Chicken a la King

The chickens on order are gals not blokes; the royal title 'King' refers to the quality of their new abode; it's a palace.
 All this space for three birds who want an upgrade to the good life, not The Good Life with Tom and Barbara in which programme they would probably get eaten.

We are back in the city and we know it. The boys have vague memories of seeing birds wrung, beheaded, plucked and trussed en masse and I well remember the fabulous flavour. You knew you were eating real meat. However, in this instance we would know we were eating our pets...

Let me talk you through the many features:

• The rooves both  lift off 
• The enclosed coop detatches . It can be positioned on either side of the covered run. 
• The nesting box projects to the front with lift up lid for easy access.  
• There is a perch inside for sleeping comfort.
• A little door on the right enables us to easily reach in and out.
• The intention is that the house can be moved along the jungle strip until it is cleared. After that I suspect it will stay put.

From the back, you can just  see it is in front of the raspberries so they will gain some welcome shelter from the wind.

Moving along, a quick before and after, the site of the new tunnel house. We have the flexi curves, whatever they are called, and three of the four standards are left from the old glasshouse to attach things to. Tomatoes are growing relentlessly so march on, march on. 

One of the shortages with a new garden is soil suitable for planting rootcrops. I've begun with beetroot, carrot and parsnip in a borderline spot.Today the prevailing menace has been caught on camera - Katie cat scratching out seedlings  or napping on top of any newly weeded area. Have to start spiking key areas of the garden.

Do we all have a good recipe for carrot cake? Someone asked me for this one the other day. It  is fool proof, not oily or too sweet and makes two loaves if you want to have it that way.

Carrot Cake

1 C oil
1/3 C water
3 C wholemeal flour
1 t baking soda
1 t cinnamon
4 eggs
2 t baking powder
pinch salt
1 1/2 C brown sugar
2 heaped cups grated carrot

Icing
50 g soft butter
100g cream cheese
rind of 1 lemon
1 1/2 C icing sugar

1. Beat eggs, oil, water together. 
2. Add to remaining ingredients.
3. Bake about 1 hr at 160 C as loaves. Possibly a bit longer as a large cake. 
4. Icing. Beat everything together and spread on cooled cake. Have used chopped dried apricot, peel, and pumpkin seeds on top.

'Build it and they will come'

It was easy enough to start a few pottles of seed off inside and move them about to catch the sun but once I potted them on there was always going to be a problem...



Bill came home from sailing to find the problem, and then build a solution down in the garage. The trusses fit onto a compost frame. It is lightweight and easy to lift off.




I covered the current compost heap which was still warmish, with a wheelbarrow of grass clippings and a layer of cardboard. Cardboard also around the sides to keep out the wind. The plastic has steamed up a little with this cold weather; a good sign. I'm hardly going to start growing pineapples but it will boost the plants a little.



I have Siberia and Galina, those two that you thought would be good for Dunedin Mum, and Moneymaker and a black cherry tomato: feeling optimistic there. A little like Field of Dreams , 'plant the seeds and the tunnel house will come.'

I will end up replanting about 75% of the front bank I think. Am leaving in some of the taller hebes to shelter new plants,  quite a few of which are peices or cuttings of the old ones.Notice how nice and clear the path is. It became so overgrown that you had to brush through plants to get to the front door (no fun in the rain) or worse, visitors tripped on the overgrowth.

The dwarf NZ Toe Toes ( new plants below) died off in the centre but threw out lots of vigourous side shoots first. It figures that any successful plant must have a back-up plan.  They were also easy to pull out which secures their future.  I will put in one or two again. I've managed to 'gift' most of the rest of these away. The remaining debris is on a long-term compost heap.

Here's the  little nursery of cuttings. Some of these are  hebes that didn't survive so I'm pleased I can start again with them, for free. Others are cuttings from the cemetery. I didn't think there would be any ownership issues and the plants there generally have to thrive on neglect.

 

Cut and Come Again

The most  relevant question for any gardener must be,

 'What is in the garden at the moment?' 

or even better, 

'What are you eating from the garden at the moment?'

This is something that non-gardeners don't know: it is one thing to grow it, another to eat it and you are always looking to bring the two together as perfectly as possible.
I planted  purple sprouting brocolli in late summer for the first time and when it started to throw out these spindly shoots I wondered if I would bother with it again. Cancel that thought.

 

Run over the plants with a sharp knife, or snap the shoots off,  and harvest the lot. Maybe about 5 days later do the same again and on and on and on  it goes, throwing out new shoots from nowhere. And in the meantime, the price of brocolli and cauliflower in the supermarket are just about equal to a small chicken. Timing perfect.
 I chop bunches into three even lengths to make it easy to eat, steam it, add a little butter, s & p. Children eat it; the highest recommendation.
The purple goes to a grey green as it cooks; not as bright green as brocolli. It is strange that any cooking water that is drained off is purple.

 

Pickings are lean in the garden otherwise, in case you are imagining a self-satisfied smile, although I am beginning to remember all the fairly edibles I haven't documented, like the 'Onion Weed Experiment': Failed. That's something to look forward to hearing about...
Meanwhile, parsely, chives, mint and thyme are the most useful remnants, and the rhubarb. I would take photos but the camera's batteries have just fainted on me so that's all for next time and I will also put up an after shot of the hebe massacre below.

I think this front garden was about 10 years old this year.  In that time the cabbage trees left their neighbours in the dust,  the hebes grew old and lost their vigour and some plants like the miniature toi-toi died and threw out new shoots. I have dug out this hebe stump  in the foreground, although remarkably it did come away, and replaced it with something size appropriate that won't need annual pruning to keep it in check. Of course I thought I was doing that the first time. 

the roast with the most

Welcome family to the blog, just stretching my blog muscles and dipping my toe back in the water. There were a few technical problems to overcome, and computer access - breaching the teenager shield, will be an ongoing challenge.

As you can see we took the coffee nook with us and set it up in the kitchen corner, business as usual.
I've put the kitchen cupboard on parade for the minute because a surprising number of people walk into the kitchen and throw open the cupboard doors for a look.

I am  starting this garden from scratch in many ways, which will make for an interesting journey and next post I'll put in some overview and then begin to document progress.  Meantime here is one of those garden treasures that waited for us five years, and flourished, almost becoming a garden nuisance... horseradish.

Like all rootcrops, it is a great one to dig in Autumn. The tops die down over winter and come away in Spring. I imagine it might be like an overwintered carrot about now, tough and hairy.

I've peeled and  grated it finely with the foodprocessor because it is fiery; think lung-stripper. Then cover it with white vinegar to sit happily in the fridge for months. Horseradish becomes the secret ingredient in mayonaise, a good spoonful, and the not secret  ingredient in 'Horseradish Sauce'.
Now that we are in town I get a meat pack about every three weeks which always includes a roast of beef, hence the interest in horseradish sauce. 
So the recipe? I hear you ask.

Horseradish Sauce

2-3 T grated horseradish

1/2 C sour cream

1/2 T grainy mustard

2 T mayonnaise

and that makes enough for 6 people around  one roast.

Going Home

Leaving a community is a bit like mopping the kitchen floor, where you walk out of the room backwards mopping up your footsteps as you go until no trace is left that you were there. The house will be repainted and a new family will move in. Life moves on.
One of the things I've enjoyed in the garden is growing great weeds: phacelia and calendula in the glass house below, borage not flowering yet and red poppies in the background.

Here's a closer look at the poppies growing on the path. I'll leave these traces of joy but around the house it's time to erase, to return everything back to woodchips and trees that can be easily managed with a lawnmower and poison spray.

One thing will last a little bit longer: fabulous soil that absorbs moisture instead of repelling the rain and for a few seasons, wild flowers will try and establish themselves. Oh yes and it will take a lot to remove the comfrey. The poppies below are a snag in my timetable because they are just about to flower. These are great big blue ones that a favourite neighbour gave me seed for and this is the first year they are growing in quantity. I will pull them out at the last minute.

I pulled the comfrey out easily in Spring when it was crowding the trees and just threw it down as a nutritious mulch. If you like it, it is very easily dealt to and useful but if you don't like it, well ...
I've been reading a marvellous book Finding the Still Point by Gerald O'Mahony. One of the things he talks about is finding a motto that encapsulates what we want to be. I'm working on mine and I suspect it will have something to do with food. I even like my garden to be well fed.

Now the frost did damage some of the tomatoes and more spectacularly the potatoes; compare plants on left in the warmer mid section of the glasshouse to the end rows. This will reflect in yield and timing too I expect.

I had a little experiment going with the raspberries with pruning and sure enough these will fruit for Summer instead of Autumn this year. I later read that you can prune half your raspberries in Autumn and half in Summer (after fruiting) if you want to stagger the crop but here it is too cold too quickly for Autumn fruiting berries.

I am endeavouring to delegate some packing and have a couple of unsuspecting neices arriving the week before the moving truck does. I have singled out some of the more exciting jobs for them, collecting pine cones to fill the shed and hosing down the house and windows among others.  The outside of houses, in this climate, need a good scrub down every few years or five,  which was a housekeeping revelation to me that I intend them to act on. On with the rubber gloves then...  

Unfamiliar Text

NCEA exams are no longer on the horizon. They are coming into shore on a speed boat and boys are busy getting in final assignments, applications and folios.
They didn't do so well in unfamiliar texts for English so we are going to have some practice together over the next week. We all 'see' according to our level of expertise but there must be some broad rules that apply to most things. For the person who covered one of my compost heaps with red hot poker debris, blue gum leaves, rose prunings, couch and what looked like Pyracantha prunings-branches with spiny thorns my advice would be: 'look at the end result or the big picture' or to put it another way, 'What is the purpose?'
In a compost bin you are looking to make compost.

For the person who tipped buckets of food scraps on top of another tarpaulin covered heap I would suggest 'Look for a pattern'. If there is a heap amongst the five that has fresh food debris on top, go for the obvious and follow suit. Like with like.
Compost has been a very gratifying success this year. Thanks to the briars and thorns keeping me out I still had a beautiful stash for the glasshouse come tomato time. It has hitherto missed out and the compost has made a big difference to watering times, about every five days instead of everyother day at this time of year. The compost piles I made on site in the glasshouse in late winter were a cinch to spread out as a thick if rough, mulch. The wheelbarrow can take a holiday; on-site heaps are the way to go.

Now you can see below how the plants are thriving  in this mulch. We had a frost or two recently that has clipped the wings of about half the potatoes in the next glasshouse but tomatoes don't seem to have suffered. I was gifted various trays of seedlings of which I've used about 80. By the time I got them the labels were gone and I know one tray were sweet 100's. So much for my strictly moneymaker and beefsteak. All will be revealed in time.

On the first read through the text we'll be underlining literary devices and any sort of patterning; garden equivalent would be my sorting out the plants from the weeds which is what I'm doing in Dunedin to rescue any treasures that have survived. 

Louis had to create something out of a complete sheet of paper for his design application.
It's a viewing box where you look through the peephole, through a set of bars to see 'Freedom' in the distance. He suggested it was something some fellow students might like to use to get a preview of their future if they didn't make some lifestyle changes. We knew living in the country would give them a different perspective on life... I don't know what we thought it would be. I choose freedom.

                                          

Cow Cola

Brace yourself for a slew of 'before and afters'. It's enormously satisfying to get such apparent results and immediate garden. I guess TV programmes are made out of this sort of thing. I'm working on the patch of long grass in the middleground. The tree to the left is an annoying self sown sycamore that is cleft between concrete. It has to go but how? not quite sure as I can't get a saw in to the base. I cut down the long grass and dug out the roots in clumps. It's the hard way to garden. Planted globe artichokes and mulched with clipped up grass.

 There is a bank above this patch so it collects a reasonable run-off of water. Artichokes like water and shelter. One out of two is only half bad.  These will be sacrificial as a shelter belt; they are going to protect the vegetable garden.

It took me quite awhile to separate out the grass clumps, chopping them up as I went until the bin was nicely full. There is a name for this, something like 'kinetic meditation' where you idly can do a job while your thoughts run free.
This project of renovation is reminding me of one of my favourite books 'The Secret Garden' where the garden starts to come alive in the Spring as she (Elizabeth?) clears away the overgrowth.
When our children were younger and we chose storybooks I always looked for a great text and Bill picked them by illustrations. A really good illustrator would plant secrets, extrapolate information from the text to enrich the story for the keen observer. I suddenly remembered Sleeping Beauty. From memory the whole kingdom sleeps for a hundred years and one of the versions we had showed flowers blooming and brambles and thorns peeling back as the Princess awoke. The gardener in me must have noticed those details and leapt with delight.  As Ken might say, I speak fluent garden and anything is fair game for the topic.
  
                                         

Now the bucket in front above is loosely manure tea, a big dollop of fresh cow manure that I kept refilling and stirring and decanting onto the heap as an activator. If it was fizzy and in bottles you would be banning it immediately, just the smell would strip the enamel of small children's teeth and coins would dissolve in it overnight: Cow Cola. I'm expecting some heat from this pile.

I'm finding lots of treasures still alive amongst the weeds in the herbaceous area. Other finds, see pegs below and what you can't see is two buckets of plastic rubbish, yoghurt pottles, foil, bread ties, an amazing amount of non biodegradable stuff.

Last photo I've put the blackcurrant, gooseberry bushes and rhubarb along this strip up against the bank where they'll get some shade but also extra moisture. The strawberries in front will get the extra sun. Sometimes the theory can be perfect but incomplete. Having some good reasons to make decisions is a good place to start.  And this might be a good place to finish...