Melons

This summer we've had a little bit of success with melons. I think that has something to do with the unexpected rainfall, as a drought had been predicted. I didn't plant very many - one rockmelon which did not ripen very well. We enjoyed x2 watermelon, these were pink fleshed but had yellow skins and I forgot to take a photo of them - sorry! Have saved seeds to try to grow them next year as they were good.

I would say the most success however has been with these little Korean melons pictured below:

They are sweet and crunchy and as you can see by the comparison with the pen, only very small. This means one is a nice serving and you don't need to worry about storing excess cut melon in the fridge as you would with a large melon. Also the small size means that there seem to be more per plant than with normal melons. I have a couple of vines that have about 5 each on them, almost ripe so will be harvested any day now.

Otherwise in the garden things are starting to slow down a bit. Although having said that I am still picking tomatoes!

The pumpkins are just about done, have picked some and they are curing in the sun - we have had no rain for a few days now but I think it's forecast for the weekend.

Time to get in there and clear out a lot of stuff now, get the soil turned over ready for some seeds to go in for over the winter season. Mostly will be hoping to grow a decent amount of carrots. I have had some success with carrots in the past, tending to be a case of numbers - the more seed sown the greater chance of getting some to harvest. I normally just scatter the seed too rather than sowing neatly in rows. I also want to get some greens going, spinach and chard. My Cavolo Nero kale is still producing really well however.

How is your garden shaping up this Autumn, and what do you intend to grow over Winter?

Plums!

Plums. Lots of them this season. And the best ones so far here at CTF have been the Luisa variety, which is a Japanese type of plum. We have 2 trees of this variety and they have done really well, producing lots of huge juicy fruit.

 The Luisa plums can get pretty big...

Here's a link to a page telling about the history of the plum in NZ - you need to scroll down to almost the bottom of the forum to see the post. Very interesting.

 http://www.gardenweb.com/discussions/1490840/luisa-plum

We are suffering with very high humidity here at the moment (approx 96%) and many of the other stone fruit trees are succumbing to rot, but not the Luisa plum. It's fantastic. We have picked numerous kilos of fruit, it's a real winner! I have bottled them in the past but we are not eating much bottled fruit now that we have cut down on sugar, and besides these plums taste best when fresh.

Tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes........!

Yes it is that time of the year again. We have loads of big juicy tasty tomatoes ripening daily. The varieties I grew this season are beefsteak, the red one is 'Brandywine Pink' and the green is 'Aunt Ruby's German Green'.

And they can grow pretty big, especially the Brandywines. Here we have a few heavy weights, the first weighs in at 444gs:

This one a little heavier 474gs.

But this is the winner (so far), 603gs! A record.

I should also note here that these tomatoes have done well pretty much all by themselves, they were planted with a good amount of compost in the hole, I haven't fed them much other than a slosh of liquid manure and they have pretty much relied upon rain to keep them alive (thankfully we had a fair amount in January while I was away). So these are winners!

So what do with all those tomatoes you might ask? Well we've been eating them almost at every meal, and are not sick of them yet! Last night they were made into sauce to go with meatballs and spaghetti (zoodles for me).

I've cooked up a few batches just simply with onion, salt and pepper, then processed preserving jars full of cooked tomatoes in my Fowlers Vacola. I now have several lovely jars of ready to use tomatoes lined up on the shelf for when needed.

Apart from preserving the tomatoes, I have also frozen quite a lot of them. I just chop them into big chunks, freeze them on trays then when frozen bag them into Ziplock bags. That way I can just take out however much I want for any particular use (i.e. making a pasta sauce or pizza sauce, or adding to mince for bolognese sauce).

Here are the Aunt Ruby's German Green variety:

These are quite big tomatoes also. They are ripe when slightly yellow. They are not quite so disease resistant however, but still a very nice tomato, and the green colour is pretty. This biggy weighs in at 456gs:

 

Tomatoes in the garden, early January 2016

Note to self: always stake tomatoes well! The sheep netting affair I have here is not adequate to keep them staked properly and with the weight of all those heavy tomatoes they are now flopping all over the ground :-(

Aunt Ruby's German Green

The garden late January 2016

This was the first season in the new garden space. It is flat, and fenced from the wind. Next time round however I will do things a little differently, like not having pumpkins and melons trailing everywhere! More photos and blog posts to come soon on these.

January

Hello and a very happy new year to all!

I have been away in England for a month and am slowly getting back into the swing of farm life again!

The main adjustment has been the weather. Coming from a UK winter (albeit a mild winter) to the peak of NZ summer with 100% humidity and temps up in the late 20s has not been easy! The morning I left England it was minus 4 degrees C! We are however enjoying some beautiful sunny days, mostly with a slight breeze and some lovely sunsets at the end of the long summer evenings.

In my absence, the garden has been growing like crazy. Hubby did a great job of watering my plants in the grow tunnels, and harvesting the produce as it ripened. The Brandywine Pink heirloom beefsteak tomatoes are doing really well, I have picked several kgs of these already with many more to come. We've had some nice homemade tomato soup and they are also getting used up at every meal, fried with bacon and egg for breakfast, sliced up with cheese inside a bread roll for lunch, and made into sauce for pasta for dinner.

We're also harvesting cucumbers (Indian variety - Poona), Italian zucchini, peppers, scallopini (patty pan) squash and potatoes.

The plums were very good this year, we had lots (most of these eaten while I was overseas!).

 A handful of blueberries from off our young bushes, not many at a time but they are very tasty!

The pumpkins are growing well, this variety is Musque du Provence a very large French heirloon variety, it will turn yellow/brown when ready. I also let some self-sown pumpkins grow where they sprouted so will be interesting to see what type they are. Can't have too many pumpkins as they also make good stock food for when we are raising pigs.

Scallopini or patty pan squash

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Summer BBQs

Just sharing a photo of the food we ate last night. 99% of it was produced here on CTF.

Rump steak from a cow raised here on CTF, salad with our own cucumber and tomatoes, Italian zucchini (lovely when grilled on the BBQ), and strawberries. G fried some of the strawberries on the hot plate. They are absolutely delicious done this way and made a nice accompaniment to the steak, well we thought so anyway.

Only the lettuce in the salad was purchased, because I've been a bit slack about growing lettuces this summer, mainly because I didn't have somewhere partly shaded to grow them. This has now been remedied though as I now have 2 long planters at the side of our garage which gets afternoon shade, plus I've covered them both with a hooped shade cover. Now all I have to do is remember to water them..ehem!

Hope you are enjoying the Summer produce from your garden too (those of you in the Southern Hemisphere that is!).

Citrus time

Over the last couple of weeks we've been getting some pretty stormy weather, lots of rain and it's been cold with southerly winds. At this time of the year, when we get a day with some sunshine it's a welcome break. Apart from a few showers this morning, today was pretty calm and sunny. The washing even dried on the line for a change!

Here on CTF the citrus trees are producing. This year we've had quite a good harvest of reasonable sized mandarins, the Satsuma variety in particular has been the best we've had so far.

The mandarin trees are only small, most of them only about 1m high and only a few years old. They are in quite a sheltered north-facing spot and I have been feeding them regularly. Despite the Summer droughts they seem to be doing a lot better than our other citrus trees which are in a much more exposed position.

This is our Seville orange tree, planted near to the mandarins so also in a sheltered position. It's also very small but bearing fruit. The fruit is not ready yet though - one we picked and tried was really sour! (UPDATE - have since realised - doh - that this orange is supposed to be sour! It is a cross between a tangelo and a mandarin and great for making marmalade.)

The one citrus tree I'm really looking forward to bearing fruit though is the 'blood' orange. I think it may be a few years off doing so at this stage as it is less than 1m high now.

Other citrus varieties we have are grapefruit, Rangpur limes, lemons (Meyer, Lisbon, Yen Ben), lemonades, kaffir lime and tangelo. The lemons are still a way off producing, but the limes are really quite hardy and the lemonade tree has a fair few fruit on it this year, although not yet ripe.

What citrus do you grow and what is your favourite?

Apples and applesauce

It's apple season here on CTF. I am steadily working my way through mountains of apples. OK 'mountains' might be a slight exaggeration, but there are certainly quite a few kilos!
Here is a big box of delicious 'Reinette du Canada' apples - a French heirloom apple - that I picked yesterday. This variety is great for cooking, but it can also be eaten as a dessert apple. We usually cook it.

Some of these apples get quite big. The biggest one I picked was 500g (18 oz)!

So I'm busy in the kitchen still - this time making applesauce. It's really easy to make, just a bit time consuming - as all preserving can be, when you're dealing with large quantities of fruit. From a bit of research on the web it seems that some folk just chop the fruit and then when cooked put it through a food mill to remove the pips and skin etc.
I prefer to peel, core and slice then cook up and puree with my stick blender (immersion blender) until I have a nice smooth sauce. Then I process in my trusty Fowler's Vacola water bath unit.

It's been great to finally put these old 'Agee' preserving jars into action. I've had them stored away for just the time when they'd be needed. They were given to me by a work friend quite a few years ago now.

Disappointingly though, when getting them out of storage I noticed quite a lot had small cracks on the base. Some of them you could feel that it was broken but some of them G and I thought might be just where the glass came out of the mold rather than damage, they had like a tiny line on the base but no obvious break or chip.

I am going to have to test the ones we're not sure about to see if they'll be OK to use. I found a site that said to boil the jars in water for 15 mins to test them, has anyone tried this? I'm loathed to throw away what may be a potentially usable jar, but on the other hand I don't want any disasters with jars full of fruit cracking and leaking!

Grape juice

As you know I've been really busy in the kitchen lately, preserving  lots of lovely peaches and tomatoes. I've done several bottles of peaches now, which I know we will enjoy in the coming winter. The tomato sauces, both Italian and spicy Indian versions, are lined up in the pantry at the ready for future pasta dinners and curries, both of which are a big favourite here at CTF.

However, this past week I've been picking bunches and bunches of juicy ripe red table grapes. Now there are only so many grapes we can actually eat 'au natural' - I say 'we' but the truth is I don't actually like them much! So there was only really one other alternative - grape juice!

It's easy to make, just a little time consuming. Here is a quick guide to making:

1. Pick your grapes
2. Wash your grapes and remove stalks, insects, leaves..
3. Put into clean stock pan
4. Mash with potato masher
5. Bring to boil and simmer for about 10 mins.
6. Cool for about 10 mins
7. Pour into 'jelly bag' aka old clean pillow case.
8. Suspend 'jelly bag' over another big pot to catch juice, leave to drip for a while. N.B. Juice will stain so use newspaper on floor
9. Squeeze out any extra juice you can
10. Bottle up and sterilise in water bath as per preserving fruit.
11. Drink - we dilute with water but I'm thinking soda water would be lovely.

Note - no sugar was added and the juice is sweet enough for us. It's delicious!

'Airships' and continuing fruit harvest

Madeleines aka 'airships'

Lately I've been making batches of the little French butter cakes known as 'Madeleines'. You need to chill the batter in the fridge, which works well for me because I can make it in advance then cook up as and when required for a lovely treat. My soon to be 7-year-old D calls them 'airships' because of the hump underneath! In any case, they soon disappear. I won't give a recipe because there are so many on the net, basically it's butter, sugar, eggs, flour, vanilla and lemon zest. I used my homemade lemon extract which is lemon zest soaked in vodka. I have silicone madeleine pans which makes getting the cakes out when cooked a simple task.
 
Our citrus orchard is yet to be performing well, so I don't often have my own lemons on hand. Limes yes, and lemonades, but not lemons. Sometimes we receive a lovely big boxful of Meyer lemons from my husband's dear aunty (thanks L :-)!) as she has an established tree. Our citrus orchard is still very exposed to the elements and the little lemon trees are struggling to grow. In a couple of years the feijoa hedging will make all the difference I'm sure, and with better wind protection, they'll be away.

On the other hand, we have had a fantastic year for stonefruit, with peaches and nectarines galore. I've made loads of chutney and jam, and have also bottled some of the fruit, giving the Fowler's Vacola a good workout and filling up my pantry shelves tout de suite! We are now picking our lovely purple 'Black Boy' peaches, which are just delicious! Will post photos soon.

Unfortunately after a great harvest, the tomatoes were getting badly attacked by plague of green shield bugs. They were also going quite 'mealy', so I decided to rip them all out, salvaging the last of the fruit including any unripe ones, just in case I feel the urge to make some more chutney...! The last lot of ripe tomatoes have gone into a delicious Indian spicy relish which I have made this morning. It will go very nicely with a curry. I found the recipe on Pinterest - here's the link.

Spicy tomato relish

Blackberry time

This year we are very lucky to have found a good source of wild blackberries on the farm. In past years we've had to go walkabout to find them, often not too far afield, but further away than our own property. So yesterday afternoon we went out armed with containers and picked a whole lot, not stopping until the sun went down and the light failed us. We enjoyed a fabulous sunset.

There are still more left to pick but as it was raining (well drizzling) today we didn't get to go back for them.

Meanwhile, the close to 4kgs of blackberries we picked yesterday are now frozen awaiting to be added to pies etc.

Sometime very soon I shall be boiling up fruit to make jam. We have an abundance of peaches, plums and now blackberries! Now where did I put all my spare jam jars?!...

Plums and peaches

We are enjoying a bumper harvest of stonefruit right now. Super juicy big plums from off our 'Louisa' trees (to the left of the basket in this photo).

Basket of fresh stonefruit and plum muffins

I made some plum and banana muffins which did not last very long at all!

We're harvesting the stonefruit daily and fortunately they are getting eaten quickly. The plums keep a lot better than peaches, which tend to go bad overnight given the chance. I just cut the bad bits out and usually add the good flesh to smoothies, or put on top of porridge for breakfast.

I will make a peach trifle soon. If I get a chance I may bottle some of the better fruit too.

Time for tomatoes

Our tomato plants are producing lovely juicy tasty fruit right now. The 'Brandywine Pink' beefsteaks are doing well, although I had to net them this year - we have a resident blackbird that likes to eat them too! As a result I am picking them as soon as I think they're ready, rather than leave them the extra time on the plant. I would rather have them ripen up fully indoors than risk coming out to find big holes pecked in them the following day!

Here is a basket lot I picked yesterday:

Brandywine Pink tomatoes

The big one in the photo weighs in at a mega 592g (20.85oz)!

What to do with all these tomatoes? Well I shall be making pasta/pizza sauce, and some soup too.

I also grew some smaller 'standard' sized tomatoes 'Blood Butcher' which are doing fairly well. We use these mainly for salads, and I will be putting some in the dehydrator to dry them for 'sun-dried' tomatoes.

Bloody Butcher tomatoes

Nuts!

Nuts... not as in crazy...... although sadly I do know some people who are..but that's another story!

No, the nuts I'm referring to are these:

Our very first harvest of almonds!

You can see the fruit/hull which is sort of like a dried up peach/apricot, it's not edible, but I wouldn't want to eat it anyway - it is tough and leathery! This fruit splits and inside are the almonds (pits). These have to dry for about a week or until an audible rattle can be heard and then it's time to crack them open and see what's inside. Will keep you posted!

Digging up the potato harvest

Over the last couple of days I finished off digging up the last rows of potatoes. It's a rewarding chore, a bit like digging up buried treasure, give another dig and find a few more!

After letting them dry in the sun for a few hours, I bagged up several kilos of lovely red skinned potatoes.

This area will now be hoed and sowed with lupins and other 'green manure' plants. I might sneak in a few rows of carrots too..!

Update for mid March

The hops are ready so I've been picking them and frozen lots in zip-lock bags for future use. I've also dried some for use in sleep pillows, have made one for myself and will start on more soon. I'm also hoping to make some beer soon, when I get my brew bucket I'll get started! Will be my first attempt at brewing so wish me luck!

We are still getting a reasonable amount of grapes and passionfruit. I made some grape jelly but unfortunately it didn't set well. Maybe I should have added some pectin instead of the lemon juice, or maybe I just didn't boil it long enough...

In the veg. garden we're getting tomatoes, chillies, herbs, greens (rainbow chard and silverbeet), beans, carrots and the other day D picked 6 cucumbers off his vine!

I've planted broccoli, cabbages, kale and cauliflowers and covered them with netting to keep the pesky cabbage butterflies off. In the empty pig run we've sown sugarbeet, mangel, silverbeet, turnips, beetroot, spinach. I've bought  more seeds to sow (for us!):

I've not grown parsnips or brussel sprouts before so that will be interesting! The 'Majestic Red' carrot got a good review in this month's NZ Gardener magazine so thought I'd try them out. Broad beans are always a useful crop, if we don't eat them, the new pigs will and they are very good for the soil.

I'm waiting to get some more farm milk to try my hand at mozzarella, haven't made any more cheese since the last lot of ricotta a few weeks ago.

Off to make ice cream, gingernut biscuits and some focaccia bread for lunch!

Passionfruit time!

We have loads and loads of passionfruit, so I am busy freezing as much as possible. Apart from using standard ice cube containers, I also have a couple of silicone trays, which my sister gave me ages ago. They are designed for freezing portions of baby food. I'm now putting them to good use for freezing handy portions of passionfruit pulp. Being silicone, it makes the job of removing the frozen pulp easy, then I put a whole lot in zip-lock bags.

We are also enjoying it fresh of course. And scooped over homemade vanilla icecream with just a tiny drizzle of golden syrup.....

We've been busy shelling peas and broad beans here on CTF. A job that D enjoys helping me with luckily. While the pea harvest has not been huge (note to self - grow more next Autumn/Winter!), what we have had we've really enjoyed.

Broad beans (fava beans), on the other hand, there are no shortage of, since I put in lots of plants with a view to not only eating the beans but to improving the soil - the roots have wee nodules that supply nitrogen to the soil. I have a few broad bean recipes I'm keen to try out, such as falafels (made combined with the usual chick peas), linguine with broad beans, bacon and mint, and ham hock with chorizo and broad beans. Not everyone in the household is quite so keen on them as me though, so I might have to make 'dinner for one'!

These frilly lavender blue sweet peas are just starting to bloom, their scent is delicious!

Other flowers in the garden at present are these geraniums:

Gardenias -

And this lovely pink petunia (thanks to my mother in law), which is called 'Raspberry Blast' -