Garden!

 

Snapped this yesterday after I'd repotted some individual basil plants - seem to be having great success with these, and I grew them from seed, which is even more exciting - and I was sitting out there taking the time to really look at my plants. I realised that my cape gooseberry has grown significantly. I had this weird idea that the plant I bought would just stay the same, that the berries that were on it would be the only ones there would be and that would be that. So, I've been surprised to see the plant has taken off, there are new flowers and new berries, including tiny baby ones. I've just been reading about this plant and have harvested some seed, so I might just see if I can grow one myself!

The same thing has happened with my pepino plant (not in this picture), which is so lovely and bushy and green now - not the tired looking little plant it was when I bought it.

Similarly at the plot, my broccoli has taken off, the cabbage is looking good, the onions are growing and there are random little pea plants sprouting all over the place. Mostly I'm just leaving them where they are, unless they are competing with something else, and I'll just see how they go. The strawberry is so happy and content - you can tell just by looking at it!

Water and care, but mostly water, is really all it has taken.

Yesterday I planted red pak choy seeds and kohlrabi seeds - don't even know what this second one is so it will be interesting to see it come up! I also planted some sweet pea (flowers) into a pot. Busy, busy.

Jobs to do: plant out beetroot in the plot and I've got one little spot left in there so I'm going to buy a kale plant and see what happens to that.

I just want to spend all my time doing this stuff, it makes me happier, or more content than I thought possible.

Modern horrors

I've just started reading The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton and usually I wait until I've finished a book before I talk about it but I was so horrified by what I read last night in the first two chapters that I thought it was worth writing about now.

I really enjoy Alain de Botton's work - in particular The Art of Travel. I read this before travelling, while travelling and after I returned and will still return to it for its truth and beauty. de Botton is so clever - he just gently points things out, doesn't get upset about it, doesn't rant and rave, just gently draws the reader to the conclusion and, sometimes, if you aren't paying attention, even that can slip by unnoticed.

The first two chapters of this new book describe logistics. Shipping, freight, warehouses, trucks, delivery and all that fairly unremarkable stuff. Only, it turns out, it really is quite remarkable. While I found it physically confronting to follow the journey of a fresh tuna steak from being part of a tuna in the sea in the Maldives to a plate in suburban Bristol, it was in a way also graceful and incredible. This fact, however, did not deter my decision to stop eating anything that did not come from my local area.

The amount of concrete (the worst sort of building material in terms of energy), fuel and waste that went into that tuna steak dinner was astounding. Not only that, the idea that de Botton came across a very familiar label (one he sees in his local Sainsbury's) in the packing factory in the Maldives also shocked me. I thought about all that is in my freezer and where it came from. I just can't be a part of that anymore.

I already try really hard to buy things made here - food especially, but sometimes I'm hungry or there isn't much of a choice or it is expensive, or I'm addicted to bad things that come from elsewhere. But this resolves me to try harder.

There was another part of this section that really got to me, he writes:

That we are each surrounded by millions of other human beings remains a piece of inert and unevocative data, failing to dislodge us from a self-centered day-to-day perspective, until we take a look at a stack of ten thousand ham-and-mustard sandwiches, all wrapped in identical plastic casings, assembled in a factory in Hull, made out of the same flawless cottony-white bread, and due to be eaten over the coming two days by an extraordinary range of our fellow citizens which these sandwiches promptly urge us to make space for in our inwardly focused imaginations.

So really, how can this work any other way? How can we, as the large, industrialised society that we have become, even hope to reject the place we've found ourselves in. There are simply too many of us. This means for our work (the real topic of the book) and for our environment? These are huge questions. Too huge. Too scary to really think about.

I listened to de Botton on Radio National this morning and he was talking about Smith, the economist, who pointed out that yes, it is terrible that we have this huge machine that turns out ham-and-mustard sandwiches and biscuits and tissues but if we didn't have it 10% of our western population and probably a lot more from other parts of the globe would die of starvation. Not because they are eating the ham-and-mustard sandwiches, you understand, just because they are making them.

Fucking scary stuff.

Glorious quince paste

Two posts in one day is a little much, I agree, but this is just too exciting to wait to write. Let me just start by saying that I LOVE quince paste. Love it. The taste of quince paste on a lovely chedder on a cracked pepper water cracker (Oz made only - check you aren't buying the ones made in China - Arnott's is best) with a glass of Bacardi and coke with ice just as the sun goes down is one of my all time favourite things. LOVE IT.

So, it was perhaps brilliance on my part that I chose to begin my experience with preserving, jam-making and all associated concoctions with quince paste because if I'd started with something I wasn't in total love with I might have given up. Suffice to say that the directions I followed (from the brilliant A Year in a Bottle by Sally Wise) were deceptively simple and certainly didn't indicate that it would take an entire afternoon. I'm proud of myself for sticking with it and have been enjoying the fruits of my labour this evening. Yum.

In order to make quince paste you need about 8 quinces. I bought mine from a farm shop in Margaret River and really you won't find quinces for sale at Coles. My personal tragedy is that I used to have a quince tree and composted every single fruit from this prolifric tree which survived despite the severe drought. I didn't taste quince paste until a few months after I sold that property. Quinces are not for eating off the tree, so if you can find someone with a tree chances are they will be glad to give you the fruit.



Once you have carefully washed and chopped up the quinces, you put them in a large pot with a cup of water and the juice from one lemon.



Try to cook them slowly - for about 30mins or so. I cooked mine too quickly and have a large pot with burnt quince to clean up and I also suspect burning them dry made the next step unnecessarily difficult. When they are very soft, strain them through a colander and then through a sieve. This took me about two hours to do.




Don't give up if it does take time. Remember this is an old craft and our experience of having things immediately (buying them at the shop, for example) is not a good grounding for this sort of activity. During this time of exhausted arms and blistered hands, it was the love of quince paste that kept me going and a belief in something unknown that got me there as I shoved what looked like stewed apple through tiny holes - the belief that it would eventually become something I loved. Eventually you end up with a fine puree.



Put this into a clean saucepan with sugar - one cup of sugar for each cup of puree. Bring to the boil slowly and then cook over a medium heat. Now, if you did get away with an easier straining experience than me, your patientence will be tested next. The paste will take about two hours to be ready but you MUST stir it every few minutes during this time. I put a stool next to the stove and read then brought the laptop into the kitchen to blog. But you must stay in the kitchen and stir. When you start the mixture is quite wet and sloppy:



Very slowly, over time the paste dries out and begins turning a more richer colour. I never got my whole batch to be that beautiful crimson colour of the paste you can buy in the shop, although there were spots here and there like that. In fact, I probably left mine on the heat too long waiting for this to happen. But in the end it didn't matter. You end up with a paste that doesn't move on its own.



Just a pause to explain the sterilsation of the jars the quince paste will go into. You will need to wash them by hand or in the dishwasher then put them on a tray in a cold oven. Turn the oven up to 110degs and as soon as it reaches this temp, turn the oven off and leave the jars for 10mins. They should be warm when you put the paste in them, so try to time it right. The lids need to be simmered in water for 2 mins. Don't buy Ikea jars like I did which have plastic lids that buckle in boiling water and break when you try to push them onto the jars - this means I'll have to eat my paste quickly as the jars aren't airtight, but that shouldn't be a problem!



When all is ready, spoon/shove the paste into the jars and seal.



And finally, you could wait for the paste to cool before you eat it, but as mine was ready just on sunset, I had biscuits, a lovely Capel Valley chedder and the required drinks, I couldn't wait!



Delicious and virtous, home made, hand made and I know exactly what went into it.

For a "gormet" product like this this was cheap. $4 for the quinces, two cups of sugar, a lemon and an afternoon. Not a lot for one of my all time loves in life! Cheers!

No plant left behind and other sundries

I'm such a sucker for the last, sad, lonely plants in a nursery. You know, the one left, abandoned by its mates or one solitary kind of plant sitting at the back of a shelf, the price tag peeling off and the roots sticking out of the pot. I just have to take them home. This time it was a lavender eggplant. I'd seen photos of these and can order seeds, but never seen one for sale. This was the only one there and it had a tiny eggplant hanging from its tiny branch. Cute!


(You can see the 'proper' eggplant behind it in this shot)

I potted it today, along with a red centre lime (a plant developed by the CSIRO!) and the fig I pulled out of the garden and quite likely killed in the process. It is certainly looking sad at the moment. I hope it will be okay.

My house has turned into some kind of weird scientist's den. I have a little greenhouse of sprouting plants, some potatoes on the shelf waiting to be ready to plant, the mushrooms in the cupboard doing mysterious things, the bread starter on the bench (more about this in another post), the worms eating their way through strange worm food in the laundry and currently I'm hopping up every few minutes to stir the quince paste on the go on the stove (this also deserves its own post). Not one to do things slowly, I must admit that I'm perhaps reaching my limit of learning curve velocity.

I should change this blog's name to 'things I've learnt from books' as that is where I get almost all my information from!

Easter jobs

I've heard many-a-time that easter is a great time to "get those jobs in the garden done". Now I believe it. I had friends staying who have helped me get the plot ready by digging in the compost, spreading the pea straw and planting out my first vegetables. There is a strawberry plant as well as peas, broccoli, cabbage, brussel sprouts, onion, beetroot, garlic, english spinach, bok choi and the potatoes are almost ready to go in. I also have at home a mushroom box (yay!) and I've set a starter for bread. All very exciting and enjoyable!


Katrina and I digging in the compost


The planted plot

It is lovely there in the early mornings when I go to water. The roosters are crowing and everything is damp from the overnight dew and quiet - the world around seems to disappear when I inspect the plants, excited and impatient to see what will happen, but knowing I have to wait.

A battle of wills

My poor broccoli.



It is so chewed and munched that almost no leaf has survived. The other day I was peering at it, looking for whatever could be eating so much when suddenly into view came a little green slug-thing. As soon as I saw it, five more popped into view on the leaves. It was an astounding moment - like they had zapped into existence in a second. I pulled them all off and squashed them (they exploded satisfiyingly into a mess of little green balls of poo). The next day three more were there, the next three more and this morning another one. My poor broccoli!

I finally looked up some of my books to find out what this little slug was - it is the larvae of the white cabbage moth "particularly pesky in warm weather". Hmmm, it has been over 30 for days now. There is something I can spray on it (an organic pest control thing) or I can pick them off by hand and cover the plant with netting so the moth can't lay its eggs. I will have to do something because when the broccoli goes into the plot I won't be able to keep such a close eye on it.

For now, however, I check the leaves every time I think of it - even brushing away a white cabbage moth itself earlier - and hope that it recovers.

Community Plot

Today I went to my community plot (I've had it a few weeks now) to attend a workshop on starting the year's planting (autumn being the end/beginning of the seasons for gardening). It was fascinating. I learnt more about how to create the right soil environment for growing veges than I have in all the reading I've done put together. I think it was the hands on experience of actually spreading manure and all the additives the soil there needs (it really is as simple as throwing it on and digging it in but now these terms have a lot more meaning for me). Also, I didn't have to guess what kind of soil I have and what it needs - the lady leading the workshop just told us exactly what we needed to do.

Afterwards, mum and I went around buying all the bits and pieces we would need and we'll start on it one afternoon this week (we have to wait for one more additive to be available on Monday). Can't wait. I have also planned out my crop rotation system - important for building up the correct nutrients in the soil for specific types of veges - and am just about to order the rest of the seeds I'll need. Now I have been given a direction to start off on I'll be happy to try things out and play around.



The bare plot. Mine is the one with the triangular bit.



You can see a bit more of the community garden surrounds in this one.