I was picking for an Indonesian style curry – ginger, galangal, turmeric, lemon grass, chili, Vietnamese mint (and I added – Kaffir lime leaves and garlic as well) and I couldn’t resist the photo. Add this spice base to an oily sauce and you have a wonderful curry sauce for fish or meat or poultry or vegetables.
I live smack bang in fruit fly territory. Bactrocera tryoni – Queensland Fruit Fly. They seem to be getting, if anything more prolific as the climate heats up, and I think over the years I’ve tried every known method of control, short of spraying, which I can tell without trying it wouldn’t work.
Chooks and vegetable gardens are such an elegant arrangement. I’ve tried lots of ways of combining them, from domes to compost making down a slope, but I’m really liking the current solution.
From late winter until now, I plant climbers – beans, cucumbers, squash and tomatoes – along the fences all the way round from the eastern to the western side, and sometimes (usually a bit more lightly) on the northern side too. The tallest beans even start to climb across the netting over top of my beds, the beans hanging down like fruit. But from late summer onwards, I start planting…
Aren’t they cute? I found them when I was recycling potting mix from some seedlings that I didn’t need to plant out. There are two different kinds. I think the larger ones might be land mullet eggs, and the smaller ones the little skinks I find in the shadehouse and garden.
Chooks are such a good way to double the harvest. These bok choy were self sown and if I’d been pressed for space I would have fed them to the chooks as greens much earlier. We ate a few leaves, but then since I had nothing desperately needing the spot I let them go to seed – which they did very happily, producing lots and lots of seed (which is…
The first compost pile of the season, and it’s a good one. It’s a lasagna pile with nice thin layers, with mulch from the Mulch Mountain every second layer.
Azolla is a really valuable plant. It’s a rampant native waterweed, that is symbiotic with a nitrogen fixing bacteria, so, like legumes, it is capable of harvesting nitrogen out of the air and putting it into a form that plants can use as a fertilizer.
I like mowing. It’s just hard enough work for me to feel entirely justified ignoring the gym. A few kilometres of power walking, a bit of aerobic exercise pushing it uphill, a bit of weight training emptying the bag, a bit of stretching and flexing. The perfect workout.
Jackie is sitting on 9 eggs. At least we think there are nine. Patrick and Trevor get very upset if we try to go near her. Geese are supposed to be monogamous (or at least “in an open relationship”) for life, but maybe because we have two girls and three boys, both Patrick and Trevor seem to have decided it’s a modern family.