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+.

From the KierkeGaarden

Long skinny eggplants from an eggplant that overwintered in a pot against the house (as opposed to eggplants I tried to grow from seed sowed in August), basil fino verde, tomatoes-of-survival, Shirley's ovum, Golden Queen peaches, Tuscan kale (the least cabbage moth-molested of our Summer brassicas), and the pumpkin de resistance, Golden Nugget (first of many).

Nashi pears and rhubarb. Dessert material.

The head of John the Baptist. 100% organic.

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!