Now that's a zucchini!

New South Wales temperate zone has been hit by a cold snap so we pulled out the last of the summer vegetables and replanted some winter veg - snow peas, cauliflower and cabbage. I've never had much luck with Brassicas but we'll see how they like the new plot location. 

We invited one of the chickens to help turn the dirt over but she was more intent on escaping. 

 

Butter knife for scale. The large carrot was a bit woody but still edible. The zucchini / courgette went into a zucchini slice.

 

 

Another even more impressive home grown zucchini next to a store bought one.

Let's talk tomatoes

Tomatoes are one of the easiest fruit to grow. This tomato plant self-seeded in the veggie patch so I transplanted it to a pot, which it didn't seem to mind at all. It is loving all the rain, but it is being loved by insects.

 

 

One of the easiest fruits to grow is seemingly also one of the easiest fruits to invade. You can see at the bottom of the pot there's a couple I didn't get to in time. I don't like using sprays so I bag my baby tomatoes to protect them as they grow.

There are a few different varieties of bags including mesh ones but I just use paper ones. I have two different types, the larger one has a removable tie while the smaller bag has the tie attached and is a bit more fiddly so I sometimes use small cable ties instead.

Simply pop them over the young uninvaded green tomatoes and they will continue growing in the bag. Yes the tomatoes will still ripen. The only issue I have found is that in heavy rain the bags get drenched and can split, or fly off in strong winds.

The result:

 

Homegrown macadamia nuts

Macadamia nut trees can grow up to 12 metres tall. I have a dwarf version growing in a pot and it's still a good 2 metres high though the nuts themselves tend to be smaller than those available commercially.

I harvest the nuts when the outer casing splits though sometimes they will fall off the tree before this. Macadamia nuts are notoriously hard to crack, especially if they haven't dried enough to shrink from the shell, but I find the Crack-A-Mac handheld nut cracker works well on my home-grown macadamias.

Here's a 30 second video showing the process:

Produce

Our home vegetable garden has been established and producing for over a year now. It's been a year of experimentation - some things have worked, some things haven't. It's also been a year of education - I've learnt a lot. Above all I've been suprised by how productive the garden has been. Now that I've worked out what does work and got the timing sorted, we rarely buy vegetables from the shops. Just the occasional bag of frozen corn cobs. There's not a huge amount to harvest each day but I easily get something even if it's just a strawberry and some parsley. Today's dinner vegetables were broad beans, carrots and the last of the snow peas. A couple of home-grown swedes where mashed with a store-bought sweet potato and that was sufficient for our family of 6.  I think our garden could easily provide ample vegetables for a couple, perhaps even a family of four if I planned better.

We have to eat what's in season though, and that can get a bit boring. Peas, carrots and beans are popular because they are so easy to grow but we like a bit of variety so for the following year I am going to try growing things I've never eaten before, like choko, and stuff you can't buy in shops because it doesn't store well. This will also mean trying new recipes to use up the produce we grow. I'm planning to get my hands on a copy of Indira Naidoo's new book, 'Edible Balcony', because it contains recipes and ideas for using home-grown produce. Check out her foodie blog.

I also find Jackie French a great source of inspiration. I came across this great self-suffiency article by her today as I searched for ideas to expand growing space. I'm rapidly discovering that you can never have enough vegetable beds! One thing's for sure, I've been well and truly bitten by the gardening bug. When I woke up this morning my first thought was, "I forgot to put the netting back on the blueberries." Luckily the birds hadn't gotten to them because there are plenty almost ready to ripen to be added to muffins and stacked on to pancakes along with home-grown strawberries.

MasterChef

I missed the first two seasons of MasterChef but I've got into it third time round. And like many others I've been inspired to try some new things in the kitchen. I mainly cook meals the whole family will enjoy but tonight I decided to try something cooked just to please me. I didn't follow a recipe, just followed my MasterChef instincts. The result was creamy smoked salmon pasta (using lemon, silverbeet, dill and spring onion from the garden) with a side of bruschetta (using homegrown tomatoes and basil).

The result was as good as anything I've ever had in a restaurant. In fact it was so good there's no photo because it was gobbled up so quickly.

The problem of course, with using fresh ingredients and making tasty dishes is that it's really hard to then go back to eating frozen meals or the sort of bland tasteless foods that busy families often fall back on. But freeing up time to spend more time in the kitchen and garden is not such a bad thing. We are what we eat.

Intro

I got into gardening a few months back after an innocent request to remove a small tree turned into a full-on landscaping epic. We are a fairly typical family on an average suburban block (around 610sqm total) on the outskirts of Sydney. Our yard is L-shaped and by no means large. A portion is fenced off for the dog, another section houses the blow-up pool (in summer, trampoline in winter). Some of the rest is given over to a play area and what will hopefully be a deck, and also a meditation garden.

We have four beds assigned to vegies, another which I haven't completely decided on yet and is currently home to some lovely sunflowers and another bed which is for flowers only. I probably could have planned the bed rotation better but because the whole set up was a bit haphazard (made up as we went along basically) there are plants alongside plants that probably aren't recommended to be together. But hey, Brooke Shields and Michael Jackson were happily dating for a short time so why not corn and beets?

Here's a list of what's currently growing (to varying degrees of success):

Bed 1 (kitchen garden bed)
Tomatoes, lettuce (various), capsicum, dwarf beans, lavender, basil, marigolds and a sick zucchini.

Bed 2 (along a fence)
Ballerina apple, cucumber, lavender, watermelon, leeks, carrots, capsicum, squash, cherry tomatoes, rosemary. And just planted runner (climbing) beans.

Bed 3 (the organised bed)
Cherry tomatoes, carrots, lettuce, capsicum, zucchini and newly planted runner beans.

Bed 4 (the anything grows bed - pictured below)
Ballerina apple, dwarf beans, squash, sunflowers, chia.

Bed 5 (new raised bed)
Corn, butternut pumpkin, cos lettuce, beetroot, cauliflower, radish, broccoli.



Also around the place are dotted a few pots containting various herbs, strawberries, blueberries and a dwarf peach. Nearly all of the plants have either been purchased as seedlings or grown from seed in the past six months.

This blog was inspired by a tip I read in one of Jackie French's books. She said to get the most from your garden, as motivation for doing all the yakka if you like, eat something from it every day. Even if it's a sprinkling of herbs. So for the past few days that's what we've done. Yesterday it was a handful of dwarf beans cooked with mushrooms to go with our sausages and mash.

Can we keep it up for 365 days? Let's see.