Yesterday I was out checking the veggie plot and thought I should thin the beetroot. Beets come as compound seeds, and so they can germinate in bunches, and because they have been fairly slow to get going I didn’t have the heart to thin them when I should have. Now I’ve got big plants squashed together. It’s not survival of the fittest among beets in the garden, so it was well time to pull the smaller ones to make room for the big’uns. Then I thought I should do the…
Read MoreYear: 2014
Daikon
Daikon is not a vegetable that I bought often, maybe because it tends to be sold as big specimens that seem daunting to get through, but when they’re home grown they’re more appealing. I sowed these at the end of May, and after a slow start they are off and jostling with the turnips next door. A feel around during a weeding revealed a shoulder, so I pulled one to see how they’re going (and thin them a bit). The result was not a huge root, so apparently they can…
Read MoreTurnips
Turnips are only second to radishes for quick root crops. My carrots are still tiny, the beetroots are not far ahead, but the turnips sprouted luxuriant greens and started showing their purple shoulders after about 6 weeks. I needed to thin them, and we were having salmon for dinner, so I pulled three to go with. The cultivar is ‘purple top white globe’, from Eden seeds. I put in ‘gold ball’ in the same sowing, but they haven’t done well, and have been overshadowed by their neighbours. They were delicious.
Read MoreSalad greens
The salad greens bed: Back row; Lettuce ‘lollo rosso’, Celtuce, Lettuce ‘Australian yellow’ Middle row; Rocket, Mustard greens ‘Osaka purple’, Lettuce ‘marvel of four seasons’, (fennel). Front row; Mibuna, (Mitsuba – failed to germinate), Mizuna. Tomorrow the salad greens bed will be two months old from sowing, and they are providing some nice winter salads. The rocket is stronger in flavour than the rest, but just picking a few leaves from each of the others and throwing them together makes for a nice mesclun. The fennel was already in…
Read MoreSourdough with millet
I’ve been baking more often since we moved here, partly because we have lots of friends and family visiting, and partly because I have a cracker of a new oven that bakes beautifully. I usually make sourdough from my trusty starter culture that I’ve had for many years now, but I change the style with the extra flour, usually rye (sometimes with caraway), also wholemeal or fruit and nut or multi-seed, but this week I thought I’d try some of the millet flakes I’ve had in the larder for a few months.…
Read Morewattle
Even up here in subtropical northern NSW, our mid-Winter flower is the wattle. We have a nice strip of sally wattle, also called black wattle (Acacia melanoxylon) which at the moment is lighting up the gully to one side of the house. Thinking of what you can do with an abundance of wattle, I read many years ago that you can make fritters with the flowers. I’ve never been much of a deep fryer, but maybe a modern tempura take would be the…
Read MoreOur first hay cut and composting
One thing this property has is lots of grass. It grows very thick and long, and we don’t have livestock yet to keep it mown. We need to keep it down, so a week ago we got our new tractor, which is a beauty. It has a ‘four in one’ bucket at the front for moving stuff and a slasher at the back for mowing. So we have been out learning to slash the grass. The sun has shone the whole week too, with the result that there is a lot…
Read MoreCoffee processing of our first crop
First processing of home grown coffee berries Coffee processing at home takes a little practice. I ventured into the old ‘food forest’ this morning. It’s a little way from the house so I’ve only now got far enough down the list of to-dos to consider cleaning it up. There’s a lot of weeds to clear up and a good amount of tree maintenance. It was good timing, though, because the coffee is just beginning to ripen. There are a few coffee trees, but the best ones are growing under a…
Read MoreLemon myrtle
Before we moved here I only knew lemon myrtle (Backhousia citriodora) from powdered leaves I bought at the supermarket, but here we have a few trees, so I’ve been using the fresh herb.
Read MoreOnions
By all accounts the Winters here in northern NSW are too warm for standard bulbing onions, but the good news is there are other types we can grow, namely the bunching onions and shallots. That’s extra good news since I preferred to cook with shallots in Sydney, but they came at a premium price compared to ordinary brown onions, and of course here I can buy brown onions cheaply anytime. So to clarify, as there’s some confusion in terms used, shallots are the long bulbs, either golden or red, that…
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