Lablab, dolichos, hyacinth bean, this bean has a multitude of names, which indicate how widely grown it is. Lablab beans grow on a sprawling vine and will be handy here for covering slopes productively. The foliage is good fodder, and apparently will come again if you slash it back to use as a green manure. It gets the name hyacinth bean from the pink flower spikes, which are edible and good in a salad.
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Black radish seeds seemed like an interesting option from the seed merchant, so in my spirit of adventure and finding what grows best for us here, I bought a packet. They were something different from the usual, and worth a try. When I started pulling them, I was wondering if they would be consigned to the experience bin, but with a few tasty crops and recipes tried, I’m a convert.
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It’s peak season for burrs here. We get them all year, and many different sorts, but Midwinter seems to be the time. They are just everywhere; on the dog, on shirts and pants, but specially on socks and bootlaces. Here’s a photo of my socks after a bit of digging this morning Cobblers pegs come up everywhere here. The local name is ‘farmers friends’ and the Latin name is Bidens pills. It’s not a particularly troublesome weed, being easy to pull, but it’s easy to see how it spreads to every part of…
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Jicama first came to my attention through Jeremy Coleby Williams‘ excellent blog on subtropical gardening, and segment on Gardening Australia. I had also been intrigued by Matthew Kenney‘s raw food recipes, where he uses thinly sliced jicama as a layer in nori rolls. Jicama is another food that is not widely used or available in Australia, so I was keen to try it myself. In early Winter my jicama plants were looking a bit end-of-season, with some purplish leaves, so I had a go at digging one. I had thought I could…
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At last we have some colour in our cleomes! I first sowed the seed from a seed company pack back in Summer, and all the surviving plants were white flowered. They were an elegant foil for the colourful zinnias planted alongside, but they were supposed to be a colour mix. Growing cleomes It turned out to be a timing thing. The February blooms provided ample seed for an Autumn planting, which grew much better than the Summer sowing, but of course they were all white too so I risked my last…
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The celery of the lettuce family is called celtuce. It’s been selected for its stems, rather than the leaves, but the young leaves are also good for salads. Sowing seeds too thickly is a common error, especially for me, but fortunately with lettuce you can salvage the situation by thinning them out and using the thinnings for salad. We have been having celtuce as a salad lately, and also for cooking, as I thin out my lettuce bed in favour of standard lettuce.
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Australia seems to be regarded in awe by other places for our multitude of deadly creatures, and I can confess now that I was worried about what creatures might lurk here at Hill House. As I grew up on the other side of the country and had lived in towns and cities on this side, I was unfamiliar with the level of wildlife here, and expected that it would be frankly seething with animals, some of which would be keen to bite. But I can report back that we have been…
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A blank slate was what we wanted with our new garden, and when we moved here, that’s what we got. There was a small, roughly fenced and terraced vegetable plot on the hill below the house, which had been mostly abandoned to layers of cardboard and plastic. The rest was grass, with lantana and other tall weeds on the fringes. In our first year we have tried and moved a couple of gardens, and begun to plant the ornamental gardens round the house.
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We have just celebrated our first year here at ‘Hill House’. It’s been a great time, highlighted by meeting new friends and settling into the community, as well as having lots of visitors. We also got our beautiful smooth fox terrier, Willow, who has kept us busy. The daunting unknown of looking after 20 hectares has now become more a familiar reality, as we find out what is achievable here, but there will be many years to come of trial and error to try achieve a more sustainable future here.
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Making daikon kimchi is an excellent way to spread out a harvest. My daikon (white radish, mooli) crop did very well, but after a few weeks of picking, the final half dozen plants needed to be pulled to make way for the next planting. So with the fridge already loaded with daikon roots, I decided to try a fermentation.
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