Fantastic Mr firedrum

Briony bought me this fabulous firedrum made by a local blacksmith for my birthday in 2007. It is the best gift I ever received. It is fantastic to sit around and watch the flames flicker through the moon and firesprite shaped holes. It also turns out to make an excellent hibachi style cooker with a grill on top as well as the best super high temperature wok burner.
With a small amount of wood - a few sticks or pine cones - I can get a flame that's hot enough to burn my legs and that lasts for long enough to do a stir fry


This time I made a version of the Thai dish with prawns (which we didn't grow), holy basil, garlic, snow peas, bok choy and chillis (which we did).


The super-high heat of the wok lends such a special char flavour that can't be replicated on the stove

Summer solstice garden progress

It's a week or so late but here are some snaps of the garden so you can see how things are growing in December here is Tassie.

Tomato vines are a metre or so high with good fruit set.


eggplant bushes are growing well and just flowering


Tomatillos are growing at their usual frenetic pace and look like they'll once again give us enough salsa verde for the year


Corn is almost one foot tall and looking good after a shakey start.


If the long-range forecast is correct - a warmer than average summer - then hopefully all of this stuff will ripen before the cold weather comes back.

Christmas food

Christmas is mostly a great excuse for eating yummy food although the kids do like to receive some presents. Being in the southern hemisphere, our christmas delicacies are different to what you might be used to.
We have raspberries, boysenberries and redcurrants, with which we made a summer pudding


cherries, which we just eat


new potatoes like these pink eyes and pink fir apples


and green beans, spinach and sour cherries which go fantastically with confit duck leg.

Garlic, garlic, garlic

One of our staple crops is garlic. The dogma is "plant on the shortest day of the year and harvest on the longest" but in practice we tend to plant earlier (April to May) to give the bulbs more growing time.

This year we harvested in the first week of December as the heads had formed and with all of the late rain were best not left in the wet. It was a great year with well formed and large bulbs which we dried on the kids trampoline for a week or so, before cleaning and hanging under our verandah.


We have about 400 heads which is enough for our year's eating and seed for next year. This variety that we have grown is some unknown purple variety that is large and tastes great but keeps OK.


We found another variety which is also purplish but a hard-necked one that kept for a full year. Right now we are bulking up this variety to grow for next year.

rows & hoes

When we started vegie gardening it was on a small scale. We made raised beds, usually with edges made of wood or bricks we planted haphazardly and we mulched to keep weeds at bay. As we've expanded, this has become impractical. There is just too much bed area to mulch and when weeds do come up, as they inevitably do unless the mulch is very thick, there's too much area to weed.
In market gardens, things are grown in neat rows in a large tilled area that may or may not have slightly raised beds. With neat rows and no edging, it's easy to walk along with a sharp hoe and weed a huge are in a short time.
So, that's how we grow our annual crops now. We plant in rows of slightly raised beds roughly 70cm wide with 40cm paths in between


With these three hoes, the Ho-mi (left), Dutch hoe (middle) and nameless hook-shaped hoe (right) we keep the beds in shape and without (too many) weeds.


The Ho-mi is not sharpened and is used for hilling and trenching, for potatoes, for example, or keeping the edges of the beds well shaped. The dutch and hook hoe are sharpened very sharply, to cut rather than drag weeds. The dutch hoe is pushed back and forth along straight, open runs of soil. The blade runs just on the surface and slices the weeds off.


The hook hoe is used to manouevre around plants and also slices off weeds. this is our most used hoe. It's a really quick and satisfying way to weed. A whole 25 metre long bed can be done in about 10 minutes.