The Organic Home Garden

The organic home gardener is home after a nice break down south of the state.

Had lot’s of great food, most of it from my sisters garden. I have a few photos to share from the visit and these will show you some amazing results from her sunflower bed!
The other great opportunity was to eat lots of fresh apricots, peaches (white and orange flesh) and some plums (only managed to get one since they are a little later ripening).

Jon is around 6 foot so you can see how monstrous these flowers are!

Steve and Jon picking more ripe fruit.
The netting is to keep out the parrots and the odd green eye.

We are still eating the peaches here at home as well as some cherries I picked up at Mt Barker on the way back from the Albany holiday.

In the Organic Garden This Week

When I got home the garden was looking pretty good! The shade cloth covers had worked a treat and the plants were all very healthy and in fact very much bigger than before I left. The plants are thriving despite the many days over 35 degrees Celsius this month.

The corn is huge and the cobs are thickening up nicely and I check them every day just in case any are ready to eat!

There are tomatoes on the bushes now and so we can expect to start eating them next week. I thinned out the carrots and had a little feed – I cannot believe how well they are growing! The capsicums are doing well and the egg plants are very productive and I will soon be picking them daily.

Today I planted some more cucumber and lettuce which should be ready just as the other plants start to deteriorate.

Drive In Food Bars for Magpies

Lastly today I wish to share a video I took one day when we were admiring the sights from a look out in Albany. A family of Magpies was sitting on a rail in the car park and quite calmly inspected each car as it arrived and helped themselves to the bugs caught in the grilles of the cars.
What we most amazed by was that they al;ways walked to the front of the car each time – never the back of the car!

Anyway have a great week and happy new year!

The Organic Gardener

The organic garden is roaring along this week due to the unusual warm weather. I will be picking English spinach tomorrow, spring onions, carrots, silverbeet and maybe some beans!

To give you an idea of the strangeness of the weather, here is a large strawberry I picked this week – there are several more to pick this weekend too!

P.S. the Pinkabelle apples are now very pink – I’ll let you know how they taste.

It was such a lovely morning here in Perth. The sun was shining the air was cool with a strong breeze and blue skies above. It’s Xmas day and I cannot think of much better things to do than go out in the garden and grab lunch! We are off today to the relatives for lunch and so we are obviously bringing the salads. We have been blessed with some marvellous weather and as a result the garden is the best it has been for years! So here is the roll call of veges this week!

Tomatos by the bucket load! Red, black and yellow!

Xmas week harvest

Eggplant and Zuchinni!

Zuchinni

Carrots, cucumber and lettuce!

Baby Carrots

Lebanese Cucumber

Butter Sweet Lettuce

Onions, spring onions and leek – I harvested all the onions this week and most of the garlic and they are just drying out a little before we store them for the summer!

Brown Onions

The onions are so sweet that I have been eating the little ones raw! Well they are too small for cooking so I eat them as a salad! My son-in-law Jon has been eating fried onions with Russian black tomatos this week and loves them.

PLANTINGS THIS WEEK!

I have half of the leeks left for harvest this month so I have started planting the next lot and also some white onions, cucumber and tomato for late summer salads! We also like to make tomato chutneys with the green tomatos on the last of the bushes in early autumn.

Leeks

Tomato

Oh yeah here is the first of the Capsicums!

Capsicum

BRAG BRAG BRAG!

I hate to do this but the tomatoes on the Mortgage Lifter are already gigantic so get an eye full of these two – they are as big as my fist already and there are 5 more on the bush as well!

Mortgage Lifter

2 weeks later - Ripe

PRESERVING EXCESS CROPS

As you have seen the production can sometimes be way over what you can eat. So what do you do?
Well I give away a lot to family and friends so that is the usual solution. However, I like to have some vege and fruit for those cold winter days as well. So we have a number of options – preserving in chutneys, freezing and drying.

We are actually still eating green tomato relish from last year on our salads – even after giving so many bottles away as gifts! This year I am trying to dry some veges and the first effort are some tomatos – red and green!

Preserving Fruit

We made fig leather last year and I ate the last of that recently. The difficulty is sometimes the variety of fruit is not suitable for drying – some have more water in them than others and this affects drying. Anyway I will continue to experiment and will eventually get it right!

Have a lovely Xmas season and enjoy!