Disease on Pear Tree

Today we noticed a black part on the pear tree leaves, only a few and we cut the effected parts off, but here is some images. Any ideas of what it may be?

Disease on pear tree leaf

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From the Garden

We have been eying off the broad beans for a few weeks and Lee Ann decided that today would be when we harvested out first lot of beans. We picked beans the that were approx 15cm long. I have 8 plants in this lot and another 5 on another vege patch (but they are a bit younger). We picked what seemed like a lot.

Fresh Broad Beans

2 kgs in fact. I have never had broad beans before and the ones when freshly picked seemed a little bitter. We had two recipes picked out, a dip and a pasta dish.

Well after removing them from the pod, boiling them and removing the outer skin of the beans we had only 400 grams, while that was enough for dinner, it was not enough for the dip. So 200g have been frozen and we should get approx 2-3 more pickings of the same size from the plants. We will try the dip next week.

Shelling the Broad Beans

Dinner was great, just a simple pasta dish with bacon, onion, garlic, thyme, parsley and broad beans. We will be making it again.

Now I know how much to plant, I would probably double the quantity grown for next year and go for approx 16-20 plants.

Also today I removed the last of the broccoli (which we blanched and froze), planted some celery, fennel and water melons. And put a tray of seedlings down

• Capsicum
  • California Wonder
  • Corno Di Toro
  • Alma Paprika
  • Long Red Cayenne
• Chilli
  • Tobasco

A last comment while talking about the garden some of the Queensland Blue pumkins have sprouted.

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Field Day

This weekend was the Murrumbateman Field Day(s). Murrumbateman is just down the road from Yass (15kms) and it was the weekend of the annual Field Day. These days are all about machinery, animals and more machinery, but it seems that more and more people just selling everything has crept in. Thou the only two dollar style places are some of the stalls selling cheap tools.

So on Saturday morning Lee-Ann, Alyssa and I headed off early, Lynsey thought it would be boring and none of her friends were going, so she stayed at home. It was good day, tiring as it is quite spread out. One of the good things they do is give each child a card to get stamped at certain stalls so it means that we had to visit every corner of the place to collect all the stamps, which meant backtracking as we missed stalls.

While there we managed to speak to some producers of products we buy or intend buying in the future. Like Brinadabella bee keeping supplies we spoke about our small hive in our gum tree and how and when we can start our own hive. We spoke to Tony who makes the Le Barre olive oil that we buy from our local butcher and found that he can supply a large 4 litre tin of olive oil and since we buy a lot of olive oil seems to be a good idea for the future.  No-one in yass wishes to stock it due to space issues whcih sems strange as it is a nice size tin.  We spoke to the owners of  Minto Galloway who rear their beef and we can also order direct from them, local beef, organically produced, so will save time going to the canberra farmers market – If only our freezer was bigger.  So in all going to the field day was worthwhile for us even if I did get a bit sun bunt

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