Eat Australia

planning new gardens

We're about finished fencing off another roo-proof area - 6ft fences, that sort of thing - and with the return of some energy comes plans for new gardens.  It's not _quite_ time to overhaul all the summer's gardens although truth be told, most of 'em were ready for replanting some weeks back.  Although that was mostly due to crop failure so I wasn't quite ready to kill them off.  But now we've had our heat (all two weeks of it; glorious, glorious) and the temperatures have plummetted, and we can legitimately go into autumn mode.

And edges are easiest to garden.  If there's a fence, it's always easier to start the garden there rather than in the centre.  there's no real logic, except that fences are a non-expandable edge which remove one, two or even three points of planning from the equation, and therefore make planning easier.  Note to self: edges are not a fault ...

This new set of gardens are going in/on the ground.  I'll dig up the first 10cm or so of clay and thin soil, gypsum and dolomite the base (gypsum for clay-breaking, dolomite for sweetening the natural acidity of clay soils), put down a layer of chook-enhanced straw, and then pile up as much bought compost/soil as I can afford.  I will use some of my own compost, but I don't have enough for the gardens I want in place. 

These gardens will then be planted with my usual combination of perennial herbs and plants, and annual herbs and veggies.  I'd love to do rotational plantings but I'm just not organised enough for that, so I'll have to settle for having patches that become bare every now and again and get planted with stuff ...

I'll have another go at putting midyimberries in here, plus more tetragon, plus the new system of "constant" seedings that I'm planning.  One advantage of this location: it's right up against the water tank against the garage, and I'm hoping the remnant concrete soil around the edges will provide some areas of relatively free-draining garden that will promote better growth:

That pale patch to the front of the tank itself is the old concrete sand/mix.  Of itself, barren.  But when covered with soil and compost, hopefully free-draining and non-toxic!!

The garden is extended past the tubs to the left and up to the garage itself.  I'll put stepping stones/paths in to access bits and pieces, rather than plan the garden around paths.

So, we're getting there ...

cool climate bushfoods

This should be an update on how stuff is going - we've had heat, we're back to cold, one chook snuffed it, others are broody, we finally had rain, I'm disillusioned with my horrible soils and lack of self-determination to put time into composts etc - but actually I just need to upload my Cool Climate Bushfoods document so I can access it more readily!!

Download coolclimate2.doc

I'd like to PDF it and a whole host of other things, and I think it got updated a tad, but no matter - SOMETHING is available :).  I'll upload new versions as I go along.

season of digging and simmering ...

Well, it's officially the first week of autumn. Not, as anyone will point out, that we've really had a summer in this part of the continent.

However. My nasty grumblings about not having had enough warmth to bolster me against an undoubtedly bitter winter coming up aside, it DOES make for excellent early-season cooking and digging weather. And finally, FINALLY, I seem to have some energy to actually make use of it. A couple of consecutive days off work and out of air-con seems to have had an effect, and the booooring tejious tiredness seems to be giving way. 'bout damn time.

So, over the course of the last few days, I've made (or am making as I type):

• Pesto. LOTS of pesto, made with my own basil and local olive oil (Denmar Olive Oil from Goulburn. No website, sorry) and parmesan cheese and garlic, and not-very-local pine nuts. Now in little jars, topped with more olive oil and looking awfully tasty. Now _that's_ local food :)
• Gnocchi from left-over mashed potato and seasoned with aforementioned pesto. Not my own potatoes, I admit; I haven't dug them up. Yet ...
• Slow-cooked octopus a la Jamie Oliver and stuffat tal-qarnit, served with aforementioned gnocchi
• Chicken and/or turkey stock. That is, I bought the makings for chicken stock and whilst fosscking out the stored chicken carcasses from the freezer, found the Christmas turkey carcase. So in it goes as well ... plus the last rinsings of the pesto container that I've just decanted.
• Bolognaise/mince thing. I use this as a basis for pasta and taco sauces. Basic tacos are v. popular in our house and as long as there's a mince sort of a thing, a salsa sort of a thing, cheese, tomatoes, and some kind of green leaf, we're set. We can forgo guacamole and sour cream quite cheerfully :)
• Poached chicken. This will happen when the chicken stocks are finished this afternoon. I'll cook up a couple of cheap chooks in the stock - with any luck the good stock will improve the flavour of the chooks - and then strip the meat to make the family favourite chicken stew/pies. (It depends on whether one can be stuffed making pastry to create said pies or not. Generally, I don't, but encasing it in pastry does make for better freezing ... ).
• Pre-prepared chook mash. No, not halfway as exciting as human food, but with any luck it'll bring the morning chook food preparation down to a few minutes rather than anywhere up to 10, but still maintain the happy condition of the chooks, all of whom will probably go into moult Any Day Now and stop laying. So the longer I can put that off, and the shorter I can keep the moult (it can go up to three months, eep), the better everything will be. So - a morning mash, made from bought oats and pre-grated frozen carrot and chook pellets, defrosted with hot water. Happy chookies!

And I even finally got into the garden again and cleaned up the struggling citrus garden, turned over the soil, and planted perennials around the edges. Citrus don't like competition around their roots but the coriander, broccoli, parsley, cabbage, calendula, and lettuces aren't going to be a threat to these small trees over the next 12 months, and it means the soil gets broken up and gets some action, rather than just drying out - the usual state of soil around here, despite the excellent rain. I was rather shocked at the dust-dryness of the soil around the citrus - it was well-worked before I planted, with lots of manure and new soil, but still tries to revert to clay dryness. Much, much more work needed! I think water crystals will help.

I'd like to add some groundcovers as well - maybe even pretties like eyebrights or violas or pansies, as well as my usual preferences for thyme and chamomile.

The next tasks are to collect tomatoes and, instead of feeding them to the chooks, making tomato sauce. Even just passata. Or adding them into the bolognaise.

It's going to take me a little time to move into an organised food pre-prepration mode ... maybe a couple of years ... but I will get there. Because it is SO warming when you can reach into the cupboard of fridge or freezer and eat your own produce.

apples and eggs

Our attempts to force the chooks to lay in the same place seems to have worked; we are now finding 5 eggs in the actual laying boxes, rather than scattered around the garden.

And in the exciting moment of the week - we picked one of the apples from the tree that was here before us, and it was _delicious_. Well, actually, it was a Pink Lady, which goes beyond Delicious (har har, apple variety joke) and makes Th'Bloke very happy, as Pink Lady is his favourite apple. If there's a way to tell apple varieties merely from their leaves and flowers, I'm not that good yet!

Tomatoes are going beautifully, but we sort of had a bit of a chook-ravage of the veggie patch in their area and we've lost most of everything except the tomatoes in there. For some reason, that garden just isn't flourishing, and I'm at a loss to explain why. The tomatoes are good, and the eggplants are ok, but the squash relatives (pumpkin, cucumber, squash, zucchini - collectively called cucurbits, as I recall) barely made it to flowering. In fact, there are huge leaves scattered all around the place, including in the compost, and nary a flower. It's too late now for them to flower; unless the weather improves drastically, we could have a frost any moment now - Captain's Flat had one last Saturday - and that'll pretty much knock off what remnant summer plants there are.

I know I haven't been paying as much attention to the plants as I could be, but we've had good rain and the beds were solidly fertilised, so I'm somewhat at a loss to explain the absolute lack of fruiting on the vines.

I'm pretty much ready to cut my losses on the summer harvest, really, clear the beds and start putting in the autumn/winter plants or winter green compost. It's been such a cold and damp summer that apart from the tomatoes, there's not much point waiting out what might still come up. I might hold on to the corn and see whether it can go anywhere but I'm finding the beds in their current format somewhat depressing. (Granted, I've still got whatever this damn virus is that makes me so TIRED all the time, and I really have a chronic lack of motivation right now ... ).

On the plus side of the weather, unless we suddenly get a hot autumn (always feasible - it's hot today), it's perfect weather to start throwing in chinese green leafy things and be able to harvest them in only a few weeks, and to be quite honest, they're my main food source anyway. The curly and black kale and the chard have remained steadfast since their planting almost 12 months ago, and they're harder to buy than peas or beans or corn.

I guess I'm just a bit dispirited at having to create the garden beds before I can actually plant into them. Sometimes I'm just too impatient to be a good gardener ...

summer returns

After a couple of weeks of hanging around in the low 20s, we finally lurched over 26 and the sun appeared. The excitement was profound, I can tell you.

Th'Bloke and I are gradually recovering from the various illnesses (headcolds, tired viruses) that have kept work to a minimum around the place, despite the perfect working conditions (ie cool and damp). I'm finally feeling able to plan autumn's work which will involve the creation of new garden beds, hopefully deep-ripping the new planting area to open up the clay and allow planting of fruit trees (nashi pears, apricots, cider apples and pears, peaches, nectarines ... ) to really start forming an orchard, and putting in buckets of seeds in the hope I won't have to follow proper seed propogation practice ... I'm not very good at growing from seed.

I was thinking about seed planting systems on the commute back from Canberra. I've read about "filing" systems but they always seemed a little small to me ... but if I got four expanding files for spring, summer, autumn, winter, and put seeds in fortnightly packets, and then went out on a roughly fortnightly basis and chucked those seeds into hopefully receptive raising mix in place ... well, maybe I'll have half a chance of having an ongoing edible garden! I'm tending toward the Jackie French mixed-veggie concept. She firmly maintains that combining edibles of various types in a garden results in less pest loss, because pests regard long rows of the same kinds of veggies as a supermarket aisle, and so one should just mix'n'match one's gardens. This is a form of organised chaos to which I can relate and so I've been mixing seeds of similar types - parsley and coriander, for eg, or kale and chard - and sowing them together.

It does, of course, mean that I forget what's been planted between sowing and identifiable plant growth, but I rather like the lucky-dip concept. For my own purposes, anyway. For the bushtucker, I may have to be rather more organised. But on the other hand, if it reduces pest incursions ...

So, in conjunction with my newly-actived subscription to Eden Seeds, and the ordering of the 12-month seed pack, I'll hit Officeworks or similar and get me some expanding files and little packetty things into which I can store seeds. Sounds scarily organised, but I'm sure I'll be able to turn it into disorganised chaos rapidly enough ...

eat australia on track

I'm so proud! This last week, I have supplied 10 (!!) bunches of warrigal greens (which I also call tetragon) for supply to the local deli at Bungendore (Food Lover's Deli). This is the first time I've ever seen fresh produce for sale in any NSW store and the fact it's me providing it gives me a little thrill ...

Now I'm deep in plans to actually plant the greens in a rather more accessible and reliable way! Like, in rows interplanted with muntries or midyim ... as the side gardens become enclosed by 6ft fencing, this becomes more and more doable.

This is also one advantage of the cool (positively cold!!) and damp summer we're having (La Nina is well advanced now); gardening plans don't have to put on hold until autumn kicks in.

In fact, today's the perfect day for gardening. If both Th'Bloke and I weren't ill and capable of little more beyond cooking chicken soup and sitting in the sun ...

bit of a summary

Yes, we've made it to summer without a post on this blog. I'd apologise but it's only myself who really suffers, as I'm trying to keep this for future reference, so I shall forgive myself for being busy and not having dialup, and go on. We now have broadband, you see, so I can write my posts at home (on the Mac, using MarsEdit, an offline blogpost editor) and upload them nice and quickly. (Insofar as NextG uploads quickly, which it doesn't; but at least I have _something_. We are very pleased!). So, a summary of what's happened over the last few months:

• We got pups :)
• We got broadband :}
• We got heat - it turned up just after Xmas, after I was starting to wonder whether it was going to be cold and drizzly for the whole summer.
• We got food in the garden and it's not all dead!!
• We've had quite a lot of rain!

planting in earnest pt I (spring 07)

Wind-rich, time-poor, but I finally managed to extract enough time between gusts of wind (honestly, you'd think 10 solid days - including one long weekend - would satisfy even the most roaring of windy deities!) to put in the plants I've been accumulating over the last three weeks, building up to an expected three days of planting on the October long weekend.  Bleh.  I got in barely an hour the entire three days.  But we did take delivery of a new bushbuggy, courtesy of th'Bloke's brother, and a lot of eggs.

The complete list, plus comments, is after the break.  It's a long one ...

Created over the last two weekends were one garden bed in the barren part of the native garden, one chookpen completely covered - when the chooks go to the native garden, this will become the dogrun when we get dogs and until the back section is enclosed.  Then it'll become ... well, I don't quite know.  Something spare and enclosed.  If nothing else, the two apples and quince will grow undisturbed, which is a good thing.

Chooks are now laying two eggs a day, with sporadic breaks for only one.  I'm re-visting egg recipes I haven't made since I left home.  A highly successful quiche Lorraine  (well, ish - it also had home-grown spinach and  fresh-grated parmesan cheese) is laying the groundwork for more "ways to use lots of eggs".  A second quiche flan dish will help a lot! - as quiche freezes quite well, apparently.  Lucky, that.

The problem is that the best egg recipes also involve cream - chooks and cows coming into their best times at about the same time.  Not that I mind, but I am trying to remain healthy, and vast amounts of cream aren't likely to be good for the lungs.  Still, one or two pasta Cabonaras (essential ingredients - fresh eggs and cracked pepper and cheese) aren't going to kill us.  I could even hand-make the pasta, just to really push the boundaries of this whole home kitchen thing ...

Yup, the long winter is slipping away, and the joy of being on our own productive land is just about to start kicking in.  Roll on a fertile (and hopefully damp!) spring and summer.

gardens take shape

Created this past weekend:

• one (1) native garden, 1 sleeper square in size, the bought soil intermixed with chook-enriched straw and the local claydust soil.  Top-mulched with the on-ground leaves and twigs.  Planted with 8 native peppers - 5 Tasmannia xerophilia, 3 Tasmannia lanceolata. There's a risk they'll crowd eachother out in years to come but right now, I haven't the capacity to protect and water anything more extensive.  The garden is located above the dam, in dappled shade under eucalypts, and protected (currently) by waist-high plastic.  This will be replaced by netting as the weather heats up.  They are irrigated by about 30m of hose running from the machinery shed rainwater tank into weeping hose.

Planted:

• Tetragon (Warrigal greens) into the first of the raised gardens.  This is a refugee from the battered greenhouse and I'm uncertain as to whether it'll survive the transplant intact.  However, even if the current growth dies, it will regenerate from the root - I've learnt that warrigal greens are practically unkillable.  This is likely to be the first of my cash crops, however, and it would be nice if I had something lush and juicy in the next few weeks.
• Tarragon, vietnamese mint, ordinary thyme, lavender, dill; into the verandah gardens.
• Comfrey into the shady part of the verandah beds
• A remnant native raspberry from Rosebery; I'm not sure if it'll survive but it was green when I planted it ...

Bought:

• Tomatoes.  To be planted on the front verandah bed, to replace the brassicas.  This area is frost-free even in midwinter and the tomatoes should survive until the warm weather.
• Lemonade tree.
• Meyer lemon tree.  These two are going against the shed, with the blood orange (ordered; see list below).
• Blood plum and a yellow apricotty/plum cross.  I'm not quite sure where they're going yet but probably inside the native garden to gain the roo protection :)

Ordered:

• Midyimberries (Austromytris dulcis)
• Blood orange
• Atherton raspberry (native raspberry)
• Plum pine (Podocarpus elatus)
• Strawberry gum (Eucalyptus olida)

Watched:

• Black Sheep - hilarious NZ carnivorous sheep gorefest.  I shouldn't love this film, but I do.
• The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello .  Steampunk animation from Australia.  Odd and beautiful.
• The Simpsons Movie.  Well, it WS midnight by then :)

All in all, a good weekend :)

hip hooray, soil's on the way ...

I have just got off the phone to a local landscape supplier.  As from tomorrow, I will be the proud owner of 3 cubic metres of combined mushroom compost and decomposed turkey manure, 12 battered untreated sleepers, and 30 tomato stakes.  Combined with the two raised no-dig gardens, these are the start of our food gardens.

Part of the soil and sleepers will go toward the creation of the native pepper plantation, just above the dam.  The tomato stakes will actually allow for some fencing around said native peppers. 

Now I just need to hang some irrigation piping off the machinery shed water tank (currently not used for anything and consequently chokkas with water going to waste and mosquitos), and we're set.