Monthly Archives: February 2012

Six months…

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We’ve been here six months now. That dawned on me as I was brushing a Boychild’s teeth last night. It was slightly disconcerting, as I feel that we’ve really slowed down on the work that needs and wants to be done around here.

Canvassing opinion from some friends though assured me that we have made more great changes, and if we feel like we’ve slowed, and that the weeds are slowly creeping back, we can blame it on things like Christmas! and School Holidays! Spending Time with the Children! and Getting Ready for School to Start!! So it’s all good, really.

I can’t help feeling a little nostalgic for the early days of discovery – I know I have 6 more months, and then I will have been here, breathed this air, for the turn of a year. I will have seen the moods of a year pass in this place. Watched the sun stream from East to West each day for 365 of them. Or 366 this year. 6 more months, and then we can do some of the bigger things we’re planning; the infrastructure that needs to be taken down/shifted/put up. The plantings we’re dreaming of. Decide whether that home office we now have a permit for actually needs to be built or not…

What I do know is true is this: I fall in love with this place anew every day. It only takes a step outside to remind me how lucky and grateful I am to be able to call a place like this home. It is pretty shabby, and run-down, and the garden feels like a constant avalanche of weeds, produce and work, and I doubt that the edges will ever be neat, but there is something indefinably lovely about the whole thing. The ‘feel’ of it, which has gotten under my skin. I’m glad, and hope it never leaves.

Harvest Storm!

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We have been harvesting such a lot from our garden lately.

This pic above was taken when the bounty was just beginning; when there were small zucchinis, and scant handfuls of beans. When I could pick a bunch of lemon verbena leaves and know that I would dry them carefully, not touching each other, and turning them often before laying them in a glass jar and screwing on the lid with a maternal satisfaction. A leisurely stroll in the garden meant picking a bunch of flowers, too, for the sheer joy of it, and for having beauty sitting about the house.

Now, however, our kitchen table more often than not looks like this:

What you see there in the pic are lebanese x parisian pickling cucumbers (we’ll cover that little slip up in another post…), mini white cucumbers, scarlett runner beans, avocadoes, nashi, baby corn, grapefruit, rhubarb and gadzooks. Or at least that’s what you say when a zucchini that size is suddenly sitting in your well-kept and genteel zucchini patch. These beauties are lebanese zucchinis, and we’re thinking of making a dugout canoe with the next one we find.

So that volume sitting on the table? That’s EVERY DAY, folks! What do you do with so many cucumbers?! I know, I’m totally blessed. This is what we always wanted, a garden that can feed us… but the learning what to do with it, and the total non-plussed feeling I get sometimes when I look at the combination of things coming into the kitchen and wonder ‘what do I make with all of THIS for dinner?’ is a little overwhelming sometimes.

That pile above is still sitting on my kitchen table as I speak, astounding me with the beauty and abundance that it represents. But also, a little guilt has started creeping in. What if I don’t get to it in time?

Harvest Storm, we’ve dubbed it, and to keep up we’re running as fast as we can.

So I made jam…

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Apricot, it was, from fruit my mum harvested from her tree…

I used an American recipe, which called for less sugar, and then said to use water-bath canning to preserve the jam. I’d always just made jam the good ole Aussie way – equal parts fruit & sugar, cook to buggery and then ladle into sterile jars, screw on the tops and hope it vaccum seals… This was a new experience! And a good one. We now have apricot jam that you can actually taste the apricots in, rather than the sugar ruling the flavour. Yum!

And then I must have snapped and lost my tiny mind in some way, because I made:

L-R: tomato relish, canned nectarines, pickled zucchini (in tall jars at the back), and in front of them are dill pickles (cucumbers!). All but the tomatoes were from our garden, and were sitting gradually subsiding on our kitchen table, causing me anguish and guilt. There. Take that, produce avalanche!!

Of course, I also did it in the week that school went back for Girlchild, and I had school supplies to get for Boychild, and there were eleventy million other things to do… and did I mention that it was HOT? Well it was. So I canned at night, and muttered about the heat and humidity and did prep work for it all during the day, and sat watching the Vacola canner burble away into the night, wishing that my kitchen came with built-in foot masseur. (Perhaps I should put it on the list for the one-day upgrade?)