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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Farmers Markets

At least once per month we try to visit the Farmers Market in Canberra. It is a great, market two sheds full of food. The first shed you must be the actual grower/producer of the food. The second shed, you must know the grower/producer. The markets are each Saturday and from 8am – 11am.

It gets a good crowd and lots of people riding bikes instead of driving. But it makes me think, while I am eating locally produced food, I do feel guilty that we are driving50kms each way to get the food (but fresh local garlic is amazing).

Yass itself does not even have an independant fruit shop. The only fruit and veg (unless you grow your own) is from Woolworths and Franklins. I know that I am growing (or attempting to), but there will be times that I need something that I do not have. It would be good if Yass could have its own markets. A place where local produce can be sold or even any excess that home gardeners have can be sold. We are a town of 5000 – maybe a letter to the paper to see what interest there is.

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New Bread Maker

The other week I got a $150 giftvoucher from work (only for a particular online store). Anyway wondering what to do with it I bought a bread maker. Well it turned up this week. Looking forward to our first loaf this weekend.

The breadmaker

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Spring is on the Way

Spring has now hit us (and they say it will be a warm spring). And the fruit trees are now blossoming. The peaches are the first ones with a mass of pink flowers.

The peaches are first to blossom

The next is the quince with a mass of white flowers, the rest are just still budding, but I expect they too will break out in flower over the next month.

The nut trees are still basically ’sticks’ hopefully they to will show signs of life soon. Actually we are beginning to get worried on the nut trees, they were bare root stock but there have been no real signs eg budding/leaf growth. So if anyone has any suggestions, they would be appreciated. All 11 other trees (fruit) seem OK.

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Recent Plantings

Well a big two weeks, last weekend I planted the aspargus (10 crowns) and also the rhubarb (3 crowns). Both these are plants should keep on producing for 10-20 years.

So the top part of my vege patch looks like becoming where I plant the more permanent fruit and veg as this is also where I have the raspberries and the silvenberries. It will also probably end up where the strawberries will be.
During the week (once again while I was in Sydney) my bareroot apple trees turned up and so did the potatoes from Diggers.

I have the bed for the potatoes already in place and just waiting for the frost to pass before they are placed into the ground, but I did pick up a couple of bags of manure which didn’t make it into the ground this week but will hopefully next week.

While picking up the above mentioned manure from the local rural store, there was a few blueberry plants. Lee-Ann and I had not thought about blueberry plants for this year, but there they were, infront of us and I had the cash so we thought why not. The real clincher came when we figured we would place them around the Biolytix unit. Blueberries themselves bush out to approx 2 metres wide, so a circle of these around the unit would look good (and relatively easy to net so the birds don’t get the fruit.)

So we bought

• Blueberry Denise – Early Harvest
• Blueberry Northland – Early Mid Harvest
• Bluebeery Joy Blue – Mid Harvest
• Blueberry Brigitta – Late Harvest

Hopefully that will keep us in blueberries all season. So they got planted along with the two apple trees. And with those two apples I believe that is the orchard for 2008. 11 trees in total. I still have space for 5 more so we will have to wait till 2009.

The orchard so far looks like this

• 4 apple
• 2 pear
• 2 peach
• 1 quince
• 1 black mulberry
• 1 apricot

other fruit related crops are

• Raspberries
• Silvenberries
• Blueberries

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Citrus and Cold

Need some citrus, need some help.

Yes I know we get cold winds and frost in Yass, but someone must have grown citrus in these sort of climates (or I hoe so). My idea is to find some citrus in September, plant them out and hopefully they will be strong enough to withstand the winter here. At night I will bag the trees to help keep the frost off. Also I am planning to place the citrus in the middle of the orchard so that hopefully they get a little protection from the apples and pears etc.

So I am looking for a lemon, orange, lime and mandarin. Any help/ideas greatly appreciated

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First Pickle – woohoo

With the excess of zucchini and having the zucchini soup, zucchinis in tomato sauce, on pizza and I am sure there was another dinner or two that had zucchini in there as well (and the zucchini cake is coming). We did out first pickle from our first real bountiful produce and guess what type?  It was a zucchini pickle, it tasted fantastic and no where near as hard as I thought it would be.

Making the pickle

And the final four bottles – and to think this was 1kg of zucchini

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The Best Lamb Shanks

After a few hit and misses with lamb shanks etc, I believe I now have the perfect recipe – and the few times I have cooked it – perfect each time. This is also a “two pot meal” as we have enough sauce left over for a pasta dish the following lunch/dinner.

Lamb shanks with tomato, chilli and honey

• 4-6 lamb shanks
• 1 red capsicum
• 1 yellow capsicum
• 4 garlic cloves
• 2 brown onions
• 750mls full bodied red wine (I use shiraz)
• 1 tbspoon cumin seeds
• 1 1/2 tbspoon coriander seeds
• 2 tbspoons olive oil
• 2 red chillies (or sometimes I use crushed chilli from a jar)
• 800grams (2 tins) chopped tomatoes
• 3 tbspoon honey
• 1 tbspoon plain flour

Place lamb in large dish, add chopped capsicum, garlic and onion. Pour over the red wine. Cover and place in fridge (I try to do this for at least two hours).

Place cumin seeds in fry pan and dry roast (no oil), cook for approx 2 minutes they should smell fantastic. Place them in your mortar. Dry roast the coriander seeds and place them in the mortar when done. Now pound them into a powder.

Preheat oven to 180. Take lamb from the fridge lift shanks out of the marinade (keep the liquid). Brown off the shanks in a fry pan. Transfer them once brown to a casserole dish.

Now pour the reserved marinade into the fry pan and simmer for 8 – 10 minutes, add chilli. After the 8 minutes add the tomato and honey and mix in. Simmer for another minute or two. Scatter in the spices and flour, season with salt and pepper.

Add the marinade to the casserole dish, cover with the lid and transfer to the oven for two hours. After two hours transfer the shanks to a warm plate and cover. Place the liquid in a saucepan, let the mixture simmer for 10 minutes to reduce the sauce.

Serve shanks and pour sauce over. I usually serve this with some roast veges.

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