Gardening with Children

Posted on June 16, 2012 by Liz

I generally enjoy (although I did consider putting enjoy in italics) gardening with the kids.  We happily sow seeds together, we dig holes, we plant out seedlings, we water and we harvest (very, very carefully) together.  There are some activities though that are less successful.  Take weeding; sometimes Mr 2 lets over exuberance get the better of him and suddenly the bed will be devoid of lettuces.  I say over exburance when actually I mean plain ordinary naughtiness.  Much to my shame I tend to have a slightly hysterical voice when he approaches the beds.  Highpitched shouts of NO,….. its a plant!…….You’ll kill it!……Oh NO you’ve pulled it out…….You’re going straight to timeout!…..  Must amuse the neighbours no end but they also make gardening with the kids a high stress activity at times.

Pruning is another activity I’m not entirely sure about.  Here we have Miss 5 about to do embark on some ‘pruning’.  What she was about to prune was, at the time, unclear…..cue Jaws music………

I held my breath, had visions of decimated dwarf citrus and another child in timeout, but fortunately this time it was of some parsley for her salad.  Next time the oranges may not be so lucky.

What parts of your garden do you allow small children to touch?  Is anything out of bounds?

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Growing Horseradish in a Pot

Posted on June 14, 2012 by Liz

I’ve only been growing horseradish for a couple of years.  The first year I grew it in the ground.  That was last year.  I thought I harvested all of it but despite this I have spent much of this year weeding out horseradish shoots.  The problem with horseradish is that any bit of root left in the ground has the propensity to sprout, so when you dig it up to harvest it you are leaving lots of bits of broken bits of root in the ground, all of which can and will become plants if you let them.  Because they are roots they also spread quite widely, I had horseradish come up in the lawn, through the beds and some was quite a distant from the original plant.  The other difficulty in dealing with them is that poisoning them is fairly pointless as you only get that little piece of root and you have potentially hundreds more bits in the ground.  I found pulling off the leaves the easiest way of dealing with them, and as the season went on less and less appeared.  I will be interested to see if more come up this Spring.

Because of the invasive nature of the plant, I now, much more sensibly, grow horseradish in a pot.  This year I grew it in a 35cm diameter pot.  In retrospect I think it would have enjoyed a slightly larger pot as although the end product was fine the roots did escape the pot quite a bit.

For those of you unfamiliar with the plant this is what it looks like:

This was taken in Spring, by Autumn the plant was much larger.  At the end of Autumn the leaves die down and it is ready to be harvested and washed:

Before trimming off the smaller and hair like roots until you are left with roots of a workable size:

This is about 300 grams of horseradish which is enough for me to enjoy some freshly grated;  it makes a lovely dressing/sauce when combined with yoghurt (preferably Greek), lemon juice and a bit of garlic, and also to make a jar of preserved horseradish.

I put a few bits of root back into a pot (this time a 40cm diameter pot), for next years crop and there is very little I will do to it between now and harvesting next Autumn aside from ensuring it has sufficient water.  And that is horseradishes great attraction – because it is so vigorous it is virtually trouble free – although the slugs do seem to like the leaves.

Oh and while I’m on the subject of horseradish Dave from Dave’s Square foot garden provided this excellent piece of trivia in his comment after my Monday Harvest post:

“Decades ago horseradish was such a valuable crop (due to the large US German population) that there was a commodity market for it. Horseradish was bought and sold by the ton on the St. Louis Commodity Exchange which set the price of horseradish for the US.”

Isn’t that fascinating?  I still have to set a price for it on my spreadsheet perhaps I should write to the St Louis Commodity Exchange and see what they think.

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Posted in Herbs & Spices, Spring Planting, Winter Harvesting | Tagged | 52 Comments

Top 5 – Kitchen Utensils

Posted on June 12, 2012 by Liz

My first ever top 5 post was on the Kitchen Gadgets I thought I might need.  Since writing that in January I have actually acquired 2 of them – a microplane and a salad spinner.  Thank you to everyone who recommended them as I love both.  This weeks Top 5 is about things I actually own – my favourite utensils.  The rules are: it has to be a manual device and it has to have a kitchen gardening related use so as much as I love my food processor and my eggbeater they were ineligible- the food processor because it electric and the eggbeater because we don’t yet have any chooks.

So what did make my Top 5?  These indispensible items did:

1. Spoons – Where would we be without the good old wooden spoon?  Or without a serving spoon?  A slotted spoon?  A soup ladle?  Spoons are incredibly useful when you think about it.  How cool is it that Simply Self-Sufficiency makes her own?

2. Graters – I use graters a lot, my current favourite being my newly purchased microplane, but I also use conventional graters as well as a small plastic one my mum got for me in Vietnam which produces those longs shreds of carrot.  Really useful.  The main things I use graters for is: zest, cheese, carrot, ginger and garlic (when making curry if I’ve got the grater out for the ginger I just grate the garlic cloves as well).  Given there are very few meals that I cook that don’t use zest, cheese, carrot, ginger or garlic I find that I use a grater most days.

3. Juicer – I love my little silver juicer.  Yes I know I could strain lemon pips out with my hands like Jamie Oliver but it gets juice all over them and then you’ve got to wash them and that involves getting the water temperature right (or be left with cold and clammy hands) and all in all it just seems so much easier to just get out the juicer and get on with it.  I use it for all types of citrus and I like citrus, my usual salad dressing uses lemon juice as its acid,  so I use my juicer a lot.

4. Strainers – I am a big fan of strainers and colanders.  I love how useful they can be.  Anything boiled goes in the colander.  Any stocks go through the strainer.  I find the fine mesh ones the best for straining things like stock (although I’m not super particular about getting every little impurity out).  Teas go through the little one, so does gravy which I seem incapable of making without lumps in it.

5. Garlic press – Garlic presses seem a little bit out of fashion at the moment.  There was a time when every recipe you read called for crushed garlic but now its more likely to be chopped.  I do actually chop a lot of my garlic and indeed grate it as I mentioned above, but where a really good solid garlic press comes into its own is when you’ve got lots of tiny little garlic cloves.  I do find I often grow garlic heads with a fair few small cloves (although this year WILL be different….) and rather than skinning them completely, which is really fiddly if they’re small, I just top and tail them and put them in the press with the skin on.  You have to have a really good solid press to do this – it would break a lot of the flimsier presses but if you’ve got a decent press it should work fine and give you lovely crushed garlic without having to peel the cloves.  As Jamie would say Result!

And that is this weeks Top 5.  Have I made any glaring omissions?  What would you not be without in your kitchen?  Already I’m thinking maybe I should have included my morter  pestle and my….and my…..and my…..

While you’re in the mood for Top 5s head on over to see what the New Good Life has for us this week.

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Monday Harvest – June 10th 2012

Posted on June 11, 2012 by Liz

Today is a public holiday, for the Queen’s birthday no less.  I’ve always found it mildly amusing that we get a day off here, in the colonies, but they don’t in the motherland.  Shame, he he he….  Actually I used to be something of a republican but to be honest I’d don’t feel strongly enough about it these days to even call myself that.  Besides I would miss the holiday…. we could rename it Snow Day I guess, as this weekend is also the opening of the Ski Season here in Australia.  If you’ve been skiing elsewhere in the world then skiing in Australia is something of a disappointment – very short and limited runs – but if you haven’t then its fun to play in the white stuff, as long as it stays on the mountains and away from my garden that is.

Speaking of gardens, I guess I should actually tell you about this weeks harvests which have been rather fun.  Anyone who read yesterdays post will know I harvested ginger:

I also harvested turmeric:

And continuing the root theme I emptied the horseradish pot:

I used some of the horseradish in a horseradish and yoghurt dressing I made for a beetroot salad.    I also used some of the ginger and turmeric in a South Indian chicken curry I made this evening.

I did a fair bit of gardening maintenance this weekend, including finally pulling out the eggplants, which although they may have given me another eggplant or two, were casting too much shade on my brassicas.

Pictured with the eggplants are my second ever orange and some absolutely tiny raddichios.  I was hoping for much bigger heads but the outer leaves had started to rot and I was concerned the whole lot would be ruined it I didn’t pull them now.

Aside from the ever present silver beet – which I have failed to photograph this week, my most regularly harvested crop was parsley.  This week I used it in stock, salads, pasta sauce and a pie.

Fruitwise there were more tamarillos:

And greenwise there were herbs, celery

and loads of lettuce:

 Thats it for me this week, but others will have more, lots more, so head over to Daphne’s Dandelions and have a look.

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Posted in Winter Harvesting | Tagged | 49 Comments

Growing Ginger in Melbourne – Is it worth it?

Posted on June 10, 2012 by Liz

I harvested some more of my ginger today.  One of the plants in the pot was dying back and I was dying to see what lay beneath the soil.

So I dug it out, leaving the remaining green plants in the pot.

This is what I got:

And this is what it looked like after I’d cleaned it up a bit:

Beautiful isn’t it?

The dark brown section on the right of the photo near the gloves is the original rhizome I planted.  The rest is new growth.  The new growth weighed just over 100g.  At the moment ginger is $11.88kg at my local supermarket.  So my bit of ginger is probably worth about $1.20, perhaps a bit more if you consider that its organic.  I paid $6.95 for the original organic ‘seed’ rhizomes of which there were 6.  So presuming I get similar results from the other plants in my pot I should just about break even this year (except of course if you factor in the cost of the potting mix and fertiliser in which case I’ve made a small loss).  This loss is due in most part to the price of the seed ginger which going forward I wont have to pay.  I have cut this section off, which as you can see is just starting to shoot and I have repotted it and I will keep the pot inside for the winter.  Hopefully that way it will start its growth phase a lot earlier than if I stored the rhizome for planting in Spring.  I will store some bits of the remaining crop for Spring planting though.

Another method of overcoming the cost of seed ginger would be sprouting some bought for culinary purposes but not having tried to before I am unsure of when the best time of the year to attempt it would be.  My early Spring planted ginger has tended to appear in late Spring/early Summer so my feeling is that it would need to be started sometime in Spring.  Has anyone done it successfully?  And When?

All in all I do think its worth attempting growing ginger in Melbourne (the cost of seed ginger aside).  Apart from anything else its fun.

Thus far my experiments have suggested that pot grown ginger; grown in potting mix fertilised with slow release fertiliser and then given liquid fish fertiliser fortnightly yields better results than ginger grown it straight in the garden.  I think this is largely because you can more easily control the amount of food and water it gets and ginger likes lots of both.  Where I previously planted it in the garden it has had a fair bit of competition for both water and nutrients and it hasn’t really appreciated it, if you could isolate it in the garden a bit it may fare better.

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Posted in Herbs & Spices, Spring Planting, Winter Harvesting | Tagged | 35 Comments