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Archive for the ‘Frugal Living’ Category

Perennial Leeks

Posted in Frugal Living, tagged on November 25, 2011| 45 Comments »

Last year, my friend Christine at Slow Living Essentials put us onto perennial leeks.

In garden terms, these have been life-changing.   We bought seven tiny leek seedlings from Cornucopia Seeds (sadly, they don’t seem to stock them anymore!), planted them in the yard, and watched them grow.  They’re smaller than regular leeks, but sweet and delicious nonetheless, and we use them right up to the green tips.

I think our leeks are a slightly different variety to Christine’s, so I decided to take some photos for you.  Here’s one we pulled out last week (it reminds me of a Muppet)…

Unlike regular leeks, these grow with a bulbous base, particularly at this time of year, when they’re madly reproducing…

As we peeled back the base, we found 24 bulbils, half of which were already shooting.  All of these will grow into new leeks – we simply poke a hole in the soil with a stick, drop in a bulb and water it in…

Before we had perennial leeks, we planted regular ones, which have taken a full year to get to a picking size.  Here’s a comparison of the two.  Remember that even though the traditional leek is larger, there are oodles more of the perennial ones in our yard, and they’re growing much faster.

After a quick phone call to our friend the Spice Girl for advice, we turned a few leeks and a couple of onions into bhajis. We mixed the sliced vegetables into a thick batter made with:

  • besan (chickpea) flour
  • salt
  • lots of cumin
  • coriander
  • a little turmeric
  • chilli powder
  • a little bicarb of soda (baking soda)
  • water (added sparingly)

Heaped spoonfuls of the batter were then deepfried until golden brown. They were very moreish with a garlic and yoghurt dipping sauce…

Our perennial leeks taste just like the regular kind, but reproduce like onion weed (albeit less vigorously).  They’re thriving in our small suburban backyard, and more than make up for the fact that we haven’t been able to grow onions!

Edit: According to Jerry Coleby-Williams, the variety we grow here in Australia is Allium ampeloprasum var. porrum.

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Now, about those tomatoes…

Posted in Frugal Living, tagged , on November 6, 2011| 38 Comments »

To date, we’ve harvested nineteen tomatoes from our indoor plants.

The first two we cut open were mealy and watery, but the others have all been great.  We’ve been astonished by how large they’ve grown – here’s the biggest one of all…

It had sweet, pale flesh.  It obviously didn’t ripen as well as a tomato grown outdoors would have, but it wasn’t mushy in the middle and was great eating raw…

All the subsequent ones have been delicious too – we haven’t had another mealy tomato after the initial two. Here are the ones we ate tonight at dinner…

Hopefully as the weather warms up we’ll get improved ripening, but if not, we might look at getting some lights for next season.  We’ll keep you posted!

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Lessons Learnt

Posted in Frugal Living, tagged , , , on November 5, 2011| 61 Comments »

We learn something new every day…

Last year we planted garlic for the first time.  We grew it outdoors in an old concrete laundry tub, and were only able to produce small one-inch bulbs with tiny cloves.

This year, thanks to a tip from Gardening Australia, we stored the cloves in the fridge for a month before planting. In addition, we fed the plants with blood and bone, and this time most of them grew much larger…

Here’s one bulb, broken up and peeled.  Just three huge cloves…

. . . . .

We’ve been short on time lately for preserving, so instead of making our usual passata, we’ve been slow roasting tomatoes in the oven instead.

We drizzle halved Roma tomatoes with oil and a scattering of salt, then pop them into a low oven for a couple of hours, until they just start to burn at the edges.  Halfway through the cooking time, we squish them with a potato masher to flatten them out.

These store beautifully in the fridge for about a week, but also freeze really well in ziplock bags, ready to be taken out and added to the pot whenever a concentrated burst of roasted tomato flavour is needed.

They also make a wonderful addition to dishes like Pete’s vegetarian paella…

. . . . .

We’ve discovered that sometimes weeds help with pest control, like this one which seems to have attracted all the aphids in the patch, leaving the mint and garlic bug-free…

. . . . .

Finally, we’ll never throw out a sprouting onion again!  We planted an old Italian sweet onion in the hopes of collecting seed, but had to move the chook dome before the plant had time to flower.  So we pulled it out and found it had grown into quite a lot of edible onion…

So now, whenever an onion starts to sprout, we plant it in the garden and ignore it.  If we need spring onions, I go out and break off some green shoots, and when it’s time to move the chickens again, we pull out whatever is there and use it in a stir fry!

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Indoor Tomatoes

Posted in Frugal Living, tagged , on October 28, 2011| 65 Comments »

As you might recall, at the end of July, we planted tomato seedlings in pots inside our enclosed verandah.

At the time we were hoping to overcome problems with verticillium wilt and fruit fly in the garden. But we were never confident that the plants would actually ripen indoors. A couple of weeks ago we had large, bright green toms that appeared to have stagnated.

Then last week, amidst the overcast, cool Spring that we’re having in Sydney this year, we had two hot days – on  Friday the outdoor temperature hit 34C.

Bingo!  The tomatoes started ripening before our eyes!  I took these photos a couple of days ago – the ones above and below are from the big Apollo plant near the window, which gets the most sun…

This tomato is in a container full of Grosse Lisse plants – a variety which fruits very heavily, and needs lots of support…

The Black Russian seeds that my friend Christine sent me are growing well and just starting to fruit…

A couple of weeks ago, we harvested one of the green Grosse Lisse toms and left it on a windowsill to see if it would ripen.  It did!  Hooray!

(As you can tell, we’re very excited about our tomatoes)

This morning, Pete harvested the ripe tomatoes – the  bright red one and the small one are from the Apollo plant in the corner, and the other one is from the Grosse Lisse plant.  We’ll let them ripen up a little more before eating…

If anyone is thinking about growing tomatoes indoors in pots, do give it a go!   You’ll need a sunny aspect, an electric toothbrush to pollinate them, and some decent potting mix. The plants won’t produce nearly as much fruit as they would outside, but it’s certainly doable. And it’s been such a joy to watch them grow from tiny seedlings to enormous productive plants in just thirteen weeks!

Addendum: I was having a discussion yesterday with Pete about why we have so many problems with fruit fly in our backyard.  He believes that it’s because we live in a suburb with lots of established fruit trees – the neighbours on the left have fig, papaya and citrus trees, and the folks on the right grow mangoes.  As we’re unwilling to use pesticides or tomato dust, it makes it very difficult to grow uninfested fruit.  Thank goodness for the enclosed verandah!

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Two Weeks

Posted in Frugal Living, tagged , , , , , , , , , on October 10, 2011| 70 Comments »

I’ve missed you all!

We’ve had a fun couple of weeks, although the weather here has been a bit bonkers. The combination of mild sunny days with heavy rains has led to a burst of growth in the garden.  The irises, which were slow to start this year, are finally greeting passersby from our front yard.

In the enclosed verandah, the tomatoes seem to have stagnated, possibly due to the lack of light and heat. Hopefully October will bring warmer days to ripen the fruit.  The plants are now eleven weeks old and festooned with dozens of green tomatoes in varying sizes.  Here are the largest…

A tiny Venus Fly Trap has taken up residence with the toms in the verandah. We brought it back from the Better Homes and Garden Show, and it’s been quite the talking piece at dinner. We couldn’t resist setting off one of the traps (just once) to see how quickly it closed!

The potatoes that we planted in hessian bags a month ago are growing tall and strong.  They’re almost ready to hill up…

The assorted dwarf beans from New Gippsland Seeds have all germinated, but no luck so far with the snake beans – I suspect we’ve been a little overambitious and sown them too early.  We’ve planted more in seedling pots on top of the fish tank to see if they’ll shoot…

Our bed of kohlrabi is thriving.  We’ve been really happy with these plants – they taste like cabbage, are incredibly easy to grow and use, and they’re not plagued with pests in the same way that other brassicas are.  They also grow well from directly sown seed…

We peel, julienne and stir-fry the swollen base, then feed the leaves to the chickens and the scraps to the worms…

We made a decision this year not to plant any heading lettuce.  This small patch was grown from scattered seed, and I harvest salad leaves with a pair of scissors every two or three days.  It grows back remarkably quickly – even though I’d given the section below a severe haircut just a few days earlier, the gap was indiscernible. Wouldn’t it be lovely if all bad haircuts grew out that quickly?

Despite our decision not to plant heading lettuce, we were delighted to find these green oaks (at least that’s what we think they are) self-seeding themselves all over our yard.  They’re deliciously sweet and surprisingly hardy…

The celery is growing very well this year.  The nice thing about having celery in the garden is that you can bring in stems as needed, without pulling out the entire bunch…

The blueberries have survived their transplant shock-free and are ripening up…

Our young lemon tree is in its second year and trying to fruit, but Pete’s not confident that any of them will grow to full size yet…

The first crop of peas are finished, but this new batch are just starting to flower.  We have an entire month of rain predicted, which will really test this variety’s claimed mildew resistance…

And some photos for Joanna of a lovely acrobatic Soldier Bird feasting on a neighbourhood bottlebrush tree. Also known as the Noisy Miner (not to be confused with the pesky Indian Mynas), both the bird and the tree are native to Australia.  Aren’t they lovely?

Please, catch me up!  How have your past couple of weeks been?

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