Suburban Tomato

A few weeks back I posted about Grow it Local and their local growers feast.  Well I got tickets.  A very big YAY!  And the feast was fab.  There were: great speakers like Costa from Gardening Australia.  Deano brought some fabulous Kombucha.  (It was my first time trying Kombucha and I have spent much of today googling it to work out exactly how its made).  The venue was fun, everything was beautifully presented and the food was great.

Check out the menu:

I can dutifully report that everything I tried was absolutely lovely.  Sadly though I didn’t get to try everything.

The tomatoes and figs had both pretty much gone in the seconds it took me to move from my seat to the buffet.

Is it wrong to hope the woman with the plate piled high with broken figs found a least one half caterpillar in it? (Actually it’s probably a very sad indictment that I can’t even enjoy a beautiful night, with beautiful food without a slight feeling of resentment….)

For me the highlights were; the Eggplant dip – beautifully smooth, slightly smoky and lovely and rich, and the Rhubarb & Berry tarts.  But really everything was lovely and to pick favourites is probably not being fair to the rest of the menu.

All that’s left now is to plot how to get tickets to next year’s event and to wonder; who ate my cucumbers, and what happened to my purple congo potatoes (probably not much as the more I eat them, the more I really don’t rate them at all….).

The Sustainable Living Festival is on in Melbourne at the moment (http://www.slf.org.au/)  and a friend and I thought we’d check out a couple of the things going on as part of the festival.

This trip into Melbourne’s CBD was in part motivated by a marketer who made contact with me to see if I’d be interested in checking out some of her clients products.  These products – Woolly Pockets, were a feature of a carbon positive house which is on display in Melbourne’s city square.

I have to admit that the older I get, the more interested I get in good functional design. So the idea of a carbon positive house with ‘woolly pockets’ on its exterior was rather intriguing.  And this is it:

The woolly pockets look like felt but are actually made from recycled plastics.  Designed for creating wall gardens, they are flexible pots with a wicking type watering system.  Aside from looking pretty they can also create a cooling effect inside a house if used, as above, on a sliding door.  Breeze on the wet pots cools the area inside.  Cool eh?

While I loved that idea, for me the (almost) bigger attraction was that they looked great filled with herbs.  Imagine a whole wall of these things with plants cascading out of them.  Potentially very beautiful.

The same company also make these other more plastic looking wall pots (and yes that is the bedroom on the right of the photo).

These were inside the carbon positive house.  Now I want a wall full for my kitchen (although I may need a skylight……and a new kitchen first).

The main reason I was so interested in wall pots is for my kid’s school.  There are some unsightly pillars and fences there that I think could do with a bit of living colour, and something like Woolly pockets could work really well.  (Hint, hint woolly pocket people).

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The other exhibit we looked at the Sustainable Living Festival was the Town Hall veggie patch.

These beautiful displays of veg are growing outside Melbourne’s Town Hall, and all in pots.  Although at first glance you would never realise.

These displays are created by loads of 15-20cm pots crammed together and with wooden edging attached.  This picture shows how they did it:

Incredibly simple isn’t it?  But really effective.  The thing that amazed me most was the pot with 3 corn growing (and looking really healthy) in it.  I wonder what they use for fertiliser….

I’m enjoying preserving at the moment.  Having a little bit of free time helps.  My youngest child has just started school and so I’ve gone from 15 child free hours a week, in which to cram in work, chores and a bit of blogging, to a wonderful 32.5 hours  a week.  Oh the luxury.  I can type that guilt free as, at the moment, he’s loving being a school boy.  Wooohoo!

Of course I should really find a ‘real’ job and have vaguely started looking but in the meantime I have been putting things in jars.

A friend (well actually two different friends) of mine have peach trees, and over the past couple of weeks the fruit has begun to ripen.  There’s no way they can use all the fruit so I have become a very grateful beneficiary.  Some of the fruit have become peach and plum jam (the plums were from my parent’s tree), some has become peach and chilli sauce, and some peach chutney but the best fruit I saved for bottling.

My kids love bottled peaches, they will a whole jar in a single sitting, which quite frankly is pretty gross to watch.  Because they eat so many at once I want to limit the sugar a bit so I preserve them in either a super light sugar syrup, 1 cup sugar to 2 litres of water or occasionally in plain water.  I used sugar syrup for these as they were ever so slightly under ripe.

I never peel the peaches I am preserving.  I find the process too time consuming and I don’t think the minimal textural difference  warrants it.  I also find that some peaches hold their shape better if you leave the skin on.  If you really want skin free peaches it generally comes off pretty easily when you take them out of the bottle.

These are freestone peaches, I love the colour and texture of the flesh where the stone has been – very pretty.

I bottle all my fruit in Fowlers bottles.  I bought a kit on eBay a couple of years ago and have really enjoyed using it.

You just put the fruit in jars, top with water, sugar syrup, or brine depending on what you are preserving, put the rubber sealing rings and lids on, clip them in place and into the water bath they go.  They emerge after an hour or two (there is a guide that explains the appropriate temperature and preserving time for each fruit or vegetable) ready for the shelf and the occasional proud glance.

Now I just have to keep the kids away from them, at least until the fresh peach season is over.