Category Archives: permaculture

Apr 13

Getting Ready for Winter in the Greenhouse

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I have had a rush of blood to the head recently with the onset of the cooler weather and some welcome time at home, and have been doing a bit of tidying up around the house and garden. After cleaning up some plants around the pergola and getting rid of some of the clutter, I turned my attention to the greenhouse and a job I had been putting off for some time

Our greenhouse has been in place for a couple of years now since a friend and I built it to pool our resources and use it as a shared facility (you can read about it here). It has been a real boon in extending the growing season for many plants and also for growing some plants that would be difficult otherwise. However. I have not really used it as well as I could partly because of the way it had been set up.

Originally, I had a section down the back of the greenhouse for my plants while my mate had the bulk for his Aloes. It was, and is, a good arrangement except for one thing. As the aloe plantings have expanded and grown it has been becoming more difficult to get to the back of the greenhouse on a regular basis. The area was being used less and less simply because it was hard to move things back and forth and to water etc. without getting caught on the spines or damaging some of the rare aloes. I had been thinking about re-arranging things to move my section to the front as it was the most used and now was the perfect opportunity as a few weeks ago my mate had taken a lot of aloes away to sell at a plant shows.

GreenhouseClean-01

 

There was a lot grunting and heaving and lifting and carrying and sweeping and more sweeping and yet more sweeping. I must have swept out about 10kg of dirt, sand and weeds!

 

 

 

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I also took the opportunity to recycle the table frame I rescued from the hard rubbish collection a while ago and a section of second hand mesh fence to build a propagation/potting table for the greenhouse.

 

 

 

 

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Securing the mesh to the table frame

 

 

 

GreenhouseTable-04

 

 

 

It turned out really well, and the only cost was the price of a few screws and a piece of scrap bracing strap for brackets.

 

 

 

GreenhouseTable-05

I also rebuilt my climbing frame ready for some winter tomatoes and cucumber. We’ll see how well they turn out.

Everything has been moved now and it is so much easier to access the area and materials like potting mix, and water the existing plants.

It’s just a matter now of cleaning the pots and get planting 🙂

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Apr 07

Music to prune by

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It was a glorious day on Sunday and the afternoon was particularly delightful

Not too hot and not cold,
not too sunny and not to dull
but…Juuust right!

A great day to clean up the area around the house and remove some of the excessive growth on the vines and trees under the carport. And what better way to do it than to set it to music.

An interesting mix of music that included music from Franz Liszt and Beethoven, “The Beatles” and “System of a Down” provided the perfect backdrop.

The grape vines needed some serious work as I wanted to untangle them from the wire netting and move them all to the front so that it will give them more room and make it easier to net them to protect against the birds

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I had to cut thegrapes04m back pretty hard but I finally got them all rearranged and ready for next season. I will get a smaller crop next year as the grapes grow on new shoots from one year old wood and I removed many of the buds that would produce grapes. However, we should get it all rather the birds! and it will be a bumper season after that.

 

 

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I also cut back the bay leaf and the passionfruit very hard to make more room and provide extra light and warmth to the the house.It was a fair bit of hard work but made all the easier listening to the music in the background 🙂

What music do you listen to in the garden?

 

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Jan 30

Mostly Homemade Cheesecake

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We had a party to go to recently and we were asked to bring a dessert. At the last minute, I remembered and thought, “Oh Oh, what are we going to bring”. I stressed for a few seconds and said, “I know, I’ll try to make a no-bake home-made cheesecake or something. How hard could it be?”

As it turns, a little harder than I wanted it to be. However, a short time later, I had modified my plans and decided to just do the filling and buy a flan and some pastry cases. I had seen a few simple recipes and  to based my attempt on some of those.

I ended up making a lemon filling and an apricot filling using Ricotta cheese (from the shop) and ingredients from the garden (or made from ingredients from the garden). I was pleasantly pleased with how they turned out.

Lemon Filling in Pastry Shells

Lemon Filling in Pastry Shells

Apricot Cheesecake

Apricot Cheesecake

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here’s how I did it. None of the measures are exact and I’m sure there are other ways to do it but this way seemed to work and it was so easy.

Lemon filling Apricot Filling
250g Ricotta cheese
Two tablespoons Honey
Two tablespoons Natural Yoghurt (optional)
Grated rind of one Lemon
Juice of one Lemon		 250g Ricotta cheese
Two tablespoons Honey
Two tablespoons Natural Yoghurt (optional)
Half teaspoon Vanilla essence
100g Apricot jam with fruit pieces
Beating the Ricotta (and Yoghurt)

Beating the Ricotta (and Yoghurt)

 

The basic technique is the same for both just make sure the Ricotta is at room temperature before you start beating it to make sure it becomes smooth with no little lumps. I just used a fork to beat the mixture, it doesn’t take long. The optional Yoghurt gives it a real creamy texture.

 

 

 

Adding the Honey

Adding the Honey

Beat in the honey. We used home grown honey from our busy little bees in the backyard but commercial honey will do just fine. You can use more or less honey according to your tastes but add it one spoon at a time and taste because some honey has a very strong flavour.

If you use more honey you may need to reduce the yoghurt so the mix doesn’t get too runny.

 

 

The wonderful Smell of Lemon Rind

The wonderful Smell of Lemon Rind

Add the lemon rind and juice last because it will stiffen the mixture. The lemon also came from the garden.

With the second batch we used home made apricot jam (made with our own apricots – Oh, and some of the neighbour’s 🙂 ) instead of the lemon. You can also add vanilla essence but not too much. If you are using commercial jam, get one with lots of fruit and with little chunks of real fruit. Add these last as well.

 

Use the mixture to fill the flan or pastry shells. You can also cook up some crepes and roll up the mixture in those.  Put them in the refrigerator for at least an hour and they will get quite firm, unlike the gooey mess the supermarket versions become.

These should keep a week in the fridge and will continue to improve in flavour. However, It’s difficult to know for sure as ours were gone well before then. 😀

A lot of the ingredients came from the garden and it’s possible to make it even more homemade if you want to. For example you could have a go at making your own ricotta. There are a number of sites that show how to make ricotta including this one by a mate of mine http://www.littlegreencheese.com/search/label/Ricotta

But it doesn’t matter if the ingredients are home grown or shop bought, it’s such a simple and delicious recipe and only take minutes to prepare, why not give it a go.

 

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Jan 03

Gone to Seed

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parsnips-gone-to-seed

Coming home after being away for several weeks I expected to find the garden a bit overgrown. But even so, I was very surprised to see how much everything had overgrown. I had also left some veggies to go to seed but I certainly didn’t expect to see this!

When I first saw them I thought, parsley? No, parsley self seeds all over the back yard as do the carrots, but it wasn’t parsley. AHA! Carrots! Giant carrots? Nope!  I had a closer look at where they were in the garden bed and then realised… PARSNIPS!   😯

I could hardly believe it, but there they were. I’m not sure if I have ever seen parsnips go to seed before but I didn’t think they would get this big !

Hopefully those seeds produce a bumper crop YUM! 😀

 

 

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Nov 05

A Taste of Honey

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Well, after all the madness with the Swarms over the last few weeks it was a relief to settle down and extract some honey this weekend. I collected four swarms and apparently missed two more over the last five weeks and managed to sell one to a friend of a friend. That leaves me with five to manage which is more than I had planned but it is still do-able. If it seems to be too much effort I can always combine a couple to reduce the total number.

Using a friend’s two frame extractor I extracted 14kg from 9 frames, I was expecting a bit more but quite a few frames were not yet full or had brood in them. But that’s OK I wasn’t after a huge yield and I’m not currently using queen excluders.

I like to get a hive done in one hit and then return the extracted frames (stickies) to the hive for cleanup and refilling. It also helps me to keep the frames in the same hive as much as possible to minimise the spread of disease. Because I only have a few hives to manage it’s pretty easy. With a lot more hives I imagine it would be more difficult to keep track of the frames and hives.

Of course, while doing all this, I have been listening to a lot of honey related music including this old favourite.

What’s your favourite track with the word Honey?

 

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