Eat Australia

bring on the rain ..

... by installing watering systems. Works _perfectly_.

I can now water four beds with one turn of the tap. Pleased, I am. This includes the greenhouse, although all I'm watering right now is the chooks, which I haven't the heart to expel from their warm snuggly nests in the new greenhouse bed. (And they're digging it over nicely).

However, I have clever plans for giving them lean-tos made of our heavy-duty plastic, which will go in place once I've cleaned the garage and dragged the extremely heavy roll of said plastic in there.

Then I'll kick the chooks out of the greenhouse and start planting ... what? I'm not actually sure. I'll pop in some of the carrots and broccoli, just to see if it does any better/worse. Maybe a tomato experiment, or something that's a bit borderline for our climate.

I'm also very pleased because I found about 50-odd warrigal green seedlings in the berry-bed. They are now in pots awaiting transplantation or growing larger for possible sale to the local nursery. I had to do every one I found because then I let the chooks into the bed to turn over the topsoil and hopefully get rid of the mice.

Now to put in warrigal green seeds and time how long they take to germinate. And see if one can germinate midyimberry seeds in late autumn in a greenhouse ... !

musings on the weather

Escaping the midday heat inside, after a morning of gardening, and I wonder, as a sudden gale throws buckets around ... is a change in weather always accompanied by violent gusts of wind, around here? Was it that way in the Blue Mountains, where I grew up? Maybe I never noticed because one doesn't, when growing up, and then in cities one is buffered from the extremes of weather by sheer numbers of houses.

Or maybe it's just how things are, around here ...

The wind is the bane of a gardener's life, here. It drives moisture from the soil within days, scours the ground bare of anything vaguely friable, and throws dust everywhere. With the clay and eucalyptus roots sucking nutrients and moisture from beneath, and the wind taking it from above, the only things that survive are those with deep root-systems; things that can tap the moisture and food in the clay.

Shallow-rooted plants, like perennial herbs and veggies, barely stand a chance. Now I understand why the tank-beds are the only ones that do well - they've got a solid two feet of good soil before hitting the ground, and a lip of another hand-span or so, which prevents the wind removing the topsoil. They're the only beds where mulch is a benefit, rather than a quicker killer ... exposed mulch around here dries out and becomes hydrophobic, just like the soil, but much less inclined to let water through. At least the bare soil absorbs water under the sorts of rain onslaughts we tend to get here.

So, how to keep my desperate food plants alive over a dusty, hot, wind-borne summer?

• Use strawbales around the edges of all the gardens, to provide wind protection.
• Use non-chippy mulch like straw or the lovely green mulch the electricity contractors have left in gigantic piles down the road (we're up to three uteloads and still going). I figure it will break down fairly quickly and therefore let liquid through.
• Mix water crystals into everything before planting. And lots of them. No amount of compost seems to improve the soil structure at the moment, so I might as well use artificial aids until the soil is deep enough to survive on its own (maybe in five years' time, sigh).
• Do more greenhouse planting. Although even the bed in there is showing signs of compaction, hydrophobia, and drying out!!
• When creating garden beds, put some kind of barrier between the clay and the soil above it. I've just been digging gypsum into the ground, but this evidently isn't enough; a double layer of straw "biscuits" or something similarly compostible but water-retaining is more like it. I've just bought "solid water" packets to put next to my citrus trees; I wonder whether they make them in garden bed size???
• Water more frequently. This last has been this morning's exercise and is the topic of a separate post, I think ...

Now I just need to judge that fine line between "too hot to work" and "too cold to work" ... weather changes so violently and abruptly around here and the changeover can be a matter of minutes!! Particularly as the wind coming through appears to be a roaring southerly (cold), but the sun temperature is still a lovely 27C. This sort of discrepancy just makes one's wrists ache ...

spanokopita was delicious, thanks

I used the SBS Food Safari recipe, as it used fewer ingredients, more eggs, and less cooking (ie no pre-cooking) than Stephanie's version.  I also turned it into two large strudel-y logs, rather than a single deepish pie, as I was trying to get the 60mins cooking time down to 30mins.

It worked.  :)

Recipe variants or notes:

Warrigal greens instead of spinach (blanched in boiling water and hand-squeezed to remove excess water)
Home-made ricotta, and nore of it than the other cheeses.
Home-grown eggs
Home-grown herbs (including lemon thyme, oregano, flat-leaf parsley, and native pepper, as well as the listed mint)
6 layers of filo as I was wrapping it around itself
Blended in a Breville Wizz (it would have been the Kenwood blender but I broke it some time back - must get a new one!) rather than mashed.  Produced the precise grainy texture I was looking for.

YUM.

Num.

we made some cheese, grommit!

There's a recipe for 30-minute mozzarella in Barbara Kingslover's "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle". And then I found a man selling rennet at the Farming Small Areas expo, and I sourced four litres of milk ...

... and have failed to make mozzarella yet, because I failed to source a cooking thermometer, and temperature's sort of vital (at least, until one has a good feel for what happens when, I suspect).

But I do appear to have made a perfectly OK ricotta ... and on the plus side, I have an excellent insight into how all these different cheeses came to be!  Basically, once you've heated the milk and added the rennet, what results is curds and whey ... and when you remove curds from whey, you have cheese. The kind of cheese completely depends on what you added when and at what temperature, and what you do to it from this point onwards ... but it's still cheese.

Either that, or I have excellent beginner's luck.  Because while it didn't make the nice solid curds I was expecting, the little grainy lumps, when drained of whey and hung in cloth for an hour or so, are perfectly edible.  No nasty flavour (*phew* for all that cleaning and scalding I did of everything beforehand!).  Dry, bland, nothing I'd spread on a cracker right now - but it tastes like cheese.

My sister recommended a large infusion of chopped herbs and salt and turning into spanokopita (Greek cheese and spinach pie, essentially).  This shall occur this evening, with some substitutes - warrigal greens for the spinach (there's my bushtucker component!), and a lot more herbs and salt than the usual recipes call for, because it really IS bland.

And as I only need half of what turned up, I'll do the other half of the mozzarella recipe ANYway and see what occurrs.  At worst, I'll end up with a ... well ... cheesy sticky mess.  And if I won't eat it, the chooks will, so it becomes dinner in some way or another anyway :)

Note: cooking cheese is the limit of my food inspiration right now.  I've got all these seedlings and forestry tubes awaiting transplanting, and I appear to have run out of energy to put them in the ground, dammit.  Maybe when I finally get the last part of the irrigation equation together, I'll be motivated.

In the meantime, the greenhouse beans are producing lovely flat green and purple pods, which we're eating raw and by the handful.  One of these days I'll produce enough to actually _cook_ ... until then, it's a snack or salad veggie!

And the reducrrants are fruiting already - we've netted just in time!!  I don't think we'll get bucketsful from these either, but handsful will do me ...

summer wending its way to us

... which makes a nice change from last year, when it was cold and dank and damp; all very nice for bushfire prevention, but not so fun for heat-loving humans.

It's been rather a good few months on the planting front, and I can but apologise to those few readers I apparently have for not actually telling anyone else about what's going on.  Going on and on about why a blog hasn't been updated, without actually providing the long-awaited updates, seems rather a waste of reading space to me, so suffice to say - sorry, and I'm going to try and be better from now on (I say that a lot though, I do admit).

So.  I've planted a lot of fairly usual summer-bearing plants.  As usual - but hopefully for the last time - the planting often involved the actual creation of garden beds to plant into.  From this point, I'm hoping the seasonal planting will just mean improving the existing locations, not actually hauling out the mattock and wire for the fencing and claybreaking necessary to keep stuff alive around here.

Mind you, things might go better if the chooks didn't get into the carefully-planted beans, peas, zucchini, corn, cucumber, chard, amaranth, native raspberries (their destruction really hurts) and tomatoes ... !!  I'm teetering between a temper tantrum of destructive and ultimately-pointless, but feel-good proportions, or mindless purchase of replacements and replanting.  The latter is, of course, the option that means we'll have something to eat in a few months, but ARGH!

I was so proud of getting the seeds in on time; of the growth coming up, slowly but surely; of the thought of the more unusual plants I'd put in the ground.  Of the seedlings bought at the Canberra Outdoor Show a couple of weekends ago and nurtured in the greenhouse until I was ready and able to plant. 

It's not completely too late to put in seeds, but they'll need more nurturing to get them going before the summer really hits.  Or I could just give up (AGAIN! - seeds and me just do NOT seem to get along! - I just don't have the patience ... ) and go buy a batch of ordinary advanced seedlings - I probably won't be able to get the interesting varieties I'd put in.  Not as cost-effective, and I won't be able to put in as many as the seeds I'd planted, but I won't have lost so much.

On the plus side (I'm not _completely_ in despair), the chooks have turned the soil over nicely, and it'll just be a case of me putting it back into its elegant heaps and replanting.  That is, after all, what I got the chooks for.  It's not their fault I've given them a taste of the free-range life among the grasses, which I cruelly keep them out of except on those evenings we're home early enough, or on weekends.  Or, rather more to the point, that I underestimated the ability of chooks to squeeze through gaps in the gate to get to the greenstuff.

So it's off to Bunnings or similar for a batch of seedlings.

Aside from that, though, coming along nicely are:

• The redcurrants, white currants, blackberry (thornless), and gooseberries
• The self-seeded tomatoes and potatoes
• the self-seeded warrigal greens (and this is EXCELLENT news.  I just need to transplant them!)
• the red grape and the kiwifruit (but the green grape appears to have snuffed it for reasons unknown)
• the scattered salad leaves around the verandah
• the scattered (and sometimes self-seeded) herbs along the verandah (including the comfrey, which came back from winter-induced death; I thought it had died from fungus, but apparently not!)
• the fruit trees, particularly the newly-discovered almond (discovered as it has two actual almond fruits!!) and a possible mulberry (yay :)  )
• the midyimberries (well, ok, they're not completely dead; that's my definition of "alive")
• the self-seeded rhubarb
• a figtree that's been trying to grow since I moved in - it came back from a bare stick and I'm coddling it now, as it deserves to live!
• the three citrus (these, too, aren't completely dead, although not very happy)

The natives are prettier than ever, and the bottlebrushes are putting on a particularly spectacular show rigtht now which I may try to photograph.

My greatest pride and adoration right now, however, is reserved for the new greenhouse, created during two weeks off in July.  Designed by me, and created over three days by Th'Bloke, his father, and me, it's made of recycled hardwood, recycled clear plastic panels, and strawbales.  It's spacious but not huge (about 4x4m, roughly), has a bed in the ground, and is my haven.  It's warm, cosy, and smells of (currently) compost, beanflowers, maltese blood orange flowers, kaffir lime leaves, and radish.  And things don't die.

In that small space, I've got:

• Beans and peas
• Assorted salad leaves
• Radish
• Carrots
• Potatoes (in sacks)
• Warrigal greens
• Vanilla lily
• Snowy River mint
• Maltese blood orange (awaiting transplant into pots)
• Kaffir lime (awaiting transplant)
• Tomatoes, zucchini, cucumber, eggplant - raised from seed as well as bought seedlings awaiting transplant
• A batch of native edibles awaiting transplant, including raspberries, lillies, mint, lillypillies, native plums
• "Fruit Salad Trees" - Xmas pressies for lots of people
• and anything else I need to keep alive for a few weeks before going somewhere else.

It's this latter point that makes me adore my little shed.  No longer do seedlings wilt and die from four weeks of neglect as I run out of time to plant.  Sure, they might be neglected; but they don't die!!

And not-dying is what it's all about ...

spring sprung (october)

Spring is hitting and I'm getting over my barren-winter gloom by observing, with glee, astonishment, and some delight, seeds that I'd forgotten I'd sowed coming up by the _thousands_.  Not just the bulbs, but the salad-mixes I'm creating.  I've got this sudden sea of fragrant green outside the kitchen door, and it's glorious every time I step out.

Not to mention I've actually got edibles!! 

And we went and created this double-fencing concept as the new chookpen - I need them to create garden beds inside the dogpen, and the double fencing is to prevent the kelpies scaring the chooks into egg-bound - and it took me three days to realise we'd created 26-odd square metres of perfectly fenced garden space.  So I'm madly sowing chook forage plants - green leafy things and seed-bearing things to reduce the cost of feed to us (sunflowers, amaranth, chard, kale, beet spinach), not to mention stuff we like eating - and plants that can take advantage of lots of sun and 6 metres of fencing.

So I spent most of a rather hot and sunny Sunday creating lovely little beds for beans and peas to grow  up the fencing, and then created more nice beds for leaf amaranth and chard and some sunflowers I found from last year.  Transplanted half-a-dozen warrigal greens - they're suddenly sprouting all over the place, as per my prediction, even though I didn't actually expect it to happen.  It really IS unkillable.  I will now never lack for the stuff.  Yay :)

Corn and more amaranth (there's two varieties) are going in when I get in there during this weeks' evenings - love daylight savings starting early!!!! - and a nice gap for the tomatoes and eggplant and zucchini and cucumbers which are starting in the greenhouse and which will go in the first week of November.

That was about six hours of concentrated work, so for a break I dug over the established bed in the now-empty native garden (did I mention we moved ALL the chooks into the new pen?  No??  We did that on the previous Friday) and planted carrots and beetroot (golden and stripey) and pumpkin.

Just to wind down, I put new soil in the beds around the verandah and scattered lots MORE salady leafy things, given their success (it took me three weeks to realise I'd put in rocket; it wasn't until it went to head and flowered that I realised what it was!!!).

I planned to end the day in the greenhouse, as I had the evening before, putting tomatoes and eggplant and zucchini and cucumbers (seeds) into pots, for transplanting in November.  The potatoes I planted into sacks some weeks ago have gone berko, but a slight watering neglect means the carrots and beans and radishes and chinese leaves weren't doing as well as poss; not to mention the dormant chookseedmix in the soil had taken over somewhat.  Saturday evening had sorted all that out and everything looking lovely.  But Sunday ... I sort of ran out of puff :).  Even though there's a kaffir lime and Maltese blood orange awaiting transplanting and just adoring the warm, humid, atmosphere, to the point where they're flowering and the smell is just _divine. 

I love my greenhouse.  My _lungs_ love my greenhouse.  It's warm and cosy and smells of the earth, and it's soothing.  But after about 8 hours, I was sort of over plants :)

exhibition of early Australian cookbooks

... fascinating the stuff you find when you actually sit down and look ... I need to get up to Sydney sometime soon. The State Library of NSW is holding an exhibition of early Australian cookbooks - and of course, recipes for native Australian fare are included.

I do have one collection of a "colonial recipes" which does have some fascinating things to do with kangaroo (it's very complimentary about the taste, and I can't but agree :) ), not to mention wombat (about which it is less complimentary), wallaby, and possum. Not a lot about using native plants and it's those recipes I hope to find. I think they're more to be found in the diaries of the settlers ... lillypilly jam, wattleseed coffee ... those are the records I'm looking for.

But I still want to go to the SL and see these cookbooks :)

alcohol goes native

I try to monitor the web for information about things to do with bush tucker ... part of the idea of this blog was to then share my discoveries with the world. Haven't done too well to this point, but it's never too late to start :)

So. Came across an article which suggests there's someone in Victoria (of course) making beer from native hops.

[Mr O'Callaghan's] initiative, called the Good Brew Company,[...] is formulating a beer based on native plants and 100 per cent sustainable practice.

Mr O'Callaghan said he came up with the idea when he was reading a book during a bush tucker course in the Otways.

[...]

"It said that the first settlers used native hops extensively when they were brewing their beer because they couldn't get the European varieties.

Unfortunately I don't drink beer but damn, I'd love to find out whether it was up to snuff at all! I should get in a batch for Th'Bloke to try.

The website does suggest they're not quite up to selling the native produce-based beers, but it's a lovely thing to see.

catchup again ...

The reason I keep dropping off the earth is because I prefer to do my blogging from home, and our 'net reception is - being rural - bodgy at best. We've been trialling NextG but it's borderline at best, and unreliable ... I need reliability over anything else; speed, cost, included downloads.

So we're finally biting the bullet and going with our last resort, satellite. If we'd done that when we got here, we'd be out of the minimum 18-month contract by now ... but regret is one of those silly things one should never indulge in. So we're signing up.

And now back to the food-related stuff!

1. It's cold. The blood oranges are colouring up beautifully. I am SO proud, although I'd like them to stop sitting in orange phase and start getting the blood-streaks so I can pick them!

2. I've enclosed the Tahitian Lime in its very own greenhouse, to survive this winter. I'm so proud of this tree; after all its trials and tribs, it's still determined to go beyond surviving into thriving.

3. Most of my warrigal greens have died, although they'll re-seed in spring (I hope), but the two patches stripped by the chooks are coming back rather well indeed. Particularly since I enclosed that garden in netting (hah! Take that, chooks and other assorted birdies!!).

4. I feel like a real gardener. I have put down compost and straw and dug in soil and put down lime ... I have seeds of random winter greenery popping up from almost-organised 2-3 week sowing intervals and - ta-DAH! - green manure sprouting excellently ... I even sort of have irrigation in spots. MUCH better than last year!

5. The local nursery is selling midyimberries. Gracious. Apparently they're someone's "2007 plant of the year" or something. However, decidedly to my irritation, they're calling the plant "bush snacks", and the word "midyim" doesn't appear anywhere on the label. For those of us even on the fringes of the bushfood industry, this is incredibly annoying. I am NOT going to call my small white sweet berries "bush snacks" for anyone; but if this plant takes off, I risk splitting interest. I had a little rant about the topic at the nursery and they watched in highly entertained fascination, evidently recognising a botanic obsessive at work.

Anyway, I bought five and am planting them just outside the house, in the bare patch the dogs run across. This area will be planted with native wildflowers (yes! Pretties!! Inedible pretties!!) and the spreading midyims, which will keep the general theme very well indeed, without blocking light.

6. We have also bought two olive trees. These will be rather ceremoniously planted in the two raised beds and surrounded with appropriate mediterranean plantings come spring.

AND!

sun, storm and fencing ....

... and the world looks a bit better.  The red wattle is flowering, so's a red bottlebrush, and I'm finally digging up the finished gardens and adding the compost I've been carefully topping up for 12 months.  Well, heck, that's what the compost is FOR ... even if it's a bit dry right now.  Owing to Chook Adventures (below), I didn't get to plant, but the soil is in and weeping hose buried, which is an excellent start.

ALSO ... the recalcitrant chook is found and removed from her dreadful eggs (6 weeks old and she's still trying to hatch 'em in a very secluded corner we only found today), all the chooks are enclosed (again), in an attempt to persuade them all to lay where I can get the eggs and sleep where I can check on them, which means I can garden without worrying the chooks will dig things up. 

I LIKE the chooks but I guess it's typical that mine are all free-spirited creatures who want to sleep where THEY like, not where I want them to.  Sigh.  Also another is moulting, which means feathers _everywhere_.  She jumps somewhere and the feathers keep moving after she's stopped ... !!

Pups are also cute but getting big and prone to taking off and having adventures with roos.  Or next-door's sheep, which is the worry, esp. when one hears gunshots not long after having hauled them both back, panting and delighted, by the metaphorical (or literal) ear.  No amount of microchipping and collars and good nature will protect a dog chasing a sheep around here; not where wild dogs are such a problem.

So MORE fencing is going up.  I don't think I ever realised how much of living on the land was taken up with trying to persuade things to stay where you want them ...