Back on Track

How many movies have an escape scene, destruction snapping at our hero's heels and ahead, a shrinking exit, a door of steel grinding inexorably down to the floor. The long corridor from Brisbane to Nelson seemed to have many of these and we slid through each one on our knees. I could hear doors slamming shut behind me and felt like we were escaping in the nick of time. When I saw the ambulance at Nelson Airport I nearly wept with relief; responsibility rolled off my shoulders and my head cleared. I could see garden time in my future.

 

Checked in on a favourite little Nelson garden where the vegetables are still ousting the flowers from their strip beds. Beaut show.

Back home, Rose told me some weeks ago that the turkeys were circling; circling the quince tree that is. I got there in time to pick up a box full. They are seriously hard but that doesn't stop them bruising. Next time I will only get them off the tree and leave the windfalls. The turkeys must absolutely love them because already hapless, half pecked quinces lay about the tree.

We had a laugh about the fact that Autumn is prime eating time for these birds and I thought I was joking. Son turned up with minced turkey for the hamburgers at cooking the next week. Jude said the meat was quite yellow...

Turns out Rose had just waited until they were asleep and then carried one off to the chopping block. Look out.

So I'm preserving quinces over this week. Peel, quarter and core. A fairly thick syrup (2C sugar to about 3C liquid) with some honey and lemon juice in it.  These quinces don't take long to cook at all and cook to an apricot colour. They are delicious bottled.
We had a months' rainfall in a day in May which has hampered the great potato dig and curtailed the Autumn clean-up. Anthony had to swim the sheep by the river to safety about 5.30 that morning.  Later the wind came through and pushed over the sunflower stalks, bent double.
Prior to that they rather looked like a graveyard of lanterns; now all dignity is gone and I've been trucking them off to the compost heap: carbon loading.

I've cut back the asparagus fronds, and pulled out spent brassiccas. The ground is a bit wet for weeding but still plenty to do and when that's done, glasshouse.

 Here's the Bon Chretian pears. Found the best way to preserve them is oven method in a fairly slow oven. Prevents overcooking.  Have granted the other pear a stay of execution until I find out whether it is a crucial pollinator. 

                                      

I missed the deadline for broad beans and cover crops and whatever else will become apparent. Thank goodness there are things that wait for me, apples on trees at the minute and beehives waiting for their AFB check. Give me one warm day and see what I can accomplish.

Spring Greens

Lemon trees have come up trumps which is an absolute treat.  I expect every household on the property will be enjoying lemon cordial this week. Mine is. Now I have been ruthless on the bushes that haven't performed, they went to the dump, and have kept the others cut back hard to get past them.
I had already granted them a stay of execution anyway, primarily because of their flowering habit which seems to be almost all year round. The glasshouse has a continual party of bumblebees and buzz-pollination and glasshouses are synonomous. I'll reward them each with epsom salts and compost before the winter, and a metre or three of frost cloth each.

 

Last year I used some sort of chilli garlic spray for the scale and gave them a jolly good wash with warm water. More in the realms of routine maintenance than pampering. They have responded generously.

This bean is Bob's. Frada is dried and all but seed-sorted but Bob is still growing green although some pods are ripening off and changing colour now. From memory its an interesting round brown speckled bean whereas Frada is a creamy lozenge not unlike a glucosomine tablet, for all those over 40. Enormous to swallow whole. Won't be swallowing beans whole.

More beans, this time cannellinni. I bought several  packets of seed a few years ago before I took notice of things like climbing beans and bush beans. I was just looking for cannellinni. When they came up some were bush and some were climbers, some white flowers some pink. I saved seed from the climbers which are more productive and this time have noticed a big difference between the two colours.

                                         

For the record, pinks are in the lead and photo is of the different pink bean flowering habit. I think the word is racemes, these rods of beans that it throws out that make them extremely productive. This is where seed saving really comes into its own.

Plodding along, we are chowing through a wealth of brassiccas seeing as the 'Spring crop' has matured early, and that includes lettuces too. Guess I put them in too early. Last year too late. Won't do that again. It means we are snowed in by vegetables what with all the Autumn crops coming in.
Ah yes, those green things are caterpillars, nothing that a pot scrub won't flick off, a soak in salt water and a good clip. What I'm getting too is 'perfectly good.' I guess its a variant of good enough (Marg) except that they are perfectly, good, all they need to be.  Perfect for this Jamie Oliver recipe from his jamie at home book. Cauliflower cannellonni and my fussiest eater was scraping the dish. We'll have that again.

Surprise

The prune tree has only been in for two years and went from 3 fruits last year to laden boughs this year. Sensibly laden, most of them are clustered around the trunk and forearm of the branch so they are well supported and nothing has broken off under the weight or even bowed down. Important for such a young tree. The wind thinned them a few months ago, not so as you'd notice now. I looked up some local research at the time and from memory, the 16th March was the day to pick them, in Central Otago, for maximum sweetness. Give or take a day.

Sure enough, right on the button a few kilos worth suddenly dropped to the ground announcing that they were ready. This is a freestone plum, 'Italian' so I took a minute to stone them before drying and the result, surprise... prunes. The one surprise is that they are yellow inside, I imagined they would be that deep purple all the way through.

The greengage finally produced a crop worth mentioning which enabled me to scupper a few cherished dreams. For some reason I always thought how nice it would be to have enough to bottle. No no no no no. They turn khaki green and the skins crack and they look horrible and taste sickly sweet because they are so sweet.
They deteriorate the minute they are picked and they don't all ripen together, why should they I suppose. Best way to eat them is off the tree as they ripen, and this over a period of quite a few weeks. I'm on the last of them now. Hanging out the washing is never a fruitless task; it has been especially fruitfull this year.

We finally caught a 'working day' at Hayes Engineering in Oturehua which means the factory is cranked up and we got to see the machinery in action. What I didn't expect to find out the back of the restored homestead was this beautiful vegetable garden with a few flowers, snapdragons and old fashioned things to the right, out of view. The whole thing is rabbit fenced and sits in this sheltered corner. The house is made of mudbrick, 2 layers thick and radiates warmth at night. Those are tomatoes over by the windows. It may look dry, that's how it is here, it was very productive. The lady warmed to my enthusiasm and sent me home with a beautiful cabbage. I had to turn everything else down because we already had it.

Never mind taking photos of the kids, this is looking out at the garden from one of the bedrooms. What a lovely sight. What could be more practical. The whole place, his inventions, the factory, the homestead and the running of it all beautifully illustrate Occams Razor in action. That is, the simplest solution is the correct one. Sounds like a good maxim for life.  

In the Wake

We will always remember what we were doing when the earthquake hit. We were all down in the big kitchen preserving peaches and nectarines and everybody immediately said 'Christchurch'. We listened to the radio as we worked and I felt sick.
We've already welcomed new children to the school and Bill is up there today for a funeral. Cancer, this one. Life and death go on.

By way of light relief, sunflowers. They are already in far more spectacular bloom. There's going to be alot of seed, which is apparently good for sprouting. Just as well. Next time I would grow a multi-headed variety that blooms sooner so I won't be keeping it.

By way of even lighter relief, bottled spaghetti. To me it is pure Kiwiana. Never mind that no one in this household has ever really liked canned spaghetti. Nothing was going to stop me making this and more besides. It is delicious, very easy and at 30cents a jar I can't resist making more. Incidentally the family have come to the party and they like it. Recipe to follow.
It's what you make when you've already made pasta sauce, relish, soup, and dried tomatoes and there are still pounds of them to be picked. Oh to be always so blessed.
For the record, Mum had the good taste not to make this for us as children.

Beetroots are enormous this year and I can tell you the drawback. Not that they are tough but they take so long to cook, and it probably didn't help leaving them in the liquid overnight. Means the pickled beetroot doesn't have as much colour as usual. Never mind. I use Digby Law's recipe: to follow. Do we all eat the leaves? They are better than silverbeet.  

This is the brag shot. Third time lucky with the cucumbers. I'm really impressed with these telegraph type. They are very hardy and as of today these babies are ready to eat. (the photos are last week's) The plant is hardly full grown but starts to flower and set as it climbs, as do most beans that I've noticed. We have snow on the hills and temperatures have plummeted. Autumn is here and I expect to see growth slow right down.

Bottled Spaghetti
12 pounds tomatoes
1 pound onions
2 T salt
1 cup sugar
a few cloves garlic
1T mustard
1 1/2 packets vermicelli (750g)
Simmer together the sauce ingredients until soft. Put through the mouli, bring back to the boil, and add the cooked vermicilli. Simmer ten minutes and bottle. Makes 12 one pound jars. Amaze your friends.

Pickled Beetroot
Wash and boil a big pot of beetroot until tender. Cool, peel and slice. Reheat in 2C sugar, 3C cooking water, 4C malt vinegar. Bottle overflow method. Done.

21st February

Coincidentally, today it is two years since our father died and here's the Rowan Tree to remind me. The flowers on his coffin were lovely but the branches of Rowan berries seemed particularly appropriate and beautiful. Rowans thrive under difficult circumstances, do well in drought conditions and are fairly frost resistant. The flowers smell a bit like rotten meat, reminiscent of Dad's fridge, and in the Autumn the berries are stripped by the birds.

Now it is lazy gardening I am particularly enjoying at the moment so here's some of my favourite garden events. Starting with the rocket top left, I planted the seed and never got around to pricking it out or potting them up, let alone planting out. A row of seedlings has turned out to be ample supply for current demand and without any stress of moving it took awhile to go to seed. Top right the seeding spring onion finally fell over and a wealth of little seedlings have sprouted around it. Like wise the parsely plants below are volunteers.

I have been potting up any small self sown seedlings that I find to overwinter and get a jump start on Spring. Planting from seed in Spring doesn't produce parsely for eating until very late in the year. Bottom right is dill which suffered the same fate as the rocket. A row of seeds went in and that was the end of it. The dill hasn't reached it's full potential at all due to overcrowding and fairly quickly went to seed but there has still been enough for me to pick.

On the zuchinni front, gold zuchinnni, the comment might be 'live and don't learn'.  The itty bitty squitty photo bottom right could easily have been taken last year. I had some small insect infestation then and thought that they were the reason the leaves had browned to a crisp. In hindsight, the same thing happening again, I think the glasshouse is just too hot for them. The older leaves are brittle and dry so although the younger leaves are in pretty good heart, the plant as a whole is losing productivity and slowing down.
'How many zuchinni do you want?' Yes, you might well ask. Three jars of Fay's Zuchinni Relish (recipe lifted straight off the internet) is possibly a year's supply given all the other relish and condiments stowed away down here.

We snatched this photo on our last trip through the Pigroot just to show Annarosie that we may live in the middle of nowhere but there are still social occasions and signposted at that. The partygoers are geology students who start the year with a field trip up this ways every year.

To recap on the zuchinni. Next year I will stagger the planting a little more. I will probably only grow the gold zuchinni because they are less inclined to run to marrows and don't get waterlogged. They also look great in a stirfry and make the best relish. Beyond the first two of the season, the rest can go outside and make what they can of the summer. They don't seem to need the heat that corn, beans and pumpkins need to produce well.
 I can't resist one poem for the occasion.  Another by Richard Langston called:
 
He is There

When I wake.
He interrupts my nights.

In his empty armchair.
His folded glasses.

In the humor in us,
our appetites,
the heavy tread of our feet.

He is the bird lifting slowly
out of the dewy paddock,
the impenetrable spaces
above the sea.

The Lazy Perfectionist

I wouldn't reduce my personality to two adjectives, but this cap, among others, fits very well. My husband has cut back on coffee and I seem to be the one without any energy this week, out in sympathy.
So I've planted out the last two dozen leeks. Two months too late for this climate. The first batch of seedlings were wiped out twice; It seems to me that this soil does not drain well and short of bog plants, even moisture lovers need drainage. That was one problem.  A weeding 'incident' took care of the rest. Dibbled these leeks in to a better class of dirt and my secaturs weren't sharp enough so I gave up mauling the tops and in they went. Good enough gardening.

The broccolli has gone to flower and the bees are loving it so much I can't resist leaving it in a bit longer. There's kale and silverbeet and parsely in the background. The Kale will make it through the winter.

This year the garden has had shelter on two sides. I'm really enjoying the potatoes (on this side) which other hands planted, tilled, hoed up and weeded  (in the old strawberry patch). Sun-yet-to-be-flowers are a windbreak on the other side. We're digging the potatoes now, and with a record 53mm of rain on Sunday night the tops have freshened up no end.
This place is potato heaven and on the menu it is always Red King; We go from the new potatoes at Christmas (glasshouse) onto the first new potatoes  outdoors and then dig them through to the maincrop is lifted about May.

I remembered the other reason I like to grow a tiny tomato, beyond something to eat in the glasshouse, is for drying. I prop the oven door open with a wooden spoon and have the oven low, about 120C or anything less and just leave them in until they have dried or the fire goes out.  Salt the halves first,


they sweeten as they reduce and of course the flavour intensifies. The boys who won't eat fresh tomatoes will eat these like candy.  This is blackjack and never goes very red. I store them in the freezer because they aren't normally dried to a crisp. In winter I put them into an olive oil
mixture in the fridge as we need them .

I pulled out the dwarf beans this week; runner beans still running. The roots were pretty poor and I've already loaded the soil with woodchips, sheep manure and sowed a cover of black oats. I'm beefing up the organic matter to improve drainage in the soil.
Bean fatigue starts to set in when you have them every night. What helps is  the magic tool, the Krisk bean slicer. Just think of them as vegetable linguine I cheerfully  advise

when the kids start complaining that the serving size is getting bigger and bigger. The Krisk even has a little blade to top and tail them (mine has broken off, this is an old one.) It also usefully rejects anything too big and tough, bean pile on the left, so that young palates can enjoy their beans in optimum condition and form good mealtime associations. Hear, hear.  

Now I know...

Now I know why the replanted tubs aren't doing so well. Orange marigolds, lobelia and irresistable catmint under that naughty lump. She likes to lie down while she snacks on the catmint.

I also know why Jack took bean seeds and not celery. These wouldn't have got him far and slowly at that. The celery is called 'crunchy dwarf' from Otepoti seeds. Maybe this is as good as it gets. I planted the seed in the second week of September, about 18weeks ago and blamed the slow start on the bag of seed raising mix. Maybe it was old. The name caught my fancy after the dwarf incident in the U.K a few years ago. Apparently a hippo in a zoo swallowed a dwarf as he fed it a loaf of bread (the story comes from Uncle Doug of course).

In the background are my bean couple Freda and Bob. One of them has flowered and set beans and the other is barely flowering. In hindsight I planted them way too close together (45cm apart, needed 60cm at least). They all get equal shares of the light, water and food.  Some things remain a mystery.

The summer feels like it has turned before we really had it. Suddenly the glasshouses both need closing down at night and the real proof that it is cooling down, the lettuce are all the better for it, Canasta I think.  I've chanced a late crop of yellow zuchinni for a very special relish. There they are stretching into the distance. Last year they came to nothing here because of an insect infestation. This year I've awarded them my bokashi supply and so far so good. Here's hoping.
In the far distance corn is racing against time and unless we get some good temperatures it may be off the menu.

 

On the menu is all things NZ. I'm putting together a few recipes (with photos) for Louis to take to Argentina. This is Apricot Frangipane. I also make it with plums. For the record I use Pams sweet short pastry, the lump that is left over after making Chocolate Mud Pie is enough. Filling is 75g each of sugar and butter creamed. Add 1 egg, a few drops almond essence, 1/4c flour. Spread that over base, put on raw fruit and almonds and bake at about 170 for about 1/2hr. Serves 8.