Backfired!

The kids are cooking for the rest of the week after daring to suggest the other night that they'd rather have two-minute noodles than my home-made chicken soup.
I'm not stepping foot in the kitchen this week as a result.

Oh it's not that they can't cook, they're regular little chefs but tonight it took 3 hours and everyone got half serves 'cause the cat stole a whole chicken breast while people were stuffarsing around. 

It's almost 10pm & no one is showered or ready for bed. 

It's going to be a long, lean week...at least I have the soup.

Bigger IS Better

Just a few days before leaving on holidays my heritage 'Traveller' tomatoes started ripening. The travellers or Riesentraube were named as such because they could be torn apart in pieces and eaten a bit at a time for travellers.
My biggest so far is this .350kg!

Glassy Goods

Mason Jar Salads - my new obsession, although I'm still trying to buy some of the damn bottles so it's an academic obsession at the moment.
I love using glass rather than plastic to keep my food so this idea appeals to me. I also believe that making good food look great encourages healthy eating.
So after a frenetic fb discussion and posts flying back and forth (when I should have been cooking other peoples' food) one of my workmates actually showed up at my place of work with her own (mayonnaise) jar of salad.
Very impressive! Now the ideas are flying around inside my head as I wonder through the garden looking at my green snow peas, purple lettuce, yellow cherry tomatoes and red spring onions.
If only I had the jars! I can see a trip to the closest cheap shop is on the cards.

Toilet Humour

Is it wrong to be utterly impressed by a flushing toilet? To feel completely satisfied by the 'shushing' whirlpool behind you as you bounce a door that never quite shuts behind you.
After months of touting buckets of shower water back and forth from the 'not-quite-outhouse' (a toilet squeezed into a cramped tin-walled alleyway that separates house from shed) I'm inordinately pleased about being about being able to leave behind my business to go get on with business?

Now the shower water runs straight onto the almond, mulberry and fig trees and we've seen new fruit as a result of this new liquid bounty.

Sometimes I fear I really do aim too low.

I should put this all in context: Over the years I've become the queen of 'making do' - not quite enough money to keep up the maintenance work, not enough know-how to do it myself, not enough confidence to give it a try and too much pride to ask someone else to help.

This was all exacerbated in my first marriage where HusbandNumber1 was confident he could 'knock it together' himself. Now, to be fair, his intentions were good and today, with the help of YouTube and smart phones, I'm sure he's a whiz in the world of unblocking cracked clay pipes. But, let's just say that that marriage was a bit of a testing ground for both of us and occasionaly we bombed.

I know this because when MyMan talked about pulling up floors at the Shouse I could see my father's face start to twitch. He remembers the last time he was called in to rescue a damsel in distress whose husband had left her, mid-renovations, with a mortgage she couldn't afford and floors and walls she could see through.

As a result, I think MyMan is haunted by an imaginary deadline any time he begins work at the Shouse. When we discovered the leak in our bedroom ceiling was actually some previous tenant's bucket finally overflowing inside the roof, he was up on the lichen-licked tiles before the rain had cleared with a tarp and weighting tires - which turned into shiny new capping one weekend and a paycheque later.

Upon receiving the good news that his 12-year-old daughter was coming to live with us, it took just a weekend and two late nights to re-stump and replace the floors of what has been 'the kids' room' for more than 40 years and at least three families. One ex-tenant - who has children of his own today - tells us that he and his sister would often joke that with both their beds against walls and the floor peaking up between them, they never had to worry about falling out of bed in the night.

But all these little, well let's call them idiosynchracies, just make me love the Shouse more. I feel like an almost-20-year-old again starting out into the world on my adventures.

At the same time, my almost-40-year-old self is reassured by looking over at the clear stretch of land in front of us, with its sea views and connected utilities, knowing that when the adventure wears thin we've got a plan.

I love a plan. I can keep climbing over most hurdles if I have the horizon in sight. Now, if I can just keep up with MyMan and his deadlines we'll all get there pretty damn soon.

First Failure

My corn is an utter failure. Poo!

About a dozen stalks stand proudly over the rest of my garden, silk tufts flickering like flags in the breeze against the horizon. But it's a fraudulent scene because, beneath the layers of green, instead of juicy golden kernels I have anaemic white cobs with pale, pimply surfaces.

I knew this could happen when only a few stalks shot up and then I threw in a few more. There were too few in flower at the same time, too far apart, together with the vicious East Winds this place is named for...well that was just too much for pollination to overcome.

So, corn is my big challenge for next year.

I resolve to plant lots of it, plant it in its own bed (with beans though, of course, and maybe spinach between the stalks - just on principal) and grow it in blocks (not a wavering, broken row like I have this year).

I planted two varieties this (last) year. I'll do the same again next season, but in separate beds.

In the meantime, I'll keep watching the growing cobs in the hopes that SOME pollinated properly. Optimism, after all, appears to be the Shouse watchword.

Where are the Italians when you need them?

I have four of these little trays on the go at the moment, with a ripening banana sitting on top of each one. And I have just two or three cherry tomatoes ripening up, a roma here and there, an oxheart or two.
The big ribbed giants and the beefsteaks are only just starting to colour up here and there and suddenly I'm starting to panic about the volume of tomatoes going to have in our garden.
I may have to invite my sister-in-law's Nonna over for a month ;)
Other than that, kids, get ready for bruschetta, pizza & tomato salads - there's going to be a lot of them.

Garden Royalty

So my summer harvest has begun in all earnest and I'm starting to panic about the volume of food. My latest success is the purple beans. These are Violet Queens & Purple Kings (bush & climbing).
Sadly, they turn green when cooked - I'm trying to find the fine line between cooked & warm that my children will still eat. The ToddlerTerror isn't as keen on these raw as he is the 'matoes' & 'sorberries'

Here's someone else fascinated by purple vegies and an idea to keep their colour which I'll have to try out - preserving the purple in vegies. I wonder if lemon juice would tenderise them, without cooking out the purple?
A perfect suggestion for my early glut came from My Carolina Kitchen, looking forward to trying this for NYE visitors.
And some great bean recipes.

Back Where I Belong

It's a sunny Saturday & I've spent the morning planting my bean seedlings against a woven bamboo wind break. The plan is that the fast growing beans will provide a windbreak for the tomatoes which are taking a beating...
We will see.

Burgeoning Potential

I've been sidetracked from my garden by inconveniences such as the Black Plague, teen meltdowns and toddler surgery. So, I took a long-cut home past the Shouse the other day to check on my tomatoes. As a result I've been buying tomato cages & pouring on the old Charlie Carp to give my sudden green crop of tomatoes the added boost they need. I laugh at myself, overplanting out of pessimism and now it seems I'm going to need a really great relish recipe because I counted around 60 tomatoes on the first four plants and there's still several dozen to grow (let's call it succession planning, not panic, & pretend I meant it). The peas are done - they were measly but fun anyway, next year I'll plant quadruple the amount much earlier. The sweet potatoes are creeping across the warm ground, just in time for my local Mitre10 and the Yates Garden Guide to all decide to stock information and seedlings. (Bastards, where were they three months ago when I put in my own slips?) The herbs and chard are monstrous but I haven't hacked them back as I keep telling myself I'll get more worms. The sunflowers are up, the corn silks are peeking out, the bean seedlings are rampant and the strawberries still don't get a chance to turn more than pink before they're eaten by my boys. It amazes me that the hot weather has done more for my veg than all my coddling...that and getting mains water & a sprinkler. ...ok, now I need to find that relish recipe.