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Saving Tromboncino Seed

Tromboncino is my new favourite vegetable. I got my seed from Diggers and I think they will displace zucchini in my garden. They grow like a very rampant cucumber, and by using lots of vertical space they conserve my precious intensively fenced ground space.

Chili Beans With A Secret Ingredient

My partner is a chili fiend. He would eat chili beans for every meal if he could. We compromise. But I do make chili beans quite a lot. He’s a big bloke and he needs a lot of fuel. But, like me, he alternates between being very physically active and spending too much time doing sitting work. So the perfect fuel is very filling but low calorie, low GI, high…

Tamarillo and Chili Sauce

I’m not a big preserve maker, nor do I freeze vegetables. I sun-dry tomatoes and make passata if I have enough, but I am lucky enough to live in a climate where, if I plant sequentially and we eat seasonally, we can eat fresh all year. So preserves tend to just sit on the shelf looking decorative. So if I make preserves, it’s not to preserve things but because the…

Margherita Pizza

Now how do you do justice to a tomato like this? You can stuff up beautiful produce by overelaborating. It’s hard to go past just a slice of sourdough toast, a drizzle of olive oil, and a beautiful, vine ripened Brandywine tomato in thick slices with salt and pepper. Tomato on toast for dinner – if you have real bread and a real tomato, you could elaborate a great deal…

Roots and Perennials Days in Late Summer

This is a good time of year for planting perennials in my part of the world. We are past the frizzle days of high summer, but still enough time left for things to establish before going into winter dormancy, and be really ready to take off in spring. We are also coming into what is traditionally our wet season, though in this La Ninã year, that really isn’t a factor.…