Chooks!

We finally got up to Michael's sister's place last night to visit our chooks. She has six chooks in the pen, two for her family, two for Michael's parents, and two for us. We share the cost of the chook food between the three households, which means it's costing us around $10 a month for all the fresh eggs we can eat, and in fact sometimes more than we can eat. I will never buy an egg from the supermarket again - these actually look like eggs, and taste like eggs, rather than the insipid mess you buy at the supermarket. The yolks are bright yellow, and so tasty.

Garden Update - 25 November

I was out in the garden this morning with the camera again. I can't believe how things are coming on. Lots of flowers and baby fruit - more photos ;)

Cherry tomato - this is loaded. There's no red ones yet, but they're growing bigger.

Lemon Drop tomato is flowering

Pajero strawberry - this clearly loved being put in the ground, there are these two strawberries, plus about a dozen that are just starting to develop.

Watermelon is starting to flower - it's pollinator plant died, so I'm not sure if they'll actually turn into fruit or what the deal is with that, but we'll see soon...

Pumpkins - they're going gangbusters, one or two are starting to flower

The cornfield is coming along nicely, most of them are around knee high now

Cucumber flowers

The miniature chocolate capsicums are growing - there's these two that are huge, plus around three or four more just starting to grow

The snow pea mess. I've given up on trying to keep them from growing up each other, just trying to stop them trying to grow up the lettuce at the moment. Most of them are starting to train themselves up the fence of their own accord though, so that's good.

Roma tomatoes - some of these are getting enormous, can't wait for them to start to ripen

Even the baby lime is flowering, and forming tiny limes. I'm not expecting a crop this year, but we'll wait and see what it does. It's still putting new leaves on and growing up, so I'm not too concerned about it.

My wild mint patch has gone crazy again - it's spearmint.

Next thing on the list is repotting this lot out - zinnia, nasturtium and marigold, for insect control. Every seed I planted germinated, so we've got plenty.

My salsa capsicum - I thought I'd killed it, but it seems to have revived nicely. Lots of new leaves, around a dozen flowers and at least one tiny little chilli growing...

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Tomato sauce

Tomatoes. Is there anything better? There's a nice man at the market from whom I can buy a case of tomatoes at a time. This month he had romas by the case, around 10kg, for $12. Can't sneeze at that, when they were going for around $3 or $4 a kilo everywhere else. The catch is that they are uber ripe, and some are already over the line - I got 9.5kg of useable tomatoes out of this weeks's box. That's still an excellent price. But it means you pretty much have to use them straight away. Since we're still swimming in tomato relish from the last time I couldn't walk past the nice tomato man without buying a case, I thought I'd have a go at a tomato ketchup.

As luck would have it, I'd been watching one of Jamie Oliver's shows during the week, in which he made a fabulous looking ketchup. I'd recorded it because I had a feeling I might want another look at it at some point. Copied out the recipe best I could, and had a go...

The first step was to make some passata - essentially, tomato puree with some onion and spices in. I cheated a little and bought two bottles of passata at the supermarket to get things started. I put the bottled sauce, and around 4kg of tomatoes into a saucepan, over a medium heat, and cooked for around an hour, until the tomatoes had broken down. I then added onion and spices, and since I would have to blend the ketchup later, elected not to blend the passata now, purely for labour saving reasons.

While the passata was cooking, I chopped the other 5kg of tomatoes. Not a pleasant exercise when the hands are showing the signs of the kitten teething - tomatoes being acidic and all, the juice doesn't half sting in little scratches.

I then chopped around 4kg of onions. Actually, that's a total lie. I put 4kg of onion into the food processor, and whizzed them. I hate chopping onions more than almost everything else, ever.

I sweated the onions in a little bit of olive oil, for about 10 minutes rather than the 15 suggested. If I had've left them any longer they would've burnt.

Meanwhile in the mortar and pestle I whacked some fennel seeds, coriander seeds and powder and cloves and gave them a bit of a stir. These were added to the onion for the last couple of minutes of cooking.

The onion and spice mixture was then added to the passata which by now was finished. This was followed by the chopped tomatoes, a bit of salt and pepper, ginger, chilli, basil (just the stalks, the leaves came later), some red wine vinegar and brown sugar.

It was round about this time that it became obvious I'd made an ocean of ketchup - that's my 15 litre stockpot in that photo, full almost to the top. Oh well.

I then brought it to the boil, no mean feat taking into account the volume, then reduced the heat to medium and cooked the ketchup for about half an hour, adding the basil leaves right at the end so that they don't just wither and disappear.

And then, the real fun began. Jamie makes it sound really easy on the show - whack in blender, push through sieve, bottle. The reality is an awful lot of buggering around, and ketchup absolutely EVERYWHERE. That was even without having a blender lid accident. Also, blending 15 litres of ketchup 500ml at a time to prevent afore mentioned lid accidents is nothing short of tedious.

Luckily Michael was on hand to take photos. Or something. Once the ketchup had been blended, I used a collander to sieve out the skins and the bulk of the seeds, since my sieves are too fine, and were just letting tomato flavoured water through.

Fortunately, not only have I been hoarding empty jars, but so has my mum, so I did manage to have enough jars on hand, although that did include two huge V8 juice bottles! You can see some of the tomato-flavoured devastation here, all over my stove.

A very, very messy production, but so worth it. Despite having produces gallons of the stuff, I can't see it lasting long. You can use it in place of tomato ketchup, but also as a base for pasta sauce, or probably on its own in pasta. Next time, however, may make smaller quantities at a time!!

Spring!

So, I've been a little lax in updating here, although my excuses involve an overseas trip and a feline bereavement, so give me a break :)

It's well and truly Spring here in Melbourne, and despite the cosmos doing its very best, we did manage to get some planting done. I'll make some retrospective posts with some photos of the early process later if I remember. But we planted three weekends ago, and here's the most exciting parts of our progress, as of this morning (11th November).

Flowers and two fruit on the miniature chocolate capsicum

I had to have a stern conversation with the snow peas this morning, and explain to them that none of them were going to grow if they just twined themselves around each other. This one was long enough to reach the fence, but it looks like I'm going to have to keep an eye on them for a couple of days until the rest are long enough to train up the fence.

I put my strawberry plants in the ground this weekend, to get them a bit more sun and a bit more space than they were getting in the pots. They're loving it. Here's the two newest flowers, this plant has around ten flowers, and even the other runty one was two or three.

The first roma tomato - we planted six of these before we went away in late September, and they're loaded with flowers. There's around ten or twelve tiny little baby roma tomatoes on them today.

My Tiny Tim cherry tomato is absolutely loaded with green cherries. I've put a stake in it today, as it was starting to bend under the weight of around twenty or so developing tomatoes.

Here's the Tiny Tim after staking.

We inadvertently ended up with two punnets of corn seedlings, so we're busily growing our own horror film set. I've been telling Michael I'm going to buy him a scarecrow for Christmas to complete the look. It's hard to see from the picture, but they're a little taller than ankle high.

Second only to the corn, is the pumpkin patch. We'd bought a butternut seedling, and Michael's parents bought a pack of four different varieties for us for his birthday. So we've got five pumpkin plants in at the moment. Seperate from everything else, obviously.

And to finish with, some general state of the nation type shots:

The tomato bed - six Roma, five Grosse Lisse, a Lemon Drop, a Black Russian, a Mortgage Lifter (rumoured to be able to produce tomatoes up to 1.8kg - can't wait to see that one!!), a Green Zebra and one other variety I can't remember right now - will have to check when I get home.

Hanging baskets, or at least some of them - basil, curly parsley and pennywort.

Pots, some of which are out in the sun - Tiny Tim tomato, garlic, chilli, mint, a selection of cat grass/ cat mint/ catnip which the felines ignore, and the marigold, zinnia and nasturtium seeds I'm growing for bug control.

And out in the patch - only a partial shot, the others weren't so good... cos lettuce, carrots, bok choy, mini capsicum, eggplant, celery, corn.

So, the current contents of my garden is:

• Mint
• Sweet basil
• Curly parsley
• Two flavours of lemons
• Limes
• Kumquats
• Tiny Tim cherry tomatoes
• Chillis
• Garlic
• Onions
• Roma tomatoes
• Grosse Lisse tomatoes
• Lemon Drop yellow cherry tomatoes
• Black Russian tomatoes
• Green Zebra tomatoes
• Mortgage Lifter tomatoes
• The other tomatoes - maybe Tigerella, will check
• Snow peas
• Cos lettuce
• Roly-poly carrots
• Bok choy
• Mini chocolate capsicums
• Eggplants
• Corn
• Celery
• Jap pumpkins
• Butternut pumpkins
• Queensland blue pumpkins
• ? another pumpkin - gold something?
• Strawberries

Eggs

So, in quite exciting news, we have our first eggs from our chooks. They live with Michael's sister, since she lives in the really truly country and doesn't have cats to contend with, but it's very exciting none the less. We have two, and Michael named them Eggman and The Walrus.

Photos of the chooks themselves will no doubt follow when we get out there to see them.

Gratuitous Picture Post - Third and Final Part

And now, for the finale, the current progress pics.

About an hour and a half of weeding with my hands and a claw-thingie (metal note to self - learn the words!!) yielded around this much exposed dirt. So not impressed. I think I'm going to have to get Michael to get into it with his big tough boy fork of doom and turn it all over so all I have to do is pick the weeds out, or else I'm still going to be weeding it at the next planting season.

Standing just outside the vege patch fence, looking in. We got around a third cleared back to soil, but more importantly got rid of some of the particularly nasty weeds that had sprouted - including something with the most vile spiky pods that someone told me was a thornapple, and a serious weed.

Same thing, just from standing in the vege patch somewhere.

And a bonus shot of the weird uninvited plant growing out of my compost heap. As I write this, I wonder if I haven't already posted this photo, but oh well. I'm going to trim that tree that's growing over from the other side of the fence, since it makes actually getting to the compost a bit of an effort if you won't want to get smacked in the head by bits of tree.

Gratuitous picture post - part the second

So part two of the gratuitous picture post brings you the back yard of chez moi. We're lucky to have such a fabulously large yard, and the previous owners were pretty damn green-thumbed, so we've got a good beginning to work from. They were also keen vegetable growers, which has made it much, much easier for us to get started this planting season.



I've always had a bit of a dormant obsession with growing my own vegetables. We had a go once when we were kids, and managed to produce one lettuce that ran very quickly to seed, and a couple of very peculiar looking carrots, that had somehow grown out rather than down, and therefore looked rather like orange turnips. Not a crashing success.



Right, picture post, less rambling... on with the pictures, then.






The West Indian Lime planted and watered into the citrus circle. I'm hoping it will have enough room there between the lemon tree and the edge of the patio, time will tell I guess. I have vague plans to prune both the lemon trees at some point since they are a little unruly, so I suppose we can always make it more room that way if needs be.



First and foremost, I'm a crazy cat lady. No post about my yard could possibly be complete without the inclusion of one of our little darlings. This is Maddy supervising Michael in the vege patch. She quite likes to just sit there, so I think we're going to have to watch out for her when we actually plant. She doesn't use it as a bathroom or dig or anything, just sits there. But I can't see the veg liking that too much.

Michael showing the weeds who's boss. Once he got into it, they seemed to come up pretty easily, and the soil beneath them is pretty nice - as I said before, we're lucky that the previous owners were also vege growers so a lot of the hard stuff is already done for us! On top of that, the area we live in was a combination of orchards and grazing paddocks before the houses were built in the late 1970s, so its land that has been used for cropping of one kind or another for around 100 years.
This is where I'm going to put my tomatoes in, as the wall retains a lot of the heat from the full sun it gets, and we can grow them up a trellis attached to the wall which is a bit more attractive than stakes. Those two plants on the right of the bed are going, and this whole bed will be devoted to tomatoes, and possibly basil, if I can prove what I was told today that they like to be grown together. The edging around the bed was unfortunately not dug in at all, just sort of placed on the surface, which means that the grass has invaded over the winter. That nasty grass with the great big runner roots. Grr.

View from the vege patch back towards the house. You can see what is going to become the tomato bed on the left against the wall. The sticks in the top left will become some kind of ornamental grape the neighbours have kindly decided to share with us, and the monstrosity in the middle that consists of a dog kennel with some kind of shrub grown over the top will also be going. I may end up extending that bed out a little further once that happens, we'll see.

In Part Three: Progress made.

Gratuitous picture post

A trip to the nursery and the first of the slightly warmer weather yesterday led to a flurry of activity. Here's some pics of the day's labour.

First, a trip to the nursery for seed-raising mix and a new watering can. Of course, like always,
I was unable to resist the idea of more plants. We came home with the following:

West Indian Lime - we'd been after a lime to round out the citrus circle, and this one screamed 'take me home, take me home and plaaaaant me!!!!!'. Like they do.

Roma tomato seedlings. These will go into the tomato bed when I finally get all the grass out of it. They're hanging out here in the meantime.

Tom Thumb cherry tomato. I'm planning to grow this one in a pot, at least for the time being. It's already flowering, which is nice, so we'll see if anything comes of them.

These will be tomato seedlings, I hope. The last time I planted seeds they didn't sprout. When I emptied the seed tray out, I could only find two seeds. I can only deduce something et them.

Brown onions. Again, I intent to grow them in a pot. I'm not sure whether this one will be big enough in the end, but it's a good place for them to start.

Next: The gardening part.