Category Archives: Who’s Been Busy?

…and then there was Beetroot

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There was beetroot to harvest just a little while ago, and they were all lovely and big, too!

I got just over 1kg of it (that’s 2 pounds for my US friends), which was just enough to try out a pickled beetroot recipe I’d had my eye on for a while. Of course, the beetroot pickling happened at the same time as the cooking of the dinner, as well as some preparation for outings for school etc: why does so much of my canning happen when I’m just so busy I can’t stop to scratch myself? Why not on a sleepy Sunday when not much is happening?

Anyway, after everyone was in bed, and the canner finally got to 94 degrees and stayed there for half an hour, I produced these:

Let me tell you, beetroot pickled with cloves and cumin seed are to die for. There was also a half jar that we’d already hoed into too, but that’s not in the picture… I believe that someone was standing just out of the frame, making noises of appreciation. Yum! We’ve all been gorging on the stuff, and are almost through another jar. Just one to go!

Now we’re trying to figure out where to squeeze in some more beetroot in our bursting veggie patch, because such tasty treats weren’t in our minds when we planned it all out. We were thinking of tomatoes and basil… but that harvest storm is yet to come.

The Catch Up Post

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Hello!

It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Well, there hasn’t been much to talk about. Winter was here. It was long, and cold, and so very, very, very WET. It’s a little surprising how wet it was. I looked up the Bureau of Meteorology, and there was some information there that said it was the wettest June/July period for Melbourne on record. Basically it was so cold and wet – sideways rain, temps not above 6C most days – that we stayed inside, tending the fire and knitting things. (well, the others may have played cards, but I knitted.)

However, looking at some photos of the last little while on my phone, I saw that we had actually made some progress on some tasks… so with out further ado, via dot points and photos, here’s what we’ve been doing:

All that rain made the path to the cars very muddy. After the I-man fell one day and caught himself on one hand to save his suit from being mud-streaked, he snapped. And spent the Queen’s birthday long weekend digging a path bed, laying gravel, and using a whacker plate to compact it down. We’ve now got a path that we love, and MUCH less mud and dirt in the house! Win! (That there’s the Boychild helping. He’s so happy in his raincoat in the mud!)

The path got finished, complete with some winding through the garden, and I planted some lavender that I got at a bargain price from a local nursery to make an informal hedge eventually (that’s the lavender in pots, about to go in, and yes, it was a very rare sunny winter’s day – one of the few we had):

Amusing-shaped vegetables were harvested from the winter vegie patch. This one’s a parsnip. Only a couple were forked and twisted like this, the rest were gorgeously round, fat and just as a parsnip should be. Roasted alongside an organic chook… YUM!

Other things of note:

  • Boychild’s purple sprouting broccoli began to grow actual broccoli! Here are 2 shots: one just starting, and one just at harvest:

  • We’ve been eating masses of broccoli for the last 4 weeks. The plants have gone totally mad, and the side shoots that grow after the central head has been harvested are succulent and delicious, either raw or cooked! Yum!

  • Coco the goat has gone back to our friend’s house, just for a while, until the blackberries grow out of hand again. We’ve booked her back for late September!
  • We are taking the opportunity that a low livestock-to-person ratio offers, and renovating the chook shed. It is a lovely big one, but is not rat and fox proof, and the run is enormous, taking up the heart of our property. We’ve made a plan, and are excited about moving fences, opening up the heart of the place, and finally getting feathered friends again. We love chooks! Hooray! Photos of this are to come, I think it deserves a post all of it’s own.

And now that it’s Spring again, and the sun has been wrestling itself out from behind the rain clouds, I’m sure there’ll be more to tell, and more to show.

 

 

Ooer. It’s a chestnut.

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…or several hundred. The I-man and I were trying to plan the next couple of weeks this morning, because it’s the Easter School Holidays, which means Events! And potential Trips! Yippee!

Unfortunately, we kept being interrupted by two small fry who just couldn’t wait to show us things/tell us about things/ask us to play games Outside, In the Garden despite all entreaties that if we were left alone, we would be planning things that included having Fun. It was to no avail, so we sent them on a mission, expecting them to get distracted and begin playing, after which we would not see them for a good long time.

We were wrong. We sent them down to the bottom of the block with a basket each, and told them to check if there were any chestnuts ready for gathering. Well… within ten minutes they were back, with this:

The chestnuts had taken them a nanosecond to gather, and that was a miniscule portion of those already on the ground. Our children are terrific gatherers. We are very proud. Unfortunately, they haven’t moved on to the processing side of things yet.

The gathering of figs, melons and quinces were a later, collaborative project called, “Harvesting for All the Family: a mandatory, participatory workshop.”

After that, we mowed the paddock, tore out all of the tomatoes and hung them to ripen in the greenhouse, pulled out the spent cucumber plants, planted sugar snap peas and podding peas in their place and planted oodles (metric measurement) of spinach, silverbeet, pak choy and beetroot seedlings in where the tomatoes were. I can barely move, I’m so sore!

We certainly know how to spend a Sunday.

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?)

So much, so soon!

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Wow. It’s only been 14 weeks since we moved into our OKG, but we’ve ripped through some to-do items So. Fast. There are still so many things to do, but it seems odd how much we’ve actually done. I guess it’s because we’re pretty relaxed here, as it’s our long-term base now, and there’s just not the pressure that we felt at our old house to get it all done, yesterday! Less pressure = more efficient, productive work… who would have thought?!

Our achievements so far:

  • Gutting the laundry outbuilding, removing the asbestos (!), re-lining it, repainting it, and re-plumbing it.
  • Going in search of the grease trap, finding there was only an old, broken one and that horrors! it had been bypassed with a solid pvc pipe, that just kind of ended pointing at a path that is a main path to the house…and that was where the water from the shower, bath and kitchen sink drained into. So that’s why there was a swamp on the way to the car… mmm, mmm!
  • Digging in an ag pipe, to take the kitchen and bathroom grey water AWAY from the path, and through some orchard trees that can probably take the excess.
  • Made a mental note to read our product ingredients, to make sure they’re safe for greywater use.
  • Digging in a new grease trap outside the kitchen, in the process discovering the dodgiest kitchen sink plumbing we’ve ever seen
  • Paving around the back door, including around the new grease trap, so that there is not so much mud and dust getting into the house
  • Replacement of the toilet, because we discovered that the pipe to the septic tank was cracked. ‘Nuff said.
  • Epic battles with blackberries as we try to reclaim a garden and outbuildings that are in danger of being eaten by them, and used for sets for the fairytale ‘Sleeping Beauty’. This is a block that should never have been seen as a potential holiday house – who were they kidding?!
  • Got plans for a new shed, and a new home office drawn up by our architect friend, and had them submitted to local council for approval
  • Planted seeds of all sorts of things in preparation for sticking into the garden beds we’re liberating
  • Had weeding help from friends who like to be busy with their hands while we catch up! Yay!
  • Hacked a path through the overgrown front garden to the front door, and dreamed of the rose garden that I will have there one day. One day…
  • Mowed the grass countless times
  • Made very good friends indeed with the whipper snipper
  • Replaced the whipper snipper head… someone thinks they own a brushcutter…!
  • Had our ride on mower go out of action. I’m maintaining that it just looked at our paddock and had a mid-life crisis!
  • Had more rain than we’ve ever experienced at our last house. We are now officially in the area that the weather bureau mean when they say ‘chance of rain’
  • This:
  • Has been tamed, and has now turned into:

One HUGE rhubarb, and lots of seedlings...

  • And we even managed to take an 8 day holiday interstate to visit favourite Aunts, Uncles and cousins!

Watching this garden wake up and bloom through Spring has been like watching a film on fast forward. No sooner do we notice something, and remember to say to each other, “Have you seen the…?” than it is suddenly gone and finished, replaced by the next quick bloom, momentary flare of colour, astounding new growth. Except the blackberries. Always the blackberries…