Fruit and veg and baking

I've been fairly busy, with one thing or another, hence the lack of posts - sorry folks! The garden is still producing well considering we are into Autumn. I have yet to get any winter veg in, but I guess there is still time for a few things.

However we're still picking tomatoes - I've been making loads of passata and bottling that, also freezing halved or chopped tomatoes to make soup and add to stews etc. I also made up a batch of tomato relish which we have yet to try.

I've also got a few chillies and capsicums ripening now, looking forward to those.

We've cut into our first pumpkin - one of the Queensland Blues - and it is a good pumpkin, nice solid flesh and not too hard to cut. Not sure how easy the Musquee du Provence will be to cut up! These ones are not quite ripe yet, although getting there.

A small Queensland Blue pumpkin, and one cut open showing the inside

Watermelons 'Sugar Baby' and raspberries

We're now harvesting a different watermelon 'Sugar Baby' which grew really fast. Probably a few too many melons for us to eat but we can give some away I'm sure! The raspberries (not sure what variety these are unfortunately) are producing quite well now for young canes (I think we put them in only a couple of years ago). So today I made some more friands:

 

And for the space crazy youngest member of the family who doesn't like the friands (yay!), I made some of these gingerbread cookies with my new rocket cookie cutter:

Eggplants/aubergines

Here are some of the fruits from the 2 varieties of eggplant/aubergine I planted this year. The top one (all purple) is 'Long Purple' and the bottom stripy one is Tsasoniki'. So far we've enjoyed them simply cooked on the BBQ and the taste is fantastic, full of flavour.
However, now that I have received 'How to Store Your Garden Produce' by Piers Warren that I won from Spades and Spoons, I'm going to try out one of the recipes in this book called 'Brinjal Pickle', an Indian pickle with fresh ginger, garlic and various spices. Looking forward to trying that with a good curry soon, maybe lamb.

Rain and some photos

Yay we've had a decent amount of rain, and it's still raining which is great for the plants and for our water tank!

Thought I'd post a few photos from around the farm as it's been a while.
The chooks are now allowed to roam freely in the sectioned off part where we grew the corn and some tomatoes. The pumpkins are still on the vine and ripening up nicely. The chooks really enjoy being able to scratch around and get the bugs. The 3 chooks on the right in this picture will soon be chicken dinners..and they were from this lot of chicks so they are approximately 16 wks old and should make nice table birds.

The big yellowy brown pumpkins are Musquee de Provence and the grey ones are Queensland Blue. Looking forward to tasting the M d P as I've not eaten this variety before.

 

The little Kumquat is doing quite well considering the dry summer and is covered in flowers which I'm pleased about. The citrus orchard is really not very impressive as we put it in before we'd established any shelter hedging, probably a bit too keen! However the Rangpur limes are still fine, they must be the most hardy out of all the citrus we have. The hedging is coming away now so in a couple of years things will look a lot better!

Here is part of another hedge along the front boundary fence which is currently in flower. The tree is called 'Lacebark' (Hoheria populnea) and is very pretty when covered in these lovely white flowers:

Lacebark 'Hoheria populnea' in flower