Sunlight in my basket.

Limes, lemons, mandarins, oranges.  So many of them that I am making salted limes for adding to summer soda water and salted lemons for that little salty sour-sweet note that lifts so many dishes out of the ordinary.  I’m making lime syrup for cordial, but not being a real sweet tooth, mostly for Asian style dipping sauce for things like rice paper rolls.   I’m making Indian style Lime Pickle for curries (and for cheese and crackers), and mostly for giving away.  I’m putting lemon and lime skins in cleaning vinegar to make lemon oil vinegar for cleaning – it’s my one-and-only cleaning product for floors and stove and shelves.  I’m making lime and ginger marmalade – I can’t believe I’ve never posted that recipe.

But mostly, we are just using them fresh and glorying in the abundance while it lasts.  This time of year tomatoes are scant.  The ones you will be getting in the supermarket will likely be artificially ripened, tasteless, coming from a long way away, and very expensive.  I still get a few cherry tomatoes hanging on in my frost free garden but mostly that cooking niche that needs a bit of sweet acidity is filled by citrus.  So whereas in summer my pasta sauces are mostly tomato based – things like pasta puttanesca –  this time of year they are lemon based – things like lemon caper parsley pasta sauce, or Lemon Feta Tortellini.  Whereas in summer I add tomatoes to beans, in winter I add lemon.  In summer, soups nearly always have tomatoes in them, in winter a squeeze of lemon juice.  Summer salads have tomatoes and feta, winter salads have leafy greens and a lemon dressing.

It’s very neat the way tomatoes and lemons tag-team it.

I heard a mad story last October about a Northern Territory farmer growing out of season pumpkins for Halloween carving. It isn’t easy growing pumpkins out of season.  No wonder they cost a fortune.

And here, at the moment, the verandah stack grows.  The wheelbarrow in the garden is full.  The ones that the bush turkeys have (wastefully) had a peck at get chucked into the front dam to feed the red claw, or into the garden the chooks are foraging at the moment for wonderful yellow high carotene eggs. And still they come.

Food waste is an odd concept.  I mean, I get it.  Vast quantities of resources are used growing, transporting, packaging, selling, refrigerating food that ends up in landfill so tangled up with plastic tubs and tetra packs that it’s not worth anyone’s while to untangle so the only solution is to put some dirt on top and walk away.  I get it.

It’s just that for every other creature on the planet “food waste” is an oxymoron. If it’s food, something will eat it.   Eventually. Perhaps an earthworm that likes it best when it’s got to the stage of slimy.  Many fruits go in that boom bust cycle.  The plant fruits prolifically all at once, the animals feast, the seeds get distributed, the waste goes back to the earth, life goes on.

It is southern hemisphere Halloween in a week.  It is oh so easy to see where the tradition of carving pumpkin lanterns for Halloween originated.  As the daylength starts to level out into the short days and long nights of winter, as the harvest season ends and the season of storytelling round the fire starts, as we come to terms with the fact that everything living dies, Halloween pumpkins are a celebration of the excess of autumn harvest season, of pumpkins in such abundance that even after the people and the chooks and the wildlife have eaten all they can, there are still pumpkins, not for wasting but for fanciful, ephemeral art.

There is a Marge Piercy poem that I think perfectly sums up zucchini called Attack of the Squash People.  I think of it every year around this time.  I learned some time ago to plant just a couple of zucchini seeds at a time, but then I discovered tromboncino.

Tromboncino substitutes for zucchini in pretty well any recipe. I like it a bit better – the texture is a bit firmer and it doesn’t have that edge of bitterness that larger zucchinis get.  But then, I like that bit of bitterness too, and bitterness in vegetables is often a sign of antioxidant phytochemicals that are very good for you.  Not always, alkaloids that do nasty things to your liver also taste bitter, which is probably why we omnivore humans have evolved to enjoy a bit of bitterness as adults, with full grown livers and a bit of education about what is safe to eat, but reject it as children.

Tromboncino fits better into my late summer garden. It is a rampant climber, like a very vigorous climbing cucumber in growth habits – a nifty trick that keeps it up off the ground conserving ground space and protecting it from mildew diseases.  It lasts a long time – I’ve had tromboncinos overwinter and bear right through into the next spring.  And if you think zucchini are prolific…

So this is my dilemma. A nice sequence of zucchini plants, so there is zucchini if I want it.  For rattatouille for instance, that I think needs that bitterness.  A nice range of tromboncino plants, so I can save seed without it being inbred.  And not too many of either. A Gordian Knot.

I give a lot away, I have an extensive repertoire of recipes, I feed overgrown ones to the chooks, and still the kitchen bench at almost any time has more zucchini and trombies on it than it needs. Ah summer.

This is the view from our loo.

It is one of the advantages of rural life, that you can have a loo with a view.  Figs are now in season, and you can sit on our loo and spot the ones that need picking. Which is a useful thing because figs don’t ripen well when picked green (the main reason they’ve never made it into the standard supermarket array), they ripen daily, and they’re best eaten straight away.

Our loo is a red manure worm processing system, and the resulting worm castings end up in an underground trench that the fig tree’s roots can get into.  That may, or may not,  have something to do with the fact that this year is turning into a very good year for fig harvesting. It’s a relatively new system – we’ve given up on the imperfectly designed composting toilet that always required a bit too much attention and maintenance to work properly on the cool south side of the house in our sub-tropical climate.  The new worm processing system should, in theory, work much better.

I always think that “composting toilet” is a bit of a misnomer.  Compost by rights is a compound that contains big, stable molecules of humic acid created by a particular kind of thermophilic bacteria.  The particular bacteria that make it like about three times as much carbon in their diet as nitrogen, an environment that is moist but not wet,  batch not incremental feeding, and nice insulation to keep warm.  Manure (human and other animals) is nearly all nitrogen rich compounds, much too wet, and you don’t get a batch of it all at once.  Most of the designs I see work on the principle of drying and aging rather than true compost making.

Anaerobic bacteria, the kind that make biogas, like a nitrogen rich wet environment. I see a few designs around these days for household scale biogas digesters and I suspect that could be the technology of the future.

But the other creature, and the one we’ve targeted, is red worms – Eisenia foetida and Lumbricus rubellus species, commercially used to process pig manure.  We were seeking a design that used no water – we’re on tank water, and in a drought year it is always a toss up whether to conserve water for possible fire fighting, spend it keeping trees alive or the garden producing, or let it go to environmental flow.  Flushing a toilet doesn’t get a look-in.

We were also seeking a design that used no or very little power. Nowadays we now have 4.5 kva of off-grid solar power and most of the time we can be completely profligate with spending it – put the electric bread oven, the slow cooker, the stereo, the washing machine, the pool pump and every light in the house on all at once. But I am so used to being frugal with power I can’t bear the idea of wasting it!

It had to cope with urine, cycle nutrients, take virtually no maintenance, and be salubrious enough for visitors used to white porcelain.

All that, and, very importantly,  a view.