It’s late winter here in Sydney, but starting to feel like spring.
The multi-graft fruit-tree is already setting fruit, and the citrus trees are budding like crazy. We’re starting to plan some seedlings, and keeping a watchful eye on the asparagus beds.
The lettuces that have sustained us all winter are starting to succumb to slugs (and high winds), but the broccoli, snow peas and chills are going strong, and we are still harvesting tons of asian greens. It’s all good in the garden!
(Yes, it has been MANY moons since I last posted, but I’m planning to lift my game for spring. New growth all round.)
We planted out the herb hedge, the comfrey, and some silverbeet, ruby chard & rocket today. There was also a festival of feeding & mulching, & I sowed more ‘good bug mix’ under the frangipani.
We’re expecting a lot of rain over the next couple of days, so I didn’t plant beans… But they’re on the list for when the weather dries out a bit.
We’re getting ready for planting out now, so we did some clearing in the front. Two out of three potato bags seemed to be dying back, so we harvested them as new potatoes.
The sweet potato vines didn’t get much sun over winter, so they had pretty much died off, too. Mr B forked through & got lots of baby sweet potatoes… We’ll keep the greens for re-planting.
I sadly had to pull out my red cabbage – it was hearting, but was so massacred by bugs (and covered in caterpillar eggs) that I decided to sacrifice it for the good of the rest of the brassicas.
In addition to the potatoes & sweet potatoes, we harvested lots of broccoli & silverbeet. I also cleared out most of the rocket (now bolted), though I left some flowering rocket & tatsoi to re-seed. We still have great crops of snow-peas, kavalo nero, lettuce, silverbeet & parsley going strong, and the garlic is coming along nicely too.
My dad is coming for dinner tomorrow night, & we’re looking forward to feeding him a lovely new potato salad. Today’s harvest of greens will be eaten for dinner tonight, but there’s plenty more where that came from.
Working at home today, I took advantage of the rain to feed the veggie beds with pelleted chook manure – as I look out the window, I can see it’s being watered in nicely.
Did another bulk shop this week too – 5 kilos of arborio rice, a kilo of fair trade coffee, 2 kilos of tahini and a kilo of quinoa from Honest To Goodness. The quinoa is Australian grown, and has to be washed to prevent bitterness (unlike some imported quinoa). I bought a kilo to try it, and if I like it, I’ll buy 5 kilos next time. It’s not cheap, but it’s organically grown in Australia, and given the current world economic rumblings, I’m very happy to support local farmers.
In celebration of the approach of Spring, we’ve started 6 Tiny Tim tomato seeds in the mini-greenhouse.
We also cleared out the front beds under the palm trees on the weekend, and dug through some sheep manure.
Like magic, my Green Harvest parcel arrived, and we planted out the galangal & some ginger (plus one experimental cassava cutting) straight away.
The other cassava cuttings will go out back, along with some more ginger. I’ll need to get the turmeric & comfrey potted up this weekend, so we can plant them in a month or so.
I’m especially happy to be starting to work through some of the plantings I planned in my permaculture design course. It really helped me past some of my indecisiveness around planting. It may not all work out perfectly, but we won’t know until we try!
I also fed & mulched the pomegranate & fig tree, & weeded & mucched the asparagus. i’m going to give the whole veggie bed a big sprinkling of pelleted chook poo & some seaweed tonic on the weekend, too.
Filed under: budgeting, gardening, Uncategorized | Tags: budgeting, independence days
I can’t take credit for this, it comes courtesy of the fabulous Miser Extraordinaire Mimi, from Simple Savings. I’ve copied her instructions below, though I am only using 700mls of vodka and 9 lemons to start off. This was a great way to use up the zest from the batch on lemon cordial I made thanks to our harvest from MrB’s auntie’s prolific lemon tree. I’ll collect an assortment of 250ml bottles between now and Xmas, and give the limoncello as gifts. We’ll drink the cordial.
Recipe for the Limoncello Sensazionale
Ingredients:
1 litre vodka…cheap is fine
12 organic or home grown lemons (spray free)
For the sugar syrup used later:
4 cups sugar
6 cups water
Equipment:
Large open mouthed jar with airtight lid. A spaghetti storage jar with a swing top lid is ideal.
Sharp vegetable peeler
Saucepan for making sugar syrup
Method:
Peel the yellow peel from the lemons, being careful not to get any of the white pith as it will make the limoncello bitter. Pile these into the jar, and add the vodka. Leave in a cool, dark place for 14 days, giving the mix a swirl every couple of days. The liquid will gradually turn yellow and the peel will fade.
After 14 days, strain the mixture through a clean, damp Chux or some muslin, into a large bowl or jug.
Make the sugar syrup by bringing the 6 cups of water to a simmer and adding the 4 cups of sugar. Stir until dissolved and allow to cool.
Add the cooled sugar syrup to the lemon vodka, and mix well.
Rebottle as desired. You can put in a little extra vodka at this point if you like. This will increase your yield, but I would only do it to top up bottles, not to dilute it or you will lose the flavour.
This recipe works equally well with limes, blood orange or valencias.
Make sure you put a tag on it to say how it’s consumed.
“Limoncello should be stored in the freezer, and enjoyed well chilled. It will not freeze. Enjoy as a liqueur or mixed with soda or lemonade”
Filed under: Uncategorized
Garden:
Plant broad beans & radishes
Feed fruit trees
Kitchen:
Make lemon cordial with lemon’s from MrB’s auntie’s tree
Start limoncello (steep lemon peels in vodka)
Make chilli black beans from beans I cooked today in the thermal cooker
And… Do my permaculture homework!
Filed under: food, gardening, independence days, Uncategorized | Tags: food, gardening, independence days
I’ve never really dealt with a large quantity of green tomatoes before, but my January planted Amish Paste tomatoes were showing definite signs of wilt. The cooler weather means they’re taking a long time to ripen (despite being up against a warm fence all day), and the flavour is pretty bland when they do.
Consequently, I decided to pull them out, & plant broad beans instead. The three plants yielded over 3 kilos of green tomatoes.
This prompted a fast google for green tomato recipes, and a big chopping session. I made a lovely pot of green tomato soup, tweaking the recipe I found on the gardening site in the hyperlink.
I also made some super intensely flavoured green tomato chutney, which I tweaked from a recipe on the same site. I may have gone a little overboard with the cracked coriander seed & the scoop of molasses I added to bump up the flavour of the white sugar I used instead of brown… but it was a very tasty experiment.
Filed under: independence days, learning, Uncategorized, vegan eating | Tags: food security, independence days, preparedness, vegan eating
Sharon Astyk has a great post on her blog, with links to lots of her great, introductory posts on food storage, plus a lovely introductory post by Kathy Harrison.
I can wholehearted recommend their books on the subject, too: Independence Days (Astyk), and Just in Case (Harrison). I recently bought a secondhand copy of Apocalypse Chow, by Jon and Robin Robertson, which specifically caters to vegans, and seems more suited to shorter term food storage planning. I prefer that older version to their revised edition, re-badged as Vegan Unplugged. The newer book seems to me to be even more US specific, and not as useful for Australians (ie focuses heavily on a particular US brand of dried food). That said, the Vegan Unplugged website (link above) is well worth a look!
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: food security, preparedness, visions of the future
The recent cyclones & floods here, plus the political upheaval in the Middle East, seems to have a lot of people thinking about food security. Here’s a very interesting overview (with audio) from the Australian School of Business – Selling off Australia: Where Food Security Hits the Hotplate. Here’s a quote from the article:
Ian Dunlop, an advisor on governance and sustainability, is also watching the race between governments and private interests to acquire arable land and water around the world. These present big investment opportunities for hedge funds, he notes. A former chair of the Australian Coal Association and chief executive of the Australian Institute of Company Directors with wide experience in the international energy industry, Dunlop believes conventional market forces will be inadequate to handle the problem of food security without the world getting into trouble. “Relying on market forces is guaranteed to build a major conflict over the availability of food around the world in the next few decades,” he says.”Relying on conventional market forces will result in the wealthy winning, prices going through the roof and will create the framework for a major conflict.”
When the CEO of the Institute of company directors advises against relying on market forces, you know something big is shifting.
Ms Betterhome 