Monday Harvest – 19th November 2012

Posted on November 19, 2012 by Liz

Even though the temperatures are slowly warming up here, this weeks harvests definitely speak more of Spring than anything else.  First there was what will probably be the penultimate broad bean harvest.  Note to self: grow more broad beans next year – this year I’m really not ready for them to be finished.

This lot went into pasta with smoked trout, pine nuts and some garlic.

I ate salad with my pasta.  Although I grow and cut from many lettuces each week, I have been pulling a few of my ‘freckles’ lettuces whole to make way for expanding summer crops.

Even my salad baskets were looking more winter than spring this week.  Lettuce, Spring onions, mint and beetroot.

I find cylindrical beetroot great to cook with but quite difficult to photograph without it looking a little, shall we say, suggestive…

Aside from herbs,

My other photographed harvest this week was this year’s solitary red cabbage.

 I had endless problems with my cabbage crop this year.  Most of my other seedlings either got eaten or bolted but this one survived and I harvested it this week.  I enjoyed a bit of it braised last night and I suspect the remainder will become coleslaw sometime later this week.

As always there are more harvests to be seen over at Daphne’s, head over – it’s always great eye candy.

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Potatoes all year round???

Posted on November 17, 2012 by Liz

I’ve spent the last year trying to achieve self sufficiency in potatoes.  I like the idea of self sufficiency in anything for two reasons: to borrow a phrase from Diary of a Tomato: it always feels good to “disengage from the military industrial complex” by not having to rely on it for a food stuff.  I also feel like I’m emulating my parents in some sort of time warp to the late 70’s/early 80s when my mother was busy spinning her own wool.  Anyway,  I don’t have enough space to grow heaps of potatoes to store for long periods so for me self sufficiency in spuds means growing and harvesting them year round.  But can you grow potatoes in Melbourne year round?  The answer seems to be a little bit yes and a big bit no.

The plants grow reasonably happily all year round (we are frost free) but although they’re growing they aren’t always setting many tubers, which kind of defeats the purpose.

Now my experiments in potato growing have been far from scientific.  I have chopped and changed varieties depending on when a given variety was shooting.  I have used a variety of growing techniques; some potatoes I grew in pots, others in the ground.  Regardless though I do have some observations which I think I will test further and that I thought I might be worth mentioning to see if others experiences were similar.

Things I have learnt:

  1. Potatoes seem to like quite a lot of both food and water – I got the best yields from plants that I gave a reasonable amount of both to.
  2. Potatoes don’t seem to like set tubers in Melbourne’s Summer or Autumn.  Both my late Summer & Autumn harvests were disappointing with yields at about 10-20% of the weight of the Spring grown ones.
  3. Potatoes grow reasonably well in Melbourne’s winter.  Although yields were still considerably less compared with Spring grown ones (about 50%) they were much better than those grown over Summer and Autumn.
  4. The best time to plant potatoes in Melbourne seems to be July – September, harvesting in November/December/January.
  5. Kipfler was the only variety that produced shoots regardless of the season.  All the others I tried seem to be waiting for the right temperatures (ie our winter) to send up shoots.

This link details Melbourne’s climate throughout the year.

http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/averages/tables/cw_086071.shtml

Although Melbourne’s Jan & Feb (ie summer) average temperatures are only around 26C maximum, we do gets blocks of days with temperatures in the high 30 (around 100F)s followed by blocks in the low 20s.

I would be interested to know if people think temperature or day length has the bigger impact on the potato plants, and indeed what time of year, and what climatic conditions you find potatoes grow best in.

Perhaps armed with more information I can become self sufficient in spuds and thus tick one more edible off the don’t ever need to buy list.

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Lemons, so many lemons….

Posted on November 15, 2012 by Liz

After The New Goodlife’s fabulous top 5 post about lemons earliers in the week and Bek from Bek’s Backyard’s adventures with Limoncello I thought it only appropriate I continue with the lemon theme for this week’s Thursday Kitchen Cupboard post.

My parents have two well established lemon trees at their place.  A large Eureka lemon and a much smaller but still very productive Meyer lemon.  Everytime I go to their place I come home with a bag of lemons and recently, given Mr 3’s penchant for lemon picking, the bags have been particular big.

I use a lot of lemons, in salad dressings, in marinades, with chicken, zest in pasta, to make lemonade, and in the occasional sweet dish.  This year I also decided to make limoncello for Christmas gifts.  You can see the rind marinating in vodka, on the left, in the picture below.  The other thing I made this week was a new batch of preserved lemon, that’s them in the jar on the right.

Preserved Lemons

Preserved lemons are easy to make.  I use a fairly standard recipe and it always comes out well.  To make them: cut each lemon as though you were going to cut them into quarters but do not cut them completely through.  The lemons should open out at the top but be joined at the bottom.  Pour a tablespoon of salt into each lemon and then reform the lemon and place it into a sterilized glass jar.  Pack the jar full with as many lemons as will fit comfortably.  Then add as much lemon juice as you need to cover the lemons completely.

It is up to you whether or not to add spices, I sometimes do, sometimes don’t.  To this batch I added a teaspoon or so of both peppercorns and coriander seeds.

The preserved lemons will then need to sit for at least a month and its a good idea to give the bottle a quick shake every now and then.

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Top 5 – Fruits in season in Australia in November

Posted on November 13, 2012 by Liz

I’ve been eating a lot of fruit lately, all of it grown in Australia and all of it in season now!  I think that, as much as I love a new season Jonathan apple, I probably get most excited about fruit at this time of the year.

Now I wont try and pretend that all of this fruit is local.  It’s a very long way from Melbourne to the Northern Terrritory where the Mangoes are in season at the moment.  Melbourne to Darwin is over 3000km – a bit further than the distance between London & Istanbul and considerably further than the distance between Havana and New York City.  Basically its a  long way for a Mango to come, but they are good to eat when they get here.

Also coming a bit further than is ideal are the Blueberries.  The Victorian (for those unfamiliar with Australian geography, Melbourne is in the state of Victoria) blueberry season starts next month but they are in season in Northern New South Wales and Southern Queensland now and the ones I have eaten lately are tasting particularly good.

The first of this seasons Victorian grown tomatoes are starting to come into the Farmers Markets.  These ones were greenhouse grown in Eastern Victoria (or at least I think they were), still a good few 100kms from my house but much more local than the first two selections.  There are also reasonable slicing tomatoes from South Australia (the area around Murray Bridge) coming into season.  You can sometimes get them at Coburg market and they aren’t too bad for commercially grown tomatoes.

Closer still, on the outskirts of Melbourne are the Strawberry farms and November is when the fruit starts tasting pretty good.  I wish I had strawberries closer – ie in my own backyard but although I get the occasional one they aren’t they greatest flavourwise due to a lack of sun, and the slugs get as many as we do.

For me though the most exciting fruit coming into season in November are the cherries.  The first Tuesday in November is Melbourne Cup day – a day of note not just for being the traditional day to plant out tomatoes in Melbourne (I didn’t go with tradition – I planted mine a good month before the race was run), but it is also the day when many of the cherry growers start to harvest their crop.  I haven’t seen them in the supermarkets yet (but then I haven’t been for a couple of weeks) but I bought 2kg of cherries from the Smith’s Farm stall at Collingwood Childrens Farm on Saturday.  They were all gone by the end of Sunday.  I did take 1 kg to a party where they were mainly eaten by the kids and me and the other kg we ate by ourselves.  Messy but delicious.  Best of all the Bacchus Marsh cherry season starts in a week or two and that is only about 15km from my parents place.  You don’t get much more local than that without growing your own.

Thanks for the suggestions for future Top 5s!  You’ll see a few of them over the coming weeks.  If you have any more ideas or requests then just let me know – everything gratefully received.

Now head over to The New Good Life to check out her Top 5 for this week  its also all about fruit –  Top 5 Ways with Lemons.

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Monday Harvest – 12th November 2012

Posted on November 12, 2012 by Liz

I had a little taste of summer this week as I harvested a few of the cucumbers.  Admittedly I harvested them very small, more to promote the growth of the plant as to eat really, but they still tasted good in Tzatziki.

I sometimes make my tzatziki with mint but on this occasion I made it with dill – the first dill I have harvested this year.  Here it is along with some spring onions and herbs I used for corn fritters.

The final home grown ingredient in my tzatziki was garlic.  I pulled quite a bit of my garlic crop this week – all of my hardneck ones were sagging and the stems looked like rotting so I yanked them.  Disappointingly none of them had flowered so I still haven’t tried garlic scape pesto but despite that I did get a few decent sized heads (and a few not so big ones….).

Here is another batch:

My softneck garlic is still growing (reasonably happily) – I will be very interested to compare the head sizes etc.  I am trying to use my newly harvested small heads up quickly before the skin around the cloves dries and they become more fiddly to peel.  To this end we are having garlic in everything.  My favourite dish of the week was with some broad beans, mint and feta.  There are more broad beans in the bottom of the basket than is apparent here.  As you may have guessed I also made salad.

Speaking of salad my wild rocket is doing particularly well at the moment.  This lot went on top of a simple tomato and salami pizza along with some shavings of Parmesan.  Appropriately the thyme pictured is called ‘pizza thyme’.

I have so many lettuces in the garden that I am pulling the occasional head rather than treating them all as cut and come again.  This ‘Freckles’ lettuce I took out to give my zucchini more room to grow into.

I find that when my silver beet bolts I can still harvest from the plants but in much reduced quantities.  I cobbled together this lot from all the flowering plants around the garden.  I haven’t pulled the plants as this variety has done really well in some pretty shady places so I am keen to save its seed.  An added bonus is still getting the occasional bunch to make gnocchi with.

As always I advise you to head over to Daphne’s Dandelions and check out who else is harvesting what.  Its always fun!

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