The salad greens bed: Back row; Lettuce ‘lollo rosso’, Celtuce, Lettuce ‘Australian yellow’ Middle row; Rocket, Mustard greens ‘Osaka purple’, Lettuce ‘marvel of four seasons’, (fennel). Front row; Mibuna, (Mitsuba – failed to germinate), Mizuna. Tomorrow the salad greens bed will be two months old from sowing, and they are providing some nice winter salads. The rocket is stronger in flavour than the rest, but just picking a few leaves from each of the others and throwing them together makes for a nice mesclun. The fennel was already in…
Read MoreMonth: July 2014
Sourdough with millet
I’ve been baking more often since we moved here, partly because we have lots of friends and family visiting, and partly because I have a cracker of a new oven that bakes beautifully. I usually make sourdough from my trusty starter culture that I’ve had for many years now, but I change the style with the extra flour, usually rye (sometimes with caraway), also wholemeal or fruit and nut or multi-seed, but this week I thought I’d try some of the millet flakes I’ve had in the larder for a few months.…
Read Morewattle
Even up here in subtropical northern NSW, our mid-Winter flower is the wattle. We have a nice strip of sally wattle, also called black wattle (Acacia melanoxylon) which at the moment is lighting up the gully to one side of the house. Thinking of what you can do with an abundance of wattle, I read many years ago that you can make fritters with the flowers. I’ve never been much of a deep fryer, but maybe a modern tempura take would be the…
Read MoreOur first hay cut and composting
One thing this property has is lots of grass. It grows very thick and long, and we don’t have livestock yet to keep it mown. We need to keep it down, so a week ago we got our new tractor, which is a beauty. It has a ‘four in one’ bucket at the front for moving stuff and a slasher at the back for mowing. So we have been out learning to slash the grass. The sun has shone the whole week too, with the result that there is a lot…
Read MoreCoffee processing of our first crop
First processing of home grown coffee berries Coffee processing at home takes a little practice. I ventured into the old ‘food forest’ this morning. It’s a little way from the house so I’ve only now got far enough down the list of to-dos to consider cleaning it up. There’s a lot of weeds to clear up and a good amount of tree maintenance. It was good timing, though, because the coffee is just beginning to ripen. There are a few coffee trees, but the best ones are growing under a…
Read MoreLemon myrtle
Before we moved here I only knew lemon myrtle (Backhousia citriodora) from powdered leaves I bought at the supermarket, but here we have a few trees, so I’ve been using the fresh herb.
Read MoreOnions
By all accounts the Winters here in northern NSW are too warm for standard bulbing onions, but the good news is there are other types we can grow, namely the bunching onions and shallots. That’s extra good news since I preferred to cook with shallots in Sydney, but they came at a premium price compared to ordinary brown onions, and of course here I can buy brown onions cheaply anytime. So to clarify, as there’s some confusion in terms used, shallots are the long bulbs, either golden or red, that…
Read MoreBamboo
We are lucky to have two stands of bamboo; a huge one with thick canes, and a more modest one. Here’s a photo of some of the canes I cut from the big one, with the stand in the distance. I’m no judge of height but some of the canes are taller than many trees, and that’s actually a problem as the big stand is now shading an old ‘fruit forest’, with the result that the fruit trees are tall and spindly instead of pick-able. So I don’t feel at…
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