The Lalor Summer-School for Vegetables, Mid-Term Report

I seem to recall that when I last blogulated, several decades ago, I hinted at certain misdemeanours on the part of Summer: to wit, excessive heat. If I didn't hint at excessive heat, then I was certainly thinking about it, because at the time the edges of the leaves were still crisped from the previous heatwave. The edges of me were still crisped from the previous heatwave. This is despite the fact that I had spent most of the heatwave either chipping away with a spoon at 2 litres of frozen peach pulp or lying on the floor, pretending to do work-related reading, and periodically groaning.

I'm very pleased to report, however, that Summer has pulled up its socks and been remarkably nice ever since. February may be prove me wrong, but so far this has been the best Summer since 2010-11. We've had a whole fortnight of maximum temperatures in the low 20s and southerly breezes most days and a blanket or two on the bed and snuggly cats and a half-full watertank and yes I do go on about the weather, but it's because heatwaves turn the Harlotian mind to thoughts of imminent apocalypse, and, in the interests of balance, I have to be proportionately relieved by non-heatwaves.

It's been good, gentle weather for keeping veg alive, dry enough that they haven't all keeled over with fungal infections, warm enough that things are ripening in their own good time. 

We've been doing pretty well on the tomato front. The long red fellows are Amish Pastes. The big red in the bottom right-hand corner is a tomato of unknown parentage that turned up one day, the furry things up the back are not tomatoes (hello, interloping peaches), and the little orange guys are from a free packet of Diggers' Club Artisan Tomato™seeds.

I was a bit suspicious of Artisan Tomatoes™. I mean, calling something "Artisan" just isn't very artisanal. Artisanal tomatoes should have names like Wapsipinicon Peach, Jaune Flamme, Schimmeig Weltschmersch, Big Red Rockeater, or Alpaca's Delight - or Amish Paste, for that matter.

But I'm prepared to overlook the flaw in their nomenclature, because they're quite lovely. And prolific. In future I'll have to try to repress the urge to grow magnificent boomba tomatoes and instead stick with the cherries. They ripen so much more quickly and they're so much more bounteous and easy.

As for their fellow nightshades, I've been enjoying my inaugural tomatillo crop. I bought these Green Harvest seeds, never having tasted a tomatillo, and I'm very pleased to find that they're worth bothering with.

The fruit mature inside these lantern-shade pericarps, like Cape gooseberries do.

And then, it seems, they're ripe when the pericarp splits. The fruit are sweet and strangely cheesy-tasting. Word on the street is that they're the basis for Mexican salsa verde (they're green when ripe, hence the verde). Henceforth I will be looking down smugly upon mere tomato-based salsas.

Speaking of smug, and more nightshade action, I seem to have cracked the secret to getting eggplants and capsicums from seed-to-fruit in a single season. Or I've had a lucky fluke anyway. I brought on these seeds in my heated propagation tray inside, and planted them out in late October into a bed covered with about 20cm deep of my artisanal compost, which shall henceforth be known as Artisan Compost™. Apart from the minor setback caused by my Artisan Compost™ spawning a minor forest of volunteer potatoes and mallow (thank you, cold-composting methods), which it took me several weeks to realise I had to sacrifice to the greater solanum, things are going Well.

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Eggplants!

Camouflaged green capsicum! Sexy milk bottles & plastic flowerpots were deployed as earwig repulsing devices when the seedlings were planted out.

I've been getting a bit of bean action from these Dwarf Violet Queens, but the plants are disappointingly floppy. I may have over-manured the soil they're in (not with my own personal manure in this case, some of you may be pleased to read); whether it's that or that they're just congenitally lazy, I don't think I'll bother with them next year.

 Carrots and parsnips and leeks are pottering along in the excellent Greensmart wicking pots on the front driveway:

The disgustingly bitter radicchio which I didn't realise (a) would need blanching and (b) would taste like some grueling Baltic herbal remedy has gone to flower:

and in the spirit of growing my own root-based coffee substitute,  I am considering yanking it up and doing unto the radicchio (aka chicory) what hath been done unto its friends the dandelions.

Corn, corning away:

 Kale, kaling:

Leek, flowering:

Pumpkin, disappearing over the neighbours' fence, which is probably where its fruit will end up:

 NB: nibbled leaves. A personal contribution from Agatha the Pumpkin-Leaf Improver and Professional Chook.

Jaune et Verte squash, squashing:

That's not quite all. There's a potato patch doing its underground thang (I hope), two sweet-potato plants, one sending vines out on a serious rampage and the other minding its own business, the Egyptian walking onions beginning the formation of their bulbils, sorrel looking green and joyous, silverbeet going frantically to seed, Jerusalem artichokes ensuring flatulence for 2015, and Chinese water celery beginning its inaugural march across the pond into water chestnut territory.

And now, c'est tout. B+.

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.

A month

Good Dog, a whole month seems to have slipped by with nary an official despatch to HQ. It's been a month, this month.

1. We lost two dear hens. The first to go was Pamela, the sweet housechook who came into our lives earlier this year. She disappeared one early morning from the front garden, having spent the night safely tucked up on her perch in the laundry. We knocked on neighbours' doors, and phoned the local pound and the vets, searched for feathers, kept hoping that she'd turn up. Pamela was our survivor. She'd lived in the battery cage, survived (we think) a culling, got brought to our frontdoor by a neighbour who thought the best way to carry her was upsidedown, with his hand round her legs. Her first week at our place she barely left the patch of newspaper in our living room where we'd stationed her food and water, but within the month, she'd perfected her digging skills by turned our metre high frontyard compost hill into a minor valley. She'd sit next to Tim while he typed at his desk. She laid an egg, in the soft centre of an armchair. She liked to perch on an arm and fall asleep with her body pressed against a human torso. So, you can imagine, we've been missing her and furious with ourselves for not keeping her safe.

Pamela, learning the art of chook 

 Pamela in a sunpuddle on local newspaper

Pamela being lovely 

Pamela laying an egg on Harriet the Cat's blanket

A few days later, we called the remaining flock out to the green-patch behind our back fence for some supervised grazing. The green-patch behind our back fence is every chicken's favourite place, and when we open the back gate and call, everyone leaps from wherever she happens to be and gallops to the gate. And so it was, only halfway through her sprint across the backyard, Griselda fell over dead. Just like that. Gris was one of our first two chooks, sister to Daisy, and only three and a half years old. We didn't have the stomach for an autopsy, so have buried her and her mysterious cause-of-death in the front yard, plonking a just arrived barerooted peche de vigne on top of her.

 Daisy and Griselda ascending the potato patch protector in hopes of sneaking into the raised veg bed of temptation.

 Griselda, supermodel.

Griselda, in younger days, giving the poorly citrus an encouraging word. 

Griselda, upstaging the pea teepee.

2. And then I found out I was pregnant, only to find out a week later that I wasn't pregnant anymore. So that was a thing. In the intervening week, I had alerted half the town, so I had to unalert everyone (and so that's why people wait a month or three before disclosing up-the-duffitude ... not that I have learnt the error of my ways, being a serial overdiscloser on matters uterine). I was leaking half a ton of blood when I got home to a letter from the IVF people congratulating us on our pregnancy and advising the delivery date: 7th April, 2015 (W. Wordsworth's birthday, give or take a couple of centuries). This was splendid timing from the IVF people, who I have to say are pretty weird, what with their muzak-accompanied embryo transfers and their hey-here's-a-photo-of-your-blastocyst-to-help-you-get-even-more-emotionally-invested-in-this-highly-likely-to-fail-procedure.

3. Tim's ma visited from Newcastle. Somehow her presence caused us to be driving up the damp ferny foresty side of the lovely Mount Donna Buang. Halfway up, we slurped 40 litres of Donna Buang spring water into our jerry cans. Locals allege this water has travelled over a thousand years and many thousands of kilometres from central Australia. Hard to say whether this is so or not, but this water tastes sweet and clean and (I let myself imagine) sort of sacred, and beats our normal options: i.e., (a) scungy bird-poo-ridden roof-water stored in our watertank and not entirely recommended for human consumption and (b) chlorinated eau de tap, the anti-bacterial properties of which are not excellent for some of our projects, like seed soaking and sourdough propagating. (Oh, and, snow! It was snowing! There was snow!)

Mount Donna Buang in her least photogenic moment of all time, with dag in fluoro jacket, muddy road snow and 4WD hatchbacks.

4. Yesterday we set out along the outer northern suburbs' most poetically named gutter, Henderson's Drainage Trail, in search of tasty weeds for a tasty weed pie. It turns out that if you get carried away walking up Henderson's Drainage Trail, you end up at Henderson's Lakes, walking along a contrived water-front promenade thingo in South Morang, where your presence will only serve to taunt moor-hens and wood-ducks and swans with the false promise of tasty bread-crumby stuff you don't happen to have with you. If you veer off to the West, though, you find yourself in Wuthering Heights. There's this brisk, windswept hill that carries you up to a peak from which you can look down on all of Melbun. On the way down the other side, we interrupted three reddish roos, who hopped down to a fence line and then - bound - over the fence (the biggest one, anyway, cleared the fence like is was no higher than a toothpick, though the littlest sniffed along it looking for a way through rather than over). Further along I spied three seconds of fox, making a dash across the path and into a copse of gum trees. We ambled through paddocks, possibly illegally, until we got to Darebin Creek, and made our way home - with a bagful of plantain leaves, nettles, cardoon stalks, wild brassicas, chickweed and mallow for our pie.

Henderson's Drainage Trail, with Free-range Shopping Trolley

5. The almonds started blossoming. Springy!

Swallow Impersonators and almond blossom. 

Ruminations on the weather, and what can be done with a $15 box of Roma tomatoes.

It rained last night. Such a blessing after the droughty heaty hotty dry of the last few weeks (eight days over 40ºC here in Melbers; fires to the north, the west, the north-east and the south-east). 

After no rain, no rain, no rain, and watching people's lawns turn to dry carbon and brave CFA friends heave up lungsful of smoke, the rain last night was blissful. (Earlier in the day, I saw photos of people in Adelaide dealing with their most-rain-in-a-day since the 1960s, and despite water lapping dangerously at doorsteps and submerging streets, everyone was grinning madly, in the manner of people who haven't seen water fall from the sky for half a year. Rain!) We had 11mm in the rain gauge this morning, which means about 1500 litres into the watertank. I lay in bed watching the mizzle patting the windows. Later, we headed down to Lalor shops in the gentle damp, and celebrated the cool (and the fact that it would not be downright horrible to run the stove) by buying a $15 box of sauce tomatoes, which would necessitate quite a bit of stove-running. (Actually, we bought three $15 boxes, because apparently we do not have jobs and can spend the rest of our days preparing for the global home-preserved tomato shortage.)

They're not the best tomatoes ever. The heirloom veg obsessives are right, homegrown heirloom tomatoes beat industrial ag tomatoes for sheer tomatoiness tenfold. On the other hand, my attempts at growing tomatoes this year have been Dismal with a capital D. It was too cold, then it was too dry, and somewhere in the middle it was too rampaging-chickens-in-the-tomato-bedsy. On the other other hand, these romas ain't so bad.

You can make a lot of tasty food with one $15 box of tomatoes. I made tomato bread:

(Which is delicious, I'll have you know, although it seems that the only people in the house interested in eating it are me and Esme. (Wholemeal spelt, tomatoes, salt, yeast and heat, in case you were wondering.))

And we preserved ten x 1200mL jars of toms (then more, when we moved onto the second box). I love the idea of making passata, except for the bit where you have to spend whole days eviscerating tomatoes - hence my practising of the slackers' alternative, viz., whole skinned tomatoes shoved in a jar, with a slurp of red wine vinegar to stave off the botulinum toxin, and a sprig of rosemary to stave off the rosemary plant getting too big, and then the whole lot left in the Fowler's Vacola for an hour and a half to think about what it's done.

With the dregs of our $15 box, we made enough of this soup to feed a small family of seventeen or so.

Note the basil. Homegrown from seed and as organic and righteous as ever basil was. I think this makes up for the tomatoes from a polystyrene box. 

The weather's looking pretty nice for the next week. Mostly low 20s, the occasional shower portended by the Bureau of Meteorology. I'm letting myself think the worst of Summer is over. Hooray!

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.