Roots, fruits and gifts galore

We have had the most incredibly warm May weather - certainly Spring-like, with gorgeous sun-shiney days and chilly mornings and evenings that send us rushing to light our fire.  That neatly stacked woodpile is diminishing at an alarming rate!  
I never really enjoyed Autumn or Winter before but this late in life, I find a blossoming appreciation for the joys of seasonal fruits and the more laid back lifestyle these seasons bring to the back yard.  Evenings see me inside much earlier, creating wonderful dishes at leisure.  Usually I am frenetically working in the garden till about 6-7pm summertime, so evening meals are a rather hurried affair, eaten much later than the stomach would prefer!  Now we eat much earlier, relax a little and tackle studies or other tasks.  

Other tasks

Last weekend saw me making the most of the sunny weather and pruning our feijoas and peach trees, like a little guerilla gardening commando.  Eeek!  I am not sure that they will recover enough to fruit next autumn!  I think I went just a tad overboard!  However, the prunings were put to good use, mulched down by my hungry little Masport mulcher.  This is used to anchor the cardboard layer in the central garden bed.  The cardboard serves to suppress the weeds and is eventually broken down by all those gobbling micro-organisms in our soil.


Roots:
I have been harvesting potatoes, jerusalem artichokes and some bird-sown turnips.  Combined with pumpkins, Italian zuchini rampicantes, the last of the capsicums, a few green chard or kale leaves and of course, the ever-available chillies, these few humble ingredients can be rustled up into some exceptionally tasty soups, stews and bakes.  We have a huge supply of home-grown fresh garlic and plenty of dried basil for seasoning.  And of course, plenty preserves as a side serve.  Simple.  Delicious.  
Simply delicious!


Fruits:
We are harvesting mandarins, persimmons and yellow guavas at the moment.  What amazing sumptuous fruits!  Wow!  Biting into home-grown fruit is such a wickedly decadent treat!  Our little yellow guavas are super sweet and the persimmons are juicy and sweet- nature's lollies!  There are many limes on our little tree - I have even made up a lime juice cordial, to be drunk hot or cold, diluted with water.  It's a simple recipe I use when my lemons are in abundance - 1 cup squeezed juice, mixed with 1 cup sugar dissolved in 1 cup hot water.  Keeps in the fridge up to 4 weeks.  Simply dilute with water to taste, hot or cold.


Gifts Galore:
The garden gives us so many gifts and brings so much pleasure.  It is where I like to spend time.  Down time, up time, any time.  I wish I shared the same love of housekeeping.  Alas, my poor house survives on minimal attention!  So saying, I did clean 2 lots of windows this week, only so I can better keep an eye on what's happening outside in my garden!

And talking of gifts, our Indian neighbours who work in the kiwifruit industry, brought us a huge bag of golden kiwifruit this week!  Yum!  We don't really do the green kiwifruit - too tart and acidic but the yellows............mmm!  Makes wonderful jam, and I have never yet figured out, in a country that is renowned for it's kiwifruit production, why you cannot buy kiwifruit jam in the supermarket?!  Boy, there sure is a gap in the market here! 
 I do however, make sure I wash the kiwifruit well, in soapy water, to remove the chemical residues left over from conventional growing.  Deadly stuff!

Shayni, my daughter, just completed a 12 hour shift on her second day ever, working in the kiwifruit pack-house!  I now have two children in the workforce!  Amazing!

Painting by Shayni - our fireplace

  

Reduce, Recycle, Re-invent and Re-use

Recycling is now a way of life for us.  We compost all our kitchen food scraps, along with all the garden prunings and waste.  Cardboard boxes are stripped of their tape (which goes into the recycling bin) and is then used to either feed our hungry winter fire, or to lay over bare earth in the garden before being mulched with leaf and branch chippings.  This is broken down by the many micro-organisms in our soil and recycled into nutrients for our fruit trees.
Toilet rolls?  Well, they get squashed and popped one into the other, like a small child's stacking toy, until it becomes a compact roll of tight inner pieces - a drop of meths or other accelerant and it becomes a great little fire-starter!  Have you ever given a thought to how many toilet rolls are discarded in the Western world??  I mean, since they banned their use in kindergartens (too much bacteria?!) for all those wonderful binoculars and rocket ship constructions - what exactly are they good for?  We started to tear them up and place them in the compost bin (for that carbon element) and worm farm but this fire-lighting cracker gives me much more of a thrill!  I have tried so many little experiments - once E even went as far as to collecting sawdust, which I mixed with a small amount of wallpaper paste, and then stuffed into those little  roll.   Once dried (takes about 2 weeks), I did the accelerant drips and hey, presto!  Fire ball!  But I have this curious nature, once it is satisfied, it goes onto other ideas.  Can't see myself filling toilet rolls with gummed up sawdust every summer to feed our voracious fire-lighting habit. No, siree!  The stuffed toilet roll habit is far less time-consuming and fun - you can do it while on the loo!  A great little time filler while you wait!

Oh, and then there are the cost saving recycling exercises, like paint.  We have only bought two cans of paint for this house - one a deep crimson red for our Indian-inspired Bollywood bedroom, and more recently, a bright Mediterranean yellow for our passageway.  The rest (and our house is definitely colourful) was all gleaned from a commercial painter who was getting rid of some of his old stock (every time they paint someone's house or office, they are left with little bits of paint).  I loaded up my boot with various tins of paints and when I got home, my daughter and I pretended to be paint scientists - what fun!  If they were the same type of paint (i.e inside acrylic or outside acrylic), they were mixed together to create a genuinely unique colour (unfortunately, 5 years down the track, we cannot buy touch up test pots - the colours don't exist in paint shop swatches!)  I still highly recommend the exercise!  Beats all those commercial paint residues ending up in the landfills.

From coffee pouches.......... usually designated to the bin..

Onto gifts, I get a thrill out of taking something old and giving it a new lease on life.  Gift giving is just such an excuse to get creative.  Recently a friend was given a recycled or upcycled coffee pouch bag, lined with the leg of an old pair of denim jeans for her birthday!  She may never use it but it was definitely a one-off personalized gift made specially for her.

To this trendy little shopping bag.

 This week I was thrilled when my teenage daughter set about making a "denim jeans" bag for her friend's birthday - a successful, unique little hip bag!  Thinking outside the ka-ching shop-shop square, life can really be quite a whole lot of fun, fun, fun!  We are always looking at ways to re-use or re-invent things useful out of things we would normally throw away.  It is evident in our home and lives and I am proud to be a little Earth Fairy, even if it is supposed to end this weekend!
(People been talking about Mayan calender prophecy)

My daughter's cool recycled jeans handbag.

PS: 13/08/14  Obviously those people were mislead, here we still are!!

Autumn Abundance

So here we are, with all the leaves falling down and lying in untidy piles in the garden - autumn gardens are not in their best dress!  But we do enjoy the less frenetic pace of autumn, as opposed to the hectic pace of spring and summer gardening.  Instead of going into the garden for an everyday harvest, we now only wander around every second or third day - collecting a large box of feijoas (yes, they still fall!), potatoes, carrots and the amazing old-fashioned jerusalem artichokes!  Yumm!!  I love to be able to give some away to others who have not been aquainted yet, to this old vegetable!  Most tend to have a favourable reaction.

Autumn harvest includes figs, courgettes, capsicums, limes, feijoas and chillies!

On the weekend I made spicey sweet Thai Chilli sauce - 2 batches (10 bottles)!  Mike had brought me a little bell-shaped looking pepper, which I bit into the end of and thought - "how lovely and sweet - wouldn't they just taste divine, stuffed with feta cheese and baked in the oven?' - so I set about saving the seed and then proceeded to sow them.  They came up - every one of them, and so I went a little overboard and set about planting them all over the garden, wherever I could find a space.  Well, they grew!  And grew!  And they produced these angel-winged bell-like fruits.  I was ever so excited as I patiently waited for them to turn red.  Then realising that I would be harvesting 100's of them, I decided to give some to my work colleagues who marvelled at how lovely and sweet they were, until they went home with them and ate the whole "pepper", only to discover that my lovely winged peppers were indeed, actually chillis!

Eek, apart from possibly frightening the hell out of their taste buds, I wondered just what I would do with so many chillies!  We have given bags of them to any innocent visitors, including all our lovely Indian friends, who are most likely the ones to be able to use these hot little wonders, easily!  Then I had an epiphany - sweet Thai Chilli sauce and hey presto, Google did the rest for me!

For any of you out there who would like to use up your homegrown chillies - here it is:

Sweet Thai Chilli Sauce:

500g fresh red chillies

3 cloves garlic peeled 

750ml apple cider vinegar (3 cups)

3 cups caster sugar

Halve the chillies and place in a bowl of a food processor, along with garlic.  De-seed the rest of the chillies and place in food processor.  Add 250ml vinegar and process.

Place chilli mixture, remaining vinegar and caster sugar in large saucepan over low heat and cook, stirring for 5 mins until sugar dissolves.

Increase heat to high and bring to the boil.  Reduce heat and simmer, stirring occassionally for 35-40 mins until sauce thickens.  Pour into sterilised, airtight bottles and seal.

Not sure how hot this is yet...........  The seeds pack a power punch of heat, so de-seed all the chillies if you prefer less heat.

Feijoas looking for a good home.....

Oh, and to fill in some time, I have enrolled in an organic horticulture correspondence course over a year, hoping to get a good deal of it done over the winter months.  Learning about what I know quite a bit about through practice, but now I shall gain the theory behind why I do what I do, sometimes out of intuition, sometimes from what I have read and sometimes from advice from others who are successful at what they do!

Our ripening hand of bananas, with many more to follow.

I best go and put in some hard graft with the course..................... perhaps I will learn what else one can sustainably do with chillies.........

Growing old in the Garden

Sometimes I look around my garden and every patch I remember weeding suddenly resembles the Amazon Jungle of Weeds.  How did that happen so quickly and why is gardening so much like housework - it NEVER ends!  And just when you seem to have completed a round of hardcore work, you're right back to where you started - and you simply have to begin all over again.  An endless cycle of work, work, work!
It's when I have this realisation that I feel old.  Really old!  We have had so much rain over the last week and a bit, that the weeds have doubled, or tripled in size and amount.
People say you're only as old as you feel, but days like this, I feel 80-plus some!

But on a brighter note, today is the last day that my "baby" girl is 15 - tomorrow she will be Sweet 16.  Most 16's are anything BUT sweet, but my girl is super-sweet!  I have this theory: when your little child is a right royal demon, they turn into angels when they become teens and vice versa.  Well, it's a theory that can only stand up to the test in our house perhaps, as she used to be a little monster but she has grown so tall, so wise and so beautiful - and beautiful on the outside too.

It's like tending my garden; when I have these little seeds I plant, I watch over them, anticipate their "birth" with great excitement and when I see their little green heads poke up out of the soil, I am ecstatic with the euphoria of having given life............... I eagerly water them, making sure they get enough sunshine, not too much heat, anticipating their needs, feeding them and then finally planting them out into the garden where I still tend them, but less urgently as much of their needs are taken care of by the sun and the rain.  Then one day you look out on your garden and you draw an audible intake of breath as you gaze on the beauty of the plant that you have sporadically cared for - suddenly it is magnificent in it's own beauty!  And it got that way, much on it's own.

Kinda like how I feel about our kids.  The nurturing and the growing of them.

Today I dug up the first real cache of Jerusalem artichokes.  They are a tuberous vegetable, belonging to the sunflower family but mistakenly botany-identified as artichokes.  My gardening book also states that they do not come from Jerusalem either!  Strangely misleading name altogether then.  However, when scrubbed clean, these knobbly little critters are a taste sensation like no other, drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with a little sea salt.  They are said to give one a case of "foul flatulence after mass consumption" but who cares?  Would you eat less chocolate if it made you, ............. you know......?  Fart.  Doubt it.

Anyway, I think we shall be giving them away in bucketloads - simply because we have so many of them.  One tuber can yeild a small bucketful of produce - I must have planted about 16 tubers (not to mention the ones left over from the last raiding of treasures - like potatoes, it is easy to overlook pocketfuls of them when harvesting.  Oh, and did I mention the flower?  The crowning glory is a mass of small sunflower-like flowers towering 2 1/2 to 3 m tall!  A reason to plant them on that account only.
Tall and beautiful, just like my daughter.

Feijoa Fantastic

Size difference between our feijoas

So, eating seasonally can have it's challenges - none more acute than feijoa season! Feijoas, or pineapple guavas, are indigenous to Brazil, Paraguay and northern Argentina and have acclimatised to growing in our little New Zealand garden with a vengeance. They have these striking little fluffy red flowers which the blackbirds seem to love. During the first flowering season, I spent a most of my time running out and shooing away the birds as they voraciously “devoured” and tore apart our feijoa flowers! Later, I found out that the very little blighters I was scaring away, were responsible for pollinating our fruit!! So now I smile in Spring when I see them ripping the flowers apart - each one will be fruit for us in Autumn!

Feijoas have a relatively short fruiting season - roughly 5 - 7 weeks, when they drop their ripened fruit onto the ground. A daily harvest usually yields anything up to a full bucket of fruit. This of course, has to then be processed! So feijoa season is an intense mammoth industrial kitchen affair, what with 8 trees in our garden! I dehydrate them, puree them, compote them, crumble them (substitute feijoas for apple), fruit salad them, jam them,chutney them and palm them off on any unsuspecting neighbour or visitor before they can politely refuse! 

A clutch of God's little Egg-shaped  Delights at Easter!

 

A great chutney recipe worthy of sharing, from Digby Law:

1kg feijoas

500g onions

300g raisins

500g pitted dates

500g brown sugar

1 Tbspn ground ginger and 1 of curry powder

1 tspn ground cloves and ¼ of cayenne pepper

4 tspn salt

4 cups malt vinegar (I use apple cider vinegar)

Wipe feijoas, trim ends and finely slice. Finely chop onions and coursely chop dates. Combine all ingredients in a large saucepan, bring to the boil and cook very gently for 11/2 to 2 hours until chutney is thick. Spoon into hot, clean jars and seal. Makes about 3 litres.

This time of year also sees us collecting various pumpkins and squashes

A wrestling mass of Zuchini Rampicante

I really look forward to the end of feijoa season - bring it on fig, citrus, persimmon and guava season!!

Going bananas

"Way down south, where the bananas grow.........."
Actually, you can be36% south of the equator and still grow bananas!  One would think it too cold to successfully grow bananas here in the little town of Katikati, with frosty winters........... in fact, last winter, the severe frosts looked as if they had all but dealt the final death knell to our bananas, but these are really a resilient bunch of  herbaceous perennials! (In other words, bananas are giant herbs, related to lilies and orchids!).   My gardening book tells of "the trunk or portion above ground, which carries the large ornamental leaves, is a pseudostem" and not a real stem at all.  The banana is highly nutritious and the skin is rich in potassium, therefore, a vital ingredient in the compost bin.

Our first bunch of home-grown bananas

We grow 4 "clumps" of bananas (each clump consists of 3 pseudostems).  3 are of a variety gifted to us by friends and the other is one we bought called Lady Fingers or Hamurana.  With great excitement we watched our Hamurana set a beautiful ruby-red flower, which quickly became a mass of tiny little bananalets (My word for little bananas).  I was told our climate is too cold and to increase heat, to wrap our bunch up in a special plastic bag.  finding some left-over plastic from the construction of our hothouse, I managed to whizz up a banana bag - worked a charm and in January this year, we proudly harvested our first bunch of Katikati bananas!  What a thrill!
We ate bananas and for a whole 2 weeks, our breaths smelt sweet like bananas!
Now it is with pride that we spy another 6 bunches on our friend-given bananas - one is carefully bagged and reaching harvest time (this time we will harvest before they all turn yellow, thus avoiding the possibility of death by quick consumption of bananas!

Banana Grove, next to our compost bin -
note the bagged bunch of bananas!

Our bunch awaiting harvest

Our "health guru", Don Tolman, gives some reasons for eating bananas:

• Bananas are full of potassium, folate, vitamin B6, A and C for protection of heart and bones
  
• They are packed with fibre to keep you regular
  
• They contain melatonin for adjusting your internal clock
  
• Bananas help stabilize blood pressure (potassium)
  
• The potassium helps build stronger bones (mineral needed to absorb calcium)
  
• Helps with coughs and soothes heartburn and acid reflux
  
• The high amount of protein gives it a great energy reputation - it's the snack of athletes
  
• The dieters dream food - low in calories and fat to help reduce weight
  
• High in iron, bananas help anemia.
  
• It increases brain power (potassium) to help students stay alert
  
• Because of tryptophan in bananas, it helps people suffering from depression
  
• Snacking on bananas between meals reduced morning sickness by keeping blood sugar levels up
  
• Vit B6 in bananas regulates blood glucose levels, which can help alleviate moods with PMS
  

Wow! And you thought it was just a banana!
And did you know:
The signature food for the male sex organ is the banana? Yes, that's correct! It apparently increases the size and girth of the little wee fella!
....................click click click................., is that the sound of high heels as you girls all run for the nearest green grocer??

The Dirt on Nutrition

March is time to harvest figs - we grow Brown Turkey and Green figs

Early February harvests include crystal apple cucumbers, courgettes, rampicante zuchini, beetroots, beans, chillis, peaches, tomatoes, grapes and eggplants

With the arrival of colder weather, we are down to collecting capsicums, beans, feijoas and the last of the late passion fruit

I love this simple life.  One where we spend time planning and growing our food, harvesting it, preparing or preserving it - and of course, then eating it.  Food for the mind.  Food for the body.  Food for the soul.  It nourishes and sustains us.  If you are what you eat, then healthy food equals a healthy body and a healthy outlook.  I like to think I live my life following the KISS principle.  "Keeping it simple, Sweetheart!"  Life is simple - when it becomes too complicated, you can be sure, someone is making big money out of it!!
Casting my mind back 5 years ago, we were trapped in the cycle of listening to the lies about our nutritional deficiencies.  Our family spent up to $60 per week on nutritional supplements!  We believed all the lies about our food being deficient as the soils are deficient  and because we are vegetarian, we needed to supplement our iron, our B12, iodine etc, etc.
5 years ago, our newly aquired "nutritional and life coach", Don Tolman laid that lie open for us and now we have more money to spend, and I have never felt better!   He describes this in simple terms that simple people like me can understand.  If you take something from nature, isolate it, concentrate it and pack it into a capsule, chances are, your body won't recognize it. 
And the dirt on soil?
If you plant a tomato bush in front of your house and one at the back, perhaps the one at the back doesn't produce good tomatoes........... this could be due to the fact that the sun doesn't shine there, you don't water it often enough, the soil isn't as good or it was subject to fungal disease cause of insufficient air flow.  The one at the front may produce great big juicy tomatoes, full of flavour.  If that tomato bush was capable of growing tomatoes that looked and tasted as a tomato should, it got everything from the soil that it needed.  And thus that tomato will have all the nutrition you need from a tomato!  End of story!  KISS principle in action.

This is a heritage tomato my daughter grew, called a Brandywine.  The cracking is one of it's characteristics.  Her hands are much bigger than mine, to highlight the size of this little monster!

 

 

Did you know that the humble tomato helps protect the prostate in men, helps prevent and rid the body of cancer (lycopene), lowers cholesterol, supports the immune system and protects the heart?  And so easy to grow!  We eat them fresh only in summer, when we can grow them in abundance, and eat the sun-dried variety in salads in winter. Simple.