Preserving tomatoes

We have been busy in the garden and the kitchen. Now is the time to whizz around the garden and harvest as much as possible before the slugs, snails, birds, millipedes, etc. move in.

These are jars of preserved tomatoes and marinara sauce (tomatoes, spring onions, garlic and herbs). Here just a little selection. The pantry is full and looking good.

Figgy decadence

This is a really lovely, decadent dish after a day's work in the garden. Or if you need a treat. Or at any other time.
Cut figs in half. Sautee in plenty of butter for a little while. Add a dollop of honey or golden syrup (depending on how sweet you like it). Stir. Put on plates. Add a dollop of cream. Or ice-cream. Or both. Enjoy! :)

Christmas Bell Chillies

I get pretty confused around chillies; I once acquired a dozen different types in pots, and grew them all on for seed, moving them about until the labels were hopelessly muddled. Nevertheless, the plants still exist in the garden, and as far as they are concerned, I can come up with any name I like…it matters not to them.

And so, when sitting down to write this story, I was convinced that I was going to talk about Scotch Bonnet (Bell Lantern) chillies. A quick check on the internet made it clear Scotch Bonnet chillies looked nothing like my plant, and there is no such thing as a Bell Lantern chilli – I must have dreamt that up myself.

This particular plant is about five years old and about 1.5m tall, and just keeps on spreading out, though I stake it to try to keep it off the path (pruning it wouldn’t hurt either). It’s a very mild chilli – about 5 out of 10 on the heat scale – and can almost be eaten like a capsicum (pepper). I’ve kept the seed by drying them on a cotton thread hung in the kitchen. I’ll just crush these up now to separate the seeds, then the hard work will begin – finding someone who wants to grow some too.

And so what chilli is it really?

My best guess is that it is a South American chilli originating in Barbados, from whence it found its way to Europe via Brazil and the Portuguese, and then by devious routes down here to Australia. Wikipedia calls it a Bishop’s Crown chilli, a variety of the species Capsicum baccatum var. pendulum. 

Perhaps it is, perhaps it is not. For whatever its genealogy, it’s a pretty and hardy bush, and the mild flavour is just fine for a palate used to the fairly bland flavours of English/Irish/German dishes.

Snake beans

Vigna unguiculata var. sesquipedalis

For many years now, I’ve been ‘growing on’ an unusual long and thin green eating bean called a ‘snake bean’. This year I’m regenerating my seed stock, so have let the beans remain on the vine to dry out, ready for the simple business of harvesting the seed.

Snake beans are unrelated to green (French) climbing beans, bush beans, and runner beans, evolving as they have in South Asia from the cowpea (V. unguiculata) which arrived there from Africa in early times. Cowpeas have short pods used for dried beans, while snake beans are best cooked young and tender the Chinese way – stir-fried with a little oil and garlic, ginger and a splash of soya sauce at the end. Snake beans have a stronger nuttier flavour than ordinary kitchen beans.

The fancy Latin name sesquipedalis means “one and a half feet in length”;  a length that is easily attained in the home garden.

Snake beans are also called the Yard Long Bean and Asparagus Bean.

My snake beans are the vigorous climbing variety with the red-brown seeds (the beans are very narrow compared to regular green beans – about half their diameter). Apparently there are dwarf varieties about, and another climber having black seeds grown around Mudgee in New South Wales in eastern Australia.

Snake beans ‘keep on giving’, so are best cut off the vine rather than pulled off (which tends to break the vine). They like lots of moisture, warm soil and rapid growth. I grow mine up a square-mesh wire pegged at one end and sloping to the top of a frame a few metres high. This way the beans hang down and can easily be found by the cook.

Snake bean flowers are pale mauve and borne in pairs at the end of an elongated stem.

As always, much of the valuable material in this article was gleaned from my much loved and much-thumbed copy of the Seed Savers’ Handbook.

Mulch and moisture retention

The highest cost in growing one’s own fruit and vegetables in Adelaide (South Australia) is the cost of water, where the new water prices for the 2011-12 financial year were:
1) Quarterly water supply charge of $58.65
2) $1.93/kL for water use from 0-30 kL per quarter
3) $2.75/kL for water use from 30-130 kL per quarter
4) $2.98/kL for water use above 130kL

During the summer months (December through to the end of February) I’ve used 166kl (166 000 litres) of water from the mains supply. Almost all of this water went onto the garden, with household use being negligible after all the practice we’ve had conserving water during the recent decade of droughts.

Nor does this figure include the 60 kl of rainwater carried over from last winter in our giant tanks and now almost gone. All this, despite cutting back on the size of the garden planted out this year as a consequence of the gardener’s absence during the critical spring planting season…

So the cost of water for this past summer has been: -

$58.65 + 30kl x $1.93 + 100 kl x $2.75 + 33kl x $2.98 = $490.

Not far behind the cost of water is the cost of mulch to protect the soil, prevent evaporative losses and to keep the soil cool and the worms near the surface. We use pea-straw for this, purchased in bulk at about $6.60 per bale, and needing about one bale per square meter to apply.

The cost of buying water and mulch heavily outweigh the cost of seed and seedlings, new tools and various stakes and fencing materials in the gardener's budget. I’ve never had the courage to do a more careful analysis, but I reckon the cost of operating this 1000 square meter garden runs to some thousands of dollars each year, putting real pressure on the gardener to produce edible food sufficient to offset the costs of shopping at a greengrocer.

So each year I try some new method of making water and mulch go a bit farther.

This year I’m laying down about $500 worth of pea-straw (about 75 bales) along the dirt paths surrounding the fenced growing beds. This layer of mulch will allow winter rainfall to percolate through for safe storage well into next Spring, give the chickens somewhere to scratch for earwigs, and provide a mulch in a more broken-down form for surrounding small plants come next Summer’s heat waves. (Mulch for seedlings is collected off the paths, as it is softer than new straw and less full of moulds and other stuff from the farm where it grew).  Each bale is broken up into ‘bricks’ about 10cm wide; these are as easy to lay down as carpet squares, and are just dropped on the soil and kicked into place.

Over the next five years, these constant applications of mulch will build up the carbon content of the soils and make them more friable for tiny roots to grow through. In the orchard (below) those new grapevines are doing well in last year’s mulch, now broken down by the constant contented scratching of the five hens who hang out here.

In the long-term though, I’d like to reach a place where I can grow my own ‘green cover’ during winter, cut it in Spring, use it for mulch over Summer, and grow all crops on the 75 000 litres of water captured from winter rainfall on surrounding roofs and plumbed into those tanks.