Happenings lately in our sunny strawbales:

Completely home-grown roast dinner:

Ours – potato, sweet potato, beetroot, pumpkin, spinach, chook.  Others (shared with us) – zucchini.

YUM! 

Chook wasn’t tough at all. 

Which is good, because another 2 will be processed to the freezer soon.

Harvest happenings:

That big-un is over 30cm across and weighed a good amount too.

Sweet potato soup was on the menu J!

Last week, we had a delivery of the good stuff:

4 m³ of Mumby Magic – and it will work its magic in our orchard as soon as we spread it out. 

Poor orchard got all put in without us mulching properly so it is well time for us to give the fruit trees some love before winter sets in.  Plus we will be establishing a food forest as the understory in there so we grow more greens and grains so we can free-range the chickens a bit more.  I can’t wait!

Now, lookie what my Honey has been doing!  J

Now if you know your paving, you will see that he has been cementing in the edges – and that can only mean one thing!!  The paving around the house is finished!!!  Yay!!!  Cue the party whistles, balloons and confetti canons J. 

The photo is actually Michael digging up the edges of the lawn so he can extend the retic right to the paving now (and further) because we can safely let it grow to the edges now. 

Pepper, of course, immortalised herself with wee footprints in the wet concrete edge:

And yesterday, I got serious with getting some winter crops started J.

Planted seedlings of broccolini, spinach, bok choy and cauliflower, plus seeds of similar greens:

We fenced up the garden beds to keep the voracious chooks out!  And did similar inside their run as I put down seeds to start their food forest in there:

Seems voracious birds are a feature at the moment.  Lookie at our sunflowers:

The parrots didn’t even wait until they were finished growing, these were all still green!  We will get no seeds from these few plants – lucky we have plenty others saved!

I love a day in the garden!  Last Wednesday, it was overcast, with a chilly breeze and some drizzle so was the perfect day to clean up the summer tomatoes and prep for winter crops J.

The harvest:

Japnut self sown pumpkins (these are so super sweet); basil that broke off, hot Paprika capsicum/mild chilli; one cucumber (pulled that vine out); dried out red-flowering broad beans to save the seed; the very last of the tomatoes and rhubarb.  I picked the rhubarb mostly for the leaves so I had some green to compost:

That green layer had a bit of everything I could grab – what is abundant in the garden right now – so that would be self-sown dill, clover, dandelion and rhubarb leaves!  And some sort of amaranth weed looking thing…

I was in a bit of a lazy mood yesterday, so it is lasagne compost, but it will change to bolognaise when I turn it in a few weeks, eh? 

Oh, and I cooked up the rhubarb with apples and some unhappy plums – they added such a lovely pink colour to the fruit – hmmm, should have thought of that when I was making jam last time!  I call soft, semi-bruised fruit unhappy – because my go-to recipe for them is to make “Happy Fruit Crumble” – just take all your unhappy fruit and quickly stew it up, top with your crumble mix and bake for some very deliciousness J.  My crumble mix is a very simple brown sugar, butter and oats – with a little bit of muesli if there is some.

And finally, Mum and I were looking at the lavenders and saw there were plenty of flower heads on the Sugarberry Ruffle blossom – so we picked those and the perfume was divine!

And, I just looked up Stickleberry lavender on the internet (because that is the name I always think they are called – wrong me…) and the most gorgeous recipes for frozen yoghurt and a buttermilk sponge cake came up!   I am inspired!!  (NB - culinary lavender is probably different to my Stickleberry so I will be searching out some to grow too).

So what have you been up to, eh?  Maybe same as us, which is pretty much as normal – family, friends, work and gardening.

We had a wonderfully incredible family lunch in Perth – 17 of us cousins, partners and kids – eating the food our grandmother used to lovingly cook for us – 4 different breakfasts she happily provided on school holidays, cake every day, and dessert even when we were “too full” to eat the dinner we didn’t quite like.  We love her for all this still!

There has been progress on the chook palace here – why haven’t I got photos to show you?!  Ok, next time.

But here is some garden progress:

Leaf buds on our new white mulberry J, Shatoot variety:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I also admired our Nicola potato shoots J:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And I have put in some effort to try and get some peas to sprout and produce – very few have come up this year, I am blaming slaters and slugs so far, so we will see if these cloches make a difference:

 

 

 

 

 

Or if growing them in seed pots and planting out when they are nice and strong will work (this is also my current experiment – starting some early “spring” seedlings – capsicums, Lebanese cucumber – and I will start some tomatoes when my Diggers Club seeds arrive for next month):

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We are still enjoying plenty from the patch too – carrots and spinach still going strong, dill and parsley too and some snowpeas which did much better than podded peas:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And my final photos - red flowering broad beans looking very pretty:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And a sunflower – still stunning as it goes through its last stages:

 

Garden lessons ongoing – we are still picking lots from the patch J.

Carrots and beets J.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Purple beans J

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dwarf yellow beans (and next year’s pineapple in the background) J

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Waiting in the garden are:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cabbages just starting to heart (if the aphids leave us any, we will enjoy these!)

And our garden oddity – this giant carrot!!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So my harvest last night was:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And a lovely vege curry was made to go along with the gorgeous plaited loaf J