Ugly Myrtle's glory time!

The New Zealand Cranberry (myrtus ugni or Chilean guava) is a wonder of productivity at this time of the year and I treated mine to their first pick today. I have two bushes, one in the bird-proof blueberry cage, the other between the apple trees and benefitting from the hammock of netting between them. Having said that, I'm not sure that the birds go for this fruit, but am not about to find out by experimenting!

It's a funny little fruit, you eat the little leafy bit on the end as well, it's sweet and absolutely delicious as a snack or in the breakfast bowl with cereal, or with ice cream! The berries are ready when you can roll them off with your fingers and when they taste so sweet you could happily sit and eat them as you pick!

First pick of the cranberries with the last few blueberries

Gutless grapes

My bunches of grapes have been looking great! Big heavy bunches - all that was missing was a bit of ripening. Trouble is, as soon as there's any colour on a grape they are sucked dry. Prof Google suggested wasps, and indeed a friend also said "wasps". Well I haven't seen any wasps, but apparently that doesn't mean they aren't - well, anywhere! Seems they can even nest in the ground! The same thing happened last year, and I just gave up.

But this year I thought I'd make an effort to achieve some edible grapes. They're a Japanese dessert grape and worth saving!

In an attempt to protect my grapes I netted them but no, still more damage.

A friend's husband who works with grapes suggested wax-eyes, and that I make sure the bottom of the netting is secure. Hmmm, frankly it wasn't, so I went out to tie it to the plants - and out flew three little birds. Wax-eyes. Bugger. Well, probably easier to protect the grapes from birds than wasps, but the grape vines are against a tin fence, and last year when they died back I was quite fascinated to discover a birds' nest, between the tin and the vine, sitting on the horizontal fence supports. What a clever Mama Bird I thought! What a safe place to build a nest!

Well it was also a nest with an on-tap food supply if it was a wax-eye nest! I went looking for it but the vine is too thick in places, so I gave up (again! - this really IS a great place to build a nest!) and decided to concentrate the netting on the half of the vine I have some chance of controlling. Time will tell whether I've been successful! Watch this space!

More preserving of summer's bounty for the winter!

Those apple cucumbers have just kept on coming, so another batch of Alison Holst's Bread and Butter Pickle was on the to-do list today. The recipe is here.  Didn't have quite enough mustard seed or celery seed, so mixed in a small amount of curry powder, because, let's face it, tasteless pickle is an oxymoron and complete waste of time and space. I think it's got quite a kick, this batch!

Also roasted up another pan of tomato sauce, with onion in this lot. The freezer is now looking quite jolly! The small containers are blackberries, blueberries and tomato pizza sauce, and the ice cream containers behind them are full of free-flow cauliflower and broccoli. I'm hoping there will be apple sauce to add to this soon!

Oat Bran & Wholemeal Bread

This week's loaf of bread is one of my favourites. Great whole food healthy loaf!
From George Dale's book - "More Daley Bread", which contains great recipes for breads which are low-salt, high fibre, low sugar/sugar-free, high protein, or multigrain etc.
 
George Dale is a bit of a hero in the bread-machine baking community.  He is a bread-maker technician,who found that most of the machines brought in for fixing actually had nothing wrong with them.  It was the recipes, or the inaccurate measuring of ingredients which were the problem, and he has published several books of great bread-maker recipes.  He's a Kiwi and offers an advice service if the cook is still having problems!


I've got three of his books,
Daley Bread : making the most of your breadmaker
More Daley bread : hearty wholemeal and special diet loaves in your bread machine
Traditional Daley bread : a selection of classic recipes for your bread machine


And now for the recipe:
Oat Bran and Wholemeal Bread

1.5 cups water
3 tablespoons milk powder
3 tablespoons honey
1.5 tablespoons lecithin
.75 teaspoon salt
6 tablespoons oat bran
3 tablespoons gluten flour
3 cups wholemeal flour
3 teaspoons yeast

This is a 750g (1.5lb) wholemeal recipe, and on my machine, it is a Regular Wholemeal.

Planting for beneficial insects

There's no doubt that bees bring plant health into a garden - they pollinate, feed off flowers, and a garden without bees does poorly in terms of vegetable production.

Bees favour blue and purple flowers, so I allow my mint and rosemary to flower especially for them. I hope they appreciate this kindness! Certainly the herb garden is abuzz with them at the moment - here they are on mint....

And rosemary...

I also plant tansy, a herb that in times past was rubbed on food or placed in coffins to delay "spoilage", and has been shown to protect potatoes from beetles, and houses from flies. My herb garden is by the back door and I have every spare spot filled with tansy. Am hoping it protects the tomatoes from bugs as well as the kitchen from pesky flies. Does it work? Well I do still get the odd fly and it would take a scientific experiment to determine whether I'd be dealing with more flies without it. Just hope they aren't coming inside to escape it....

First corn, more berries

Picked the first cob of corn today!


Froze blackberries - haven't done that before, but laid them out on a lipped baking tray in the freezer until they were solid and then packed them into air-tight containers. Picking more than I can eat!

Made another batch of tomato sauce - freezer's getting full!

And my sunflowers are past their best, but I have enjoyed them amongst the grapevines. Grapes looking good too!

Cauliflower and Broccoli

It's a couple of years since I've grown cauliflower or broccoli because they get so savaged by the white cabbage butterfly as it lays its eggs there and they hatch into hungry caterpillars, but this year I read that interplanting with celery deters these pests, so I gave it a go.

Unqualified success!

The broccoli all matured at once, a couple of days before Christmas, so was hastily blanched and frozen. There wasn't ONE caterpillar or other nasty on any of it!

Today I harvested the first row of cauliflower - it wasn't as pretty as the broccoli, there was a bit of interleaving (don't know the correct name, but little leaves growing between the florets), but likewise not one caterpillar.
It's really unusual - when I blanch cauliflower, (2mins) there are usually a few dead caterpillars left floating in the pan!

So now there's celery that can get some fresh air with the brassicas gone, and can grow strong and hearty for winter soups and stews.  I love companion planting!!
Nice to have some vegetables in the freezer ready for winter too!

Tomato sauce

Back in the day when I was feeding a houseful of kids, everything was prepared in bulk, including home made tomato sauce. These days I make smaller batches, and freeze in smaller lots, but the resulting sauce is no less tasty for that!

Whenever I have more tomatoes than I can use or give away (and round here most people have at least a couple of tomato plants growing), I toss the excess into a roasting dish with a good slurp of olive oil, as much garlic as I have a mind to, some salt and pepper, and lay a good branch of rosemary over the top. I roast them until they're cooked, and just before they are, I add a goodly quantity of basil. It looks like this:



You can see the rosemary has cooked off the branch, which I've discarded.

When it's cooled down, I whack it into the food processor and freeze the sauce for pasta, pizza or whatever during the year. I can NEVER have enough of this yummy stuff!

Berry Yummy!

I'm currently picking about 300g of blueberries every second day, from four bushes of varying types. Mostly I just eat them - as snacks, in my breakfast - but have also free-flow frozen some for when the picking stops. They are protected from birds in a giant cage I made out of chicken wire and posts, and the oldest ones are about four years old.

Blackberries are also ripening, the bunches are heavy on the thornless vine, and am picking every second day. So far the birds don't seem to have noticed them, but I will net them if needed.

Today's pick:

Garlic bread

Garlic is a great thing to have in the garden! I plant it around the tomatoes to keep the bugs away (pity it doesn't work on birds - they love to peck the red tomatoes!) and copiously around the apples for the same reason - in this case the moth that attacks apples.

When I harvest it - about now - I lay it out on the barbecue table to dry and then string it up in bunches in the shed. I've still got some from last year - it's time it was used, so I'm tossing it into every savoury meal. I love garlic and it's great for heart health.

My herbs are rampant at the moment too, so my loaf of bread this week was this recipe from George Dale's book "Daley Bread"

Garlic Bread

1.25 cups water
.75 teaspoon gluten flour
3teaspoons fresh herbs (I used basil - green and purple - rosemary, thyme, sage)
1 tablespoon oil
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons raw sugar
.75 cup wholemeal flour
2.25 cups high grade flour
3 teaspoons dried yeast for breadmaker machines

This is a 750g (1.5 lb) loaf, 'regular' setting on my machine.

Smells divine! Pity we haven't got a smell option on the Internet!!

Apple cucumbers

I am growing apple cucumbers for the first time.
I'm not a big cucumber eater, but a few months ago I was buying a few plants from a friend who sells seedlings, and the apple cukes looked so good!
So now I've got some oversized veg...... one of the problems of going on holiday..... Think I'll turn them into pickle!
I've just harvested some onions as well, so here we go!

Alison Holst's Bread and Butter Pickle

2 litres sliced cucumbers (an interesting way to measure them! Alison suggests filling an empty 2litre ice cream container to determine quantity)
.5 - 1 litre sliced onions
.5 cup plain (non-iodised) salt
3 cups wine vinegar
2.5 cups raw sugar
1 tablespoon mustard seeds
1 tablespoon celery seeds
1 teaspoon turmeric
Halve cucumbers lengthwise and remove seeds if watery. (No need to peel.) Slice onions and cucumbers by hand or with food processor. Mix with the salt, leave to stand for 30-60 minutes, then drain and rinse well.
In a large saucepan bring remaining ingredients to boil. Add vegetables and return to the boil.
Fill hot, sterilised jars almost to overflowing. Seal immediately with lacquered metal lids or preserving seals.
Refrigerate after opening.

Done!

Blackberries!

It's pretty early in the season but the first fruit off my thornless blackberry vine is ready! Not many today, but lovely big bunches still ripening.