split into three pieces. I set to with no more nails and had it fixed in a jiffy! Pathetic achievement really, but I am glad to have the ancient dibber back in use. I think it needs a good oiling - it could do with a little love and care - my next project.

Making a mint bed

In making the washing machine fit, we removed an old laundry basin. It was too good not to re-use and I have redeployed it as a mint bed. It's always good to contain your mint, it can really sprawl!

Propped on a few bricks, I placed it so that the tap sits above it so any drips from the tap run straight into the tub, yet there is still room for the hose to connect.

But wait , that's not all. In addition, I made it high enough and left enough space for an ex-fruit juice bottle cut down  to fit under the drainage hole to catch any water that drains for re-use. (Gosh, brilliant Louise!). Come on, I know you are impressed!

...

Things are always better when the come in threes right?  So my third home handywoman  achievement was...?

Making a yabby detection system 

Yabbies are fresh water crayfish. They live in dams and creeks and they are delicious. I am planning on yabbies for Christmas dinner but are there any in my dams? I needed a yabbie detection system to find out.

We seem to be on a re-use theme here, right? So I have re-deployed one of my ex-work black tights, a bit of string, two rocks and a bit of old meat to make my yabby detector. (Best use for a work stocking I have ever heard!).

Put meat in the toe-end of one leg of the stocking and add a small rock to weigh it down. Put a not in the body bit of the stocking and tie a bit of string onto the toe-end of the other leg. Fling into the dam making sure you hold onto the string. Tie the string down onto a bigger rock and secure on the bank of the dam.

Tomorrow I am going to pull it in and see if any yabbies have found the meat. Apparently they get their claws caught in the stocking.

Are you impressed? I am! What home handiness have you  showed recently? I am sure that your achievements are move impressive than mine.

Harvest Monday - 15th October 2012

I was silly... I posted about much of my harvest this week last Friday.

It was a Friday thing... a post work stroll thru the patch and the sort of ritual of picking that helps to soothe the working week away  - and it was such a good picking that I had to post about it then and there so plenty more produce shots there.

But to cover off  the whole week, last week I picked quite a nice stash of produce. Here it is.

• 1 main head of broccoli
• lots of broccoli side-shoots
• 2 big heads of cauliflower
• several bunches of new baby radishes
• the last of the snowpeas
• lots of herbs - oregano, thyme, parsley, basil, mint and bay
• 1 fennel bulb
• lettuce leaves
• rocket leaves
• celery leaves
• a solid bunch of celery stalks
• a bunch of young sweet beetroot
• a big handful of  lemon leaves

I also raided my stashes of the chillies from the freezer from last summer's glut, opened  new jars of my rocket fuel chilli sambal and my sweet chilli and tomato jam and dug into the home made strawberry jam and lemon marmalade.

These ingredients have gone into all sorts of food:

• broccoli oreccietta 
• lamb kofte with mint and wrapped in lemon leaves
• roast beetroot and mint salad - one of Suburban Tomato's recipes that is now a regular on my menu
• fresh green salad with loads of different leaves, herbs and fennel
• radishes dipped into hummus
• vegetable juices with quite peppery celery
• piles of steamed snow peas

It's a nice time in the garden and on the plate. I am contributing this to Daphne's Monday Harvest list, there will be plenty of produce to look at there soon, when the earth turns a little more.

What are you enjoying eating at the moment with your home growns?

Monday Harvest - 24 Sept 2012

My pickings at the moment reflect where we are in the season.

My second planting of winter crops is now coming into maturity. This week I picked, one decent sized cauliflower, 3 smallish heads of broccoli  (just one in this picture) and the first picking of my third crop of snow peas.

The other things I picked  reflect the start of the summer crops.

These are trimmings really rather than pickings, which will go into a salad for tonight's dinner.

I thinned my beetroot a little - you can see that the roots had started to form. I will eat these leaves.

I also took the best leaves off the celery. Do you like celery leaves in your salads?

Then I trimmed my lime green lettuce plants, snuck a little off the baby curled parsley and picked some mint.

I think this will all make a great green salad with some semi-dried tomatoes a crumble of fetta and a slick of vinaigrette.

What are you picking?

I am contributing this to Daphne's Dandelions Monday Harvest.

Harvest Monday - 27th Aug

Pickings are slim at the moment. To make it even worse, this week I picked the last of my spring onions, fennel and snow peas.

As ever, the snow peas have been a delight. They have supplied greens every second day for 4 months.  Most of the time we eat them just steamed and sometimes in the yummy Chinese-inspired  meals that the lad makes.

Very often the snow peas don't even make it in the back door.  Standing and the crop eating them as picked is a special pleasure.

As for the citrus, the lemons are still coming  but I also picked the last of my limes - some were very small.

Herbs are fairing better. In the last week I picked loads of thyme and rosemary  for all sorts of dishes.

I also got stuck into the mint which is starting to wake up again after the winter slow down.

Next year I really must plan better so I don't have such a hungry gap. Bring on spring!

More harvests are over at Daphne's place.

Potting, raising, inspecting

The weather here has been a bit crazy lately.  We went through a patch of beautiful spring-like days in their low 20s and then, last week, that changed.  The wind blew in and brought winter back, trees came down and the new seedlings that had emerged during the warm spell, shivered in their soil.  They did - I could see them moving and could see their goosebumps too!

Across Sydney trees came down and branches snapped off and leaves blew. We had no damage here, but I hope other Sydney bloggers kept their trees and electricity. While it's still coldish today, the wind has dropped and the forecast says we are to return to warmer sunniness.

Today I potted up, raised seeds and inspected the progress.

Potting up 
I potted up some mint and some curled parsley. I also moved some self-seeded violas around.

I always have violas in the vegetable patch.  I just think they are so pretty and, because they self-seed so easily, they just keep coming back sometimes in slightly different colour combinations than last year.

The self-seeded violas invariably pop up in odd places -  little corners and cracks between the patch boarders, in the patch pathway, or in the middle of the patch where you'd want to plant your veggies.

So digging them out and moving them around or potting them up becomes pretty essential.

I must say that one of my favourite things to do in the garden is dead head the violas... strange hey?  There is something very meditative about removing the spent flowers to make sure the flowers continue. Do you like dead heading?

Raising seed
I also started raising some basil, long cayenne chillies, lemon balm, dill and zucchini.

I must say I have grown fond of zucchini (is that a pun?). They can take up a huge amount of space and can be almost scarily productive, and you can wonder what to do with them... but last summer I decided to get into finding  zucchini recipes I liked and had some success ( and it wasn't that hard).

I am kind of looking forward now to the next zucchini glut so that I  can make make those recipes again and perhaps find others I like (any suggestions of your favourite zucchini recipes?).

Being such an easy vegetable to grow, once you do find things you like to eat with the glut, for me including them in the patch becomes essential. But I know others feel differently.

Inspecting
I also looked around the patch a little... things are happening.

The espaliered Tahitian limes are flowering like crazy.  I can see that, if some of the limes don't drop off, I am going to have to take some fruit off.

My relatively recently purchased blueberries first fruit are starting to swell.  The bees love these plants and are doing a good job of pollinating!

And the pests are turning up -  sorry for this blurry photo, but amongst the blur you can see the black aphids on my chives. I spent some time squashing them with my fingers.

That's where I am up to, what is getting going in your patch - fruit, flowers, pests?

Slim pickin's

today's lime pick - two big fat juicy ones

Picked

• parsley
• spring onions
• lemons
• limes
• mint

Not much too pick at the moment, just a few regulars, but enough to contribute to some of our meals.

Today David made tabbouleh to accompany our lunch of flat bread, baba ghanoush and kofta. Yum.  David makes a  mean tabbouleh and it's one of those salads that can come mostly from the garden -  parsley, mint, spring onions and lemon (and tomatoes if you have them -  we don't at the moment). When all else fails or when nothing else is ready to pick you can almost always pick yourself enough for tabbouleh. We always have burghul in the cupboard for those moments.  David says tabbouleh invigorates him... is it the mint I wonder? or all that iron-rich parsley?

The other salad of the day is a  pea, mint and feta salad one that I love.

Pea, mint and feta salad
The original is a 'Jamie' - you know who I mean -  and comes from his Jamie Oliver - Naked Chef book  that David bought me when we lived in England.  There was something about Jamie's food when we were in  England that reminded me of home (Australia).  I think it was the freshness of the food, the no nonsense attitude and the bright colours of the pictures and perhaps the Italian influence that we'd routinely find in Sydney and Melbourne as well? 

Anyway, looking back at the recipe now I realise that my version varies quite a lot from his.  Here it is. * from the garden

feta crumbled -  I use half a pack
frozen peas - boiled until just cooked (I like the petite pois)
mint* torn
lemon* juice
olive oil
black pepper

Combine peas and crumbled feta in a bowl, add mint and separately make a lemony vinaigrette add to the salad with black pepper.  Eat while still warmish.

Citrus celebration

Collete the finger lime

Picked

•  mint

I confess, I love all sorts of citrus and if I had more space I'd grow more types.  Sydney is apparently a great climate for citrus, that's what I am told anyway.  I have a lemon, two espaliered Tahitian limes and my newly acquired 'Collete' the finger lime -  an Australian native plant that is becoming a bit of a feature in some restaurants because of their pearly citrus bubbles that pop out when you score their rind. That feature, along with the crazy colours they come in, have made them a bit of a sensation. 'Collette' has a shiny black skinned fruit and dark lime green bubbles. I can't wait till she starts producing although I have been told it can take some time.

As well as her fashionable status, I kind of like the idea that I am growing a tiny little bit of bush tucker...

Here are my citrus.

Here is 'Collette' -  I am enjoying her new growth which is a lovely dark red. She has tiny leaves and monstrous spikes and lives in a pot. She's only little.

Lemon tree, very pretty

This is my lemon, planted in this spot as one of my first gardening acts when we moved here in 2005. I am ashamed to say that I don't know if it is a Lisbon, or Meyer or anything else. It's one of those things I need to pay attention to - varieties.  It doesn't have spikes, if anyone knows what it is I'd be grateful.

It has a bit of a bad case of citrus leaf miner but its doing fine and I can put up with curly leaves.  I have a glue trap hanging up inside the tree in case you were wondering if I grew square lemons!  I have had a few of my fruit stung with fruit fly this year but most of the fruit is completely usable so again it's of little concern and better than spraying. My basil stash is growing beneath it and it (the lemon that is) gets a regular mulch of grass clippings.

I sometimes make this lamb meatball on skewers that uses lemon leaves as the main seasoning, it is just fantastic, you can't imagine how much the citrus flavour goes thru the meat.  I'll put it up here when I next make it.

Tahitian lime

Here is one of my espaliered Tahitian limes - this is the older one. It is currently fruiting quite well despite a stink bug attack earlier this season. I have fruit about to ripen and some babies on the way and  flowers just starting out so I should have a couple of crops to come if I can keep the stink bugs away.

Nearly ready to pick

The leaves are looking like they need a bit of a feed.  It has been such a wet summer I guess they could all do with some iron.

What does everyone else do when their citrus leaves look a little anemic like these ones here?


If I had more space I'd definitely grow a really tart mandarin, and a ruby grapefruit... one day.

Lemon, lime and mint cordial

I have to thank 500m2 and Suburban Tomato for their cordial suggestions for dealing with my lemon glut. I made about 1 litre of cordial using Suburban Tomato's recipe for Lemon and mint cordial, I added a few limes to it as I had some shop bought limes in the fruit basket that needed using up seeing as I will soon have my own crop, otherwise I used the recipe. I love it -  much better than Bickford's! I thought it looked nice in front of my citrus coloured glass that is a feature of our back veranda.

Yesterday's lemon tart and the cordial have reduced my lemon glut to manageable levels now, but more ripen every day.