end of summer garden update

sad sign of autumn: dead tomato plant

joyful sign of autumn: feijoa ripening on tree

but signs of summer still remain: roma tomatoes

jingle bells mini capsicums ripening

oregano, mrs burns lemon & red rubin basil

green sausage tomatoes

mesculn

an end of summer harvest: assorted tomatoes, chillis and mini capsicums

Now...

What to plant for winter?

pimp my blog/summer garden update

Welcome to the newly pimped goodness of creating! I'm quite stoked with my novice blogging and html efforts. There are still a couple of random Spanish words around the place that I'm trying to figure out how to get rid of (like "Comentario"). Any advice would be appreciated!

With a new look also comes a new resolution to post more often, and try and actually post some recipes to go under the new recipe list I created. I know its early days, but it's good to be organised! So be prepared to hear from me more regularly this year, and hopefully I will also hear from other bloggers more often too! *hint hint*

Freshly dug: purple dragon, nutri-red, and egmont gold carrots

One thing I will be posting about regularly is my edible garden. I'm still relatively new to the gardening arena, so keeping a record of what worked and what didn't will hopefully help me learn from my experiences and get better. Although seed packets advise you on the number of days till harvesting, etc., it actually depends on the climate in your own garden. Auckland weather is quite different from the majority of New Zealand, and is more subtropical, so it does take a bit of trial and error to find optimum planting times. Any gardening advice is appreciated, and hopefully I can offer a few of my own gems of wisdom that I learn along the way.

Dynamo tomato flowers

The garden is in full swing at the moment. Almost more tomatoes than we can eat, a decent crop of colourful carrots (pictured above), chilli peppers and capsicums growing steadily, strawberries still going strong, and jersey benne potatoes ready for harvesting. We're loving not having to buy produce. We haven't even been to the farmers market for ages because we don't need to. For my birthday I got a dwarf meyer lemon and dwarf tahitian lime - exciting! But I hate that I'll have to wait a few years till I can taste them...

Cocozelle zucchini plant in its happier days

There have been a couple of casualties though. My lone zucchini plant was going strong, giving us a zucchini every day or so, until it was struck by the dreaded powdery mildew. I gave it a milk spray two times but no luck. Now it appears to have given up. Due to lack of watering while we were on our Christmas holiday, some of the tomato plants are suffering from blossom end rot. Once you have blossom end rot, I hear there is not much you can do. The green sausage tomatoes were the hardest hit, but I've still managed to get a couple ok ones off there. I'm experimenting with a few varieties of tomato this summer so we will see who comes out on top. So far dynamo is the winner. What varieties do you rate or want to try?

Currently in the ground/pots:

tomatoes (1 black krim, 5 dynamo, 1 roma, 2 green sausage, 1 garden peach)
chillis (2 asian fire)
mini capsicum (1 jingle bells)
zucchini (1 cocozelle)
potatoes (jersey benne)
strawberries
cos lettuce
mesculn
dwarf beans (total waste of time!)

Herbs:

bay tree
basil (mrs burns lemon, red rubin, sweet genovese)
coriander
chives
sage
thyme
italian flat-leaf parsley
mint

New kinds I want to try growing this year:

kale (caverlo nero)
spinach
sprouting broccoli/broccolini
different kinds of potatoes

tomato delight

These are the first black krim and dynamo tomatoes from our garden this summer...

homegrown new potatoes

We were having friends over for dinner, so we decided to show off a bit by serving them new potatoes from our own garden. The varieties are jersey benne and urenika (purple ones). I thought I had already pulled out the whole urenika plant, I was quite surprised when these babies turned up among the jersey bennes. We ate them pure - boiled with butter. We were so proud.

on rocket and what to do with it

Go to any cafe and you will notice that rocket (or arugula in the USA) is quite the "in vogue" salad green at the moment. It has a strong peppery taste that makes it a nice change from plain lettuce, and what's more, it is super easy to grow yourself. I sowed a packet of organic rocket seeds this afternoon in a long trough. You can use any container, even a bucket or ice-cream container with a few holes nailed in the bottom for drainage. It depends on how much you want to grow.


The method is simple: Fill the container with potting mix up to about a couple of inches from the top. Cover with a thin layer of seed raising mix (I use Yates Black Magic). Scatter seeds over entire surface. I recently heard that you should scatter them as thick as you would hundreds and thousands lollies over a cake, but that depends on how much you like hundreds and thousands! You get the idea though. Cover with another thin layer of seed raising mix, and press down gently. Water gently either with a watering can with a rose sprinkler end, or pour water through your fingers. It is important to keep the soil moist until the seeds germinate, but not too wet. As the leaves are big enough, just snip them off as you need them, rather than harvesting the whole plant.


This is part of my sister-in-law Jeni's garden, bursting with rocket. I'm so jealous of her real garden, when I just have a community of pots! But the question is, what else can you do with this abundance of rocket besides eat salad for every meal? Because of its peppery, herby nature, rocket is actually quite versatile. A few weeks ago I made pasta with rocket and chilli pesto, which was really good. No, pesto isn't just for basil. You can make it out of coriander, parsley, rocket, even broccoli. It depends on your tastebuds really. Let me share this yummy recipe with you. Its quite simplistic and a nice change from meat focussed meals (although my husband my disagree with me there).

To make pesto from this recipe, add some olive oil to the rocket mixture until it is the consistency you like, and store in a jar in the fridge for a few weeks, covered with a layer of oil to stop it going brown.

Pasta with Rocket and Chilli Pesto
Serves 2

200g quality dried pasta (eg. spaghetti)
large handful rocket leaves
1/2 cup roasted pinenuts or almonds
1 tsp crushed garlic
1/4 tsp chopped fresh chilli
zest and juice of 1/2 lemon
1/2 tsp salt and pepper
1 tbsp finely grated parmesan

1. Cook pasta to packet instructions.

2. Meanwhile, blitz rocket in a food processor with nuts, garlic, chilli, lemon, salt and pepper and parmesan.

3. Drain cooked pasta, saving 1/4 cup cooking water. Mix reserved cooking water with rocket mixture then toss through pasta until evenly combined.

Recipe adapted from Assemble by Annabel Langbein

Also check out these recipes for potato, red onion and rocket soup; roasted tomato, red onion and rocket tart; quiche of blue cheese, rocket and tomatoes; roasted pear and rocket tarts. If you have any other ideas for uses for rocket, please post a comment and let me know because I think I'm going to have a lot of it in a month or so!

Why would you eat out when you have this at home every night!

preserved lemons and puny carrots

And the lemon obsession continues...

Most Moroccan dishes call for preserved lemons, so I decided to have a go at making some myself. I love lemons and Moroccan flavors so this sounds like my kinda food. Armed with half of the bag of lemons from the farmer's market yesterday, this was the result:


Preserved Lemons

The basic process is:

1. Quarter the lemons and coat with salt.

2. Put a layer of salt in the bottom of a sterilised jar, layer up the lemons with a layer of salt in between each layer, and finish with a layer of salt on top. You've gotta use a lot of salt.

3. Squish down to push out the juices, and add extra lemon juice to cover everything.

4. Leave at room temp for 3 weeks, shaking once a day. I've heard that they keep in the fridge for up to a year. We like that!

Recipe originally from Hungry Tiger.

To use, you only use the rind, which will be soft and tasty. Give them a rinse if adding to a salty dish. Slice it up and add to a tagine (a Moroccan casserole). I'm going to try this recipe for Tagine of Chicken with Lemon and Olives by Julie Le Clerc. You can also use preserved lemons with a variety of styles of food. I found this list of uses from Hungry Tiger. Now I just have to wait 3 weeks until I can try them out.

By the way, we pulled up our first 2 carrots today. Although the second one's hardly much of a carrot - it's barely a mouthful! We're not quite self-sufficient yet...

an abundance of herbs (or a bit of a show off)

Being the end of autumn, my annual herbs are bursting out of their pots, so I couldn't resist having a bit of a show off. You've got to love the subtropical Auckland weather! My friend Rachael came over last week despairing that something was eating her basil and it seemed to be shrinking rather than growing. Needless to say, my overflowing pots weren't much of an encouragement to her! I'm putting off pulling them out because I'm not sure what to use them for. Pesto is the obvious use for basil, but the coriander? Maybe coriander pesto would work too? Will have to experiment. I've heard you can freeze herbs so maybe that's worth trying. You know what they say: you just can't beat a good handful of fresh herbs.

Coriander - my favourite (but my husband's least)

Basil