spring harvest

nectarines were a plenty on our fruit salad tree this spring. the mint went wild with all the rain, so did the sorrel, kale potatoes, beans, peas and parsley.  our plums and peaches didn't fruit and while my lemon flowered profusely, fruit never came.
growing food take a few more tricks than i've managed to muster, but the rain has certainly sent the garden into a busy growth spurt.

after spending the winter months in Orange reporting on rural topics for the ABC, i have an increased awe for the people who grow the food we eat.  so much hangs on the whims of the weather, be it too dry or too wet, getting perfect conditions to grow a perfect crop is near on impossible.





herbs are my crop of choice, you can neglect them and they survive most of the time.  we've started a small kitchen garden in the front yard, right outside our kitchen, further away from the bush turkey nest in the back yard, its fared pretty well without a fully enclosed garden cage.  cherry tomatoes and basil are in full swing artichokes are flowering their bright flame mauve and the thyme hangs in, despite being trampled by busy little feet running past on a regular basis.

broad bean salad fresh from the garden, peeled, blanched and dressed in olive oil, salt, lemon juice and fresh parsley.

blue bower

we visited Sim and Matt in the Blue Mountains a few weeks ago.  they've just purchased a block of land and are embarking on the grand adventure of building their home.  This blue bower was nestled in their garden - see how the Bower Bird has shaped the grass - so beautiful!

loripeets

Gully called them that when he was little and it's stuck.  we have five totally wild,noisy and crazy 'runners' in an avery up the back of the garden - our small way of assisting Judith with her Wildlife Ark bird rescue.  our lorikeets have psittiscine circo virus, more commonly known as beak and feather.  their flying wings have not developed, hence the name runner.  they can't fly.  we rescued our first bird, Jasper about august last year.  i was on my way to pick Gully up from school when i heard a commotion and saw a crow and a kookaburra attacking him in the mud below a mangrove tree.  Judith showed us how to care for him and lent us her spare avery.  because the virus can spread to other psittiscine species (parrots), we offer a local isolation recovery ward for lorikeets.  Jasper has long since recovered and flown off.  he was so tame when we first got him, we could hold him and could have focussed on taming him, but we decided to let him stay wild in the hope he would recover. here he is enjoying fresh flowers picked by Gully, River and Akira.  at least two more of our birds are recovering and growing their flight wings the other three don't look so promising.  we named our first two birds Jasper and Jack after Gully and River's cousins.  the new ones are baby one, baby two, baby three and baby four.

cucumbers and chillies

Charlie and the boys harvested our first hand of bananas today.  they're strung up outside Charlie's office in the back yard.  tiny little finger bananas - we'll keep them on the stalk and hope they ripen.  cucumbers, chillies and pumpkins are all thriving, rhubarb is making a comeback, lettuce doing well, eggplant and capsicums are in flower... parsley, borage and rocket are sprouting.  there are eight lemons on the maya tree, two on the fruit salad citrus and three ruby red grapefruit coming along - the few that survived the baby fruit cull. i tried to pull off the baby fruit for the first two years while the trees establish, but it felt so sad pulling off over thirty plums, and all the other baby fruits on the trees, i left a few lemons on the maya tree.  the grapefruit snuck under the radar, i'm so pleased they did.

eggs

I went to wish Leah a happy birthday this morning and came home with a dozen fresh eggs from her chooks!
David and Leah have four beautiful chooks in the bottom of their garden and they're in fine laying spirits.
This photo is from the markets in Mondulkiri, Cambodia, black eggs were very popular there. In fact all sorts of eggs are very popular in Cambodia.  People would put whole eggs with shell on skewers and smoke them or steam them. They would number the eggs 1-5 - referring to days. Apparently 3 days  is very tasty, we didn't ever try - the number refers to the age of the chick in the shell.

what a lovely bunch of bananas!

Misha and Mandy gave us three banana tree suckers november before last - this is our first hand.

first summer harvest

cos lettuce in flower

My vege patch was looking a little under the weather today, so after over a month of not watering it, I caved in this evening.  Yesterday was supremely hot and a few of my plants look dead. Our vege patch has been a very consuming project over the past two years.  Charlie has built a huge cage to protect the plants from the alpha male bush (brush) turkey who has made his mound in our neighbour's yard.  This is his third nesting season with us and we find ourselves extending garden protection defences every year to guard our precious plants from his obsessive raking of leaves and mulch and digging for sweet roots and worms.  I spotted a baby turkey in our garden last week and I hope this means papa turkey will stop this season's raking soon.


The grass is growing high against the chicken wire enclosure and it's going to seed, making the garden look really quite messy.  I'm not looking forward to the grass weeding, but I have to get into it soon. The diversity of edible plants, my ad-hoc version of companion planting, is working though and my veges are thriving. Zucchinis, cucumbers, pumpkins, lettuce, cherry tomatoes, parsley, rocket and bok choy have all re-seeded from last year's crops.  This spring I harvested my very first purple artichokes, baby carrots and spanish onions!  I have corn on the way and my leeks are getting really big! This morning River and I ate about 10 strawberries and the blueberries are starting to fruit too.

french purple artichoke flowering like an edible waratah

the heat has woken our resident diamond python

mother duck and ducklings waiting for their breakfast