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.
Everything has lined up beautifully for a planting day today – no bottlenecks for once. I have old compost and creek sand for seed raising and potting mixes, seeds and seedlings for planting, a new bed just vacated by the chooks ready to plant into and mulch to mulch up the spaces in the old beds, a barrel of old seaweed brew, a dam full of water, a lovely cool,…
This recipe is a riff on Mollie Katzen’s Enchanted Broccoli Forest, or at least it owes some heritage to that inspired combination of broccoli, lemon, eggs and cheese – which you wouldn’t think would work but it so does.
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.
There is a reason that Greek salads have no lettuce. Greece has a Mediterranean climate – cool wet winters and hot dry summers, and lettuce and hot dry summers don’t mix.
The best way to eat mulberries is to be ten years old and sitting up in the fork of the tree, near naked to save clothes from stains, maybe with some other kids to chat with or maybe just with your thoughts, selecting the fattest purple berries to go directly from tree to mouth. Failing that though, paw paw, strawberry, mulberry and citrus fruit salad is one of those made-in-heaven…
Aren’t they gorgeous? These are the strawberries in the new patch. It really does make a huge difference to the yield to replant strawberry runners in a new patch, with fresh compost and lots of mulch.
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.
A neighbour is killing a couple of their free range male ducks today, and putting on a duck stone casserole dinner. Stone casserole is another…