Top 5 – Things to do with Basil

Posted on May 7, 2013 by Liz

If you garden in a temperate zone within the Southern Hemisphere then chances are that you have a lot of basil around.  Basil that wont last too much longer as the weather cools.  I know I do.  Which nicely brings me to what I intend to do with it.  These are my top 5 uses for Basil:

Basil

Pesto – Everyone’s favourite basil based sauce.  Pesto is quick, easy, delicious and freezable.  What’s not to like.  I free mine in meal sized portions after I’ve whizzed the pine nuts, basil, garlic and olive oil together in the food processor but before the cheese is added.  Not really sure why but it works really well doing it that way.  I wont add to the wealth of pesto recipes on the net but if you feel you’d like one, this looks as good as any.  (I never add lemon to mine).

Puttanesca

Puttanesca-  I used to only ever make Puttanesca pasta sauce with parsley but then I posted on it and got heaps of comments from people who used basil.  Now I use basil too, although I think I still prefer the parsley version but the basil aint half bad and a useful alternative as it is generally available at times when parsley is in short supply.

Freeze it- I tend to freeze quite a bit of basil.  I detach the leaves from the stalks and freeze them whole.  They do discolour but provided you use them in cooking it doesn’t matter much.  It is a great way to get a basil hit in the middle of winter.

Tomato Salad

Salads-  I love throwing basil leaves into mixed salads.  They taste great, add interest and provide a nice green element.  I also use them a lot with tomatoes, but at this time of the year the fresh tomato supplies are dwindling so I use them more with other salad ingredients.

Add it to passata- Whenever I’ve been given passata made by Aussies of Italian descent there’s always quite of bit of basil in it.  I’ve never preserved my tomatoes with basil but I reckon I should give it a go.  Who would argue with ‘Nonna’ after all?

Those are my Top 5 uses for basil.  What do you think I’ve missed?

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Posted in Herbs & Spices | Tagged , | 14 Comments

Monday Harvest – 6th May 2013

Posted on May 6, 2013 by Liz

Our weather is divine at the moment.  Mild, sunny days – absolutely perfect for gardening.  I am getting a little worried about our lack of rain but hopefully some will arrive soon.  In the meantime I will enjoy my time outside watering.

I have really loved the Listada de Gandia eggplants this year.  I am hoping for a few more but if not I will enjoy eating this last one.

Bishops Cap Chillies & Eggplant

My chillies continue on, I made 8 jars of sambal this week from a mix of chillies, but mainly Bishops Cap which are amazingly prolific at the moment. The other varieties also producing well are: Birdseye and Tobago Seasoning.

KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERA

My harvests weren’t all red this week.  There was the occasional bit of green.  I’m harvesting a fair bit of celery at the moment, as well as basil.

KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERA   Basil

In addition to the things for my own kitchen I also harvested a few things for the local food swap this week.  It was the first time I’d gone, and having gone once I can see I will become a regular.  It was very relaxed with great coffee and cake on hand as well as lovely produce to take home.  I took curry leaves, kaffir lime leaves and some bishops caps chillies.

Bishops Cap, Curry Leaves, Kaffir Lime

I came back with kumquats, a few chillies to save seed from, some mint as mine is a bit ropey at the moment, a couple of limes and a pomegranate.  A lovely result.  I’ve already used most of it – the kumquats are candying.  The mint and pomegranate were used in a salad.  The chillies have been seeded and eaten and the limes are earmarked for guacamole.

KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERA

My final featured harvest this week were the finger limes that I posted on on Saturday.  I tried some on avocado today and the combination was perfect.

Finger lime

They were my harvests, head over to Daphne’s to check out some more.

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Posted in Autumn Harvesting | 23 Comments

Saturday Spotlight – Finger Limes

Posted on May 4, 2013 by Liz

There is a great deal I don’t know about the plant I am spotlighting this week but as I have just had my first harvest I am keen to share it with the world.

These are Finger Limes:

Finger Limes

Finger Limes (Citrus australasica) are, as their botanical name suggests, a native Australian citrus.  They grow on thorny bushes which can grow up to 10 metres high according to Daley’s informative website.  Daley’s are a fruit tree supplier in New South Wales but I acquired my plant from my parents who it bought it from Vaughans Australian Plants who are outside Geelong.  Unfortunately the label just calls the plant ‘finger lime’ so I’m not sure which variety I have.  What I do know is that, currently mine is happy in a 30cm pot and is only about 1 metre high (and half of that height is one branch which only recently shot up).  I think the plant is probably about 4 years old.  My parents had it for two years during which it looked very unhappy in their cooler climate in the Macedon Ranges (which does get frost).  I acquired it two years ago, potted it up from a 15cm to a 30cm pot at that point and it has lived in that pot ever since.  I feed it 6 monthly with Osmocote for citrus and that is about it, although I do give it the occasional feed of fish emulsion.  My plant started flowering over summer and subsequently set its first fruit.  I picked 4 today and it has another 8 left on it.

The plants are incredibly prickly with small skinny foliage.  The flowers on my plant are pink and the fruit started out green and then changed to a darker browny colour as they ripened.

Finger Lime

The ripe fruit are about as thick as my finger but only about 3/4 of its length.  Inside each fruit there are tiny pale pink balls:

Inside a finger lime

which taste like a cross between lemon/lime and grapefruit to my palate.  They are sour but good and I think they would give salad dressing an amazing taste and texture.  The little balls kind of burst when you eat them.  I am going to have a lot of fun experimenting with them I have to say.

Finger lime

Have you eaten finger limes?  If so what did you do with them?

Saturday Spotlight is a series of posts highlighting particular varieties of edible plants.  If you have a favourite, or even a less than successful variety of a plant and would like to include it in the series then please leave a comment with a link below.    I have created a page (above, just below the header) with an Index of all the Spotlights to date.   I will add links to any new posts below and in next weeks post as well as ensuring they appear in the Index.  

New Spotlights last week were:

Summer Perfection Spinach – From Seed to Table

Red Ursa Kale – Our Happy Acres

and from this week:

 Pea Eggplant – Kebun Malay-Kadazan Girls

Cream Garlic – My Little Garden Project

 

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Posted in Citrus | Tagged , | 45 Comments

Planting garlic

Posted on May 3, 2013 by Liz

I seem to have reached a height of disorganisation of late.  I’m doing quite a bit of volunteering at my daughter’s school which is eating into my gardening time.  I don’t resent it as I’m enjoying it and it is for the school after all, but it does have its repercussions.  One of them is that I haven’t planned my winter garden properly and I have just bunged brassicas in where there is space.  Additionally the chooks are proving more trying in their free ranging than I had (very naively) imagined.  I also keep running out of time to do basic garden maintenance so there are areas in the beds that haven’t been fed or mulched properly etc etc etc.  The result of all this is that I don’t seem to have any space much to grow my garlic.  However I did managed to plant out a section last week.  YAY!

I selected the biggest heads from last years crop of soft neck varieties.  Last year I planted both hard neck and soft neck varieties but the soft neck seem to prefer Melbourne’s climate so I am just concentrating on them this time.   I posted on last years experiences and you can find it here.

Garlic for planting

I separated the heads into large cloves to plant for storing garlic, and  little cloves that I will plant for green garlic.

Garlic cloves for planting

The small cloves I planted really close together in small sections of the garden, however (and this gives you an indication of my current levels of ineptitude) I forgot to mark where and now have no idea where I put them.  Note to self: Get your act together!  Hopefully they will reveal themselves soon though.

The larger cloves I planted out in a grid leaving 15cm both between cloves and between rows.  This is the same spacing I used last year and seemed OK.  I then covered the area with a very light mulch (as much to mark the area I planted in as anything else) and put some chicken wire over the top to try and stop; the chooks, blackbirds and doves scratching all the cloves up.  It has only been kind of successful…

Protecting garlic

This year I am planning on feeding my garlic more than I have in the past, mostly because Dave from Our Happy Acres recommended it in this post, (check the comments).  He grows pretty fab garlic and given my heads are generally on the small side everything that might help them be bigger should be tried in my opinion.

I only planted out 30 cloves (plus the small ones) so I wont get a years supply from this area , but perhaps I will be able to clear another couple of areas this weekend.  I usually aim for about 100 plants to give me a years supply so I have a little bit of work to do if I am going to achieve that this year.

Are you planting or about to harvest garlic?  Do you feed your garlic?  If so what and when?

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Posted in Alliums - Onions, Leeks, Garlic, Autumn Planting | Tagged | 22 Comments

Top 5 – Fruit and Veg in Season in Melbourne in May

Posted on May 1, 2013 by Liz

I like Melbourne in May.  For a start my birthday is in May and that means presents.  May also brings our first really Autumnal weather heralding falling leaves and slightly cooler temperatures.  As a result May often sees the final harvesting of many warmer weather crops.  Crops that started in Feb – April continue on in May, things like Sweet Potato, Tamarillo, Eggplant, Capsicums and Chillies as well as greens & herbs like Parsley, Kale, and Silverbeet.  As I have included them in my earlier posts I won’t highlight them here.  Instead these are some of the new things and final crops that will come out of my and other Melbourne gardens in May.

Pomegranate

Pomegranate –  I should really have included pomegranate last month but as my tree is yet to reach cropping size I wasn’t really sure exactly when crops began.  I went round pick up my daughter from a friends house the other day to find two trees in their backyard laden with beautiful bright red fruit.  And better yet the family to whom they belong to don’t use them so we get them all!  YAY!  I picked a good few that day and left a few that weren’t quite ripe yet but as those others will ripen in May I thought I could include them in this post.

Feijoas

Feijoa – I love Feijoa’s but as yet I haven’t found room for a plant so this is another crop that I have to scavenge from neighbours.  There is a tree between my house and the shops which conveniently deposits fruit on the footpath and May is when it generally deposits them.  As its not unusual to use feijoas as hedging I suspect I’m not the only one who gets their fruit by picking it up on their daily constitutional.

Lettuces

Lettuce –  My lettuce struggled this summer.  I didn’t look after it well enough and the plants bolted in the heat.  Plus I didn’t sow seed regularly enough to keep up with the bolting.  All this will change in May as the ones I sowed at the beginning of March start to crop well.  My plants seem to be really enjoying our mild (about 20C) temperatures and are growing nicely.  Well those that haven’t been attacked by my marauding hens are, but that is another post altogether….

Basil

Basil – I find my basil plants start to look a little on the sad side by the end of May so I try and harvest as much as possible during the month in order to freeze it for use during winter.  I freeze basil leaves whole and in pesto form, with both working well as a way of ensuring I have that fantastic basil flavour to use with all those tomatoes I preserved over summer.

Turmeric

Turmeric – I think I will harvest my turmeric crop in May – I harvested at least some of it then last year.  It does depend on the weather a bit as I do want to maximise its growing time so if May is really mild I might not harvest until June.  Regardless though I will probably bandicoot around a grab a few bits as I have been doing with my ginger for the last month or so.

So what will you harvest during May, or indeed enjoy scavenging from others?

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Posted in Autumn Harvesting, Top 5 | 26 Comments