Moss curled endive was a treat vegetable when we were living in an apartment. I didn’t often see ones that looked appealing to buy, and they can be tough and bitter. In Sydney they tend to be sold with the outer leaves pulled back and tied together, so they look a bit odd and inside-out. These ones from the garden have been quiet achievers. I sowed them back at the end of May and they sat in their half-row, not doing much but surviving the dry weather well. As with most…
Read MoreCategory: Gardening
Time for sowing
Spring is feeling near and we have hopefully left any cold nights behind, not that we had many, but most importantly it has been raining after a very long dry spell. I see that other gardeners in the region have been winding back their vegetable planting until wet weather returns, so I guess there will be a lot of people out getting their hands dirty now. The forecast is for showers for at least a week, so it’s a good time to get the last of the August seeds in,…
Read MorePlanting citrus for Spring
We were in at Tweed Heads (our closest city, on the Gold Coast) on Sunday, and bought six citrus saplings to plant for Spring. They were reasonably priced, come from a local nursery, and most importantly looked healthy. In Spring here citrus have a big flush of new leaves and flowers, and it is important to catch the growth spurt to get the most out of the season. I have a lot to learn yet about citrus care in the subtropics, but I’m giving it a go. Looking around at properties here you…
Read MoreMaking kimchi from thinnings.
Yesterday I was out checking the veggie plot and thought I should thin the beetroot. Beets come as compound seeds, and so they can germinate in bunches, and because they have been fairly slow to get going I didn’t have the heart to thin them when I should have. Now I’ve got big plants squashed together. It’s not survival of the fittest among beets in the garden, so it was well time to pull the smaller ones to make room for the big’uns. Then I thought I should do the…
Read MoreDaikon
Daikon is not a vegetable that I bought often, maybe because it tends to be sold as big specimens that seem daunting to get through, but when they’re home grown they’re more appealing. I sowed these at the end of May, and after a slow start they are off and jostling with the turnips next door. A feel around during a weeding revealed a shoulder, so I pulled one to see how they’re going (and thin them a bit). The result was not a huge root, so apparently they can…
Read MoreTurnips
Turnips are only second to radishes for quick root crops. My carrots are still tiny, the beetroots are not far ahead, but the turnips sprouted luxuriant greens and started showing their purple shoulders after about 6 weeks. I needed to thin them, and we were having salmon for dinner, so I pulled three to go with. The cultivar is ‘purple top white globe’, from Eden seeds. I put in ‘gold ball’ in the same sowing, but they haven’t done well, and have been overshadowed by their neighbours. They were delicious.
Read MoreSalad greens
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 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 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 More