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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October 25th, 2008 AndrewD
Well thank you Mother Nature. Due to the cold snap we got last week I lost
2 x Butternut Pumkins
2 x Queensland Blue Pumkins
All my red kidney beans and approx half of all the other beans
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October 19th, 2008 AndrewD
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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October 19th, 2008 AndrewD
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
A last comment while talking about the garden some of the Queensland Blue pumkins have sprouted.
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October 17th, 2008 AndrewD
Didn’t get home till Sat this past weekend, A long week at work in which I stayed in Sydney an extra day and then Lee-Ann and the kids headed off to my mum’s house in Bundanon on Friday, as mum wanted to pick up some shoes and clothes for the kids, so instead of going to Goulburn or Yass I jumped off the train in Bundanoon.
Got home Sat and the patersons curse has shot up. Especially right behind the house, a sea of purple flowers. That rain last week really got them going. I think we will have to get the ’slasher guy’ back.
So on Saturday once home we hit the front yard and I made sure Lynsey the eldest came out and helped, it took 3 attempts for her to find suitable yard working clothes. Over the past few months I had built a small swale approx 10 metresinfront of the house with the clay/dirt that I dug up from my partly completed trench. The point of it is to help stop the rain water run off that goes under the house when it rains.
Also we had picked up a few native plants the other week and they needed to be placed in the ground before they died(too often Lee-Ann and I have picked up potted plants only to ignore them and they end up dead).
So with that we pulled out a bundles of newspapers that we had picked up from the local newsagent and started supressing the weeds around where the swale was. Once that was done we grabbed the mulch and mulched over the paper. Before mulching all over the clay we put the plants in with some extra soil around them, and then mulched over.
So what did we plant
For bookends on the swale Melaleuca armillaris (Bracelet Honey Myrtle), then working in from each end Prostanthere rotundifolia (Round-leaf mint-bush) and in the middle Eriostemon myoporoides. Anyone know if these are good for making tea? I do know that the round-leaf mint, when you rub yourhands over it they smell like mint.
So anyway another 10m2 of weeds that hopefully I won’t have to deal with.
Native swale in the front yard
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