Small Green Annoyances

Posted on May 19, 2012 by Liz

The damage:

The culprit:

Lots of cabbage white caterpillars and a solitary baby snail.  Shame I don’t yet have any chooks to feed them to.

Actually although I have quite a few brassicas in the garden at the moment this is the only one with much damage.  The cabbage white butterflies don’t seem to be as prolific this year.  Either that or my attempts to get rid of their eggs, by regularly rubbing the underside of susceptible leaves, is working well.

Have you had problems with the butterflies this year?

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Posted in Pests and Diseases | Tagged | 32 Comments

Thai (ish) Red Curry Paste

Posted on May 17, 2012 by Liz

I made red curry paste last week.   I intend to make a few batches of it before both; I exhaust my supply of fresh lemongrass and the thai basil packs it in for this year.  I find you can be fairly flexible with the ingredients of curry paste.  This probably isn’t particularly authentic but to me thats not as important as whether it tastes good.  For instance I would prefer to make my own with fresh ingredients and potentially sacrifice a component or two, (in a ideal world this would have galangal in it), rather than buy a paste that has sat around in a jar for months.

This is what I put in this weeks paste:

Thai Red Curry Paste

  • 2 tspn coriander seeds
  • 1 tsp cumin seeds
  • 100g shallots – chopped
  • 4 large cloves garlic (actually I used about 8 small ones as thats what I have left from my summer harvest) – chopped
  • 5 hot chillies – chopped (or more to taste)
  • 3 lemongrass stalks – chopped
  • 1 tspn chopped coriander root
  • 2 tsp shrimp paste

Roast the cumin and coriander seeds*, then grind.  Place all ingredients including ground spices into a food processor and whizz together with a splash or two of water to make a paste.

I haven’t included ginger in this paste as I usually use this paste to make curry and I add the ginger seperately.  If you are using it for something else it might be worth adding ginger into the above recipe.  Galangal also works really well in this recipe, as do ground white peppercorns.

I use fresh chillies because that is what I have at the moment.  Dry ones are great too – just soak in water first.

*I do this on the stove top in a dry frypan – move them around a lot and roast until they just start to change colour and smell yummy.

I’m sharing this recipe on The Gardener of Eden’s Thursday Kitchen Cupboard , which this week is at Spring Garden Acre and Greenish Thumb’s Garden to Table.

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Posted in Autumn Harvesting, Chillies, Capsicum & Eggplant, Herbs & Spices, Recipes | Tagged , | 23 Comments

Top 5 – Ways to Kill a Tomato Plant

Posted on May 15, 2012 by Liz

OK so the title is a little over the top, but my daughter has been particularly melodramatic of late and I think its rubbed off.  What the post is really about is the mistakes I have made over the years, when growing tomatoes.

1. Insufficient food – I actually think I made this error this year, in my rush to get them in I didn’t prepare the bed as well as I could have.  I added some Dynamic Lifter (pelletised manure) to the soil but thats about it and despite good initial growth the plants just ran out of steam (or more accurately food).  They perked up a bit when I gave them some fish emulsion but it was really a case of too little too late.  Tomatoes need good levels of nitrogen, phosporus, potassium and calcium and I suspect mine ran out of most of these.  This year I will prepare my beds properly with lots of organic matter (manure and compost) and hopefully will be rewarded with stronger and healthier and thus more productive plants.

2. Sowing too early/too late – The old adage is true – ‘timing is everything’.  Plant out your tomatoes too early and they just sit there unhappily and look sad.  Sometimes they never fully recover – especially if you make the mistake of planting out before the last frost and it kills them.  Plant them too late and you could run out of warm weather needed for ripe fruit, or worse still the first frosts arrive before your crops.  Having said all that, I do find that most books on tomato growing in Melbourne err a little too much on the side of caution particularly when it comes to early plantings.  I have happily planted out tomatoes in August before (admittedly in a pretty mild year) and I don’t think their progress was slowed much at all.  Personally I think the key is a slightly staggered planting out (in Melbourne from perhaps September to December) to allow for both early and late crops  – especially if you have room for lots of plants.

3. Irregular watering – Tomatoes like regular consistent watering – but not too much.  Too much water will cause the roots to rot and as a result the plant will be less able to withstand any periods of hot weather.  The signs over watering are very similar to the signs of underwatering as in both instances the plant isn’t able to access sufficient water from the soil – in the case of under watering because it isn’t there and in over watering because the roots have rotted so they don’t have a big enough root system to take up the water.  Other watering issues include: Too much water while the plants are fruiting and the fruit may split and too little water and the fruit don’t reach a nice size.  This year I’m pretty sure I over-watered my tomatoes, they like it on the slightly dry side but that isn’t really what I gave them and they looked pretty unhappy at times as a result.

4. Pests & Diseases – Is there any disease a tomato can’t get?  And why do all tomato diseases look pretty much the same but with differing sizes and shapes of brown spots on the leaves?  And its not just the leaves and stem, from blossom end rot (which may be a sign of a lack of calcium) to fruit fly there are endless things which can destroy your fruit as well.  Good soil, attention to garden implement hygiene, judical pruning of effected branches and the removal of bugs will all help but sometimes there isn’t much you can do other than simply hope for the best.

5. Unsuitable varieties – All tomato varieties are not the same.  There are some which will tolerate far higher levels of humditiy than others.  There are some which will grow happily in colder temperatures than others.  Some take far longer to set fruit than others.  If you plant the wrong variety for your micro-climate it is very easy to have some very sad looking plants.  The early fruiting varieties are generally better suited to cooler areas and equally there are some varieties which cope far better with the tropics than others.  Because temperatures vary from year to year some varieties do much better in some years than others.  This year I found Rouge de Marmande did really well for me but that Purple Russian was absolutely hopeless.  I wonder what will do well for me next season…

So what else could I do to my tomatoes to reduce their productivity?  Any hints you could give me would be much appreciated as I’d prefer not to destroy my tomatoes in any new ways next season…

Wanting another Top 5?  The New Goodlife talks TV this week.

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Posted in Tomatoes, Top 5 | Tagged | 22 Comments

Monday Harvest – May 14th 2012

Posted on May 14, 2012 by Liz

Its cold here today (59F/15C) and as a result I don’t know how much longer the summer crops will last.  We are still getting eggplants, a few tomatoes and the never ending chillies.

What we are not getting are decent coriander crops, I pulled up this lot which had bolted before producing many leaves  in order to use the roots in a Thai red curry paste.  The paste also contained the lemongrass.

The below Thai basil, kaffir lime leaves and chilli went into the curry I made with the paste.

I just know that I will be harvesting a bit of silverbeet (chard) each week from now until Spring so I am trying to find new ways of photographing it.  Not entirely sure that this one was that successful photographically but it did taste good in Chicken Saag.

Another thing that I harvest each week and have similar photographic issues with is parsley.  I can’t remember if this lot became stock, was used in bean and chorizo casserole or was simply used in salad.  What I do know is that the lizard didn’t eat it.

The reason why I am trying to find different ways of photographing parsley and chard is clear when you see this next pic – while this picture is fine do you really want to see it every week?  Celery is something that I harvest every week so I need to come up with some new ideas for that too.  Thoughts anyone?  I do like the little spider in the bottom left of the photo though.

Despite the cooler weather I’m still eating a lot of salads – this basket went on to become a Salad Nicoise which I ate for lunch one day last week.

I didn’t only harvest summers crops and greens this week.  More tamarillos hit the basket, I’m up to about 50 so far and counting:

Finally, I decided it was high time I harvested one of our pots of turmeric.  This is what it looked like just out of the pot.

This is what the rhizomes looked like after I’d cleaned then up a bit:

This is a pretty small harvest admittedly but then my climate is really not well suited for growing turmeric and this is really something of an experiment.  This is my second year of trying and I’m learning all the time.  This lot comes from some rhizomes that I left in the pot over winter.  I will be interested to see how much bigger or smaller it is than that from the pot with freshly purchased rhizomes.  My suspicion is that I will get better crops from rhizomes that I either buy fresh each year or lift and store until the next planting season as our winters probably cause a reasonable amount of it to rot in the ground.  But I might be wrong.  I’ll leave my other pot for a few more weeks and then harvest it and compare.

For more harvest related excitement head over to Daphne’s Dandelions to see what else is being cut this week.

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Posted in Autumn Harvesting | Tagged | 43 Comments

The Kitchen Garden in May

Posted on May 11, 2012 by Liz

Each month during the past year I have written a page describing what I do in the Kitchen Garden in that month.  You will find them on both my side bar and above under Planting Notes.  I have written one for every month except for February and March which I will get around to soon hopefully – or at the very least before February next year…

The information is designed for a southern hemisphere temperate garden.  If you can add any info to my pages then I would love to hear from you.  What do you do in your garden in May (or November for the Northern Hemisphere equivalent)?  What do you/have you planted and what do you harvest?

This is what I have written for May so far:

May, to me, is about watching garlic grow, seeing the broad beans shoot up, wondering whether the capsicums will ripen and eating bowl after bowl of pumpkin soup.

Seeds to Sow:

Broad Beans, Cabbage, Carrot (not all varieties), Chives, Garlic, Kohl Rabi, Lettuce, Mizuna, Mustard Greens, Oregano, Onions, Parsley, Peas, Potatoes, Radish, Rocket, Shallots, Silver Beet, Spinach, Spring Onions, Watercress

Seedlings to plant out:

Bok Choi, Broccoli, Brussel Sprouts, Cabbage, Cavolo Nero, Cauliflower, Leeks, Lettuce, Pak Choi, Parsley, Silver Beet, Spinach, Watercress,

Garden maintenance to perform:

  • Order seed potatoes.
  • Prune Tamarillo, after harvesting all fruit.
  • Tidy up Autumn fruiting plants as they finish.

Seasonal Plants Harvesting now:

Beans, Capsicum, Citrus, Chillies, Eggplant, Feijoa, Ginger, Pumpkins, Sweet Potatoes, Tamarillos, Turmeric, Tomatoes (although mine have usually finished)

The following plants should be able to be harvestable all year round if planted in succession throughout their growing season:

Broccoli (but it is very susceptible to pests during the warmer months), Beetroot, Carrots, Celery, Lettuce, Mint, Parlsey, Radish, Sage, Silver Beet, Spring Onion, Thyme

 

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