Mid-summer harvest and winter sowings

As the year draws to a close so too do those crops planted mid-year and mid-winter – garlic and onions. Planted on the shortest day of the year, we harvest around the longest day or thereabouts. So these slender plants have had to be nurtured for six months, protected from the competition of weeds, watered and mulched and finally dug up and stored in the shed.

All this effort is repaid because onions – at least the brown and white varieties – store well and will supply the kitchen for months to come.

Red onions stay in the garden bed until the cook wanders past and selects one to slice into salads. Whereas the tops of the Hunter River brown and white onion varieties die off to signify that it is time for harvest the Sweet Red variety maintains green and healthy tops even after the bulb is formed. These tops are also used by the cook as ‘oniony-material’ in soups ands stews.

The garlic has come out of various beds to make way for pumpkins – another long-storing vegetable – and silverbeet for the chicken flock. The tops on the hard-neck garlic varieties stay in place and allow the garlic cloves to be braided before hanging in the shed.

The soft-neck garlic types lose that sturdy tie and so are stored in open-mesh onion bags that are also hung out of reach of mice.

Once these beds are cleared the remnants of the spring seed-table sowings are set out – largely lettuce and carrots.

Now the cycle starts again: the seed table is re-established and I look to the seed collection to begin sowing crops that won’t enter the soil until the break of the autumn rains in late March.

These winter crops include winter-hardy herbs – coriander, sorrell, chia, parsley, lovage, thyme, dill, spring onions and rocket. These will flourish briefly in the cooler yet still sunny days of an Australian autumn. The deep winter crops belong to the cabbage family – broccoli, kale, Chinese and German cabbages and ‘Palla Rossa’ radicchio, a form of bitter red lettuce beloved of the cook.

With the hottest summer weather still to come all these seedlings will be permanently covered by shade cloth and hand-watered daily with the last of the water from the rainwater tanks.

Pumpkin planting and garlic hanging

Planting out the tomatoes seemed a simple objective for a weekend in the garden. After all, I needed only to drop a small punnet of a dozen pumpkin (squash) seedlings into the existing garlic bed first and I’d be ready to get into it.

Fifteen hours later, with the pumpkins and garlic sorted, it had become abundantly clear that the tomatoes would have to spend another week in their pots and I’m left to rue my complete inability to guestimate just how long any particular job in this garden will take.

Gardening – like painting the house – is 95% preparation and 5% actual doing.

In order to get the pumpkins in I needed to get the garlic dug out and hung in the shed, the watering system tested, the soil profile re-wetted, some ‘blood and bone’ fertilizer in to feed the colossal pumpkin plants that will produce a crop, the drip tubes back on, the pumpkins planted (15 minutes) and the mulch back in place.

Along the way the cook offered to pull about 100 onions that were going to seed early (the chooks had buried the working end of the drip line and they’d dried out), leaving me to hang those in the shed too.

As for the tomatoes, all I managed was to wet-up that bed, water the pots and get mulch onto the soil to minimize evaporation.

Maybe next week?

Pumpkin-pickin’ Saturday

Pumpkins (squash) are usually picked in autumn after more than four months soaking up the sun. But this year it came right down to the wire; pumpkin-picking happened on the very last day of the Australian autumn, on Saturday the 31st May.

Warm weather and family pressures didn’t help the business of getting underway but that’s not a problem for pumpkins; after the fruit has formed the tough skin makes them fairly impermeable to attack from birds, insects, rats and disease while they lie about on the ground. The vines have all but disappeared and the stalks have withered, hardened and browned off so that the pumpkins can just be picked up from the ground or gently broken away from the remains of the vine.

Nevertheless, I need to get the onion crop into that bed and there’s all the usual preliminary work still to be done of pulling the bigger weeds and turning the chicken flock in to clean up insect pressures.

I’ve grown the usual small sweet Butternut pumpkins but ‘something new that’s old’ as well; Triambles. This three-lobed old heirloom variety of pumpkin has all but disappeared from the greengrocer’s shelves since I was a lad and I’d had to shop around to find seeds.

The results have been poor; poor germination and poor fruiting. In fact, I’m not convinced that three of the five ‘blue pumpkins’ that resulted aren’t in fact ‘Queensland Blues’. So I will save seed from the two that have the distinctive ‘three-lobes’ and try again next year.

In the meantime I need to store the barrow-load of pumpkins just harvested somewhere where they will be dry, out of the sun with good air circulation and out of the way of rats and mice. Fortunately there's plenty of fruit tree netting around at this time of the year and I can use that to envelop the crop on a shelf in the shed where the cook can get them at her ease.

Making grape juice and harvesting sunflowers

The table grapes have finished but the wine grapes (Shiraz and Grenache) are ripe and ready for harvest. As I have only a single vine of each I’ll turn the tightly-packed bunches into grape juice rather than attempt to make wine.

The process is simple, if messy.

Pick the grapes, wash them to get the wildlife out, then push them through the juicer, compost the skins and twigs and filter the juice through a sieve.

The juice tastes fine when diluted with mineral water.

But most of this juice goes into ice cube trays and will be stored in the freezer for making homemade fruit sorbet, along with frozen raspberries, blueberries, mangoes, bananas, peaches, mint and other fruits from the garden. These are whipped up in the Thermomix along with some dried fruit and almonds (to slow down the digestion) and served with whipped cream or fresh fruit salad.

Despite the hot weather, the ‘Multi-Flora’ sunflowers are doing well and make a charming gift from gardener to cook to brighten up the kitchen table and our frequent trips to the garden.

The seeds from this bank of sunflowers will be dried off and stored for chicken food; sunflower oil provides much-needed fuel for the hens in the cold of winter.

The seeds that grew these fifty or so plants were in turn grown on year after year from a single packet of commercial seed purchased for about three dollars many years ago; seed-saving always repays the effort involved in both quantity of seed available and beauty in the garden.

Saving broad bean (fava bean) seed

Broad beans – Vicia faba –  are also known as fava beans, horse beans, English beans, European beans, Windsor beans, field beans and tick beans. Broad beans are one of the oldest legumes in cultivation and have been an important crop since the stone age. They were well known in the ancient cultures of Egypt, Greece, Italy and many Middle Eastern countries. They have rigid stems and an upright growth habit. (Source: ‘Seed to Seed’ – Susan Ashworth)

This hardy lot were planted in blocks back in May 2013, consisting of both a short and tall variety – ‘Coles Prolific’ and ‘Aquadulce’ respectively. Although broad beans are self-pollinated, bees are attracted to the large flowers and can cause a good deal of cross-pollination. So rather than attempting to keep these two varieties pure by separating or bagging them I plant and store seed from both, including the crosses. Very few gardeners are managing to develop new varieties of vegetables, and my hope is that I will eventually be able to find plants that still carry the long bean of the Aquadulce but on the shorter stalks of the Coles Prolific. Perhaps that way they won’t get blown over so readily in Spring!

Because broad beans are a member of the Leguminosae family they play an important role in organic gardens in storing nitrogen in the soil via nodules on their root systems. Planted out between late autumn and mid-winter, they do well as a cover crop that provides delicious fresh large-podded beans to the table in early Spring when not much else is available from the cold ground. We cook ours in olive oil with finely-chopped onion. The cook collects pods from higher up the plant, knowing full well the gardener’s stern injunctions about leaving the lower (early) beans on the plant for next year’s seeds.

By summer these broad bean plants have died off into black sticks with just the hard bean cases attached. Some of the pods burst open and spill the dried bean seed onto the ground, but this can’t be helped. These spilt beans will germinate in the beds and make attractive plants during summer, but aren’t much use so are weeded out. The dried pods are picked off and stored in open trays in the shed awaiting processing, and the dried stalks are knocked over to be shredded as mulch or until the bed is needed.

When seed-saving day arrives for the broad beans, the dried pods are simply placed in an old onion bag and banged on the cement path to release the bean seed. This mixture is then sieved and rocked to lift the broken shells to the surface where they can be picked off and tossed onto the compost heap.

The bean seed is placed back into trays until I get a further minute to pick out the misshapen and miscoloured seeds and throw these away, retaining only the best for planting out in six months time. These selected seeds will spend a few days in the freezer to kill off any bean weevil eggs in residence.  Each year I manage to save a few more tins of these wonderfully large seeds so that I might extend the areas of the garden where winter crops of broad beans create natural fertilizer in the soil to boost my summer vegetable crops.

How to pickle garlic

It’s the longest day of the Australian year (tomorrow is Christmas Day) and so I’m harvesting the garlic that I planted out six months ago around the shortest day, in late May and early June.

Harvesting garlic in these heavy soils needs only the simplest of tools – my horseshoe-shaped ‘potato hoe’ – and a tub to put the bulbs in as I pick them out of the ground. That, and a strong back!

By this time of year, the garlic tops have died back and disappeared into the yellow background of the barley-straw mulch, so it’s now that I’m grateful that I planted them in straight lines, as they are all but invisible from the surface.

To avoid damaging the garlic bulbs, I hoe under the depth at which the bulbs have been grown, and use the hoe to lift and break up the surface (as for potato harvesting) and to expose the garlic. Picking through the clods is easy in these friable soils; one need only toss one’s findings into the tub, which gets dragged down the row after the gardener. The tub has holes in the bottom, as I will use a high-pressure nozzle to wash the dirt off the harvest and back onto the garden.

Up at the house, the cook’s eager to view the crop and start pickling some of the better cloves. Pickled garlic is placed in the cellar, and outlasts even those bulbs plaited and hung to dry in a cool dark part of the house. The taste changes slightly, but the goodness is preserved and pickled garlic adds a certain piquancy to late winter dishes when the price of garlic at the market has gone through the roof.

The garlic variety we like best is called ‘Monaro Purple’ as it has large bulbs that separate easily into tasty cloves. There are other varieties in other beds – yet to be harvested – but these are the pickling ones, so they come out early before the cook is overwhelmed by the Christmas turkey and biscuit-baking.

The gardener’s job doesn’t end with the harvest; garlic cloves get broken apart and ‘shelled’ of the light purple skin, then dropped into waiting glass jars. I guess this is where some folks would don gloves, as the scent of garlic stays on the skin for days. There seems little point in my doing this however, as my hands will be back in the soil to finish the job, and that should effectively cleanse away the pong.

And the cook’s recipe for pickling garlic?

Add 16 grams of sea salt to a litre of boiling water, stir then let cool to room temperature. Pour this salty water over the garlic in the jar to within an inch (25 mm) of the surface then place raspberry, grapevine or horseradish leaves on the garlic cloves and push down to sink the lot below the surface of the water. Add whey or ‘culture starter’ to kick off the bacteria that drive the fermentation process. Add glass marbles to keep the lot weighed down. Close the lid tightly and leave around on a shelf out of the sun until bubbling ends after a few weeks to indicate that fermentation is complete. Store in the cellar or a cool dark spot. Once opened, keep the jar in the fridge.

Carbon storage on a backyard scale

Backyard gardens accumulate old timber, typically from trees that have blown down or been cut down during pruning, plus building timber so old that its value for construction has become outweighed by the fact that it is taking up valuable space and looks ugly to boot.

The wood heap in our garden grows for some years until other pressures force me to deal with it. This Spring, a long chain of causality has pressured me, once again, to get out the chain saw and table saw to sort the wood heap onto the firewood stack or the kindling stack. [In brief, to be able to find working space in my own shed, I have to move the woodheap to make room for a new chicken shed so that I can empty the old chicken shed to receive a bunch of unused furniture that’s clogging up my shed. So it goes – each job in a garden generates six others!]

My youngest son is kind enough to help Dad with this work, and cook and gardener move all that wood by wheelbarrow around the property until, finally, space is cleared.

Now all that has to happen is the building of the new chicken shed, the movement of stuff hither and yon until space and order appear in front of my workbench, and the other piles of carbon – two very large stacks of twigs-and-sticks – get put through the shredder and laid onto the soil of the garden paths to break down further for storage in the soil as worm food.

The soil of this district is a sticky red clay; in my garden, the rich loamy black texture of the soil arises from annual storage of carbon broken down from mulch, shreddings and compost, seasoned with the ash from our winter wood-fires.

Father’s Day Harvest

Down here in southern Australia, the first day of Spring (1st of September) fell on Father’s Day, and the sun shone over our warm garden. Crops planted last autumn and grown over winter are producing at last, and all those weeks of wet weeding seem suddenly worthwhile.

The asparagus is shooting and there’s lettuce aplenty for salads, to which we add nasturtium flowers for colour and piquancy and slices of yellow capsicums (peppers) that were planted a year ago. These have survived the mild winter frosts of the Adelaide plains and are bearing fruit that they’ve carried through the winter.

The cook’s skipping about the place harvesting stuff for bottling – red Russian kale, purple sprouting broccoli, the first broad beans, beetroot for kvass, Daikon radish and fielderspitzkraut cabbage for sauerkraut and kimchee.

Nor is the gardener unhappy – he’s breathing a sigh of relief that the Lady Finger banana palms felled in late winter (to cut the pathway for possums from local trees to house roof) have ripened satisfactorily in their shiny blue and silver ‘banana-ripening’ bags. The stern eye of the cook has beamed away elsewhere…

How to pickle olives

Winter is well along in southern Australia, yet we’re still enjoying our summer crops – some from the freezer, but also all those things the cook has pickled so that they last well in storage for the lean times in late winter and spring – pickled cucumbers, kimchee, sauerkraut and olives.

I had never set out to grow olives, but nevertheless, an olive tree grew. Perhaps I threw an olive pip into that piece of garden, or perhaps a bird brought it. However it got there, this olive tree grew so well that the darn thing was starting to cut out our winter sunshine and push aside orange and plum trees. And yes, it had olives on it, but now they were so high up only the birds could reach them. So the cook placed all the usual pressures on the gardener (knowing full well the action of water dripping on stone) until neither tree nor gardener stood a chance. One proviso got though the negotiations - that the last crop of olives from this one tree would be salvaged rather than wasted. In due course, the olive tree was felled and cleared away, pickled olives appeared, and harmony was restored between cook and gardener.

Felling a big tree like this can wreak havoc, so it needed to be dropped in exactly the right spot; this was accomplished by tensioning a nylon rope from the tree top along the line of travel to a stake set deep in the ground, then the chainsaw did the rest.

Once down, olive harvesting was much simplified. A week later, the chainsaw and wheelbarrow took care of the wreckage and the olive pickling process began to appear all over the kitchen table and cupboards. I missed most of it, but here’s the cook’s recipe, garnered from the old Italian lady over the road, who still thinks in pints and cupfuls rather than litres and kilograms: -

Soak olives in fresh water for two to three weeks, changing the water daily – this soaks the bitterness out of the olives. When that’s done, immerse the olives in six pints of water, one pint of white vinegar, one cup of salt, a bay leaf and fennel seeds and bring the lot to boil. Simmer for ten minutes, let cool, sterilize jars then fill them three-quarters full with olives and this fluid. Add garlic and chillies to taste. Keep the olives immersed by covering them with vine leaves, then clip on the jar lids. Let stand for two to three months.

It appears that there are alternative ‘experimental’ recipes to the one described above – these involve  salted water and letting the lot stand for six months, and an even rarer method involving olive oil instead of vinegar. But those are tales for another day. In the meantime, home-grown olives are appearing for the last time in among the gardener’s meals…

Sorting bean seed for storage

Quite some effort goes into harvesting and processing our ‘Lazy Wife’ bean seed for use next summer. And not just for our own backyard garden – by disseminating surplus seed, I am able to encourage others to grow on this wonderful old heritage variety of green eating bean.

These beans were shelled over a month ago, and have been kept ever since in an open sieve in a dry sunny spot away from mice and damp. With a cold wind blowing outside under grey skies, the laborious task of ‘bean sorting’ holds more appeal than usual…

Almost one third of the crop that was shelled is unfit for seed-saving. These seeds are separated out by firstly sieving out the small seeds and debris through the large sieve in which they have been air drying. Then all the seeds that are distorted, discoloured, misshapen, wrinkled or already under attack by bean weevils are hand-picked out of there and thrown into the compost.

Good seeds have uniform size, shape and colour. This careful selection process ensures that the ‘best-of-the-breed’ continues on.

The big danger for bean seed is the inevitable ‘bean weevil’. Even though only a few months have past since the pods were picked and dried, some seeds are already showing the tell-tell signs of bean weevil attack; one or more small neat 1mm diameter holes drilled right through the dried bean seed. And sure enough, a vigorous shake of the bean sieve sprinkles a number of these 2mm long culprits out onto the kitchen table; the little devils can be seen below taking this opportunity to make more bean weevil eggs!

So the hand-selected beans are placed in old coffee tins (my standard seed containers) and will spend 24 hours in the deep freezer to kill off all weevil eggs remnant in the bean seed; the bean seeds will themselves survive these low temperatures

Pumpkin pickin’

The arrival of winter is always blessed by the pumpkin harvest, which will supplement our roasts and dips for the next six months or more.

Pumpkins store well, and the sweet-flavoured Butternut Pumpkins that we grow each year are particularly fine-grained and tasty. The foliage that has covered one large garden bed has died down to expose the pumpkins lying on the ground; once the fruit can be lifted up without still clinging to the vine (which has now ‘dried off’) they are ready for storage.

Storing this volume of pumpkins (and this is only half the crop) takes some planning, as they are particularly attractive to rats, well able to chew through the hardy shell to find nourishment within...

One approach (above) has been to store them down the back shed on fruit-tree netting in a large Perspex cylinder found at an irrigation exhibition; the sides are too slippery for rats to climb. The netting allows air to get in below the pumpkins to keep them from going mouldy.

Another time we stored our crop in an old chest freezer inside the house – again, with the pumpkins laid on netting to allow air to circulate.

This pumpkin crop was planted out in late Spring from two packets of seeds worth about $7.00. This one-metre diameter ring of seeds is planted in fertile soil around a drip-line for irrigation. Once these pumpkin plants get going and spread out over all the available garden space nearby there’s no way one can get in close to the original seed bed to water, so an under-vine hose that stays in place all through summer and autumn does the job of getting moisture up to the vine roots.

Shelling beans and planting garlic

The shortest day of the year approaches, with the sun setting early in the northwest at 5.15pm in glorious palettes of red and orange below grey clouds that might finally signal the longed-for start of our winter rainfall. Cold short days bring the cook and gardener together before the fireside each evening, and a whole new suite of jobs  - notably bean shelling  and garlic splitting  - begin.

Dried beans (for seed storage ) pulled from the last of the Lazy Wife beans have been separated from the green beans, which will be cooked by boiling in salted water, pureeing, then mixing them through onion cooked gently in butter.

 

Garlic saved for seed last year is taken out of the store room and the best cloves broken out and prepared for planting. Some of these garlic cloves are beginning to sprout; nature’s signal that planting time is indeed here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The weekend comes around, and both cook and gardener can be found outside in the winter sunshine; 300 garlic cloves and about the same number of red, brown and white onions seedlings plus leek seedlings all get planted out in a single bed in a single day.

Night falls and the job’s done. By mutual consent, we declare ‘Feirerabend!’ – an evening off!