Posted in Frugal Living, tagged backyard vegetables, Linda Woodrow, Permaculture Home Garden on May 25, 2012| 53 Comments »
Our seven year old neighbour was tasked with preparing a school report on a backyard ecosystem, and chose to base it on ours. I thought you might enjoy his work as much as we did! I particularly like the worm close-up on the bottom right…
Our garden is based on a plan from Linda Woodrow’s fabulous book, The Permaculture Home Garden. Now that the infrastructure is well established, it’s really quite easy to maintain. As Little D points out, the chooks and the worms do most of the work for us!
Posted in In My Kitchen, tagged backyard vegetables, beef brisket, Cape Grim beef, Johnson Brothers Born to Shop, meringues and custard, Muscovado sugar on April 1, 2012| 89 Comments »
In my kitchen…
…is an easy mid-week dessert – meringues with microwave custard and frozen raspberries…
In my kitchen…
…is treasure… Cape Grim beef ribs purchased at the markets for a song (they were surplus from an export order)…
A slow four-hour bake transformed them into sticky, tender perfection…
In my kitchen…
…is a large slab of salmon, smoked by our neighbour Ellen. The Neighbour Ware is not only coming back, it’s coming back with food on it…
And speaking of the Neighbour Ware, in my kitchen…
…is the latest addition to the set, from the Johnson Brothers Born to Shop range…
…the plate came with a matching teacup and saucer that says Dieting is Wishful Shrinking. So true, so true…
In my kitchen…
…are dark and light Muscovado sugar. They add a treacly note to my baking…
In my kitchen…
…is Wednesday’s harvest – carrots, Tuscan kale, a perennial leek, white kohlrabi and three eggs…
…and Thursday’s harvest – self-sown endive, cucumbers, a patty pan squash and lots of small eggplants…
In my kitchen…
…are black mussels, cooked with soy, ginger and chilli. An easy and surprisingly economical meal!
. . . . .
Tell me, what’s happening in your kitchen this month?
If you’d like to do an In My Kitchen post on your own blog, please feel free to use this format, and to leave a comment here linking back to your post. We’d love to see what’s happening in your kitchen this month!
. . . . .
Here are this month’s posts…
Posted in In My Kitchen, tagged backyard vegetables, French chestnuts, homemade vanilla syrup, Kampot pepper, Lyle's Golden Syrup, Nick Malgieri, River Cottage Meat Book, rosemary salt, vanilla syrup on January 1, 2012| 100 Comments »
This year, we’re moving our In My Kitchen posts to the first of each month, to give everyone who wants to join in the entire month to do so.
In my kitchen…
…are imported treats – French chestnuts, Italian mayonnaise and Lyle’s Golden Syrup…
In my kitchen…
…are two new cookbooks that I bought myself for Christmas. I bought two copies of the Nick Malgieri book – one for Maude and one for myself. Abby tempted me with recipes from Bake! all last year, so I finally indulged…
In my kitchen…
…are two bottles of Pete’s vanilla syrup, made with the empty pods leftover from our vanilla sugar…
In my kitchen…
…are a few pickings from the garden. Our cucumber plants are starting to pick up steam…
In my kitchen…
…is a container of rosemary salt. It adds a magical zing to roast potatoes…
In my kitchen…
…is a bag of quince green tea and a jar of marinated baby (Persian) figs, a gift from our friends Andrea and Chris…
In my kitchen…
…is a jar of Kampot pepper, which Pete’s sister Katey brought back for me from Cambodia. It smells amazing!
. . . . .
Tell me, what’s happening in your kitchen this month?
If you’d like to do an In My Kitchen post on your own blog, please feel free to use this format, and to leave a comment here linking back to your post. We’d love to see what’s happening in your kitchen this month!
…..
In My Kitchen posts, January 2012
Choclette @ Chocolate Log Blog
Amanda @ Lambs’ Ears and Honey
Posted in Frugal Living, tagged backyard vegetables, bottlebrush tree, growing potatoes in hessian bags, growing vegetables at home, indoor tomato growing, kohlrabi, mildew resistant peas, noisy miner, soldier bird, venus fly trap 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?
Posted in Frugal Living, tagged backyard vegetables, basil, homegrown potatoes, mildew resistant peas, winter garden on June 18, 2011| 48 Comments »
It’s winter here in Sydney, and the cold weather has just begun.
Small Girl (aged two and a half) has been here – she likes to leave carefully arranged pebbles on the steps. It’s always a treat to go outside and find her latest artwork…
Our poor garden has struggled a little from neglect – life has been frantic, and we’ve been too busy to maintain it to schedule. As a result, we haven’t raised many seedlings, and some beds have just been sown with seed and covered in mulch.
Many of the plants are self-sown, although we did deliberately plant the peas below. This variety (Willow) is supposedly mildew-resistant, and they’re growing from seed this time rather than seedlings. Their variegated leaves are very pretty!
All our broccoli (we have about six plants at the moment) are self-sown. We’ve harvested one large head already…
The perennial leeks are getting fat from the rain…
Our potatoes are growing in a box, which lets us hill them up as they grow…
The sprouting onion that I planted is yielding lots of greenery, which I cut off every time I need spring onions for a recipe…
The basil is still refusing to die, even with the recent cold snap…
Some optimistic self-seeded tomatoes – we seem to have an assortment of cherry and roma hybrids, all slightly different. They’re falling off before they ripen, although this branch looks promising…
Our parsley has survived a rotation of the chook dome and is slowly turning into shrubbery. We harvest some every day for salad…
Lastly, we’ve started our garlic in seedling pots, after first giving them a month in the fridge. Hopefully we’ll find time to get them into the ground soon!
What’s growing in your garden at the moment?
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