Suggestion for Spring Gathering

‘Plants create Soil’
Understanding soil ,humus compost ,organic matter and mulch.
Here is my suggestion for Sept or October gathering, I can conduct this at Nirvana Organic Farm . We have many soil types from gravel to peat we can study. It would be a hands on exploration of soil, how to develop the right soil for you garden and orchard.
I thought a Wednesday afternoon would be good but open to suggestions
If you are interested please put a comment on this post and I will take it from there.


Know your Soil,know what it is ,how it works and how to improve it so you get quality food.

Pruning the Willow House

It’s time to prune the willow house ready for the next season and have it looking good by Kitchen Garden Day.
So weather permitting on Friday 25th July from 11am to 3pm I’ll be hosting a working bee to get the process underway. Seedsavers are welcome to come and help.
Park at house and we can go from there.
If the weather is bad(actually rain is good) we can reschedule it to Saturday.
For more details phone Deb 8339 2519

A RAINY DAY IN THE KITCHEN

Well, not actually raining in the kitchen, although it did once, a few years ago!

I decided the olives were ready to put into jars with a mixture of oil, vinegar, water and a bit of salt, after about 2 weeks of soaking in water (which I changed every day)

I made the syrup and strained the limoncello into a vodka bottle.
It will be ready in a couple of weeks.

I made a cake to share with a hugly bear!

WORLD'S OLDEST BLOGGER

Yesterday I heard on the radio about the death of Olive Riley who at 108 was the world's oldest blogger! She lived in a small town, Woy Woy, in NSW, Australia, and wrote about her life. I heard an interview with her which was made when she was 104 and she was as bright as a button and sounded like a real character. She led a very hard life, struggling to clothe and feed her children after leaving her badly behaved husband (that is how she described him) back when she would have been about 30....only about 78 years ago!

She lived in Adelaide for while with her mother and told the story of the night her youngest child was sick with an ear ache. Another child she knew had died recently from such an infection so she was determined to take her son to the doctor. After a full day's hard work she bundled him up warmly and sat him on the handle bars of her push bike and rode to the doctor, some miles away. The doctor lanced an abscess and told her to come back the next day, this she did each day until she was given the all clear.

With her meagre salary working washing dishes in a hotel she was also paying to have her other two children looked after by some nuns. She visited them every day. They all stayed together and later all 4 went to work on a sheep station in outback Queensland, doing whatever was required. Eventually they moved to Sydney so that the children could learn a trade. Whenever decisions were to be made, they made them together. When she asked them if they wanted to go to Sydney or stay on the station, one of them replied " We'll go with you, we know you'll do for us Mum."

Her blog seems to have been taken offline, which is a shame. But here is a blog by a friend which tells a bit about Olive and has one of her last posts on it.

So at 108, she was still liable to enthusiasms....way to go Olive. Here's to wonderful people like Olive and the world of blogs!

.

SPECIAL TREES

There are some things in our lives that have a kind of wordless and ephemeral meaning that it is hard to describe. One of those things for me is trees. During my years of bushwalking in the wilderness I have often been in awe of a particular tree that, for example, looms up out of the soil and disappears high into the mists, with only a whisper of its uppermost glory visible from below. Another, gnarled and aged by years of clinging tenuously to a tiny crack in a rocky cliff, can stop me in my tracks to just gaze and admire its tenacity.

Far removed from this, in my comfortable life in the suburbs, I still find some trees irresistible. One is the magnolia, some of which are just beginning to flower here. Unremarkable the rest of the year, at blossom time they become a symbol of such beauty and elegance that it takes my breath away. I don't have one in my garden.... partly because there is more joy in the desire and anticipation of one day having one - like a child waiting for Christmas, hoping they will receive a special wish. The sight of the magnificent display of a magnolia in full bloom could only be surpassed by the cradling in my hand of a single, perfect flower... and this I have never done for the same reason. It is something to imagine and look forward to in the future rather than remember in the past.....

Another special tree is a small, insignificant looking oak tree in the golf course on the other side of the road from my house. About 15 years ago I took son Hugh for a little drive into the hills one very cold autumn day, to see the colours and play in the falling autumn leaves of some beautiful trees in Stirling, in the Adelaide hills. There he collected a handful of acorns from an oak tree as well as some of the colourful leaves from other trees. We dried and pressed the leaves and have them still and we planted the acorns, one just on the other side of the fence of the golf course so it had a chance to grow with plenty of space. In the busy-ness of life we forgot all about the acorns...for years and years....until one day, standing in my vegetable garden, I suddenly thought "Look at that oak tree growing there...." and I remembered the day we had literally thrown the acorn inside the fence, into some nice soft soil there. There are no other oak trees around here anywhere...this must be the one we started! Now I love that tree and know everything it does and it is big enough to be safe and not mown down by over-enthusiastic golf-course workers! It will outlive my whole family and grow there, hopefully, for many future owners of my house to enjoy...I will take a photo of it one day.

MUTUAL RESPECT IN THE VEGIE PATCH AND OTHER SATURDAY MUSINGS

While I was out in the garden today I was thinking about all sorts of lovely things because, on such a cool, fresh and windy kind of day, all thoughts about deep and meaningful stuff seem to just blow away and are replaced with treasures, instead. Whilst some people may want to read about these treasures, I am not going to write about them now...instead I want to tell you what I was doing.

***Winter in Adelaide is weed time and, although I let weeds grow anywhere there is irrigation in summer - so I can pick them for the chooks - in winter I try to keep them under some sort of rough control so that any little vegetable seeds that germinate have a reasonable chance of survival. So much self-sown vegetable seed germinates in these damp months that I often can't find room to sow or plant the other things I want to grow. Today it was silver beet, or chard as some people call it. I have more than I can possibly use but I can't bear to pull it out...so I either pot it up and give away or let it grow for the time being.

It is interesting that all the silver beet seems to have germinated more or less at once. The previous few weeks saw hundreds more fennel germinate and before that it was a certain chicory and daikon radish and even earlier in the year it was parsley and lettuces. Really, if I never sowed or planted anything ever again there would quite a bit of variety there, year after year, by itself. This, to me, is the perfect state to reach in the vegetable garden...a kind of harmony and a feeling of mutual respect between myself and all those seeds. So long as I don't disturb the soil too much, life will spring forth and provide me with food. It is an ever so nice balance. Even when I add compost to the soil, the compost has lots of those seeds in it too, because I make the compost using mostly scraps from the garden, and my compost is not so hot that it would kill them. I like the fact that my compost isn't too hot, for just this reason; if I was better at making it I wouldn't have so many self-sown vegetables - ironically.(The photo is of the Chinese seashells)

Apart from weeding, I hunted around yet again for somewhere to plant out some of the dozens of broccoli seedlings I have raised from the seed I originally got from Kath. Such viable seed I have never had the pleasure of sowing before but it does mean I have broccoli seedlings everywhere and, since everyone I know grows this one now, I can't find anyone to give them to! I came across an area I had been setting aside on which to make some more compost but bare ground should always be filled with plants - that's my theory - and so I scraped away the semi-composted mulchings I had put there a while ago and planted 10 or so broccoli, in two furrows, with a 9" ridge of the fine mulchings on either side of the rows. It is beautiful soil down in this spot because I often make the compost heap there so I will be interested to see how they grow. I also transplanted some of the silver beet seedlings to under the pear tree while it has no leaves. Vegetables are everywhere in my garden...my absolute obsession with them may verge on slightly insane but I think sanity is about as useful as goodness, when it comes to making the most of life and its opportunities!

.

***At lunch time I picked some things for the salad. They included: cos, oakleaf and miners' lettuce leaves (I rarely pick a whole plant), mizuna, chervil, tip shoots of the Egyptian broad beans, sorrel, finely sliced fennel bulb...maybe something else, I can't remember exactly. Perfect; wonderfully perfect, actually, to eat that 5 minutes after picking it all. When people talk about the deterioration of health in western countries I can't understand why everyone isn't growing this kind of easy meal right there, at their back door. After all, that is the fastest food you could ever get..our whole table was filled with goodies from the garden, just for the 2 of us! (Plus, some of our favourite new cheese - the local Paris Creek 'Nuage Blanc' which should be eaten at or after the best before date and a little French blue cheese called Saint A.....oh no, I can't remember how to spell it!)

***The other night I cooked a fabulous 'soup' from a French book I have....It wasn't so much a soup as...well, nothing I have really ever had before....I will put the recipe on Gardeners' Gastronomy. As well as having it for dinner, I had it the next day for breakfast and again for lunch!

***I need a good name for this trip I am going on...any ideas? Very soon I will put here a rough schedule of where I will be going and when, on my garden bloggers visits.....it is all pretty well finalised.....sort of!

.

PIZZA OVEN DAY

This morning I heard of the tragic death of Brigita Whiting, the wonderful woman who gave so much of herself to those of us who went to her house in October last year to learn about making Turkish style breads and using a pizza oven. She and her husband Tony had such plans for their olive grove and their future together...here is what I wrote about that day....

A couple of weekends ago the Slow Food group had a day where we learned to use a pizza oven. It was run by Brigita and her husband Tony and focused on middle eastern breads. The setting was beautiful - in their garden on Waterfall Gully road, next to the flowing stream. Tony was a wizz at getting the oven the right temperature for all the different things we prepared and Brigita was so lovely and patient with her fumbling students, giving us recipes and tips and of course, all that food to eat and to take away with us. I don't think I should put the recipes on the blog as that wouldn't be fair to her but, if you get a chance, go to one of the sessions and learn some of the skills yourself.

Viv and Vincent were there as well as Deb, Roger and myself, together with about 10 others. While some of the slower breads were cooking we went for a walk up the steep slope behind their house to see their goats and the olive grove that was planted with many different varieties early on in Adelaide's settlement days. You could see the sea from the top and Tony is keen to build a little hut up there - you sure need something to drink when you finally reach the end of the track. As it turned out, the only hardy souls who made it to the top were Tony and the members of the Hills and Plains Seedsavers !

As the oven cooled, Brigita explained that full use could be made of it by cooking desserts such as the baked pears she prepared for us and then by cooking roasts and stews. Last of all, fruits and herbs could be dried, so the idea is to get everything organised before you start and make use of the varying heats and beautiful flavour, while having friends around and doing all the work together.

Cooking together is a great way to share time with friends, especially for people like me who don't like sitting down for long !

When you have life, you have everything. Seize the day.