Harvest Monday, 28 January 2013

My garden is still providing us with lots of fresh summer food and I have been busy making pickles, relishes and sauces (as well as the odd jam). Heres whats good in the garden a the moment.

Big Black Russian Toms, yummy I think I will make some turkish bread today and have a BLT.

This is my late planted Big Rainbow, it is absolutely covered in Tomatoes, and heaps of flowers. The seeds are from the Diggers Club who say that one plant can produce 17kg !! I hope so.

These are the pumpkins I have picked. Some people say you should just wait for the vines to die down but these all seemed to be holding the vines back from producing more female flowers, so off they came.

Here is a shot of part of the pumpkin patch, there is now another 2 Australian Butters growing and another 5 or 6 Red Kuri's. We will have plenty of pumpkin for winter use.

Isis Candy is one of my favourite cherry tomatoes, they are sweet and juicy as well as prolific.

The Blue Ballet squash are doing well and the 2 extra plants I added at the end of December have both set their first fruit.

Very excitingly the chook shed was finished, so we are off today to buy some point of lay girls.

Here are my totals for the week.

Zucchini                                 3.160 kl

Tomatoes                                8.560kl

Cucumbers                             1.380 Kl

Sweet Corn                            1.250Kl

According to my spread sheet, from the start of January my garden has produced $695.41 worth of veggies! Crazy.
There was also Basil and parsley that I used to make dips and pesto with but I don't weight those (even though the are about $4.00 per bunch and I probably grabbed a couple of bunches)

Harvest Monday - 21 January 2013

Summer so far has been pretty good to my garden, we did have a 39 degree day(nothing compared to South Australia, they had 48!!!) that burnt a lot of my Tomatoes and Capsicums as well as toasting my Rattlesnake bean plants. Thats small fries when there are out of control bush fires in other parts of Victoria and all over Australia at the moment. There is some more hot weather coming up so I hope everyone is staying safe and cool.

So heres whats good in the garden at the moment.

My Pumpkins(this one is an Australian Butter type) are growing and setting fruit like mad, I decided to pull this guy off after he passed the fingernail test. It seemed like the vine was putting all its energy into this pumpkin and not into producing more female flowers so I picked him. Low and behold the vine produced 3 new female flowers shortly after and they are getting fatter every day.

Blondkopfchen, or Blondie as I call it is such a sweet tomato. It is heart shaped with a little nipple and gooseberry like veins. Its a multiflora type that produces masses of little flowers followed by a ridiculous number of these little guys.

This is one of many hundreds of sprays that the Blondkopfchen is putting out!

I currently have a massive stash of these lovely Beit Alphas in the fridge waiting on my new Ball Mason jars to arrive. Yum, bread and butter pickles galore.

The Black Cherries are abundant and so yummy.

and the Purple Beauty Capsicum are getting nice and big. Aren't they such a pretty colour?

These little Red Kuri are the perfect size for 2 people.

Its not all been good though, in late december i started noticing holes in a lot of my Tomatoes. Caterpillars - not only Caterpillars but mice too, Dang it all. So far I have managed to get rid of the Caterpillars with Dipel but the mice are not so simple. I have been picking the fruit as soon as they get colour, if  i leave it any longer all thats left the next day is a tomato skin.

But everything is looking lush and green an we haven't had to buy any Veggies since before Christmas. Whats growing in your garden at the moment?

Here are the totals

Beit Alpha Cucumber              1.52 Kilos

Costata Romano Zucchini        1.15 Kilos  

Tomatoes                                  3.59 Kilos

Green Beans                    260g

Capsicum                           240g

Corn                                990g

In case your wondering, i'm not going to add in my Pumpkins until they are all done. That will most likely be mid April.

Thanks for stopping by!

Tomatoes

With summer in full swing my Tomatoes have started to produce some delicious specimans.

 Tigerella's

 Jaune Flammee's

Japanese Black Trifles

All super fresh and yummy. Talk about low food miles, straight out of my back yard.

My first Romano broccoli

Happenings around the garden

Even though it's cold and miserable here, the garden is looking good. Here's a few shots of what's going on around the place.

Garden Goodness

I wandered out to the garden with Tux this morning to plant a few onion seedlings (rossa lunga di Firenze, from the Italian Gardener if your interested) into the spot I had prepared for them last week. But after I planted those out I pottered around the garden and came inside with this haul.

A very funky looking Violet Sicilian Cauliflower to the right,  diakon radish,  a mix of heirloom beetroots,  Gem Cos and some beautiful salad greens including mizuna, baby spinach and baby Bok Choy (you will see where that went in a second). We'll be having delicious home made hamburgers tonight with the below buns, made from my recipe for no knead bread and will include some yummy roast beetroot and that little Gem Cos. I'll probably make a salad with the baby spinach and Mizuna that will include roasted almonds and a lemon and white wine vinaigrette, yum! Roughly worked out, if had bought this from the supermarket it would be around $11.00 and most of it would have been soggy and limp. 

And below is my lunch Mizo soup made with the Diakon radish and Baby Bok Choy, its was good.

In addition to gathering all the goodness from my garden, I ripped out 3 cauliflower plants that were finished and need to go out and plant some seeds maybe some dwarf snap peas or some gigante d'inverno Spinach, decisions, decisions.

No Knead Bread - cafe style meals at home

I love making bread but have always made sad, dense, chewy loaves. No longer though, I came across a recipe for no knead bread and thought I'd give it a go. I changed the recipe to fit me a bit better by changing the quantities of a few ingredients and the waiting times as well. When I first made this bread I thought it would be ok, but it blew me away. It was like the bread I see at the farmers market selling for $6 a loaf and whats more it was better! So here is the recipe.

Alyse's version of No Knead Recipe

6 cups of Bakers flour
2 tsp of Yeast
3-4 cups of water
1 tsp of salt

I like to do this in the morning just before leave for work.

Mix all the dry ingredients together well, if you want a large loaf continue without this next step otherwise take 3 cups of the mixed ingredients and put into another bowl cover with cling wrap and put aside (for me this is the next lot of bread I will be making as I only want 1 small loaf).

Mix in 1 1/2 cups of water, if its still quite dry add the other 1/2 a cup as you want quite a wet dough, mix really well. Cover your bowl with glad wrap and leave until just before you go to bed when you will need to stir it to knock all there air out of it. Cover and go to bed.

When you wake up flour your bench and tip out the dough, shape into a ball. Get a linen tea towel and flour it quite heavily. Put your bread on the tea towel and wrap up, it will rise over the next two hours.

After 1 1/2 hours of rising turn the oven onto 180 - 200 degrees Celsius and put in a camp oven or heavy metal casserole dish. After that has been heating up for 1/2 an hr take it out of the oven, take your dough in the tea towel and flip it into the camp oven or casserole dish so that what had been on the bottom in the tea towel is now on the top, put the lid back on and return to the oven. This is the fiddly bit but after making this a few times its easy. The first time I made this I forgot the tea towel I grabbed to hold the hot camp oven(putting it back in the oven) had been the heavily floured towel I had used for the bread. As you can imagine Poof - Flour every where. Below is the final result, crunchy crust with a soft tasty inside, Yum!

I really only make this on the weekends as I work full time and don't have the time to make this most days. But man is it a treat on the weekend. We can avoid going out for breakfast at a cafe which can easily add up to $40-$50 with coffees. Below is how I like to eat it. But its just as delicious with butter and yummy Boysenberry Jam mmmmm.

This is as good if not better than a cafe breakfast and only costs around $1.50 - $2.00 a serving. I'm drooling remembering how good this was. Terry loves it grilled with Vegemite and cheese, he says its so good he can't even share a little with the dog Tux!