When Caterpillars Attack!

Sometimes, you can understand why farmers resort to pesticides.

Here is my tub growing mixed radishes:

And this is all that is left of them:

 You can still see some of the culprits:

The Neglected Vegie Patch and a Monday Harvest!

This winter has been one of the worst for coughs and sniffles in our house. At the moment all three of us are having coughing fits that keep us up at night and make us cranky during the day. Thankfully the weather is getting warmer and we'll be able to get outdoors more often and get rid of the germs.

It means that I haven't been to get over to the shared vegetable patch for some time, so it's been left to its own devices for several weeks. It's been very interesting to see how everything has coped.

It's Alive!

As you can see, everything is alive and doing quite well.The root vegetables and the green leafy things have done the best. The onions are ticking over nicely, and the snow peas have started to crop.

12 leaves of Tuscan Kale

The kale is impressive! I took 12 leaves off it and barely made a dent. I'll be putting them into a bean soup.

8 leaves of Rainbow Silverbeet

I'll be putting these into the freezer for later.

1.172kg of Turnips

These are varying in size from golf ball to one that is about 400g on its own. There is still about half a dozen small ones in the ground, but I wanted to get most of them out so the beetroot has a chance to mature.

180g of green beans

The beans haven't grown too well over winter, so I might need to pull them out and start over with some fresh seeds. These ones I've picked are mostly pod and no seed, so I'm hoping that picking them will stimulate the plants into another round of production. I think this batch will be donated as chicken food.

 The snow peas are covered in flowers and there are two little pods already so I'm looking forward to fresh snow peas soon!

Hot Chillies in Syrup

The chilli harvest has begun. I have a wonderful variety of birds eye chilli. It is tough as nails, and my original plant has survived attacks by caterpillars and possums, not to mention neglect from me!  The chillies start off green, turn black, and then after 6-8 weeks turn red, often within 24 hours. This winter I gave all my chilli plants a severe pruning, and this year I have the biggest crop so far. There's no way we can eat so many chillies, so I am preserving them.

I'm using citric acid to provide the acidity required to preserve the mixture, but without adding the strong flavour that vinegar would - my husband detests vinegar and I want him to eat these!

Wear gloves when preparing chillies, and if you don't like them too hot, then remove all the seeds and the white membrane inside that they are attached to. This is where the capsaicin (the hotness) is concentrated.

Hot Chillies in Syrup

My jar was approx 225ml in volume.

300ml water
300g sugar
1/2 tsp citric acid
14 birds eye chillies, washed and sliced into rounds (with seeds removed from all but two of them)

Heat the water, sugar and citric acid in a sauce pan until the sugar is dissolved, then simmer for 5-10 minutes until the syrup has reduced by about half. Add the chillies and simmer for another 5 minutes, then pour into a hot sterilised jar. Seal the jar in a water bath for 10 minutes - the lid should pop in. Allow to cool and then leave for at least a week before opening. You could add some fresh ginger slices to this recipe for even more flavour.

Once opened, you can use the chillies to add flavour to dishes, as a garnish, or you can use the syrup to add a kick to dressings and sauces.

PS: I saved all the seeds from the chillies to dry out and plant next year!

Harvest Monday

The terrible weather in Sydney lately has kept me out of the garden, so today I went to inspect the damage from the rain. The tomatoes are really struggling - any that were ripe seem to have split and fallen, and the plants are becoming quite badly affected by mildew. The zucchini also seems to be on its last legs, with powdery mildew on most of the leaves.

The lebanese eggplants, however, are doing marvelously well, as is the basil. It's time to start thinking about what winter crops will go in.

Picked today: 16 lebanese eggplants (approx 650g), 1 large bunch of basil for pesto, 1 corn cob (that may or may not be popcorn), 3 button squash, 50g green beans and 2 radishes, plus 12 chillies from my bumper crop - these are only the first of many, and I have a number of seedlings coming up from last year's chillies too.

January Challenge: Day 15

Today was a kitchen adventure of a more unpleasant variety. While I was in the middle of giving the baby a bath and getting him ready for bed, I heard a weird popping sound coming from the kitchen. I turned around and saw the light sputter and go out, followed by a gush of water pouring out through the light fitting. This was shortly followed by a frantic knock on the front door. It was the upstairs neighbour, who had just flooded his bathroom...

 

...again...

So I have remained very calm, got the baby to sleep and am ordering pizza for dinner.

On a more positive note, today I harvested 10 lebanese eggplants weighing a total of 400g, and two zucchini weighing 1.2kg and 1.8kg respectively. I think I'll be making zucchini preserves again this weekend.

January Challenge: Day 6

Today was a lovely sunny day, too nice for hanging round the house and doing chores, so we jumped in the car and headed to 500m2 for some lunch. We had a lovely lunch of risoni and pumpkin salad with green beans, capsicum, tomato, rocket, bocconcini and basil with a balsamic dressing - delicious!

Then we went out and picked more pumpkin, green beans and cucumbers. It's not often you go to a friend's house and come home with a couple of kilos of free food!

My successful chutney experiment has me thinking of new possibilities, which is good because we're about to be knee-deep in eggplant it seems!

Tonight I used up some more couscous from the cupboard to feed the baby, and had leftovers for dinner.

  

Most of that is pretty boring, so here's some photos from my little garden:

Patio Roma tomatoes - Please ripen soon!

Baby Chilli plants sprouting from a dried chilli from last summer

First ripe chilli

A very good chilli crop this year

The frangipani started flowering this week

January Challenge: Day 3

Day 3 was a leftovers kind of day. Finishing off bread and ham for lunch, leftover curry and rice for dinner, banana slice for afternoon tea. I have no problem eating the same dinner two nights in a row (three is a bit much) but here's some ideas if you're the sort of person who gets bored easily and prefers something different every night, but wants to put leftovers to good use.

• Make a big pot of bolognese sauce, and use it to make different meals, such as spaghetti, lasagne, on roast potatoes, or spice it up for nachos.
• Give stews or casseroles a makeover by using them as pie filling.
• Freeze your leftovers in individual portions to use for lunches later in the week, or as standby dinners for nights you don't have time to cook.

In an update on the garden, there are lots of zucchini, and I picked the first lebanese eggplant. There should be many more in about a week. The button squash are starting to fruit, and there are also tiny baby pickling cucumbers appearing on the vine. I have about a million chillies slowly ripening - and a new variety has sprung up - it's a slightly larger chilli that grows pointing downwards - it probably sprouted from a supermarket chilli.There are tomatoes, but nothing ripe yet. Come on Summer - we need more sun!

Not-so-baby zucchini!

Oops! Need to harvest a bit earlier next time...

Remember those adorable little baby zucchini I posted about a couple of weeks ago? One of them turned into this 1.5kg MONSTER!

So we celebrated the start  the summer harvest with a dinner featuring lots of tasty things from the garden.

Vegies!

There was the monster zucchini, green beans, basil, lettuce and rocket, and some baby radishes (probably picked before they were ready but I couldn't resist!)

The tomatoes are growing up and up, but there's nothing ready to eat yet. The eggplants have flowers on them now, as do the button squash and chilli plants. The carrot seeds are sprouting. The rocket has bolted and gone to seed, so it might be time to replace it with some rainbow chard. The tiny dwarf bean plant is putting out an incredible amount of delicious beans - we might have to plant another!

Stuffed with mince and rice

Vegetable Feast

Zucchini stuffed with Minced Beef and Brown Rice with a Spicy Tomato Sauce

Red Cabbage Salad

Green Bean and Capsicum Salad

Tomato and Basil Salad

Green Salad

Toasted Pita Bread

Hommus

Greek Yoghurt

I was a little worried that the zucchini might have been bitter after growing so large, but it was still sweet and delicious - hooray for home grown vegies!

Baby Zucchini!!

Over the last couple of months, I've been helping to create a vegetable patch in a friend's garden. We had planted a mixture of seeds and seedlings, then went away for a week on holiday. While we were away Sydney experienced a week of tropical thunderstorms and hot weather - when we came back the zucchini plant had nearly tripled in size, and as you can see, is producing baby zucchini already.


The difficult choice at the moment is whether we should leave these babies on the plant to fully mature, or do we pick some of those delicious yellow flowers? Hopefully we will get to do both!


Other plants growing in the patch are lettuce, mixed heirloom tomatoes, basil, chillies, lebanese eggplant, button squash, small gherkin cucumbers, green beans, radish, carrots and corn. Not bad for an area of approximately 2m², and there's still some room to spare.


Just a few more weeks until we can start to pick and eat our very own vegetables. 

My Little Garden

I live in a bushy area, so I don't really have the kind of garden that's suited for growing vegetables. Instead I have a collection of pots outside my kitchen window, and with the recent burst of warm weather, everything is growing nicely!

Daffodils and Jonquils

Silverbeet, Baby Cos Lettuce and Baby English Spinach

Rosemary, Parsley and Watercress