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.

tomato trellising

After a few years of growing tomatoes in Oyster Cove's mild, maritime summers, we've found that pruning and trellising the tomatoes, as opposed to letting them grow multiple shoots makes for bigger, tastier and earlier fruit. We get less numbers of fruit per plant but they're bigger and we just plant a few more. In previous years we've used wooden stakes and trained the plants to two shoots - one on either side of the stake. This year we increased our numbers of plants to 40+ and so thought that staking and tying would become too laborious. Hence this method which is an older market garden one.

We set steel posts into concrete at the end of each row. These were not set directly but into sleeves so that the posts could be removed at the end of the season for easy tractoring. 3.5mm wire was tensioned between the posts using a gripple.

Plants were spaced at 60cm directly under the wire.

Baling twine was wrapped around the base of each plant and then tied to the top wire to form a "V" with the plant at its vertex.

These plants are then trained to only two shoots. Here's how:

Find the first flower cluster and then locate the secondary shoot growing out in the "armpit" between the stem and the leaf just below the flower. This one plus the main shoot (that is growing on above the flower) are saved. 

The extra shoot at the bottom is pinched off as are ALL other shoots. As the stems grow they are wound around the strings. This is much quicker and easier than using ties.

If the shoots make it to the top of the string, we'll just cut them off. This won't kill the plants and will allow all energy to be directed to fruit production.

laap pet

You might be forgiven for thinking that we only eat pasta. You might also think that Tasmania is cold and it would be too hard to grow the right things for, say, a Thai laap salad. Not so.
When we were in Chiang Mai (Northern Thailand) some years ago we ate a delicious laap made with duck. Apparently duck is the more traditional meat for this salad. I have been meaning to make a duck (pet means duck in Thai - they're not really our pets) laap for ages but only got around to it now.


The duck breasts, partially thawed, are much easier to mince. I use a sharp chinese cleaver and chop seeking a coarse mince.


The most critical ingredient in laap, I think, is roasted rice powder. Toast some rice in a dry pan and then pulverise it.


In a pan on medium heat, cook (don't fry it should start stewing in its own juices) the duck with sliced lemongrass, chopped garlic and a pinch of sugar. Just as it's cooked, add quite a bit of roasted rice powder stir through and remove from the heat and allow to cool to lukewarm. Transfer to bowl and dress to taste with fish sauce, lemon juice ( should be limes but our tree is a few years off production yet), black pepper. Toss through some sliced onion, chopped mint and coriander and then spoon it over torn lettuce leaves (we used green mignonette and red oak). I sprinkled over the duck skin which I sliced and turned into duck crackling. This is not traditional but I wanted to use the skin and, I think, it's a great addition. It's best served over steamed sticky (glutinous) rice with lots of chopped chillis and consumed with cold, home-brewed beer.

orechietti primavera

It's really starting to feel as though the garden is getting back into productivity after the late winter/early spring minimum. The greens taste so full of life and vitamins. To go with this bounty


we made some hand-shaped orechietti. Our neighbours, who visited for dinner helped out (otherwise they weren't going to get fed). The "sauce" was made by sweating some leeks and carrot in a lot of extra virgin olive oil. Each ingredient was added succesively depending on how long it would take to cook. The green garlic, baby broad beans (in shell cut into 1 inch pieces), fennel bulb, shallot flower stems, articoke hearts, shelled broad beans. This was then tossed with the cooked orechietti, chopped flat-leaf parsley, more olive oil and lots of black pepper and cheese. It tasted pretty good.

Fried oysters

Oyster Cove, where we live, is a really beautiful place. It's quiet and beautiful down on the water and there are thousands of feral Pacific oysters sitting on the rocks just waiting to be harvested. Surprisingly, hardly anyone eats them. I think if we lived in Asia or in southern Europe, all of the oysters would have been picked off by now.
We like eating them raw with a bottle of hot sauce in one hand and a beer or margharita in the other right there on the shore. Some people who don't like them raw might like to try this method of cooking.

Take shucked and rinsed oysters and drain them well. Soak them in a mix of beaten egg thinned with a dash of milk. "Crumb" them in medium or coarse polenta (corn meal) and fry them in hot oil (we use olive) for about 1 minute.


They are really good served with homemade mayo (egg, olive oil, dijon mustard, salt and homegrown Meyer lemon) and a green salad (Cos, green oak and mignonette) dressed with olive oil and sherry vinegar.

Of course, a nice, cold, home-brewed Pilsener washes it all down just fine.

planting out the tomatoes

The beds are made and the weather is looking fine so, even though we're one week before the magical Show Day cutoff (for all you non-Tasmanians, it is traditional to plant out tomatoes after the Royal Hobart show day, in the third week of October, as this roughly corresponds to the last frosts), we decided to take a minor gamble and plant out half of our seedlings and keep the other half as backups in pots in the poly cloche.


To minimise our risk even further, we covered each seedling with a cut-off 2 litre plastic juice bottle, to be removed when we're feeling extra brave given that we are prone to frosts sitting in a cool air drainage as we are.



You can also see that we use one dripper per plant and this drips into a shallow well in the soil.
It's hard to see from the picture but there are 23 plants of various heirloom variety in this row.

1 week later we removed the plastic bottles because of good weather and the plants were hitting the rooves. One more week later and we planted out the remaining seedlings - a further 24 plants. You might think this is a lot of tomatoes but it's not because we bottle (this is the sauce I used in the mushroom pasta dish), freeze and dry enough tomatoes so that we never need to buy any tomato products. Our stuff tastes much better than that Italian stuff and it's only travelled about 30 metres to the kitchen! This year we might sell any excess locally.

They're all growing rapidly so I'll need to start trellising them soon.

Mushrooms

We love to eat mushrooms. When we lived in the US, we sometimes went picking wild mushrooms - all the delicious ones that cost lots of money in Europe like morels, chanterelles (girolles) and porcini. After moving to Tassie, the wild mushroom choice became limited. We saw morels on Mt Wellington once and we've picked and eaten the typical field mushrooms as well as "slippery jacks".
Briony built a mushroom box out of old floorboards and filled it with some spent mushroom compost. If we're lucky, we get one or two flushes of mushrooms, usually huge ones, like these



Often we make a simple pasta dish with our bottled tomatoes (more on this in a different post) reduced to a thick sauce served over a homemade egg pasta that the Italians traditionally cut over a box laced with wires called a chitarra (guitar). We cut the pasta in our pasta machine. I was thinking that the mushrooms fried in olive oil tossed into the sauce at the last minute would make a delicious addition. They did.