We weed weed wee

Enquiring minds are no doubt wondering what all this talk of weed and wee and we and weed the abovely title portends. It's this, you see, I've been messing about with dandelions, one of the world's most famous diuretics, if for "world" you'll accept Culpepper's Complete Herbal (marrying botany and slightly dangerous medicinal advice since 1653). Old Nick Culpepper begins his reflections on dandelions by noting that the vulgar refer to them as "piss-abeds". This would be a clue: however tempting it may seem, you shouldn't drink your bodyweight in water and then gorge on dandelions unless you're prepared to sleep in a nappy on a plastic sheet. The good news, according to our favourite seventeenth-century herbologist, is that piss-abedding can be therapeutic. The dandelion:

openeth the passages of the urine both in young and old [eek!]; powerfully cleanseth imposthumes and inward ulcers in the urinary passages [double eek!], and by its drying and temperate quality doth afterwards heal them; for which purpose the decoction of the roots or leaves in white wine, or the leaves chopped as pot herbs with a few alisanders, and boiled in their broth, are very effectual.

As it happens, the passages of my urine have been in pretty good fettle of recent years, so I haven't been in dire need of a dandelion and alisander soup. However. Ever since the weather killed my first tea plant (a genuine Camellia sinensis, frizzled by a Melbourne heatwave) and then the chickens killed my second tea plant (not maliciously; it just happened to be where they wanted to excavate), I've gotten crazily enthusiastic about tea alternatives that are within my limited horticultural reach. And that means - besides lemon verbena and peppermint and lemongrass and raspberry leaf - dandelion root. What dandelion root tea lacks in caffeine it more than makes up for in a pleasing ... brownness. (How am I going? Talked you into giving up coffee for dandelions yet?)

The best time to harvest dandelion roots, I've learnt from grim experience, is before they flower (as with any root vegetable, the energy stored in the root gets used up in the flowering). We had a burst of dandelion flowering around September, but the next generation is yet to bloom, so this afternoon, with the soil good and soft from rain, I seized my opportunity to hoik up this fine assembly of rooticles.

You could probably brew with them as is, but I'm inclined to chop them up into 1cm lengths and plonk 'em in the oven for 15 minutes or toast them in a dry fry pan. The toasting seems to caramelise the sugars (starches?) in the root which makes these little niblets rather tasty.

They're ready now for my Dandelion Soy Latte deluxe. It's a thing. Sounds slightly more impressive than wee tea. You just plonk a teaspoonful of these into a tea strainer, steep it in your warmed and frothed liquid of preference, add honey if you like, and Bob's your nuncle.

P.S. more weeds for dinner. The mucilaginous mallow of the Malvaceae family has been springing merrily out of the compost I spread around my vegums. Imho, the best thing to do with a weed in the vegum patch is eat it (cf. nettles). Here, therefore, are some mallow leaves (centre) posing with some Murraya koenigii/curry leaves (left) and some cardamom leaves (rightish, downish) before being plonked into tonight's chickpea ragout. The leaves, stem, flowers, etc of the mallow are all edible, and quite an acceptable cooked green, particularly good in a casserole or something that benefits from a bit of thickening.

P.P.S. Tim wishes it to be known that he has brewed dandelion root ale. And lo it was good.

P.P.P.S. this post brought to you by the word "plonk", which I note I have now used four times.

Honey, I'm home: nectarine thieves, apricottage, and Operation Cyser

Hello blog! Hello 2015! Hello Lalor (from which magnificent outer northern suburb, we - Timnus, Harriet & Bea Cat, a posse of chooks and I - absconded for the hols)! We returned home from our abscondage just in time for 2015's first bout of Melbourne HellWeather, so it was only after we'd thoroughly watered the garden, shaded the bees, wet the worms and set out five million waterbowls for the chickens that we noticed that the entire crop of some 100 or so nectarines we'd left on our frontyard nectarine tree had vamoosed.

Melbourne HellWeather MMXV, Bout the First

I planted the nectarine the day after we moved to Lalor, in the rain (sigh), just over four years ago. Pam from up the road popped down to introduce herself and invite me over for tea (nice work, Lalor Welcoming Committee). Someone whose name I've never learnt but who lives in the next street along warned me sternly that if I put a fruit tree in my front garden kids would steal my fruit. Oh no!, I thought, Not the national scourge of fruit-eating children! and then I continued on with my row of alternating apples and stone fruit along the front perimeter, imagining the occasional youngster helping herself to afternoon tea on the way home from school. Had I known that "kids will steal your fruit" would mean "some audacious individual of unspecified age will strip your entire crop", maybe I'd have grown a thistle hedge, sunk a moat and installed a pair of lusty piranhas.  Or maybe not. I have mixed feelings about this fruit theft. I myself am an A-grade salvager of abandoned fruit, for one thing, and if someone thought our under-ripe nectarines were so delicious that she/he/they persisted in denuding the entire tree, then happy Christmas, someone. More to the point, we're lucky it was just fruit we lost. There's some serious loot in our house, just waiting for the burgling. A sack of alpaca fleece, for instance. The complete set of the Season Eight Buffy the Vampire Slayer comic books. Several hundred bottles of variably potable homebrew. A 1940s sewing machine I found abandoned on the verge in Preston and lugged home at great cost to my dorsal muscles only to find that it didn't function. The $0.99 lounge suite from ebay. The coffee table snaffled from hard rubbish. So, nectarines schmectarines.

It has also helped reconcile me to my nectarine loss that we happen to be, right this minute, rather rolling in fruit. We found a wild apple in Bright (as you do) with precociously juicy apples. Who knew apples could ripen in December? Go, you good tree! Accompanied by my trusty nieces-in-crime, K and H, and the Tim-meister, we picked almost 15kg, without making much of a dent in this tree's fructifying.

Back home, the apricot tree was groaning with fruit (safely stowed in the backyard, away from Lalor's Stonefruit Filcher of Doom). Thinking we were in for hail last night, I pulled down half the apricots - 7.5kg as it turns out - and while scoffing the ripest, Fowlers Vacola-ed 11 bottles of apricocks (in the no-not-at-all-bawdy parlance of Mr. W. Shakespeare).

7.5kg of Moor Park apricots. Was pleased to note that Mount Alexander organicky Moor Parks are selling for $10/kg, which means that these kids have already more than paid for their insect/bird exclusion netting. In foreground: remains of my lentil deluxe dinner, eaten outside to maximise benefits of cool change. In background: dwarf peach (fruiting for the first time this year, yay!) and water chestnuts in blue pond thingy.

Eleven jars of apricottery with a dollop of honey per jar, all rustically packed. Ain't winning no CWA awards for handsome fruit-packing anytime soon.

Excess apricots (is there such a thing?) safely preserved, we got down to the serious business of making out first cider of the year.

Which, once the apples are assembled, begins with apple crushing. The apple crusher is a spendy bit of kit that is entirely worth its spendiness (say I, having laboriously crushed the apples in my 2L blender the first year we made cider). Of course, as with all positive spendiness to worthiness ratio calculations, this one assumes regular and passionate use (a fair assumption, as I'll be in the cider-making lark for many years to come, dog willing, and may yet manage to cultivate friends who want to borrow the crusher (or The Crusher, to give this fine article its due Arnie-Schwarzeneggerisation)).

The Crusher in its most fearsome aspect. 

You can't see 'em, but underneath those apples are teeth on wheels. They bite the apples up and spit them out into a bucket below. Then we take the apple spit bits and stuff them into the apple press and press away and out oozes the juice. No photo of this stage, because all hands are either engaged in manipulating the press or covered in bits of apple.

It turned out that while these apples were perfectly juicy and while they tasted (to me) sweet, their sugar content was pretty low, according to our trusty hydrometer. Our juice would have made the light-beer equivalent of cider, which sounded fine to me, but my co-vintner was having none of this namby-pamby barely-fermented, cideresque excuse-for-a-drink, and promptly poured a 600mL jar of our honey into the juice. Voila! Cider turns to cyser, i.e., apple-honey wine (at which point, it behooves me to point out that mead-making, aka, mazing, has all the best vocabulary: mazer, metheglin, pyment, cyser, melomel, hippocras), and its future alcohol content approximately quadruples.

5 litres of cyser-to-be

But on that I'll have to get back to you in the fulness of time. Five years or so should do the trick.

Artichokes sotto olio and loquat chutney, via rambling anecdotes about shoelaces and spinning wheels

The other day, Tim bought himself a new pair of shoelaces. I was appalled. "You're paying money for these?" I asked, in my eminently reasonable fashion. "We could make our own shoelaces. I could make them out of nettles. In fact, I think we should learn how to make shoes. I'm sure we could cobble something together. Get it?! Cobble! Ha!" Tim, it turns out, has no interest in learning how to cobble. Apparently - it's hard to believe, I know – he has other things he'd rather do with his time. Like make cheese. The decadence of the West, I tells you.

Some fairy godperson gave me a giant sack full of alpaca fleece via freecycle recently. On the strength of this, I bought a preloved spinning wheel on gumtree.com and borrowed every book on spinning that the Yarra Plenty Library network possesses. The first one I opened featured a tutorial on how to make your own spinning wheel. I could have made my own spinning wheel! Instead I had sold my soul to gumtree.com and bought a second-hand one like the dirty consumerist I am. I'd been feeling so smug about how I was just 239 hours of textile-based labour away from my own home-spun hand-knitted alpaca-fleece undies and there was this book raising the DIY bar another notch in the direction of Tudor-era über-peasant unattainability.

So, today, I'm all set to make my first jar of preserved artichokes for the season when I remember that they require vinegar. I ignore the bottle of white wine vinegar bought by Tim, that Jezebel of mercantilism, and decide that I will use the home-grown liquid that we have been generously describing as "honey wine vinegar". This potion, which fills six wine bottles and has been sitting in our cupboard for almost a year, is the terrible consequence of an attempt at "wild fermenting" mead (wild fermentation being where, instead of adding a commercially produced yeast into the ferment, one leaves the must sitting around in the open air for a bit, allowing it to catch the local micro-organisms). But then I taste it, this "honey wine vinegar", which I haven't touched since December when we palmed some off onto our long-suffering relatives for Christmas, and I am reminded that it is truly horrible (sorry, relatives), and I decide that perhaps in the matter of wine yeasts it is preferable to surrender to the tyranny of the commercial yeast makers. While I'm in surrender-mode, I also decide to use the white wine vinegar for my artichoke project, but! I will recycle it. First I'll use it to marinate the artichokes, and then I'll drain the artichokes, and catch the vinegar, and use it to make loquat chutney.

A backyard artichoke.

A frontyard artichoke. 

Today's artichoke harvest.

The artichoke regimen is this: first I wash 'em, primarily to evict the earwigs; then I remove outer leaves and spiky tops; then I boil them submerged in a solution that's half vinegar, half water and 1 tablespoon salt per 1kg of artichokes, plus bay leaves, a couple of cloves, a chilli; this mixture has to boil for five minutes, and then I drain the acidified artichokes and leave them to cool. When they're cool, I'm going to immerse them in olive oil.

Artichokes, cooling after a brisk boil in vinegar solution.

Meanwhile, I'm plotting the demise of these loquats, picked from a dangling-over-someone's-backfence local loquat tree:

Loquats, could be riper, but the lack of household chutney was getting dire.

My loquat chutney recipe requires a kilo or so of loquats, deseeded, chucked in a pot with the leftover litre of vinegar and salt solution from my artichoke acetification process, plus 500g sugar, 500g chopped onion, a handful of sultanas, two teaspoons of ground mustard seeds, a knob of grated ginger, and a bit of chilli. This gets bubbled and reduced for an hour and a half, scooped into hot jars, and then water-bathed for ten minutes, resulting in ...

enough chutney to last until tamarillo chutney season.

And by now the artichokes have cooled, so they're plonked in one of my mum's giant ex-Nescafe instant coffee jars and submerged in olive oil (which I bought in a 15L cask last March, sufficiently long ago that I can pretend to forget that I didn't make it myself, with my own hand-forged olive press, using locally grown Lalorian olives).

 And that is the end of the story. I am ridiculous.

Meanderthals

A million years ago, my friend Miri and I spent six days rambling all over the Freycinet Peninsula in Tasmania. We had packed six days worth of chocolate, but ate it all on day one, and ended up trading our sanitary pads for the chocolate-covered coffee beans of some German hikers. Priorities. We'd also brought six dinners' worth of what I had thought (while packing) would be the best hiking meal ever: red lentils, couscous, a packet per night of dehydrated beans/peas/carrots, and a packet of Continental Cup-a-Soup. You could put all this in a billy with water, bring it to the boil, then take the billy off the flame, wrap it in a woolly jumper, and all the ingredients would keep absorbing water without any additional heat source. "What's for dinner?" Miri had asked on day 3. "Lentil surprise!" I'd said, but Miri was not surprised. (We were both quite farty by this stage, by the way, because pulses really need a good soak before they're cooked, but I guess we had the whole of Tasmania to make smells into, and a brisk breeze chopping in from the Pacific, so farty-schmarty.)

On day 4, we scrambled down a mountain onto a beach from before the Fall. White sand, gargantuan tresses of kelp washed up out of a grey ocean, and little blobs of bright green seaweed sitting on the sand like cos lettuces. Lentil, couscous, Cup-a-Soup, and reconstituted peas had gotten pretty old by now, so we decided to gussy up our dinner that night with some salty old cos-of-the-sea. I won't say that this was the moment that turned me into a card-carrying forager (because, even before the seaweed-lentil-a-bleu event of 2001, I had spent a lot of my life fantasising about being left behind at our holiday house so I could subsist on bracken shoots, blackberries, and rabbit dung), but it was certainly a formative moment.

I love a walk. I love walking pace and its sensible, intuitive uniting of distance travelled and time. I like having conversations on the hoof. And I do so like eating my environment.

Team Lalor ambled up to the parental estate in Bright last weekend. The forests around Mum's house are particularly excellent for their abundance of feral fruit, and, around Easter, for their abundance of apples. Some of these forest apple trees were perhaps planted on purpose, once upon a time, but some of them are clearly natives, rogue trees with the sort of nuggety fruit noone would deliberately propagate. We have a bit of an Easter tradition afoot, of pillaging the wild apples, more than we could possibly eat before they turn into mush, and making all the apple things: apple and ginger jam, dehydrated apple slices, apple pies, and, as of last year, cider. 

Cider is traditionally made not with sweet dessert apples like Jonathans and Galas, but with bittersweet and bittersharp apples, apples with a degree of acidity and tannininess that make them, as apples, not particularly tasty. The cider apples have names like Improved Foxwhelp, Brown Snout, and Yarlington Mill, names which are, in their own right, perfectly darling. We don't have access to any named varieties of cider apple (though we're growing a Granny Smith, who gives suitably acidic apples), but we found last year that a goodly variety of apples and crabapples from the forests around Bright results in a pretty perfect cider.

So, we walked and we plundered the trees - as high as we could reach, which still left acres of fruit for the parrots - and, as you can see, we not only found apples, but also chestnuts and a few walnuts and a few hazelnuts. The nuts are footpath nuts; the apples are forest apples.

The apples are home now, mellowing, which should make them easier to crush and press when the time comes.

Besides apples and nuts, the forests are teeming with green things. Bakers' Gully Creek is infested with watercress, which I barely restrained myself from harvesting and adding to the latest iteration of lentil surprise. Behind the shopping centre in Bright there is a rampaging hop bine in bloom, pretty much murdering a camellia.

We've been trying to coax hop flowers from a hop bine in our garden for two years now. We bought it as a dormant rhizome on ebay a couple of years ago, and lo, it did verily burst from the earth in Spring, but it hasn't grown like topsy, as hops are fabled to do, and it hasn't blossomed yet. It might be that it's still getting into its stride. I've seen hops flowering at CERES, just down the road, so there's no serious climatic reason why we ain't got no hopping action. Anyway, given the brewing that takes place in this house and our own lack of hop production, there was quite a lot of excitement at the sight of the masses and masses of hops dripping over the pavement. We pressed the flowers between our fingers and they left behind an oily smear - just the stuff a brewer wants - so we stuffed a couple of handfuls into a bag, and now they too are mellowing (or rather, sitting in the freezer) waiting to aromify a beery tribute to easter in Bright.

Speaking of hops, and, erm, therefore speaking of kangaroos, this paddock next door to the Harlot estate is a gigantic kangaroo dinner-table-cum-loo. Technically it belongs to some guy, but in fact it belongs to the Eastern Greys, who turn up nightly for a nibble and a poo. The guy seems to understand this, and has left the paddock be for yonkers.

Mum had shown me an ad in a gardening magazine for wombat poo. In fact, you can buy it online - "that special manure for that special person's special pot plant".* I'm not proud of myself for this, but I'm mentioning it in the spirit of confession: I was moved by the combination of wombat-poo-for-sale and the fact that I'd seen WilburHund eating the roo poo the day before and the fact that I am really a bit of a thief to go into the roo paddock one morning and fill a plastic bag with the freshest of macropod droppings. It's now mellowing on one of the bathtub gardens on our driveway.

So, walking. Not only is it good for the soul, it also results in apples, hops, poo, and possibly seaweed in your lentils.

* It's my birthday in a month. Just saying.

Wine. With actual grapes.

Steve the automechanic has a very dim opinion of my car husbandry. Our poor old Holden went flat about six weeks ago. The RACV fella came and said the battery was some vestige from the Keating era. He sold us a new one. Three days later, the new one was flat too. I saw this as an opportunity not to drive anywhere for a month. Which was perfectly lovely, with the exception of the morning I signed up to be on the La Trot picket line from 7am. After a month of being carless and fancy-free, finally, on Friday morning, with visiting parents-in-law about to descend from the north, I called the RACV again. A new fella came. I shouldn't have left the battery empty for so long. He recharged it. I lugged the car two kilometres up the road to Steve, who did some expensive things to the alternator, revived the battery a bit more, and then advised me, in terms not so much insistent as pleading, to drive it every day for a week until the battery is back in business. I think he's hoping I'll form sensible new motoring habits. And indeed I would, were driving not (a) expensive, (b) polluting, (c) unconducive to the little bit of exercise I could otherwise get between stints of sedentary work, (d) potentially lethal, (e) incompatible with the reading I do on public transport, and (f) detrimental to the rambling-down-alleys-sampling-stray-bits-of-edible-botany lifestyle.

The fact is, I shouldn't own a car. I should be sharing one with a dozen other drivers: once a fortnight I should have it to buy sacks of chookfood or take Harriet and Bea Cat to the vet or ferry the menagerie to Mum's place for the weekend. Organising a communal automobile arrangement (one where noone minds that I leave the boot festooned with bits of stray lucerne hay and mushroom compost) is one of my long term ambitions. In the meantime, I am driving the car every day for a week. Blah.

The one thing that makes me feel better about driving is acquiring some ridiculously large quantity of biomass while I have the wheels to carry it with: 17 sacks of horse poo, a couple of bales of straw, 50kg of exotic barley for the brewmeister. So as I was taking the car for its constitutional pootle yesterday, I was relieved to spy a man standing on St Georges Road just south of Bell St, surrounded by towering boxes of grapes.

We came home with a massive carton of these lovelies:

Grenache grapes, from Wildwood vineyard in Bulla. 

One of my longterm career ambitions has been grape-treading. Tragically, I couldn't be bothered sterilising the bathtub, so we resorted to our trusty fruit press (an absurdly spendy bit of equipment that we mostly use to crush the honey out of honeycomb, but which was also integral to Operation Cider Y2K13, Operation Feijoa Wine Y2K13, and Operation Pear Juice, and which I am pleased to use as often as possible so as to reduce the cost per use ratio from heinous to ... less heinous).

The result was many, many litres of grenache juice, which is currently sitting in a carboy with a dash of sodium metabisulphite to kill any rogue bacteria. The hydrometer reading (a measurement of sugar content) tells us that we're heading dangerously into dessert wine territory with this stuff. I'll let you know in a year.

Meanwhile, it turns out that pressing grapes results not only in grape juice, but pressed grapes. The chooks were rapturous for about five minutes and now never want to see a grape again.

Here's hoping the citizens of the compost bin have a longer grape tolerance.

DIY micro fermenting vessel

Perhaps you've heard of micro-breweries? Here in the Lalorium, we've scaled down micro-brewing to nano-brewing (for which we have a selection of 25L carboys), pico-brewing (in an array of 5L demijohns), and now femto-brewing, for experimental-to-the-point-of-possibly-undrinkable ferments, like the liquorice and the rose-hip and gentian porters below.

The brewing supplies stores round these parts, many and excellent though they are, don't seem to stock a vessel suitable for the hemi-demi-semi brew. For three months, therefore, Tim has been begging everyone he knows to take up bulk fruit-juice consumption and to sling us the empties. As for the airlocks, they're single use only.

Earth Garden

A few years ago I stole borrowed my ma's and pa's Earth Garden books. The First Earth Garden Book (1975) is full of right-on peops with back-to-the-land hair, relaying how to knit houses out of cucurbit tendrils and make sourdough out of potatoes and sip elderflower bubbly while half-naked in the moonlight. It's totally up my alley. Yes, I can leach the tannins from acorns and grind them into a serviceable ... erm ... "flour" and mold them into a sorta biscuit shape and eat them with very few clothes on!* Yes, I can clabber my own raw, unhomogenised breastmilk and go totally DIY camembert!** And oh yes, stinging nettle gnocci, you're the lunch for me.***

It wasn't long after I devoured the parental Earth Garden books, that I discovered a very much up-to-date Earth Garden magazine in my local newsagenterie and an Earth Garden presence on ye olde Pfaczbuch. As an enthusiast for all things trellised, foraged, grown, tended, transformed from SPC fruit tins, and wombat-themed, I was hooked.

So you can just possibly imagine my joy when the latest Earth Garden No. 167 arrived in the post today ...

... and among the fantabulous articles on foraging for chickweed and making rocket stoves out of junk and eating gingko leaves and the surprisingly complex business of harvesting autumn veg, and brewing your own perfume, and chocolate beetroot cake recipes, and tiny houses, and fowl-wrangling, was Tim's and my disquisition on vintnering feijoas.

Feijoas, although green, torpedoid and delicious, have a habit of rotting all too soon after falling from the tree. Last year, with several kilos to despatch before they self-composted, we made 10 litres of feijoa wine, which turned out, in my opinion (but not in the opinion of my mother, my friend Eleanor, my mother-out-law, or my friend Lucy), quite delicious. At any rate, it hits you with that fruity feijoa-y fragrance, and then, when you drink it, turns out to be kind of dry and (this is the bit that amazed me, because who would have thought you could just chuck fruit juice and tea leaves and yeast in a tub and leave it to transmogrify) it tastes genuinely winey.

So we wrote about it. The science of feijoa fermentation must be shared, dagnabbit. And our account was published, just in time for feijoa season, if this little guy in the front garden is any guide ...

* an actual 1970s Earth Garden recommendation, which I actually tried. Disappointing. But good to know that, with enough oak trees, I wouldn't lack for calories after an apocalypse.
** not an actual 1970s Earth Garden recommendation
*** this wasn't recommended in a 1970s Earth Garden publication either, but I read about it somewhere, and I would totally do this. Nettles are the schizzle.

Plumtious beauties

We have, here in Lalor, what's known as Enough Plums. Plumtasm '14 started a couple of weeks ago in Heidelberg, where my friend Kim's plum tree was pendulous and pregnant with 55kg of blood plums. Kim and I have been negotiating plum-based transactions for three years now. She gives me twenty kilos of plums, and cooks me dinner, and shows me how her carrots have gone to seed, and permits me the slightly indecorous but wholesome pleasure of being smooched by her slobbery hound, and in return I relieve her of the gluttiest third of her plum glut. How nice of me.

She's a bit of a special tree, this plum of Kim's. The fruit are deeply red fleshed, with a purple nap of bloom on their crimson skins.

I bottled 17 serious jars of these ladies, with a splodge of honey and a cinnamon quill per jar, and put the rest in the freezer. Then I and my cohabitator went for a walk along the Venetian canal of the northern suburbs – Henderson's Drain Trail – and found a blood plum groaning with hundreds of fruit. Groaning right over the back of someone's fence, in fact. Plums were rotting on the ground and That Will Not Do (oh no sirree), so we salvaged a bag of them. Just what we needed, three kilos of iddly little plums, bigger than cherry plums but smaller than Kim's, on the eve of the heatwave.

And so this ...

Plumjam. Plumjum. Having jarred a year's supply of plamjam, I have this to say: if following Eugenia Bone's plum jam recipe in her otherwise excellent book about jam and stuff, do not believe her when she recommends chucking your un-de-pipped plums into the pot, trusting the pips to rise to the surface so that you can "fish them out with a slotted spoon". Those babies rise all right, but they're the colour of plum jam and nigh impossible to spot. I fished and I fished, with a slotted spoon no less, and each time I thought I'd fished enough, and prodded at the bubbling jam just to be sure, the slotted spoon would collide with another plum stone. There may well be plum stones lurking in the jars to this day. Someone could break a tooth, I tell you.

We still had a freezer full of Kim's plums, which Sidekick Tim, as is his wont, decided to commandeer for the purposes of plum melomel. Melomel, a mead containing fruit, is an excellent solution to both a plum glut and a honey glut. Tim juiced the plums (easy after they've been frozen because the freezing and thawing breaks down the cells) and chucked the plum juice with honey and a hunk of ginger into a 5L demijohn. Then wine yeast and organic raisins (Tim's preferred low-tech yeast nutrient).

The plum melomel is fermenting like a herd of wildebeests, who, as you know, are renowned for their fermentability. Srsly. There's a lot of carbo-alco-dioxide action going on in this here vessel.

Photo suspiciously fuzzy. Almost as if I'd had a wee tipple or seven.

There, you might suppose, our antics with plums had ended, but it turns out we have a plum tree in the backyard. I should know this, because I planted her myself in 2011. She's a Japanese plum, the 'Luisa' cultivar, which means a yellowish skin with a red blush, and sweet super-juicy yellow flesh.

My finger gives you some idea of how enormous these fruit are. Eating a Luisa is like eating two plums, or three. They've been looking more like mangos than plums (all the more so because they're more ovoid than spherical). Last Summer, we had hundreds and hundreds of blossom set, but the little plumlets grew to a centimetre or so and dropped off. Probly the drought, and my stinginess with water. This Summer is the first time we've had plums come to fruition, and oh my there are a lot of them.

Solution:

Harbingers of doom and the sauering of kraut

Mum turned 75 last week (happy birthday, Mum!).  In Sydney, in January 1939, on the fourth day of Mum's ex-utero career, the temperature reached 113.6ºF. Forty-five point something, in the new money.

Mum tells a story about hospitals requisitioning wherever was cool, which meant new babies and their mothers being installed in butchers' cool-rooms, beside the hanging carcasses, I guess. 

Adelaide is going to out-heatwave 1939 this week, and Melbourne's not very far behind. We're into Day 2 of what will be a five day stink-a-thon. It was still 37ºC at 2am last night, a special kind of apocalyptic. I woke up just after midnight when a hot westerly pelted a window shut, shattering the glass, and I spent the next three hours awake in the bristling heat, watching the thermometer and worrying about the dry lightning that was falling all around. Tomorrow's set to reach 44ºC, Friday 41ºC. The glazier can't fix the window because it's too hot to work and too hot for putty to set. I think doomish thoughts when it's like this. Our chooks are panting, holding their wings away from their bodies, despite icy water and frozen corn. We've done what we can for our more sensitive plants, but they still shrivel and look sad. The 7000L water tank is almost empty, only half way through Summer. There's a 4000L back-up tank, but it doesn't have a pump, so it's pesky to use.

So. Anyway. Enough with the global warming already. I would be very happy for 1939's records to remain unbroken. I would like this kind of weather to be rare and surprising. I would really like not to find myself thinking about the moral pickle of air conditioning: on the one hand, there are people whose lives have probably been spared today because of air conditioning; on the other, air conditioning units are just pumping inside's hot air outside, where the birds and insects and trees get an extra dose of shrivelling heat; to say nothing of the carbon dioxide that's diffused into the atmosphere in order to power the majority of Australia's air conditioning units, which carbon dioxide, as you know, is contributing to the hot air that needs conditioning. (This is not a very productive line of complaint, I realise, but it's too hot for productive lines of complaint. I just want to complain unproductively, and/or for a stonking southerly wind to saunter up from Antarctica, bearing buckets of rain.)

In happier news, Sunday was lovely. Exemplary Summer weather. Top of 25º, cool breezes. This chap was harvesting plums from next door's tree:

Wise bird. Knows which side his plum is buttered on. Knows to eat fruit before it stews on the tree. From this fine feathered citizen of the air I augured that it was time to haul some food in from the garden.

The red cabbage that's been growing since August or so, some leaves from the seven bagillionth generation of silverbeet in the front yard, beetroots of love, and some very dried out coriander.

There's been some serious fermentation afoot in the Lalorium (yo, hipsters), in the spirit of which I chopped some of this veg up into teeny bits and set about sauering my kraut ...

This home-grown cabbage and beetroot palooza is now burbling away under its own juice in a giant jar, wee little lactobacilli acidifying the krauty ecosystem and producing a rather gruesome froth atop the surface. Yes, indeed. Foaming tankard of cabbage. Everybody's fave.

The dried out coriander yielded these seeds, plus some high-end coriander-flavoured straw:

One day, when it's less beastly hot, I might cook again. When that day comes, I will activate Operation Coriander Seed. Oh yes I will.

Hold me.