We picked the first of the new season’s macadamias yesterday. It’s a bit earlier than usual, but the warm wet weather seems to have been bringing them on, and they are starting to drop and be got by the creatures. I don’t mind the creatures getting some of them. Because they are a native to this region, we’ve included seedling trees in all the riparian native plantings. But we also…
The Tuesday Night Vego Challenge this week had to feature snake beans. Now I have them coming on, the poor old Blue Lakes and Purple Kings have dropped right out of favour, left to mature for seed for storing. Snake beans are more tropical than most bean varieties, adapted to the tropical summer monsoon belt. They like hot wet weather.
Have you noticed yet that I have a certain amount of experience with zucchini recipes? There is a Marge Piercy poem that I think perfectly sums up zucchini: Attack of the Squash People. I thought I had learned the lesson: One, no more than two, zucchini each planting break.
This is the second in the Tuesday Night Vego Challenge, and already I’m cheating a little bit. Making this easily within the half hour relies on you having fresh or already cooked beans and bread rolls on hand. I’m starting to harvest beans for shelling now. By the end of the summer I’ll have a big jar full of each kind for slow cooking over the winter.
I have zucchini and their close cousin tromboncino going nuts in my garden this time of year. It is compulsory in our household to have zucchini every day, I’ve given so many away that my friends are avoiding me, the chooks have gone on strike and refuse to eat any more. This is the first year I’ve grown tromboncino (Diggers seeds) and I think they have upstaged Blackjack as my…
You need real tomatoes – sun ripened, in season, varieties bred for taste rather than transportability and artificial ripening. For real decadence a few different varieties so you can savour each kind.
I’ve been mulling over a 2012 Challenge. I’ve enjoyed the challenges. The first one – 2010’s Muesli Bar Challenge, Then the 2011 the Breakfast Cereal Challenge – a year’s worth of weekly healthy and low GI recipes, based on fresh in season ingredients, fast and easy enough to make for breakfast, as a way to delete the big mostly empty packets of junk food marketed as “breakfast cereal” from the…
wasn’t going to post until the new year, but my love for patterns got in the way, and it seemed a pity not to make it a clean sweep – a Breakfast Challenge recipe for every week of the year.
The longest day, the shortest night, the night of midsummer dreaming. Happy solstice everyone! Today is the longest day of the year in the southern hemisphere and the shortest in the northern hemisphere, and it’s been a traditional festival for a lot longer than 2011 years. For me, it marks the start of holidays, a few weeks with some time with family, community and friends, some time visiting, some time…
My basic garden philosophy is that if you want a garden that yields quality as well as quantity with a viable amount of time spent overall, you have to go with your climate and environment. For me, that means virtually effortless mangoes, but peaches that are half for me, half for the chooks. But, the end result of all that is that, this time of year, I have lots of…