January Gardening: Pt 2 Fruit and Veg

We are not yet yet at the season of mists, but the mellow fruitfulness seems to be happening.




A typical carrot, now that they seem to be going down, rather than forking about in the top couple of inches of soil. An onion - see below - and some purple beans (again below).






The next two piccies show baskets of produce with lots of onions, garlic and shallots plus a few radishes and yet more beans. I think I have commented before that we have two seasons: 'Winter' and 'when we don't go to the fruit shops'.















Here are some beans in their habitatand a sample of plums. The latter are interesting in that we are trying to keep them on the tree (and safe from bird attack, but in putting some netting up I knocked about a dozen semi-ripe fruit onto the ground. Some chutney may be in our future.


The final element of this segment is a reference to the Year of the Potato! Frances went bandicooting on 5 January and came up with a rather poor specimen of spud. This was not good news, as not only had we paid good folding stuff for the seed potatoes but we had bought several bales of straw to keep the tubers heading in the correct direction.


However on 6 January I applied a fork to another plant and got some very nice looking tubers. Following a bit of work on a BBQ (in the matter of lamb chops) I can report that the pink spuds tasted damn fine. The meal was also accompanied by a totally home grown salad - including our first Carwoola tomatoes!!!!


This image shows some of our small onions having been given the pickling treatment. The mustard seed makes it look very nice (if you can pick them up at this scale).




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Insects from pine trees

Image
This afternoon (13/1/2015) we were looking out of our sunroom and noticed a strange bit of mist.  On getting my binoculars on the case I found it to be a cloud of tens of thousand of insects.  They appeared with naked eye to be flying away, but with binoculars I thought they were circling. Here are some images In the second one it may be possible to see there are two streams coming from the top of each tree. There was a loud buzzing noise but that could just be several thousand wings. Earlier in the day Frances had been to some nearby willows and they were infested with many little black soft bodied insects.  Perhaps they shifted to the pines and were swarming? Help!! Any information welcome. A colleague, from Wamboin, had noticed a similat phenomenon, but involvng eucalypts rather than pines!  Here are the photos he took with his phone. I have consulted some expert friends.   Their responses were: I would have gone for chironomids. I rec...
Read more

A tour of the West (part 1)

Image
A friend from my time in the UN sent me some photos of her family trip along Route 66.  They did this is a large camperwagon rather than a Chevy Corvette (apparently the kids jacked up about being offered a trip in the trunk).  It seems to have been a very good trip for them and most interesting to see their photos.  It was also educational for me, as I found out the German for rocking chair (schaukelstuhl, since you ask). They did 7200 miles in 30 days - a pretty serious bit of distance. This made me think of the trips we did in 1981 when living in Denver.  Frances initiated that idea by getting a book about the National Parks of the West  and marking interesting places.  I then worked out a route on a Rand-McNally Road Atlas (GPS was unknown then  - as were iPhones, personal computers and the internet).  From memory, taking nearly the whole Summer school holidays we covered about 10,000 miles in 70 days.  Here, approximately,  are ...
Read more

Maslins beach rules

Image
Anyone who was in Adelaide in the 1970s will be having a good nudge nudge at that title.  However the beach is really nice even though it is the haunt (in Summer ) of naked people.  (As an aside one of the 'van park staff was talking to some other guests and commented that the sights on the beach in Summer were not at all exciting.)  In April it is the haunt of seniors, many of them exercising their dogs, and thus a far more attractive place. Getting to the beach was a walk of about 1km along roads, from our van.  The second half of this went past a rather daggy looking paddock with many formed ridges in it, as though it was irrigated, although a water sources wasn't evident.  The paddock got interesting towards the end as some green parrots appeared.  Thanks to Frances eye for detail we have subsequently identified these as Elegant Parrots: my first lifer for 2014.    The locale is indicated by the red lines in this mudmap: Here are the bird...
Read more