birthday dessert ideas: spring

Showing posts with label spring. Show all posts

Showing posts with label spring. Show all posts

My Vegetable Garden: November 2013

In an effort to learn from past mistakes, this year I have simplified my summer vegetable garden. I am growing fewer things with the hope that I can supply adequate water and attention to each one. The garden itself is smaller than in previous years, about 16 metres square (4m x4m).

In my garden there are three already large self-seeded cherry tomato plants, six other Heirloom tomatoes (two Black Krim, two Mortgage Lifter, two Oxheart), green beans, cucumbers, four eggplants, four capsicums, garlic, self-seeded celery and carrots, and two zucchini plants. Usually a few pumpkin vines pop up from seeds in the compost and worm castings I use as fertiliser, but none have done so yet.

What are you growing in your garden?

Lebanese cucumbers (left) and climbing beans (right)

Jacarandas

I took these photos at the University of Adelaide where the jacarandas are in full bloom.

Jacarandas are the most regal trees, dressed as they are in purple, but while they lift the spirits of most people, for students at school and university they herald the arrival of end of year exams.

Earlier this year my local council chopped down the struggling, stunted trees on the nature strip in front of my house. I was delighted to be told they were to be replaced with jacarandas.

One November day, years from now, I will look out my front door to a glorious canopy of purple.

Wishful Thinking

apple

nectarine

almond

lime

plum

In late spring my garden is full of babies. There are baby limes and oranges, apples, nectarines, plums and almonds.

I find myself wishing it were later in the growing season. I imagine all I would like to do with the produce I am growing: crumbles and cakes, jams and jellies, and most of all, luscious fruit eaten straight from the tree. I check my trees daily for new growth and look forward to the abundance ahead.

In spring, I have to remind myself not to be too impatient, not to 'wish my life away'. After all, between now and harvest there may be heatwaves and rainless months where fruit falls from the trees or burns so that it is inedible. There will definitely be birds and bugs that find my fruit crops as appealing as I do.

Do you ever suffer from gardening impatience? Are the crops you imagine bigger and better than the real thing?

The First Flush

For a few brief weeks in springtime the roses in my garden give a magnificent display and then, sadly, a run of hot days makes the blossoms wilt and fade.

There will be later flushes of flowers, but none are so wonderful as the first burst of blossoms each spring.

Saturday Morning

What a lovely way to spend Saturday morning, sitting in the sun watching Will swim and reading my new library book.

Maybe next week I'll bring my bathers and do a few laps - or maybe not.

Trick or Treat

I know I say this every year, but Halloween in Australia is a truly weird event.

There is something very peculiar about trick-or-treating on a sunny spring evening with the roses all around in full bloom.

Despite scary costumes and houses decorated with fake cobwebs and plastic pumpkins, Halloween in Australia is not the least bit frightening - although it can be a lot of fun.

My 10 year old helped distribute lollies for a family friend then visited some of the decorated houses in our neighbourhood with me - it is an unwritten rule around here that you only trick-or-treat those who indicate by sign or decoration that they wish to be disturbed.

He wore a costume he has owned for several years, chatted happily to school friends we passed as we wandered along, and then we went home for tea.

How do you celebrate Halloween (if at all)?

Almond Blossoms

My little almond tree has its first tentative blossoms, one of the first signs of spring in my garden.

I love this little tree. It is a soft shell almond which means that the almonds can be peeled easily by hand and there is no brown outer coating. Even in its first summer the tree produced around fifty almonds. I am looking forward to next summer's crop which will ripen in late December.

When I think about almond blossoms I think of Vincent van Gogh's 'almond blossoms' paintings. Unlikely so much of his work, they are happy, optimistic paintings filled with the joy of early spring.

Vincent van Gogh, Almond Blossoms, 1890

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a9/Vincent_van_Gogh_-_Blossoming_Almond_Branch_in_a_Glass_with_a_Book.jpg

Vincent van Gogh, Blossoming Almond Branch in a Glass with a Book, 1888

Sweetness is prettiness

Se soubessem como eu adoro estes suportes para ovo - antigos, da Fábrica de Loiças de Sacavém, são umas peças herdadas da minha mãe e que me lembram a minha infância... Sobraram quatro, dois dos quais estão partidos. Se alguém souber onde se podem encontrar mais, diga-me, por favor. Adorava decorar uma mesa com estes detalhes...

If you could imagine how I love these egg cups - they're vintage pieces made by an old portuguese company and I inherited them from my mother... Such sweet childhood memories!... I have four of them, two of which are broken, so if someone knows where to find similar ones, please tell me - I would love to decorate a table with such beauties...

The Last Broad Beans

The beauty of eating truly seasonally is that by the time we have eaten our way through a glut, whether broad beans or zucchinis, we can't bear the thought of eating them again until the next year's crop appears.

Home-Made Mint Sauce

Mint sauce is the perfect accompaniment for roast lamb. And mint sauce is easy, quick and economical to make, especially if you have fresh mint in your backyard or in a pot.

Mint Sauce

1 Tbsp boiling water

2 Tbsp sugar

2 Tbsp finely chopped mint (I use spearmint)

2 Tbsp white vinegar

Dissolve sugar in water over a low heat or in the microwave. Stir in mint and vinegar. Cool before serving.

Chillies for Tomatoes

A couple of days ago I put out a plea for assistance on Facebook because sparrows and blackbirds keep digging up my newly-planted vegetable seedlings. I have had several seedling casualties in the past week.

One suggestion which seemed worth trying was to scatter chillies around the seedlings. I guess the taste of the chillies is supposed to deter the birds.

As you can see, I scattered some dried chilli flakes around my seedlings today and will wait and see whether the flakes are an effective deterrent. I'll keep you posted.

Do you have any tips for protecting seedlings from energetic birds?

A Bike Ride to the Botanical Gardens

A gloriously mild and sunny Saturday afternoon seemed the perfect opportunity to go for a bike ride to the Adelaide Botanical Gardens with my husband and youngest son.

Photos were more difficult to take than usual in the gardens because I had to stay clear of all the wedding parties (we counted four, although there may have been more). And I bet each of those wedding parties was glad to have today's balmy weather rather than last Thursday's, when it snowed in parts of Adelaide for the first time in October since 1899.

I had felt rather out-of-sorts today until I went on my bike ride, but a visit to the gardens and exercise were the best medicine possible. My more usual sense of optimism has now been restored.

Beans with a History

Way back in the late 1950s an Italian man from Calabria brought bean seeds to Adelaide to start a vegetable garden in his new country. Since then, every year, he, his children, then grand children, and now great grandchildren, have faithfully planted the descendants of that first batch of seeds.

Today I was given some of those bean seeds by the Italian gentleman's great granddaughter Sandra, who works with me.

Sandra says the beans are snake beans, and must not be allowed to grow too big or they lose their tenderness.

She told me that her great grandfather also brought persimmons and figs to Australia, which have since become persimmon and fig trees that appear in many of the family's gardens.

I feel honoured to have been given these seeds, and look forward to planting them, watching them grow, and hopefully saving some seeds to pass down to future generations of my own family.

Oranges and Carrots

The carrots and oranges in my garden are both ready for picking right now, which makes for some very orange-coloured - but tasty - snacks.

Home-grown carrots smell completely different, and somehow more carroty, than commercial carrots, and sometimes grow in weird and twisted shapes. The fun of digging up carrots is that you can't tell whether you have a monster or a beauty until it's out of the ground.

I have had mixed success growing carrots in the past. However, this year I dug the soil over deeply, mixed through a tray of worm castings and voila, a few months later my best crop ever.

Our orange tree, is a magnificent specimen which bears masses of fruit each year. The oranges look ripe in July but are lip-puckeringly sour until September. At the moment they are deliciously sweet and juicy and we raid the tree every few days (with a ladder, now that the lower fruit has been picked).

The local possums enjoy my oranges too, but there are plenty to share.

What are you harvesting at the moment?

Spring Magic

This has been the most magical of springs. The days have been cloudlessly blue and the sun warm and bright. After two and a half years in this house my young fruit trees I are growing beautifully and promise great harvests to come. I have planted my summer vegetables and am excitedly watching them grow.

Life is good.

Bananas at Last

When I came home from the supermarket with bananas, my daughter said, "we must be rich, we have bananas".

It's felt like that this year, hasn't it, with bananas often $13-$15 a kilo since the cyclones last summer. Like most Australians, I suspect, we had gone many months without bananas prior to this recent splurge.

My brother, who moved to Sweden mid-year bought Chilean bananas at $1.95 per kilo and wrote on his Facebook page, "Finally, affordable bananas."

While I am overall opposed to the importation of fruit we Aussies can grow ourselves, I'm not clear why we protect the banana industry when we don't, for instance, protect the apple industry against cheaper imports.

Thankfully, prices are now dropping and should hopefully be normal in the next month or two - that is, until the next cyclone season.

Spring Roses

Freshly cut; waiting to go into the house.

Magical Mystery Birthday Tour

Yesterday was my birthday, a birthday filled with surprises.

For weeks my husband had told me that we were going out somewhere on the day, but he wouldn't say where. He said he wasn't going to buy me a present in advance, because there would be things to buy when we arrived at our destination.

As we drove up Main North Road I quickly worked out that we were heading for the Barossa Valley, although I didn't know which part. Eventually, the sign for "The Pheasant Farm" gave the game away - we were having lunch at Maggie Beer's famous Pheasant Farm!

This was a most wonderful surprise as I have been a fan of Maggie Beer for years. I thoroughly enjoyed my game terrine and the post-lunch walk around the lake.

After lunch, B told the kids that today was Mum's day and that our next activity was to go antiquing (their idea of torture). I had a lovely time wandering through a number of antique shops in the little Barossa towns we passed through. We also visited the Barossa Museum at Tanunda, full of fascinating artifacts from the early German settlers.

Throughout the day the sun shone gently on us as we passed vineyard after vineyard, the leaves newly emerging on the grapevines. In the orchards the stone-fruit and apple trees were in blossom or had delicate, new leaves. The entire landscape was green and lush after the winter rains.

Some birthdays pass by uneventfully, but this one was one I will never forget.