Garden harvest and tree planting

Today I harvested a small bunch of small carrots (variety 'Touchon'). I steamed these and served them with butter and honey, they were absolutely delicious! Looking forward to more carrots, this variety seems to be doing quite well, I haven't had any luck with my purple ones so will sow some more.

Another small but tasty treat out of the garden right now is leeks! These were sauteed in a little butter until tender and were sweet and scrumptious.

Over the last few days we've been busy planting trees along a watercourse on our property. They are mainly cabbage trees, coprosma, and pohutukawa. We still need to put in some flaxes along here.
Even after planting several trees along the stream we still have quite a lot of plants left over. We got these going several years ago from small seedlings when we were living in Auckland, and they have all been waiting in the wings for the last couple of years for us to put them in the ground! Most have survived well, as we had them in a damp sheltered area near our pond, some are a bit root-bound but once they go into the ground they'll be fine. We have another area in mind that we want to plant out so it's great to have all the trees ready to hand and I'm glad we did all the hard work of growing them from wee plants all that time ago!

This watercourse should look great once the trees grow up. We need to dig out the stream a bit more (purely for aesthetic purposes!).

Lastly, the amaryllis is in flower and looks great:

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......

Equinox gales

Dead chicken house!

 

 

 

Well this was the result of a severe hammering from the strong winds we've had over the last few days. Yesterday the chicken house copped it and had flipped upside down. Amazingly the 4 eggs the hens had laid earlier were still intact. And the hens were all OK, no casualties! The hen house has subsequently been re-erected and is now hopefully more secure.

Thankfully we've suffered no other damage on the property, apart from a few things blowing about.

Today is the actual Spring Equinox and also the full moon, so I'm hoping the windy weather will settle down soon - although I read that this may take about 4-6 weeks!