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…
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.…
Capsicums are the feature crop out of my garden this week, and they are so much in season that even if you aren’t growing them, you should be able to get beautiful local ones at Farmers Markets.
The mice have been a pain this last year. They got all my pea and snow pea seeds for the first planting last autumn, and all my corn seeds for the first couple of plantings this year. With most plagues of anything, the populations of predators will immediately start building up in response to the increased food source, but the higher up the food chain you go, the slower the…
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.
Remember the mulberry cuttings I took back in late winter? A lot of them failed to take. They grew some lovely healthy looking green leaves but it was a trick – just the cutting drawing moisture up. When I checked, there was no real root development. But a decent number did take.
We thought it was going to be one of those super bumper years for mangoes, like 2010, when the trees were flowering, but it’s turned into just an average good season. Mangoes are biennial, and this is the good year, but it has been a bit wet around flowering time to be a huge year. Still though, we have enough that mangoes have to be one of the two fruit.
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…
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…
One of the best things about planting advanced seedlings is the head start you get. I think people tend to forget how long plants spend germinating and as babies. These seedlings are a month old already. If I’d planted them directly a month ago, this bed would have spent all that time hardly used, just inviting weeds.