The Mechanics of Reproduction – Hand Pollinating Pumpkins

Posted on January 14, 2012 by Liz

I was thinking of a range of different titles for this particular post – but then I thought of the disappointment that any number of 13 year boys would feel when they pulled up a site about gardening rather than what they intended to produce from their Google enquiry, so I decided on a sceintificish rather than salacious name.  Actually I do find that showing kids how to hand pollinate a pumpkin is quite a good way of explaining sex, or human reproduction without the ummming and errring I usually resort to when attempting to explain how babies are made.

500m2 in Sydney did a lovely piece on this a few weeks ago and while I tread very similar ground here I had the photos so I thought I would write on the topic anyway.  Besides I see no problem with cluttering up the internet with pumpkin related posts.

Why hand pollinate?

If you can see pumpkins forming on your plants but they are never reaching sizes greater than a golf or tennis ball (how large non-pollinated ones get depends on the variety) then one possibility is that they are not being pollinated.  Bees are great pollinators but if you are lacking bees or they are off fertilising elsewhere hand pollination is a great backup plan.

How to hand pollinate?

It is best to do this is the morning as the female flowers tend to close in the afternoon.

To hand pollinate you will need a male and a female flower.  Male flowers have long stalks and the female ones are the ones that you can see baby fruits forming behind.

Cut a male flower off the plant with a decent bit of stalk attatched.  You need to make sure the pollen is ready – to test if you very gently touch the stamen of the flower and pollen comes off on your hand then it is ready.

Remove the petals from the flower.  Try not to tip the flower upside down as you want to retain as much pollen as possible.

Place the stamen of the male flower inside the female flower touching as much of the stigma as possible.  You want to make sure all the different bits of the stigma get pollinated.

Cross your fingers and wait for pumpkins to form.

Note: If you are saving seed make sure you hand pollinate with a flower from the same kind of pumpkin (or indeed the same plant), if you are not worried about saving seeds you can use any male flower.

Share
Posted in Cucurbits, Pumpkin, Summer Planting | Tagged , | 16 Comments

Bread & Butter Cucumbers

Posted on January 12, 2012 by Liz

All winter, Australian winter that is, I’ve been reading about people making dill pickles, refrigerator cukes, etc etc etc as the northern hemisphere enjoyed summer.  Well today it is my turn, today I will share with you the most fabulous, the most terrific, the most wonderful pickled cucumber recipe ever!  Yes I know its a big call and these things a very much a matter of personal taste, so perhaps I should call it the pickled cucumber recipe that I find most fabulous, most terrific and most wonderful.  My mother likes it too though and that should count for something right?

Anyway the spicing in this recipe borrows from a recipe in Stephanie Alexander’s Kitchen Garden Companion (a book that narrowly missed my Top 5).  It is a recipe from her sister who, as Stephanie reports, grows great cucumbers.  Perhaps she lives near me because of all the things I grow I find cucumbers one of the most troublefree (touch wood).

This recipe makes about 800ml worth of pickles, double it, triple it, quadruple it, or make a series of batch as I do, as they keep for ages – we ate our last jar in September from a January batch (we only still had it because it found its way to the back of the cupboard) and they tasted great.  My kids love these too so they don’t last too long in our house usually.

Bread & Butter Cucumbers

  • 500g cucumbers – not too big ideally.  I use the Lebanese ones that are about 15cm long and they work brilliantly.  Slice the cucumbers thinly.
  • 1 large or 2 smaller onions – thinly sliced
  • 1.5 tblspn salt
  • 1/2 cup hot water
  • 1 cup vinegar
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 2 tsp mustard seeds
  • 2 tsp chopped dill
  • 1/4 tsp ground turmeric
  • 1/4 tsp chilli flakes

Dissolve the salt in the water, if it doesn’t dissolve you may need to heat the water on the stove.  Put the cucumbers and onion into a large bowl, pour on the salty water and leave for a few hours.  Strain off the liquid.  Rinse the cucumbers under running water to remove excess salt.  Strain again pressing down to remove as much liquid as possible.

Place vinegar, sugar, mustard seeds, dill, turmeric and chilli into a saucepan.  Bring to the boil.  Add cucumber & onions.  Simmer for a couple of minutes – they will lose some of their beautiful greenness but dont worry they still taste great.  Bottle in sterlised jars ensuring that the vinegar liquid completely covers the cucumbers.  Try to keep them for a few weeks before using them to allow the flavours to mellow.

For other Thursday Kitchen Cupboard ideas check out the Gardener of Eden’s site.

Share
Posted in Cucurbits, Recipes | Tagged | 41 Comments

Growing Tomatoes in Melbourne – Part 3

Posted on January 11, 2012 by Liz

I do find tomatoes one of the more idiosyncratic crops that I grow.  Nothing ever seems simple with tomatoes.  If its not the leaves, its the fruit, are they too dry?, are the too wet?, overfed?, underfed? there always seems to be something.  This year my tomatoes seem to be doing reasonably well, the leaves are dying off a bit at the bottom of the plants but I think that is normal, it happens every year after all.  Reassuringly the Burke’s Backyard website agrees with me it is so I’m going along with that for now.

Of the varieties I’m growing:

Broad Ripple Currant, Baby Red Pear, Sweet F1 Hybrid, Tommy Toe, Rouge de Marmande and Yellow Boy have all given me at least one ripe fruit and all have reasonable amount of fruit ripening on the plants.

Black Krim has heaps of lovely green growth but only just started to set fruit, there are two tiny ones I’ve have noticed in the last couple of days and that’s it.

Purple Russian set a few fruit a month or so ago but all but one fell off the plant.  The one that remains has yet to ripen.  The plant looks very wispy, not unhappy per se, but not really growing much either.

Black Cherry & Cherry Sweetbite were planted considerably later than the others, both have a few fruit set but they are a couple of weeks off ripening.

I do think, with the benefit of hindsight that it was a mistake to plant so many cherry varieties at the expense of more cutting tomatoes, particularly as the Black Krim seems destined to fruit so late and the Purple Russian looks to be something of a write-off.

I am also having some issues with the plants.   My Baby Red Pear tomato plant had heaps of its leaves yellow on the same day but then it was 40 degrees that day.  Those leaves have since died but the top of the plant remains healthy so I’m not too concerned.

This year however, it is the fruit I’m more worried about.  The Sweet F1 Hybrid has the occasional fruit with what looks like Blossom End Rot and a few of the others (Rouge de Marmande & Tommy Toe in particular) have some (but not all) fruit with little black spots or indentations in them.  Like this:

The leaves don’t have spots on them and in fact this particular fruit comes from one of my healthiest looking plants.  I’m thinking it could be one of two things: either a lack of calcium (so I’ve scattered some eggshell at the base of the plant in the hope that will resolve it), or insect attack.  If it is insect they are small and fast and I don’t think there is a great deal I can do about them.

Some of my other fruit have shown more obvious sign of insect attack:

Annoying isn’t it – I did eat the other half of this one though and it still tasted delicious.

If you have any ideas on what is attacking my fruit then I would love to know.

Share
Posted in Tomatoes | Tagged | 19 Comments

Tuesday’s Top 5 – Cookbooks for Kitchen Gardeners

Posted on January 10, 2012 by Liz

I am a lover of cookbooks.  Fortunately I used to live in the UK where cookbooks are reasonably priced so I built up a large collection.  Since I moved back to Australia from the UK five years ago I have purchased about 3 books (other than from op shops) because the prices are simply too high.  This compares with about 100 during the previous 5 years.  Of course I was working and didn’t have expenses like children then but still when you can by a beautiful cookbook on Amazon for the equivalent of $30 you do find excuses for owning them a lot easier than when they cost closer to $50 -$100 (or more if its Stephanie Alexander…even Stephanie only costs $40 on Amazon).

Of the cookbooks I possess there are, I’m ashamed to admit, many that I don’t open but there are many that I do and these are my favourites to turn to for recipes that highlight vegetables.

  1. My absolute favourite cookbook of all time is a South Indian Vegetarian cookbook that was given to me on 22nd (or possibly 23rd) birthday by my then housemate and still good friend.  The reason I loved it then is that it allowed me to access a whole lot of flavours I consumed while in India but had absolutely no idea how to recreate.  The reason I love it now is that no matter what I grow in the garden there is usually a suitable cooking method in this book and the results are always delicious.  The book is called Dakshin and it is by Chandra Padmanabhan.  She has also written a follow-up called Southern Spice which also has great recipes but not the fabulous photos and presentation of its predecessor.

     

2. My next selection is a book called: Paradiso Seasons by Denis Cotter.  Denis Cotter is an Irish chef who runs Cafe Paradiso a vegetarian restaurant in Cork.  Whilst I have never visited the Cafe (or indeed Cork) I would love to if only to eat the sort of food he highlights here.  Recipes with names like Pumpkin soup with lime and a coconut-peanut relish, Corn crusted aubergine Fritters with a tamarillo chutney, Chickpea, Leek and Rosemary Soup with a hot pepper salsa have all proved popular in my house – even with the more meat loving members.  Broken down into seasons the book offers a variety of recipes that I have used for both; family meals and entertaining.

   

 3. A New Book of Middle Eastern food by Claudia Roden is not a vegetarian cookbook but any book that has 3 different spinach recipes for filling savoury pastries (admitedly one of these includes calves livers) has to be included.  Claudia Roden has written a number of books on Middle Eastern Cookery but I think this one is best if you want a no nonsense (there aren’t any pictures) reference for a Middle Eastern take on vegetables.  For example there are 16 entries for spinach, 34 for eggplant and for those Southern Hemispherites currently drowning in a sea of apricots she includes 15 recipes.  The book also includes historical and cultural aspects of eating in the Middle East and gives interesting background information about how each type of ingredient is used.

4. Crazy Water, Pickled Lemons by Diana Henry is not solely about cooking vegetables either, instead it is a collection of her favourite recipes from the Middle East, Meditterranean and North Africa.  What I like about this book is the abundant use of herbs and strong flavourings in many of the dishes.  For instance a Greek Herb Pilaf with Prawns and Feta calls for onions, garlic, fresh tomatoes, a good-sized bunch of dill, a good sized bunch of parsley, plus a handful of mint as well as lemon juice and lemon wedges to serve.  All the sort of things that if you have a productive kitchen garden you should (climate permitting) have in abundance but if you were to try and buy at a supermarket you would have to fork out a lot of money for vastly inferior produce.    This book also includes one of my favourite vegetarian combinations of all time: Bulgar and Spinach Pilaf with Labneh and Chilli Roast Tomatoes – If you have the book then definitely give it a try.

  

5. My last selection is also my most recent acquisition – Plenty by Yotam Ottolenghi.  I am including it here, despite not having sampled many of its recipes as yet, simply because there are very few recipes here that I don’t want to try.  There are also very few recipes here that don’t include vegetables I grow in my garden.  But the thing that elevates this above other veggie centric offerings is the high esteem he holds Chard – a vegetable available year round just outside my back door.

  

And those are my Top 5 for cooking vegetables.  Do you have any favourites, recommendations for me?  I would love to find excuses for some more acquisitions…

As a follow up from last week, thankyou to everyone who commented on the kitchen gadgets – as per everyones instruction I will soon to go to the shops and purchase a salad spinner (and probably a Microplane).  Santa may have to provide the remainder, I shall be on my best behaviour all year….

P.S: To see what The New Good Life has come up with for her Top 5 then click here.

Share
Posted in Top 5 | 24 Comments

Monday Harvest – 9th Jan 2012

Posted on January 9, 2012 by Liz

It has been an excellent harvesting week – a great variety of things and everything has been delicious which helps no end.  What also helps is: much milder temperatures and the occasional ripe tomato.  The kids and I harvested quite a few this week , most of which were cherry size but there was the occasional larger one.  Eaten sliced on toast – my favourite breakfast.                           

This was also the week of the great shallot harvest (well 8 plants anyway).  These are the large red ones with a few small brown ones through in for good measure.

 Then there were the bigger brown shallots:

I have been hugely pleased with the shallots, the large brown shallots produced 1.5kg or 81 from just 3 bulbs and the purple ones produced 2.9kg or 61 shallots from 3 bulbs.  The smaller brown shallots produced about 250g from 2 bulbs but I planted them too deeply so I think they would have done better if it weren’t for that.  All in all I have a lot of spice paste and crispy fried shallots to make in the weeks ahead – YAY.

We also had a few more potatoes, some Kipflers from a volunteer plant in a very shady side bed and some Cranberry Reds from a 40cm pot.

The capsicum here was an accidental harvest as I much prefer them red.

I was most pleased with the Cranberry Reds – 7 excellent sized potatoes and a couple of little ones weighing about 1.5kg in all.  I have put the little ones back in the tub and I look forward to a second harvest

In the basket below, next to the cranberry red potatoes are the rest of my onion harvest – they may be small but they are eating beautifully in salads.  Also in the basket are some more beans, including the first of the Royal Burgandy.

The cucumbers are producing well at the moment, we are getting about 3-4 per week and I think this will increase markedly over the next couple of weeks.  This week we had four and I used 3 of them to make Bread & Butter Cucumbers which I will post about on Thursday.

The greens are producing all the time at the moment, although I have had issues with some of 5 coloured silverbeet either bolting or developing what looks like a mildew on its leaves.  The perpetual spinach is growing well as are most of the white stalked plants from the 5 colour batch.  The silverbeet I ate with a lemon & sage chicken dish, and this Kale was used in Caldo Verde, a soup that both my partner & I love but unfortunately the kids are nonplussed about.

  

Still on the green front (from a colour perspective anyway) I picked the first of the Beanette beans, lots of mizuna, basil, lettuce, dill and mint.

     

I also used some sage and thyme in my chicken dish mentioned above:

And how could I (almost) forget – my first red cayenne chilli of the year from an overwintered plant – I ate it tonight in Gado Gado – good level of heat from an early fruit.

All in all its been a great week in the garden – the only veg I’ve bought has been carrots (I have just sown some more where the garlic used to be) and a couple of red capsicum, the rest I grew which makes me very happy indeed.

To find out what the rest of the world is doing harvestwise all you have to do is click on Daphne’s name.

Share
Posted in Summer Harvesting | Tagged | 20 Comments