Today marks the beginning of our NZ Spring

and it definitely feels Spring like now. We have buds on our almond trees:

And on the plums:

the days are getting longer and the sun is warming up.

Work on the driveway has come to a halt as we've had a bit of rain lately so the ground is soft - not ideal conditions to have earthworks done. Hopefully it will dry up a bit soon so the digger guy can start up again. There's a fair bit of work to get done before it's finished.

Gardening wise I've planted out some cauliflower seedlings and sown my tomato, chilli, capsicum, and ocra seeds.

Weeding like crazy whenever I can, applying mulch to the beds as I go. I'm building up several compost piles and working with the compost that is ready.

Keeping the dog out of the garden is a priority because there are several entrances and no gates yet! Propped up sheets of corrugated iron are working as a barrier in the meantime.

How's your garden shaping up this Spring time?

A very long time away from the blog...

Hello everyone!

A post as last. Gee it has been a very long time since I did any blogging, sorry about that chaps.

We've had a busy time here with G being pretty unwell - he was in hospital for a week and then laid up at home for a while with me running round playing nurse. He's now back at work (on blood thinners), not 100% better but improving gradually. Makes one realise truely how much we should live for the moment and I'm trying hard to remember that it's all about the NOW - not dwelling on what's been or what's to come. I'm thankful for every happy moment on this earth.

Following on from that we had school holidays and the busyness of that. D pretty much commandeering  the computer full time for Minecraft...! Oh how he loves Minecraft. He creates some amazing things in that virtual world that's for sure.

On top of all that there have been the seemingly never-ending jobs to do around the farm! So I've been busy busy busy and to be honest I've not had the energy for blogging at all.

But, I realise it's been over 2 months now so time for a general roundup of happenings here (other than the above!).

I did a LOT of bottling this year, after all the delicious peaches came lots of feijoas so I bottled up loads of these as requested by G. They are quite delicious done like this. Now he's getting to eat them all as I've gone on a no (or as close to) sugar diet for a bit! Ha ha! I know you can bottle in water but that doesn't sound very tasty to me, and honey is another alternative, but for my purposes I'm avoiding the sweet aspect regardless of how 'healthy' that sugar is.

We had quite a good crop of apples too, but I didn't end up preserving any of these this year. We ate a lot fresh of the trees, so delicious, crunchy and sweet. Each variety a different taste. I particularly liked the Cox's orange, but also the Golden Delicious and a Japanese one called 'Akane'. G likes the Braeburn. Also the French biggies 'Reinette du Canada' which double as both dessert and cooking apples. And of course the cooking apples Bramley Seeding, which cook up to a lovely fluffy pulp. We gave quite a lot of apples away at a community group we attend 'Crop Circle'. At this group local folk meet up to swap produce and seeds etc, have a chat about growing food. It's a nice social environment and the kids enjoy meeting up to play while the adults talk food (and other subjects!). Some of the dessert apples we wrapped in paper and have tucked away in a box, we will see if they store OK like this. I've heard of people storing them in a chest of drawers but we don't have the space for that right now.

We also got a small amount of Chilean guavas, which although they are tiny, have a really nice flavour. I used them in pancakes (instead of blueberries) which we enjoyed for brunch.

Now we're enjoying the citrus, and have already harvested a heap of mandarins (Satsuma) from our trees, one in particular had a whole lot of ripe fruit. Not bad for such young trees (these only went in a couple of years ago). We had to pick most off as the little silvereye birds were pecking at the fruit. I think they've done so well because of the location they are in, it's north-facing and nicely sheltered from the winds.

I have been busy applying citrus fertliser while we are getting regular rainfall lately, and both G and I are working away steadily at the very large piles of mulch ('post peelings') we had delivered recently, putting round all the fruit trees and along the driveway hedges - edible along one length (feijoa) and ornamental along another (Griselinia littoralis). Since our Summers get so dry it is really essential to have mulch down and we've been a bit neglectful of doing this properly so I'm really pleased it's happening now. Once our feijoa hedging has filled out it should provide the much needed shelter for our rather wind exposed lemon orchard.

We've also got a huge pile of sawdust which will go on the vege garden. We prefer to use the sawdust (untreated of course) on the garden because the post peelings are quite dry and spiky. The sawdust is good both on the garden beds and on paths. I will be putting down a lot of wet cardboard first to suppress the weeds.

I'm still getting quite a bit out of the garden, beetroot, kale, Swiss chard, spring onions, plus all the usual herbs, and my Asian ingredients - lemongrass, coriander, chillies, galangal.

Indoors I've been making soap again. This time using the tallowate we prepared back in January. I used the recipe from Suburban Jubilee (see here) making half the amount at a time. The soap came out well and we are using it now, it lathers up well and is nice and creamy. Only one slight thing I used a different lavender oil which was cosmetic grade and the smell did not last! Not really a problem but next time I will go for the more expensive essential oil, obviously cosmetic grade is no good for soap! I also bought a nice silicone mould from GoNative and one of their soap cutters which made the job of slicing the soap a whole lot easier than using a knife.

I'm wanting to try out making salt soap bars too, using pink Himalayan salt. This will be happening soon as I need to build up our stock of soap. We ran out recently and I had to buy it. The soap I bought was very pretty and smelled great, but did not last very long at all (plus it was expensive!). A little reminder that home made soap is best, and cheaper too.

Will post some more photos soon.

Flower photos - garden and orchard

Just sharing a few photos taken around CTF. We are in mid Spring and things are blooming nicely.

Potager garden

 I need to remove the large overgrown lemongrass plant (in middle of photo), split it up and replant elsewhere!

Flowers on the bank

 The bank is looking a lot better, covered in flowers at this time of year. Plenty for the bees to feed on.

A bicoloured Californian poppy (self germinated)

The original Californian poppy

Californian poppies - self seeded

Unknown variety of rose

Apple blossom

Quince blossom

Quince tree in flower

Now for a question: does anyone know what this palm is? It was given to us but we don't know the variety.

First of the peaches

Early Red peaches

We are now enjoying lots of lovely fresh juicy peaches from our 'Early Red' trees. So far (am I tempting fate by saying this...?!) the possums have not found the trees, but we have had some windy weather which has blown a few fruit off.

So I am busy in the kitchen with making peach pies, smoothies, eating them fresh as is, and sliced on my morning porridge. I've made peach and raspberry popsicles, and will probably freeze some sliced peaches too. If I get enough time I will bottle some too.

Early Red peach tree

This is the size of one of the peach trees. We have already harvested about 5kgs off this tree and still more to come.

Looking forward to the 'Black Boy' peaches later on :-)

Blossom time

The first of the fruit trees in our stonefruit orchard are in blossom. This is one of our almond trees, and don't the bees just love it.

 

 

This was the little tree that we got our first harvest of almonds from last season. Hoping we will get a good crop this season!

Some photos of the new citrus orchard

Frost cloth to the ready!

Hopefully a good spot, sheltered and north facing

A healthy Kaffir Lime

Tree planting time

We have G has been out in the orchard working away, weedeating/mowing, and digging lots of holes (with spade and post-hole borer) and then yesterday we planted out several fruit trees (about 20 or so!) to fill out some empty spaces in our orchard. The trees are mainly peaches, nectarines, a couple of apricots, a quince and a mulberry.

They are all locally grown, and mostly local heirloom trees which is really exciting. One in particular, the Pahi River Peach, is a special fruit tree - this is the one that started it all with Kay Baxter and Koanga Gardens in terms of saving the plants that would have otherwise disappeared forever. For more on that read here.
So I was thinking of this as we planted these trees yesterday and am grateful indeed to Kay Baxter, as I'm sure many are.

All the trees will need quite a lot of hard pruning, as will our other established trees as we've been a bit timid with pruning them! I also have to carefully map them out, otherwise we'll be wondering which tree is which when the labels blow off in the wind!

I hope they do well for us in the years to come.

While I don't have a photo of the river peach as we don't already have this variety in our orchard, here is a photo of the absolutely stunning, and truely delicious, 'Blackboy'  peach. Bring on the summer stone fruit!

Anyone else busy planting fruit trees?

Peaches from the orchard

We've starting picking the first peaches of the season from our orchard. They are just as sweet and juicy as you would imagine them to be. The name of the peach is a bit of a mystery however. The trees we planted were labeled 'Nectarine Early Red' (an earlier post I had a photo of the tree with this name as the caption). So unfortunately we are none the wiser. But it won't affect us eating them however!

The beginnings of a citrus fruit harvest

The rangpur limes are pretty hardy (thank goodness!) and have the most fruit of all our citrus trees at the moment, even though they are still very small trees. These were the trees I grew from seed some years ago and transplanted when we moved here. I have made a couple of batches of marmalade with them, and this has turned out very well. Fortunately, since G does not eat my jams and marmalades as a rule I have several jars still on my shelves! Yay.

While the ground is still soft, we may get around to planting a few more citrus, I think more mandarin trees would be a good idea as they are always a popular fruit, especially with litte Mr D.

Meanwhile, we have some fruit appearing for the first time on the 'Yen Ben' lemon, which is a type of Lisbon lemon. We do have a 'Meyer' lemon but it is pitifully small at the moment! However I do get regular gifts of lemons from G's aunty as most people with a lemon tree have way more lemons than they can use.

Now I'm off to hunt for that lemon pickle recipe......

More special fruit trees

We collected 3 trees from Kaiwaka Gardens (ex. Koanga) and planted them yesterday. They are 2 apples - Northern Spy, a well-known and loved heritage variety, and Vaille Early which was common locally 150 years ago.
We also planted another variety of pear - Triumph de Vienna, a large brown russet and an excellent dessert pear.

and here's food for thought - according to the Koanga tree catalogue, a Northland nursery (Morrisons) had 140 varieties of apple for sale in their 1907 catalogue! 140! And then came supermarkets after WWII and the fruit was grown with one aim - long shelf-life! So we lost all the really tasty apples. Isn't that sad. It's nice to know that at least we've got a few of the old varieties in our orchard to carry on the link in the chain for future generations.

 The manuka hedge is flowering and looks beautiful:

Cherimoya seedlings

Lucky us, we were gifted x2 cherimoya plants by our neighbours W& P, thanks guys! These little babies will be nurtured until they are much bigger before we can plant them in our new subtropical orchard.

Shelter along our boundary fence

Along part of our boundary fence (about 50m) and edge of our main orchard we planted a row of karo pittosporum trees which were doing quite nicely until next door's cow (cheeky thing is hiding behind the netting in this photo!) decided to munch them. So yesterday we got busy and put up some wind cloth. In hindsight, we should have done this from the very beginning, or perhaps planted the trees further away from the fence but.......ah well, it's all a learning curve! Anyhow, we got about just over 1/3 of the length done yesterday, ran out of clips to do any more, but already it looks heaps better and should help the trees recover. It will also provide a nice bit of shelter for the orchard, and for new trees to come (including more karos which we need to fill in the gaps where some have died).

The fruit trees are doing OK, some of the more established apple trees are producing fruit (although not ripe as yet). This is a double grafted tree with both red and golden delicious.
We still have a lot of room left for more trees so will be thinking about that for this winter (planting time).

Yes, more fruit trees

It's coming to the end of the planting season, so today we grabbed a chance to purchase a few more trees to get in the ground before it is too late and would have to wait another year.

So we bought another pear - 'Winter Nelis', an almond - 'Monovale' (the almond we purchased a couple of years back seems to be a plum..), and 3 more fig trees: 'Brown Turkey' (a larger size tree than the one we just planted), 'French Sugar' and 'Brunoro Black'. OK, so we're going to heaps of fruit in years to come but rather that than not enough. Also our thinking is that we can feed the birds as well as ourselves, rather than worry about not getting to the fruit in time. That's the theory anyway!

We also picked up a kowhai tree (we don't actually have one on our property, but overlook several on a neighbouring farm). The kowhai are all in flower at present and are putting on a real show with their yellow flowers.

And lastly 2 kahikotea trees. We only have a single specimen in the bush on our property.

Another week gone by

So what's up here on Cabbage Tree Farm?

Well during the week we had a visit from a bunch of students and their tutor to learn how to prune fruit trees, which was handy for us as we needed a little professional guidance ourselves. Although we had made a start on pruning some of the bigger trees (basically into the vase shape) some required further pruning. We gleaned some handy tips from the visit.

G has planted a few more trees into the orchard: Apple 'Bramley's Seedling', Plumcot (cross between plum and apricot), Plum 'Billington', Plum 'Duff's Early', and Pear 'William Bon Cretian'.
Next job is I have to update the orchard map which is a bit scrappy and disordered jotted down on bits of paper. A good map is essential so that we can identify which tree is which (since the labels often blow off in strong winds, or fade in the hot sun). Does anyone have any suggestions for computer software that helps plan an orchard/garden? I have downloaded Google Sketchup but haven't had time to learn to use it yet, and am not sure if it will do the job I want it to.

The weather is warming up now and it's time to think about getting some seedlings going for the summer veg garden. Tomatoes are top of the list, as are chillies, More to come on this topic.

Not so much going on

I've been pre-occupied with getting ready for the arrival of the new baby lately, hence the lack of posts sorry.
Consequently not a lot happening out on the farm at present. We collected a couple more fruit trees, 2 figs "Batley/Brown Turkey" and "Totara House/White Adriatic". They are only tiny trees so it will be some time before we get any fruit however! We put in another apple "Monty's Surprise", the one that is heralded as having superb anti-cancer properties. Also a pear tree "William Bon Cretian" (grafted onto quince to keep it at a manageable size, otherwise they grow enormous). I've heard that pears take ages to mature to fruiting stage - the adage "plant pears for your heirs" springs to mind, but hopefully we'll be able to eat some even if it does take a while!
In the kitchen this week I've made lemonade with 'lemonade' fruit (similar to lemon), so busy with the juicer again. It turned out really well so I'll make it again soon and post some pics/recipe. Also made up some more candied peel with the spent fruit, and put some of that in some buns along with the candied orange peel, this time adding a little splash of orange blossom water and omitting the sultanas/raisins. Came out very well.
We've had homemade pasta again, seems to take no time at all to make now that I know what to do.
We've had another goat curry and I also made a Thai red curry using up some duck out of the freezer. Not had a great deal of success with the ducks, but it came out well in the Thai curry, chopped up small, marinated in the red curry paste and then stir fried prior to adding the coconut cream and veges.
Very shortly will be getting one of our cows slaughtered so we need to get ourselves another chest freezer. Will post some info on that in the next week or so.

More fruit trees

On the weekend G planted some more fruit trees in the orchard, in amongst the yellow flowering mustard. The mustard encourages the bees for pollination and is good for the soil. He planted 2 more peaches (bringing our total so far to 8) - Kaitaia and Camden, and 2 apricots - Trevatt which is supposed to be frost hardy and Sundrop. Hopefully they will all do well.

Fruit tree season

It's that time of year again. We've been scanning the catalogues for interesting fruit tree varieties to add to our orchard. We have a couple of local heritage figs on order from Koanga nurseries, also an apple called 'Monty's Surprise', heralded as "the best anti-cancer eating apple in the world". We already have quite a few apple trees but couldn't resist adding this one, especially since we have the space! Would also like to get a couple of pear trees, and maybe try growing some apricots, not sure how they will fare in our northern climate but we won't know until we try!
Have decided to use feijoas as hedging along the citrus orchard to offer some protection from the winds. We were going to put up a shelter fence, but it makes sense to plant something edible! We'll have tons of feijoas in years to come, but maybe that'll be when it's time to dabble in homemade winemaking!

Rangpur lime marmalade

Yesterday I collected just on 1kg of limes from one of our rangpur lime trees. This is the most fruit we've harvested as yet from any of our citrus trees so quite exciting! Since I read that rangpur makes excellent marmalade, I was keen to try making some.

The recipe I used was from the ever useful "A NZ Country Harvest Cookbook" by Gilian Painter. I highly recommend this book, especially for those of you out there with your own orchard, it contains lots of old-fashioned recipes for preserves, pickles, sauces, drinks, wine, cakes etc using various types of fruit and veg. I'd also like to try out the quince marmalade sometime. Anyway, I digress..back to the rangpur marmalade.

I sliced the fruit finely and placed in the preserving pan, adding 2 litres of water to soak overnight. Then this morning I boiled up the fruit for about 1/4 hour until the peel was soft. Then I measured it and added 3/4 cup of sugar to each cup. After dissolving the sugar, stirring all the while with a wooden spoon, I increased the heat (on the wok part of the hob as this is hottest) until the marmalade came to a rolling boil. It was set (test a bit on a cold saucer until wrinkles appear) after about 25-30 mins.

I'm very pleased with the results, the quantity made 13 medium sized jars. Can't wait to try it out on some toast in the morning.

Herbal ley

The herbal ley has come up well. Predominantly yellow flowering mustard, but the lupins are also in there just not flowering yet.

Banana plants

Down in our bush area there is a nice clearing where we put some cabbage tree and flax plants (in bags) when we first bought our land. Some of these got planted around the area later on and others we planted around our stream edges and in boggy areas.
We also used the area to house half a dozen Abyssinian banana plants that we purchased at an A&P show. The bananas took root and have done extremely well. They are not an edible type, but used more for shelter in a subtropical orchard. The clearing is not where we intend to have our main subtropical orchard but since a) it is a good spot since the ornamental banana is doing so well and b) we have no shelter whatsoever as yet for our main subtropical orchard, we decided to plant the edible banana there too.


The edible banana has had a tough life, we bought a plant years ago in Auckland and planted it in our garden there, but it was in the wrong spot, too dry and probably not enough sun. So it never gave us any bananas. When we sold up and left our house in Auckland to move here, we brought a few suckers with us in black plastic garden bags. Only 1 has survived. Unfortunately I can't remember what variety it is, but I think it may be 'Lady Finger' (very small bananas). In any case we'll be very happy if we get any edible fruit. Hopefully it will now thrive!