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...

                                                   

Two Timing

You know what the problem is, it's 'The Other Garden'; here is a small corner and there is another 1000 square metres or so in similar state. In fact, it couldn't be better as I feel like I'm getting a clean slate to work on.
By far the most interesting part of our move to the city is moving the garden and the juggle I'm in of establishing the garden for the season here whilst looking ahead to there, and not wanting to be without vegetables.
The garden is derelict and fortunately the house is empty so I can go in every few weeks and make a start. This is part of the old glasshouse so it is a concrete bounded bed and as far as I know it is free of wireworm.

The obvious thing seemed to be potatoes and the long grass suggests reasonable fertility so away we go. I cut it down with shears and then layered newspaper, potatoes, dirt stuff and grass clippings on top. Loosely one of those sandwhich gardens; I didn't have long and also didn't fancy digging out great hunks of grass with it's capacity to carry away your topsoil.
For your interest, our neighbour is a bowler as the lawns in the distance attest. We've always got on so well that neither of us has wanted to put in a fence. The boundary line is defined as where the lawn (theirs) becomes field (ours). He sometimes crosses over and mows our grass as well. Who couldn't love a neighbour like that.




Dirt 'stuff' was the contents of the compost bin. Not exactly compost, dry and crumbly; maybe five years of grass clippings. Shearing back the grass was the hardest part so I did it in stages. In the end I ran out of seed potatoes and left the area where the bin was clear. I have broad beans in pots to put in that space. I expect them both to grow at about the same pace.

Loading up the trailer. Boxes of compost, cuttings and divisions and the young quince tree.

Now I didn't mean to load this photo but Noodle will never see it. He was indignant, 'No Mum, not in the floral pinny'. I was capturing the phone call while cooking. This is classic teenage boy cook style where cooking tea also means you can have a phone conversation, take off and check your emails or try and shoot a few hoops while the potatoes are boiling dry. The current goal is a meal on the table in a timely fashion. Frills will have to come later unless they are on the apron. Chortle.   

 Tomatoes have been hit by slugs. I've supplemented my seedlings with selfsown replacements so there will be a surprise or two after all! Possibly Black Krim (good) and Blackjack (not so useful for others here). This year I tried to do mainstream but it doesn't come naturally.  

Looking ahead

Spring has Sprung
The grass has ris
I wonder where the mower is

Definitely that time of year when gardeners' fingers begin to tingle with anticipation. The classic mistake in this climate is to whip out in some small weather hiatus and put stuff in that won't make the next cold snap, like seeds.  Having the very large glasshouse at my disposal is a rare luxury and gives me a toasty conservatory environment to play in and jumpstart the planting. The down side is the lack of the very weather you are keeping out. No rain to water and freshen, no variety of plant life and animals: slugs, birds and whitefly overwintering on the parsely  and I will miss it when we move.

Last week I planted the new potatoes for Christmas: Red King as always. I quickly found that it was quickest of all to spend a bit of time measuring and placing the potatoes carefully. Then it becomes a no-think factory-line-burial-programme without that 2cnd guessing over spacing. Because of the very wet season this year, and the subsequent late and frost damaged harvest, muddy to boot, the remaining potatoes haven't stored so well. It is an important job at this time of year to sort the seed potatoes from the pigs' dinners and perhaps a little later to dust the table potatoes with anti sprout powder for use through to December.
No one was more pleased than I was to see Jocylyn and David pull up in the house bus and report for potato duty in their overalls.
Job now done done with all the rotten potatoes out, so come time to cook tea you can put your hand in the sack with impunity.  Thank you, thankyou, thankyou.  They put aside 50 sacks of 20kg each of the small neatly formed seed potatoes. These won't jam in the planting tube as they rocket down into the ground and are for next years main crop.
Because there were less potatoes, that left a motley crew for me including what I call potato clowns:  the ducks, the snowmen, the love hearts, the lumpy bumpy misshapen, knobbed and larger ones. It will be really interesting to see what this years new potato crop is like.
I've covered the beds with black plastic to warm up, usually this is just for overnight frost protection but this year it will warm the beds up sooner. Farmer David has a wonderful intuitive knowledge for growing things and there will be reasons for this decision that I have yet to uncover.

Now I cleaned up this particular pile of sticks  and it is now a nicely tucked in compost heap as it should have been to begin with.   Embarrassing really. What did I think was going to happen over the winter?... because it sure didn't. The sunflower stalks are now snapped in to foot lengths and sandwhiched with a weed selection and  some cow muck; still waiting on a soak with the hose but it is too cold to have the water supply on at this spot just yet.

Here's the brag parsnip photo. Variey is Caversham from the Otepoti Seed Savers Network. Caversham now is typically a lower income area in Dunedin, but one with a rich history, rather nice siting for the sun in some places, close to everything and my impression is it still has a strong community.
There is a way to say it, 'Caversham' with the emphasis on the last syllable to make it sound a bit posher, if you are being silly.  Very appropriate for this lovely workhorse vegetable  to come from such a humble unpretentious background and to be a culinary star nonetheless. No hard core at all. They melt. The only reason I had to crop the photo was that the oven was so dirty in thebackground. I have overplanted on the lettuce front again. The seed went in before the big snow and I thought I had lost it. I had the punnets covered with frost cloth  which I've now moved to cover the emerging mesclun. I'm sure it helped.

Planted the tomatoes, a conservative trio of money maker, beefsteak and grosse lisse. Hope to have something to show for it soon.

The north wind doth blow...

And we shall have snow
And what will poor robin do then, poor thing?
He'll sit in a barn and keep himself warm
And hide his head under his wing, poor thing.

Poor old birds don't seem to know what to do. Finches and sparrows are out gleaning the long grass for seed. I planted seed myself last week, mesclun, broad beans and lettuce and brassicca types. The glasshouse is zero degrees at the minute and outside, according to the radio it is climbing towards the high of 3 today (1.8). I went down to pick some celery for soup and checked the seed beds while I was there. No evidence of germination yet...or of celery for that matter.

I shouldn't think the snow would normally come in to this degree, except that it isn't normal snow. It's dry and powdery. The wind blows it in through the gaps.
I had the pleasure of Heather's company for four days last week and of equal worth her help in the glasshouses. We weeded, cleaned, watered and mucked with cow manure for the tomatoes. Built 5 large heaps directly on the beds with all the debris: corn stalks, bean wires, vines - there's the word, a good variety of weeds. The heap that is still warm today had blood and bone throughout which seems to have upped the temperature. Interesting.

I marvelled a bit how people seemed to get caught out with the weather, given the warning and all, but quickly realised my own preparations were lacking. Hand tools on tray turned out to be inadequately protected (above) oops, and wish I had dug a few more carrots and snips and fetched a new potato bag. Car isn't going anywhere today.

Kids were going to build an igloo, that is an 'ig' with toilet facilities. Bewilderment. 'Oh, a joke,' they said. Small laugh. Snow was too dry to pack in the boxes so they tunnelled out caves in the drifts.
By the time the snow is over I will be ready for it. Swiss M had a Swiss saying taped to the inside of her cleaning cupboard:  'Don't try to sweep up the snow while it is still snowing'. What it meant was, kids have to be allowed to play first. Don't try and clean up too soon. Not something I have ever been accused of but I take the point to heart of enjoying it while it lasts.