April 18th, 2009 AndrewD
Yes Summer in Yass has now passed. The morning and evenings are cooler and of course the days shorter. The hottest day over the past two weeks being 24.
So how did the summer produce go. I would rate it a 6 out of 10. We did not get things in the ground early enough and we had no back up plants for the late frost that hit us.
What worked?
Tomatoes, approx 15 kg of tomatoes, mostly cheery and grape variety. Witha few kgs of Roma and less of the Amish. Also I really did not truss them up, definately next year I will truss them up and at least double them up. Of course we are still enoying some of the tomates as semi dried (in the oven) and bottled. And we also cooked a lot and froze them (no more of this).
Potatoes, had approx 15kg at the end, not enough. Probably under watered and under nourished and definitely need a lot more next year to plant.
Zucchinis, nothing else to say really, they get grated into evrything (including dog food) and when they become too large the kids can enter them in the Yass show.
Cucumbers OK, not great but enough, back to buying them. Pumkin. mmm Frost killed off teh first lot but we did get some butternuts and all going well we may have two Queensland blue (still growing).
Beans, foprget it. Besides all my beans for drying being killed off in the frost, I must be the only person in Australia not capable of growing beans.
Capsicums, forgot which capsicum I planted, but is of a small variety, still a few coming thru.
Egg Plant, Now there was a surprise – three plants and we may still get a few off before the first frost comes in. Definately more next year so we can bottle some.
Beetroot, were good as were the spring onions
Corn, well thast a 2 out of 10 and I say that because thats about as many good corn cobs we got. Not sure what went wrong there but most of the cobs did not fully develop. But the chickens still loved them.
Chickens, while not really a crop I recommend two – three birds for any family. Easy to look after, not expensive to feed and so far they are all healthy.
Watermelon, got this great little watermelon seeds and they produced these small fantastically sweet watermelons. After dinner these were the perfect size to cut into 4
Later I will add some pics as well.
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February 1st, 2009 AndrewD
What have we been harvesting recently? Lots of tomatoes, cherry and Roma in particular and the Amish soon to turn red. We have been eating them and I have been supplying some to people in Sydney and at present we still have 2kg in a basket in the kitchen. We have approx 8 kg of potatoes and we still have 6 plants (Nicola) to harvest (probably next weekend).
The cucumbers and zuchini are coming on strong and we made our first zucchini pickle of summer (and probably not the last) 
We have been getting a few cobs of corn as well and of course beetroot, radish and lettuce. All the onion has now been pulled up and we did have about 35 (more purple than brown). Definately a lot more onion next time.
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January 24th, 2009 AndrewD
Well while we have had salads from the garden and other odds and bods todays frittata is almost all home produced. The salad, tomatoes, spring onion and cucumber all from the vege patch and the frittata itself the eggs are from our chickens and the all the veges (potatoes, tomato, garlic, herbs) are home grown to.
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January 13th, 2009 AndrewD
Forgot to say this earlier, we picked our first rasperberries last week, just a few this year, but we expect a bumper crop next year. Next time there are some reday to pick I will take a photo.
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December 14th, 2008 AndrewD
Well we had so much planned for this weekend, I would make big headway into the construction our deck and pergola, garden duties and christmas duties.
Due to the wind and continual drizzle over the weekend I did not construct my deck/pergola (4.5m x 4.7m). This weekend was blustery, cool and wet, 51m of rain Fri – Sun and temperatures were around the 15C mark. On the flip side it is a perfect day today Monday, little breeze and the sun is out (but it is not too hot) but I have to be logged in doing the paid work. Oh well next weekend now. Hopefully I will have it almost done before Christmas.
We have a great nursery here in Yass called Dan and Dan (also where our fruit trees come from) and they have a small pine farm which you can call up each year and reserve your tree. You specify the size and arrange a pick up date. So we went down on the Sat and picked up our tree. Apparently it was only cut that morning and it had that very sweet pine smell about it. So Sat nite was decorating nite in which Lee-Ann and Alyssa decorated the tree.
Sunday as we had not bought the concrete for our deck we purchased 5 ‘Red Devil’ Photinia as we do need a wind break for our vege patch. I planeted them in approx 15 meters further down from where the last vege patch is (I will be building some more vege patches to take up the space) Lee-Ann has nicknamed this the Devils Break.
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December 12th, 2008 AndrewD
Well the good news is that everything has had a great drenching over the past 24+ hours, tanks are full and over flowing.
Rain map from BOM
While in the image it appears light, it has been constant since 3am today
The bad news is that we had been noticing that somethng had been making our pear leaf (on Big Red) “skelotonised”. Found the culprite today PEAR SLUG…. so tomorrow off to the nursery and to pick up pyrethrum and clemsel. Mixed with water and repeated over a few weeks it should kill the buggers off
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December 6th, 2008 AndrewD
Well this weekend we decidedd to harvest the garlic. We dug up one and to our surprice it looked and smelled like garlic, so as Sat was a warm dry day, I thought that was as good as any day to harvest the garlic. So taking my garden fork to the vege bed I extracted them all.
And what a haul, 42 garlic bulbs and a few more in the rose bed which will be harvested in a few weeks. Definately planting more next year as I want to keep 10 bulbs for planting out next year.
Garlic first picked
Onve we had it all collected we brushed them down and gave them a bit of a hair cut (we cut off most of the roots). Now comes the curing as garlic needs to hang in a dry airy place out of direct sunlight. It will sty there a few weeks before being stored in a nice cool, dark place.
Garlic curing
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December 6th, 2008 AndrewD
It has been a few weeks so this is a bit of a catch up, have harvested radishes (French Breakfast – Diggers) probably planted too many as the only place I know to use it is in salads. So from now on only 4 of these at any one time. But they are quick and ready to harvest in under a month. Also we have harvested our first Beetroot (Mini Gormet – Diggers). These taste sooo sweet. I am ashamed to have said that the only other beetroot I had ever had was Golden Circle. So with the few that we had we also looked for a pickling recipe.
The recipe we ended up using came from the ABC cookbook “A Year in a Bottle”
1kg beetroot
1-2 cups sugar
4 cups white vinegar
1 teaspoon grd cinnamon
1 teaspoon grd allspice
10 cloves
12 black pepercorns
1 teaspoon
Cook beetroot in boiling water unitil tender, peel and slice and pack into sterilised jars.
Combine remaining ingredients in a large saucepan. Bring to the boil, remove from heat. Cover and allow to stand for 20 minutes to allow vinegar to cool a little and flavours to infuse. Strain and pour over beetroot (make sure they are covered). Seal and store in a cool, dry dark place for upto 1 year.
We have had our first jar of pickled beetroot and it was fantastic – highly recommend it. So I have now planted bulk beetroot so we will have plenty to pickle. Hopefull enough to last until next summer.
We are now harvesting the onions we planted 6 months ago, they are not all ready, so we are just harvesting as required. There are a few smaller ones that will stay in the ground for a few weeks. There won’t be enough onions to last the year, knowing how much to plant of anything is a learning curve. We will have approx 20-30 onions in the end. Next onion planting will at least be double the amount.
Some of the first Beetroot
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November 13th, 2008 Lee-Ann
well harvested our first onion today – it was practically pushing itself out of the ground so out it came. It looks good.
Our first onion
And a quick update on The Nut Boys – Wally the walnut has some leaves, Chester the chestnut seems to have one softened bud – could be a beginning, Al the almond is still not doing much except looking like a broken umbrella with all the leafless twigs. On Monday I picked all the remaining broad beans and podded and blanched and peeled and they are now in the freezer, actually am going to use some tonight, but with all the usable beans gone we can now use the patch to get some kale and spinach in plus a heap more lettuce for the summer. till next time – cheers.
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November 8th, 2008 AndrewD
Well, we survived the onslaught of 13 year old girls. All went reasonably well. In the end it was Lee-Ann that escaped while I watched a movie in the kitchen on the laptop. Later on I will get some images of Lynsey blowing the candles on her cake out.
Last nite it rained and it is approx 11 degrees here but the garden looks OK. So today I am ripping the weeds (patersons curse) out from around the water tanks. If I get time I will lay a quick garden bed, no edging and plany a few zucchini (yes a glutton for punishment) and the Minnesota Rockmelon. Hopefully they will supress the weeds that want to grow there.
The other piece of info is that I am back to Sydney tonite (via the XPT). The reason for it is that I am still President of BikeSydney the local bicycle user group in the City of Sydney. and every year we host the Sydney leg of the International Bike Film Festival (International site http://www.bicyclefilmfestival.com/ ; Sydney site http://bffsydney.org).
Bicycle Film Festival - Sydney 2008
So tomorrow I am helping with the Newtown Festival where we have a stall and next weekend is the actial festival.
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