Homegrown content

I was cooking a basic little meal for the two of us last night and, as usual, I took a moment to think about the homegrown content in that meal. I do this almost every time I cook, as there's always something from the garden in most evening meals. Here's what was homegrown last night.

It's no fantasmagoria of self-sufficiency, it was just a typical night. The potato salad (shop-bought spuds) included homegrown radish and green onions (shallots), and the tomato salad was homegrown cherry tomatoes plus homegrown basil. The fish that I grilled came from the fish shop.

I can't remember how many times people have asked me if I grow all the crops I eat at home. The answer is always "no, I'd need an acre to grow all our own food, and it would be a full-time job to keep up the supply." 

Instead, all I like to do is grow enough edibles in my garden to have some homegrown content in most meals I prepare. Herbs often fit that bill, but it is nice when vegies get to be the star turn. 

And that's what most backyard food gardens are all about. A bit of homegrown content, the occasional star turn, rather than the self-sufficient organic farmer fantasy.

Festive snacks

Last night at a pre-Christmas gathering with friends, almost all my favourite snack temptations were on offer: potato chips, a board full of cheeses plus a selection of crackers; dips and flatbreads… and I tucked into all of them. But there's another festive snack that I'm enjoying yet again around Christmas time, and it's home-grown cherry tomatoes.

Whenever I water the garden in the
mornings I snack on one or two of
these little beauties. When you bite down
on the firmish skin of each little red
globe they explode in your mouth with
one of the most intensely tomatoey
flavours you can find. Delicious.

I have just two pots of these guys
growing here; that's enough to provide
a glut for two people when they get
into serious summertime production.

I grow them from seed sown
in September or October
(whenever I get my act together).
I find it's getting harder to find
dwarf tomato plants either in
seed or seedling form. Most
grow too big for my little garden.
These Yates seeds are the only
ones I can easily find, and while
they aren't heirloom toms, I
don't really care. They've done
 a great job for me over the years.

Tonight I'm going to harvest a punnet's worth of our cherry toms, chop them in half and toss them with some already cooked, still warm asparagus to make a warm red and green salad. Dressed with a splash of olive oil and Vino Cotto (think 'balsamic', but it's not; Vino Cotto is made from grape must and red wine vinegar, and is a pink colour and has a light, sweet flavour all its own that's not really anything like dark and sweet balsamic vinegar). Grilled salmon steaks go with the warm salad, but I know it's the cherry toms that will probably be the star of tonight's quick little meal.

Patient progress

One of my favourite gardening blog titles is 'Patient Gardener', as that is what I would like to be: a patient gardener. Shame about that, can't have everything I guess. 

However, wandering around my garden this warm and sunny spring morning I felt such a sense of progress here, there and everywhere, despite much effort on my part. It was then I realised that I must have been experiencing an unfamiliar bout of patience. So that's what patience feels like... it's a sense of knowing calm, a preparedness to wait, without interfering.

Pleased with the spring progress all around me, I popped inside, grabbed my little pocket camera and found all these little patient virtues enjoying the spring sunshine every bit as much as I was.

Mr or Ms butterfly posed for many seconds atop a lettuce leaf
while I fumbled excitedly for the right camera settings. Ta.

I could have sworn I harvested a big bunch of
this perpetual spinach plant for our dinner last
Wednesday, but now it looks just as big as ever.

The brown liquid splodge on this collard green leaf is this
morning's organic liquid feed. I have a few collard greens
plants steadily growing from the seed sown in early September.
The seeds came with my order of my friend Awia Markey's
'Soulicious' eBook cookery book, so I might as well give it
another plug while I'm at it. Check it out here.

I had to get out the tall step-ladder to take this shot of the first
passionfruit flower bud finally making an appearance. The
vine itself is a huge, wall-covering thing, but it's all greenery
and no flowers or fruit. Hopefully, if I'm patient and leave it
alone, it will produce many flowers and many fruit and we can
all live happily, deliciously, ever after.

I'm not sure why my Thai makrut lime looked
so ordinary all through winter, as it wasn't a
cold winter at all – quite the opposite in fact.
Regular feeds and cutting off the ugly bits has
suddenly borne flowers and fruit this spring.

Baby Turkish Brown figs have appeared on schedule.  

So too the next crop of strawberries from the
self-sprouted patch which came up out of the
compost. Such a healthy plant, these, easily
the most vigorous strawbs I've ever seen here.

This year I'm limiting tomato production to just a couple of
pots of cherry tomatoes, raised from seed. After a slow start
they're now 50% bigger than they were last weekend, or so
it seems.

Another "sown-from-seed" planting done last autumn, this is
the first love-in-a-mist (Nigella) flower to come out. Many more
should follow next week, so I'll post something about them once
the full range of colours makes an appearance.

As usual, the so-called Christmas bush gets its timing
completely out of whack, colouring up in October. 

The deciduous frangipanis must have been
leafless for just five or six weeks this year,
their shortest 'winter' ever.

Finally, as I was up on top of the step ladder
taking that passionfruit flower bud shot,
I had a view of the garden I rarely get, and
so here's the progress on my new fence
screen of four Gardenia magnifica plants.
What's that smell? Of course it's Dynamic
Lifter, that heady chicken manure perfume
that you detect. Look closely and you can see
the odd yellow leaf, a gardenia trademark
that often happens in winter and spring.
Chicken manure is the cure. Works every time.

Good cheer

Of all the silly things a usually sensible person could do, I updated our accounts on Saturday, and delving into inconvenient financial facts always has a slightly depressing effect, doesn't it? And so yesterday, Sunday, was a low point for me, a cheerless day in the garden where all I did was pull out weeds and cut back a rampant ground cover in the front garden that likes to accost pedestrians in the street.

Not the greatest weekend, but it did end well with the first good downpour of rain in ages, and then this morning, Monday, wandering out into the garden had an amazingly uplifting effect on me. Everywhere I looked I saw positive signs, pretty colours, sweet scents – it was full of good cheer. 

And so, dear readers, I present a simple posting designed partly to cheer myself up but also to celebrate the benefits of slowing down and taking stock not only of the pennies in the jar but also the beautiful, natural riches around you.

This is what started it all off this morning. While gathering yet
another colander full of cherry tomatoes, the air was wafting along
on sweet tropical frangipani scents. I stood up, looked at their
lovely simplicity, inhaled another breath and my mood changed.

 

For the record, this is my favourite typo, cheery tomatoes.

Just as I stepped away from cheery frangipani
land I smiled at a conversation I had with an
expert gardener about how impossible it is to
grow Acacia cognata in Sydney. 

The rain brings out the scents and the colours;
this pot of mint was spicy with its tangy scent.

The mint is in flower now, a happy plant in semi-shade provided
it's given outrageous amounts of water and fertiliser.

Next door to the mint, the French tarragon is a contented low
forest of foliage. Medium water, slow-release fertiliser is all
it needs, plus one hell of a cutback in early spring.

My first go at growing Florence fennel is doing
OK. I have a whole packet of seeds here, but
only planted a few in late spring, as I had
missed the boat for the earlier spring sowing
it prefers. This autumn, I'm sowing lots more.

The strawberries just keep on coming. We started
harvesting breakfast bowls full of these back in
early October and they aren't close to finishing
yet. And to think I didn't even plant anything
there! They came up out of the compost, just
like monsters come up out of black lagoons.

And while I'm counting my blessings and
spreading the good cheer, let me recommend
radishes to you. These are French Breakfast
long cylindrical radishes, and I sowed the
seeds for these on Thursday. I'll probably
be eating some of these by early February.
And I've learned to like their flavour, too.
Super-finely sliced, not too much either, added
to a green garden salad, they are pure zing.

The Thai makrut lime fruit is ready for grating
into dressings, salads and sauces, but the only
hard thing is removing them from the tree,
simply because they look so good there, all
knobbly, deep green and just a bit weird.

There's a party going on in the succulent patch.

The Tiger Grass which is meant to become a
tropical look screen to hide the boring metal
fence is finally growing fast, now that the
heat of summer is here. That's what it loves,
apparently, heat and water, just as if it was
growing in the jungles of Thailand. One of
these days a tiger will jump out of that foliage!

If you're still with me after this marathon 'cheer up' to myself, thanks. There really is nothing quite like a spin around the garden on a cool morning after overnight rain. Quite magical, its effect.

Sizzling!

Sydney seems to get one or two of these outrageously hot days every summer. It all depends on the wind direction. When the winds come from the north-west, where the deserts of the inland are, then Sydney cooks. And today we cooked while also getting an unpleasant taste of what is likely to happen a lot more often in the future.

Today, at our place, it reached 41.1°C, but in
the official weather station at nearby Sydney
Airport it reached, ugh, 42.2°C. That high of
41.1 at our place is 106°F on the other scale.

First thing this morning I gave everything a very
good drink indeed, then I dusted off my collection
of shadecloth sheets and picked out the plants
needing special care. Around lunchtime, when the
temps were racing up from 37 to 38 then 39 in the
space of just 5 minutes, I first draped the very
healthy and productive strawberry patch with a
protective layer of cool, pale green shade.

Though, for the record, I have never actually stepped into a sauna,
(being one who hates the heat), I feel obliged to pull out my
extreme heat cliche generator and testify that stepping outside
was, indeed, just like stepping into a sauna. My actual sense was
that it vividly reminded me of the time I left the cool comfort of a
Qantas plane and stepped out into the muggy delirium of Bangkok
Airport one hot day many years ago. Felt faint for a moment, I did.
Anyway, braving the heat, I then covered up the ripening crops
of cherry tomatoes and vulnerable adolescent eggplant plants.

Right now we're bringing a whole kitchen
strainer full of ripe cherry tomatoes in every
morning, and with me foolishly planting
all five plants I raised from seed (couldn't bear
to cast any tomato babies adrift) I now have
far too many plants, and way too many tomatoes!
No worries though, Pam loves them as much as
I do. I think good cherry tomatoes have the
best tomato flavour of all. I love the zingy explosion
of pure tomato 'hit' you get when the firm skin
gives way and bursts inside your mouth. Yum.
Well worth saving on a scorcher, that's for sure.

The last piece of shadecloth was reserved for the water pond,
and its beautiful little occupant, Paul the goldfish. Last year
when it sizzled like this in January, I was a bit slow to add the
shadecloth on a similarly hot day, and Paul's big pot was
frighteningly warm to the touch and the water was disturbingly
on the wrong side of lukewarm. Despite this my little golden mate
was doing fine, seemingly unbothered by slow braising. This time
his bowl is in a cooler, shadier spot, with shadecloth on top.
Paul probably thinks there's an extended eclipse going on, looking
up into the gloom above from his cool, dark and shady little pond.

So here's hoping all my fellow Aussie gardening friends are surviving this unpleasant day when survival is all that's on the agenda. Here's to cooler days ahead.

Surviving a scorcher

There's such a huge difference between the weather merely being hot and life-threateningly scorching. Everyone here in Sydney experienced the scorched side of far-too-hot last Sunday. Here in Marrickville, it got up to 40°C, or 104°F in the old money, and I'm close to the coast, so it was a lot hotter than that in the suburbs further inland. It was hard to cope with. Walk outside for a few minutes and you started to wilt, just like the plants.

For what it's worth, proof. Of course we knew it was coming, so I was out early in the garden protecting what I thought were the vulnerable ones.

Most vulnerable, the goldfish! A hastily erected shadecloth tent.

Unconcerned as ever, greedy as ever for a sprinkle of food, the comets kept on circulating all day.

My supposedly 'cool climate' tomatoes must have thought they'd been transferred to Namibia, and so they got their own little shadecloth tent.

These are the chubby little 'Beaver Lodge Slicers' under that tent, Canadian tomatoes who had been enjoying a holiday in Australia, suddenly regretting their tour Down Under. They came through it all OK.

Across the path, this hastily erected structure, which I dubbed the 'Sarah Palin Room', houses my other cool-climate tomatoes, the 'Alaska' variety. Marvellous use of orchid stakes and bulldog paper clips from the home office under pressure, I must say!

Underneath the shadecloth shroud, the Alaskans were undoubtedly muttering recriminations to themselves about who booked the passage to Australia, but they survived.

Elsewhere in the Scorcho-Dome, the cumquat tree received special treatment, mainly because a good friend Michelle, whose cumquat plant I baby-sat for several months recently, had told me about the awful 40°C day a few years ago when her potted cumquat almost went to heaven. Panic-struck, I decided my baby citrus, right now in the bloom of youth, was going to avoid that fate, and it did. Breezed through it all in fact. Seemed like an over-reaction, actually. That's always the problem with people/critters/plants which survive due to good planning. Did they really need all that fuss in the first place? Next year, complacency!

Alas, there was one victim. Ringo. Not discovered on the day, or even the day after. But on the day after that, my usual greedy quartet of goldfish who appear like lightning at the first sprinkle of goldfish food – John, Paul, George and Ringo – well, they lacked the usual rhythm. The drums were silent. Ringo hadn't made it.

RIP Ringo, it was all my fault, somehow. Sorry old chum. It was a beastly day. I tried my best, but nature is like that. Beautiful, then vicious, then beautiful again.

Fingers crossed in tomato land

Is tomato-growing really gardening, or is just horticultural gambling? I really shouldn't feel so nervous about a mere backyard crop, but I've got into that terrible danger zone called "so far so good" with this year's tomato crop and there's a real risk of a successful crop this year. No wonder I have my fingers crossed.

This photo was taken about five minutes ago, and it's what I usually get with cherry tomatoes. Lots of them. And all sweet and delicious and terribly tempting to eat as I wander by. But they fruit so prolifically and happily no-one will ever notice that 25 have gone missing in the last two weeks. Cherry tomatoes never make me nervous. They're reliable and trouble-free. They're tomatoes that let me sleep easy.

Here's the full extent of Tomato Land here in my tiny plot. Four low, spreading 'Roma' egg-tomato plants, one tall-growing 'Grosse Lisse' salad tomato plant, and a couple of 'Tiny Tim' cherry tomato plants scrambling around for good measure.

There are lots of bunches of 'Roma' tomatoes looking like this right now. All suspiciously healthy, green and growing fast. Normally, the 'Roma' tomato is meant to be a tall, staking type, but the seed packet said this one is ideal for pots and doesn't need staking. The truth seems to be is that these plants sprawl sideways and still need staking with small stakes to keep their heavily laden lower branches off the ground.

The tall 'Grosse Lisse' salad tomato bush is rising steadily, developing numerous bunches of big, green gorgeous fruits along the way. The plastic 'thing' in the left of the photo is detailed below. It's my secret weapon.

It's a home-made fruit fly trap, using Australia's national breakfast spread, Vegemite. Just mix up a couple of spoonfuls of Vegemite in a jar, add enough water to fill the bottom few inches of the bottle, shake a lot to mix it all up, then pour it in. The yeast in the Vegemite attracts the fruit flies, and my nifty little entrance funnel on the left is where they check in forever.

As well as the Vegemite bottle, which has snared lots of victims already, I am using another organic fruit fly spray which I have blogged about a while back, in November. This organic spray needs a lot of re-application, especially after rain, so I thought I'd take out some extra insurance via the tried and proven Vegemite trick.

So, why am I nervous? Simple, disasters in previous summers of tomato growing have taught me that "so far so good" is pretty well par for the course in December. Every gourmet pest in Sydney fancies nibbling on a tomato, but fruit fly are the worst, as they lay their eggs into the fruit and their grubs hatch and start munching from the inside. And if summer gets too humid, the fungal diseases make themselves right at home.

Add up all these factors and you've got nothing but terrific fun! Home-grown tomatoes do taste magnificent, but with a little sprinkling of "I grew that" magic dust over the top, I suspect I'll enjoy that real home-grown flavour just a little bit more than my guests – if my crop makes it all the way to harvest in a month or two, that is.